Chapter Thirteen The Jailer of Souls
Annister’s gun went up and out as the black-bearded man, turning, saw him where he stood.
Travis Annister, parchment-pale, took two forward, lurching steps, as the doctor, backing stiffly against the wall, hands upraised, called something in a high sing-song, savage, inarticulate.
Then—everything seemed to happen at once. A snarling, animal outcry echoed from the passage just without; it rose, as there came a far, gobbling mutter of voices, and the pad-pad of running feet.
The hooded Familiars, as one man, turned, and the long knives flashed, luminous, under the lights, as Kane and Ellison, meeting them half way, raised their heavy guns.
Annister, covering the Doctor, froze suddenly in motion as that gobbling horror mounted, and then, filling that narrow way like figures in a dream, they came: the outcasts, the lost battalion, the Men Who Had no Right to Live.
In their van, but running rather as if pursued than as if in answer to that snarling call, there came three men, guards by their dress, their faces contorted, agonized, upon them the impress of a crawling fear. They streamed past that door, pursuers and pursued, as Black Steve Annister, finger upon the trigger of his pistol, saw that lean hand sweep upward; it flicked the thin lips; the dark face grayed, went blank; the Dark Doctor, his gaze in a queer, frozen look upon Eternity, pitched forward upon his face.
In some way, as Annister could understand, the madmen had won free, but—how?
Turning, he saw a white face at his elbow as there sounded from without the staccato explosions of a motor, and a swift, hammering thunder upon the great door.
“I am—Newbold Humiston,” said the face, “and I am not mad, or, rather, I am but mad north-north-west when the wind is southerly,” he quoted, with a ghastly smile. “This devil—” he pointed to the body of Elphinstone—“has gone to his own place, but the evil that he did lives after him—in us.”
His voice rose to a shriek as there came a rush of feet along the corridor: a compact body of men, at their head a tall man at sight of whom Stephen Annister flung up a hand.
“Well, Childers,” he said. “I’m glad!”
Childers spoke pantingly, in quick gasps:
“We just made it, old man,” he said. “A day ahead at that. The station agent put us on the track. We got ’em all—Lunn, and the rest; all but Rook—”
He paused, at Annister’s inquiring look, turning his thumb down with an expressive gesture.
“We found him—strangled—in his office... a queer business....”
Annister gave an exclamation.
“The Indian!” he said. “Well, Rook was the ‘Third Light,’ sure enough!”
Again he was seeing the lean, avid face in the vestibule of the smoker, the lighted match; himself, and the conductor, and Rook, the lawyer’s pale eyes brooding above the glowing end of his cigarette.... And again, as the picture passed, he was aware of the white face at his elbow as Mary Allerton, her hand in his, behind her the golden hair and the wide eyes of Cleo Ridgley, turned to Childers with a smile that yet had in it a hint of tears.
He that had been Newbold Humiston continued:
“The others—they’re quiet now. The guards have gone—to follow him—the others saw to that.”
He gestured toward the silent figure on the floor.
“His plan was worthy of his master, the Devil, because it was diabolically simple: Rook was his procurer and his clearing-house; you see, Rook found the victims, and cashed the checks that Elphinstone wrung from them; and then, when they had cleaned up, or when they deemed the time was ripe, the victims—disappeared. Rook’s secretary they kidnapped for revenge; Miss Allerton because she knew much; they suspected that she was in the Secret Service. And so—these others disappeared.”
He laughed; the laugh of a dead man risen from the tomb.
“They disappeared—yes—but—they remained, as you see—myself—a living ghost!”
“But how?” asked the younger Annister, in the sudden quiet, the realization of what his father and Mary had escaped burning like a quick fire in his veins. The toneless voice went on:
“Elphinstone was a surgeon, a master.... You’ve heard of Dermatology? Well, it’s been done in India, I believe; practiced there to an extent unknown here, of course. An anesthetic, and then an operation: new faces for old, forged faces; the thing was diabolically simple. And so when they, the victims, saw themselves in a mirror, sometimes they went mad, for who could prove it? Who would be believed?”
His voice rose, died, gathered strength, as a candle flames at the last with a brief spark of life:
“It’s done,” he muttered. “He’s gone—but his work lives after him, even as he called himself—the Jailer of Souls!”
The End