The Avenger 20 - The Green Killer (4 page)

“Why didn’t you want to go, Heber?” asked Benson.

“I’d heard it was a bad spot to enter. The natives are mean. Little, wild fellows. Use poison darts. You never see them. You feel them all around you. And then one day you feel a kind of pin prick, and that’s that! I told Stahl. But he’s brave. He said we’d go anyhow.”

Heber moved his legs restlessly, acting as if the crooked knee joints pained him.

“I told him I’d heard there was more wrong with the place than mean natives. I told him that everybody in Manaos has heard, at one time or another, that some funny kind of disease is around the place. I don’t know what it is. Nobody seems to know. Nothing like it anywhere else on earth.”

Heber’s tortured eyes went to his bent legs.

“It turns a man into a monkey,” he said.

It sounded insane. But it wasn’t insane when you looked at Heber—at his apelike figure. Mac and Smitty, Nellie and Josh and Rosabel were tense as the grim tale went on.

“Stahl offered me a lot of money, and I needed money badly. So I took him up the Negro River, north and west of—”

“I’ve been through there,” said Benson evenly. “Isn’t there a rumor of the existence of some ancient Indian city?”

Heber nodded indifferently. “Yes. I’ve heard of it. Supposed to be quite something. Never saw it, though, and I shouldn’t wonder that it doesn’t exist except in somebody’s imagination. Supposed to be not far from the spot where the pitchblende is said to be.”

He picked up his story.

“We got to within sixty miles of the place Stahl was heading for. He was crazy to get there. The radium, he said, would be invaluable for America’s defense program. He simply must find it. Our native porters began to desert.”

Heber stared at nothing, with haunted eyes.

“We started early on that last day. We were an hour along when I began to feel funny. Couldn’t seem to straighten my legs, and every bone in my body ached. I looked at Stahl and saw he was feeling the same way. The natives looked at both of us, dropped everything, and began running back the way we’d come as if the devil was after them. We were hit. The green killer had us.”

There it was again. That green killer stuff.

“Is that what ye call this disease?” asked Mac.

“Yes. Everybody calls it the green killer. Because it seems to come from the grass near that region. You just walk through this grass, high boots or not, and after a while you’ve got it. And you start looking like a monkey. It seems to take every bone and twist it—hurts like hell, too—into monkey shapes. And it stimulates the growth of hair in some odd way. Look how mine’s grown down on my forehead.”

Heber shivered.

“I was going back then. I didn’t care if there was radium ahead of us or not. But Stahl
still
wanted to go on. His country needed the stuff, he said. We argued about it when the little black men charged us. Monkey men! They had this disease, but it didn’t seem to hurt them except to stunt their growth and change their appearance. They didn’t seem sick from it.

“Anyhow, I ran. No sense in both of us being caught. If one could get away, he might bring help to the other. So I ran. I managed to get away, but they caught Stahl.”

The Avenger drew a deep breath. His face was as much of a mask as ever; but Nellie, who was delicately tuned to the chief’s every motion, knew that he was deeply stirred.

“Stahl was killed?” he asked.

Heber shrugged. “I don’t know. Not as far as I saw. The little men were all around him. But they were just holding him, the last I saw, as if they meant to take him prisoner but not to kill him. I have a hunch he’s alive, held by these men. Of course, he won’t stay alive long. The monkey disease kills, in time.”

The Avenger paced the big room slowly but with every small muscle in such perfect tune that his tread was like that of a panther.

“Stahl,” he said, “is an old friend of mine. I traveled Brazil and Peru with him for nearly a year. We worked together on some tin mines I promoted when I was about twenty.”

“I know he’s a friend,” nodded Heber. “That’s why I was hunting for you in New York.”

“You were on your way here when you were attacked on Sixth Avenue, then,” said Smitty.

“Yeah. Stahl talked of Mr. Benson often. He was the world’s best engineer. He was the world’s best authority on rare tropical diseases, too. So when I got loose from the natives and got to Manaos again, I came up here for your help as fast as I could make it. Your old friend’s down there, and he needs you, Mr. Benson.”

Nellie impulsively looked at her watch.

“Okay,” she said crisply. “We can leave in about ten minutes.”

But The Avenger shook his close-cropped black head.

“This is one time when haste must be made slowly,” he said. “It would be meaningless for us to rush down there and fall victim to this queer disease before we could locate Stahl. We must beat the disease first. You seem to have it rather badly, Heber.”

Heber’s mouth twitched, and he shifted his bent legs restlessly.

“I’ll say I have it.”

“I’ll take a sample of your blood,” said The Avenger. “I’ll work on it immediately. If you will bare your arm—”

Heber drew back from the glittering needle. His face was twisted in fear. Then it went apologetic.

“Do you mind if I take the sample myself? In another room or some place? I’m scared to death of a needle in the hands of somebody else.”

“As you please,” said Benson evenly. He turned to Josh. “Take Mr. Heber down to one of the suites, please, Josh. Bring the blood samples back up when he’s ready with it. Take this vial.”

He gave Josh a small, wide-throated bottle.

“And while Heber is resting, please wash his shirt out and clean up his coat a bit. The bloodstains from the wound on his head—”

Josh and Heber started for the door.

Then there was trouble of a peculiarly deadly sort, from the last source on earth they’d expected.

There was a vicious
twang,
and an arrow skinned past Heber so close that it took a fleck of cloth from his coat. Then the arrow buried itself in the leather depths of a divan beyond Heber, across the room.

They all whirled, Heber with his mouth open in fear and amazement.

The archer was the girl Smitty had brought in.

Unnoticed, she’d risen from her dull-eyed squat on the floor and crept to the far end of the room. There, on the walls, The Avenger had hanging some different types of native bows and arrows. The girl had taken one down, fitted an arrow into the bowstring and sent that death shot with an expertness unexpected in a New York young lady supposedly innocent of all jungle lore.

Mac jumped to her side. But he didn’t grab the bow from her. Grabbing was not necessary. He took it from her limp fingers with ease.

She looked at Heber, the man she’d tried to kill, with no emotion on her face at all. She looked vacantly at the rest. She said not one word.

She squatted again on the floor.

“What’s the matter with her?” Heber wrenched out. “Who is she, anyhow? Is she crazy?”

There were no answers to these questions at the moment. He went on out with Josh to get the blood sample while Josh cleaned his clothes up a bit.

The rest turned their attention to the girl.

She was a very pretty girl—pretty even with a face as vacant as an empty dish and eyes as witless as the eyes of a month-old child. She had reddish-brown hair and light-brown, almost amber, eyes. She was so long-legged and lithe that it looked as if she might be a professional dancer. She was expensively dressed, but clothes and makeup suggested that she hadn’t touched herself for many hours.

“Who are you?” said The Avenger gently.

The girl didn’t say anything.

“How did you happen to be caught by the monkey men?”

There was no answer.

“Why did you try to kill Heber?”

She only looked at the pale, icy eyes with a sort of brainless curiosity. Benson leaned closer and stared into the pupils of her eyes. Then he rigged a tiny mirror and light on his forehead and stared harder into the pupils.

“Paralysis of some sort,” he said. “Yet, it leaves the motor muscles and nerves unaffected. Nellie, take our odd guest downstairs and look her over, inch by inch. Make a note of any marking, no matter how slight, and report here as soon as you can.”

Nellie went out with the girl, who followed docilely, like a beautiful machine.

Josh came up with the vial full of blood, and Benson took it quickly. He went toward the vast laboratory he maintained.

Mac said, “There are a couple more things I’d like to ask Heber. D’ye mind?”

“No. Go ahead,” said Benson, pale eyes abstracted.

Mac went out, and Benson continued to the laboratory.

In addition to countless other pieces of apparatus, The Avenger had one of the latest and best electron microscopes, those mighty scientific eyes with a magnetic field for a lens. It could magnify up to a hundred thousand diameters. With the blood sample from the sick man downstairs, The Avenger went to this machine.

Mac, a floor below, knocked at the door of the suite given to Heber, got an answer, and went in.

The apelike figure of their guest was stretched on a bed. Heber opened his eyes as the Scot entered, but he didn’t move. He just looked questioning.

“Too tired to talk a little more?” said Mac.

“No. What’s on your mind?”

“In my store,” said Mac, “while ye were gettin’ over that clout on the head, ye said somethin’ about emeralds. A bucket of emeralds. Nothin’ about radium—just emeralds.”

Heber smiled faintly.

“Did I say that? I guess I was scrambled in the top story. I was going back to something Stahl told me in Brazil. I said he got me to guide him by offering a lot of money. He did offer me a lot, but it wasn’t enough to make me start for the kingdom of the green killer. I guess he saw that, so he put out this hot air about emeralds. He said a witch doctor near where we were going was said to have a whole lot of raw emeralds, and there’d be no reason why I couldn’t grab them off on the trip. That, plus the money, was enough to get me to go with him.” He grinned ruefully. “There weren’t any emeralds. He admitted it the last day out, before the monkey men captured him.”

“Oh!” said Mac. Then: “Got any idea who tried to kill ye?”

“No,” said Heber, looking puzzled. “If Indians had tried to get me, I’d have known. But this gang weren’t natives; they were whites. Nobody I’d ever seen before.”

“How do ye mean, if Indians had tried it, ye’d have known?”

The sick man explained.

“There’s a definite tribe around that section—the monkey men who hold Stahl. They’ve got more brains than most of the natives. At their head is a young Indian who has been to school in England—”

“What?” exclaimed Mac.

“Yeah. Smart boy,” said Heber bitterly. “He knows the answers, all right. For one thing, he knows that when the outside world comes into the jungle—the natives go out. So this young leader is seeing to it that no white gets in. When anyone does come near, members of the tribe follow him out, if it’s to the ends of the earth, and kill him, so he won’t go back again or lead anyone else back.”

“Nice boys,” said Mac thoughtfully.

“Very nice. There’s a squad of them in New York, now. Followed me up, I guess. One of them was found killed near your store, I hear. That has me stumped. Who’d kill him? Unless it was one of the gang that tackled me. But why would they kill an Indian, and why did they go after me, and who are they? It’s got me licked.”

Then he got indignant.

“Also, why did that girl try to drill me with an arrow? What’s she got against me? I never saw her before in my life.”

All of which were questions with no answers, as far as Mac was concerned. In fact, the Scot gloomily decided there’d probably never be any answers, particularly for the completely goofy conduct of the girl.

Nellie was just coming back into the laboratory after going over the girl’s shapely white body carefully, as instructed. She went to the giant electron microscope, where The Avenger was busy.

“There are two tiny punctures in the skin of her left shoulder,” Nellie said.

Benson nodded as if he’d expected that. But he thrust pencil and paper toward her.

“Draw them.”

Nellie made two little dots, close together. “They slant in a little toward each other,” she added.

“The bite of one of the giant South American spiders,” he said. “No antidote. Even in a body as large as a human’s, it causes total paralysis for a few hours. The motor nerves recover first, so that the victim can move. But in some way not yet explained by scientific investigation, the conscious will remains numbed for long after that.”

“So our guest won’t be ready to answer questions for quite a while?”

“It may be days before she can tell us who she is, and why she tried to kill Heber. Though I have an idea on that.”

“You have?” gasped Nellie.

“Yes. If you noticed, the girl handled that bow and arrow like a native.”

“How in the world does that answer the question of why she tried to kill him?”

But The Avenger didn’t answer. He had withdrawn into concentration over the electron microscope so intense that it was as if he had literally gone into another room and shut the door. Nellie went quietly out and left him working.