“Looks almost as if he could get up and walk,” Mac whispered. “But he won’t — not with embalmer’s fluid in his veins.”
“What was that?” It was Smitty’s startled whisper.
“What was what?” said Mac peevishly. The giant had scared him into jumping a foot.
Smitty didn’t answer. He thought he had heard a low laugh in the corridor outside the vault.
The Avenger went toward the door, not seeming to strive for fast movement, but getting there in an incredibly short time. He knew he had heard a laugh. No question about it.
Mac and Smitty crowded after. And then, where there had been solid floor, there was only emptiness, and they were falling!
“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac.
He had bumped so hard it had knocked the breath half out of him. He got it back and stood up and looked around.
The Avenger was on his feet and raying his flashlight around.
Smitty was sitting on stone floor rubbing his head. Above them where a section of the floor had swung to plunge them down into a subcellar, was now, apparently, solid rock.
The three men abruptly stopped their methodical survey of their surroundings and their own injuries.
All round the floor, at the base of the walls, were ragged little holes. And these holes suddenly began spewing things out.
Rats!
Hundreds of rats, gaunt, starved-looking, black, brown, big, little. In a swarm they made for the men.
“Whoosh!” breathed Mac, beginning to do a sort of Highland fling as he tried to step on some and still avoid the others. He was joined by Benson and Smitty. The three seemed to be executing a weird waltz. But there was nothing funny about it. It was a dance of death!
Smitty yelled as a rat found his ankle in spite of the frantic stamping and jumping. The pale eyes of The Avenger were little chips of stainless steel. They’d be fleshless skeletons in a very short time if they couldn’t escape.
“Smitty, give me your hands. Mac, keep the rats off Smitty as much as possible.”
The Avenger leaped from the giant’s cupped hands to his vast shoulders. Standing there, he was about four feet under the ceiling. He crouched with bent legs while his pale eyes sought the crack around the stone block that showed which square of floor they’d fallen through.
Smitty moaned a little as tiny teeth ripped at his legs.
“Mac, you Scotch squarehead, keep those rats off!”
Mac, jumping and stamping and swinging at Smitty’s legs with his coat, let go a large, round oath.
“What d’ye think I’m tryin’ to do, ye ten-foot dimwit!”
The Avenger’s eyes had stopped at a certain spot in the line around the stone block. The thing swung on a pivot in the middle, evidently. That meant there had to be a steel bar at one side to catch the block and keep it from swinging when it was not supposed to. He thought he had located the significant bolt.
“I’m sorry, chief,” moaned Smitty, “but I’m not going to be able — ouch! — to take this much longer. Mac, gas the damned things.”
“Sure, and gas us, too,” snapped Mac. “Shut up and stand still.”
The Avenger whipped out a thin blade, toothed like a hacksaw but much thinner and finer than any regular saw ever was. He hadn’t used this on the basement window bars because the rasping noise might betray them. Now noise was meaningless; it was speed that counted. With all the phenomenal strength that lay in his average-sized, slim fingers, he leaned on that saw.
Three terrible minutes passed. Terrible for Smitty, anyway, and only to a slightly lesser extent for Mac.
“Chief — I can’t… much longer,” panted the giant. His ankles were something to keep from looking at.
“All right, Smitty.”
Benson pocketed the fine saw. He put his shoulders up hard against the block at the catch side.
“Heave!”
The Avenger’s body became a bent gray steel bar. His wrists went chalk-white with effort. And under him the huge Smitty pushed, too.
There was a loud crack as a partly sawed bolt gave. And then the stone block pivoted in the middle, with no catch to keep it secured any more.
Benson was up through the opening in one fast move. Smitty, hanging onto arms that were not overlarge but had all the strength of steel cables, followed.
“Hey!” yelled Mac, leaping up and down. “Me, too!”
Smitty’s hamlike hand came within reach, and with one arm the giant hauled him up so fast that he popped out of the hole in the floor like a jack-in-the-box.
They stood there, panting. Then they forgot the rat bites and the nasty death they had just escaped and all the rest of the deadly dangers of the night, forgot them in a sudden glimpse of something supernatural.
Ahead of them, down the corridor from the vault of death in which was the coffin of old Wendell Haygar, was a tenuous, dim white figure that seemed to waver like mist.
“ ’Tis a ghostie,” whispered Mac, appalled.
“It can’t be!” Smitty whispered back. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Try an’ disbelieve that one away!” Mac rapped out. “Look, it’s movin’—and it wants us to follow.”
“I’m following — the other way!” Smitty vowed, whirling.
But behind them was only the end wall of the crypt. They could only go ahead, toward the white thing.
The Avenger had already stepped across the hole in the floor and was going down the corridor. With their flesh crawling, Mac and Smitty followed in his wake.
The misty white thing had a face. They got glimpses of it as they caught up to it a little. It had a face, and a purpose. They found out the purpose in about twenty seconds.
The white figure stopped at a section of corridor wall. One misty arm went out toward a certain spot in the wall. So that was the purpose — they were to look here for something.
Then they really saw the face.
“Land o’ livin’!” jerked out Mac. “ ’Tis old Wendell Haygar, risen from his coffin!”
There was the delicate, small face, with a neat gray line of mustache. There were the sunken eyes, open now, and the dapper body.
Then there was nothing. The white shape disappeared utterly.
“Smitty, after him,” snapped The Avenger.
The giant raced on down the corridor, flash boring a thin white line into darkness. But only darkness. The white figure had vanished like mist, though it would seem there was no place to vanish to.
With the giant’s footsteps hastening down the corridor, Benson turned to the spot in the wall indicated by the white thing. He saw one of the many trenches gouged from the concrete and later replaced by fresh cement.
But this spot, for six feet, was larger, almost two feet wide instead of six inches. And it was cracked a little as if the base for the cement had settled behind the stuff.
The Avenger took out Mike, and four slugs whispered from its silenced little muzzle. The impact was not very heavy since the caliber was so small, but the cracked cement did not need much of a kick to break loose.
Half a dozen small fragments fell out, revealing the reason why it had cracked in the first place.
Back in there, a part of a bone could be seen. At sight of it, Mac looked significantly at The Avenger.
“Human tibia,” said Mac.
They knocked out a few more chips, and more bones were exposed, some not completely bared. The shriveling of a body had cracked the concrete. A few wires were exposed, too.
“A dead mon’s bones,” whispered Mac. “Pointed out by a ghost of Wendell Haygar, or else by his perambulatin’ corpse—”
He stopped. Down the corridor Smitty’s little flash was waving a come-on sign.