The place wasn’t empty long. Another came in — a dapper man with a tiny gray mustache and a trim little goatee. It was Sharnoff Haygar, though Nellie didn’t know that.
What she did know was that she hated this man on sight, and that he was precisely the type to whose extermination she had dedicated her life. She knew that by the way he approached Carmella.
He had a little bottle in his hand. Evidently, he had gone out to get the bottle, which was the reason he had not been in the room when Nellie first looked in.
With her tiny knife, Nellie had pried up the window an inch. She could hear through that crack as she clung to the brick ridges outside.
“Now,” said the man with the trim goatee, “I think you will talk. This, my dear, is sulphuric acid! It does curious things to faces. As you shall certainly find out if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
He shook the little bottle, then drew out the moistened stopper.
“First,” he said, almost gently, “we’ll press this to your right cheek. Then just a drop on the left. After that, if you are still stubborn, there will have to be a bit of attention paid to the eyes—”
Nellie dropped the knife, not having time to put it back in her belt. She snapped out her gun and smashed the window with it. Sharnoff whirled, hand going for his pocket. But the hand stopped and stayed very still as he saw the gun.
Nellie did not dare come through the window. She stayed where she was for a moment, gesturing toward Carmella, whose black eyes were enormous with horror — and relief.
“Untie her,” Nellie said, cold fury in the tone that came through her small, set teeth.
Sharnoff turned to Carmella and untied her. He didn’t even try to stall. The acid vial, which he had set on the floor to work on the bonds, was his death warrant, Nellie’s flaming blue eyes told him, if he didn’t obey implicitly and swiftly.
Carmella stood up, rubbing shapely ankles and flexing slim arms.
“Now tie him,” said Nellie, nodding to Sharnoff. “But keep behind him! Don’t let him grab you and use you as a shield.”
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned — or a woman whose beauty has just been wantonly threatened. The blaze in Carmella’s black eyes matched that in Nellie’s blue ones. By the time Sharnoff was tied, the cord bit into his flesh so deeply that he sunk his teeth in his upper lip with the sting of it. But he made no sound.
Nellie knocked jagged glass out of the window sash and crawled into the room at last. The storm outside was at its height now, with wind howling, rain hitting like bullets, and occasional thunder rattling the universe. Nellie had to pitch her voice high to be heard.
“He was after your medallion?” she said.
Carmella hesitated. Gratitude to her rescuer fought with reluctance to say anything about the golden disks.
“In a way,” she said finally.
“What do you mean — in a way?”
“He wanted to know the message on the medal.”
“Well,” said Nellie, annoyed by all the mystery in the affair of the golden disks — a mystery which she still couldn’t make head or tail of, “what is the message?”
Carmella pretended not to hear because of the storm. Nellie said something to herself, shrugged, and went to the door.
“What are we going to do now?” Carmella said.
“Is everyone in this house your enemy?” asked Nellie. “Or only this rat here with the acid?”
Carmella hesitated again, but this time in real, instead of pretended, indecision.
“I think they’re all enemies,” she said at last. “But they pretend not to be. And this one is the only one who has openly attacked me.”
“We’ll have to take a chance on the others and go downstairs,” said Nellie over the storm’s roar. “Can’t roost up in this turret forever.”
And besides, she added to herself, she wanted to see how things went with Mac and The Avenger and Smitty.
The turret room was a full four stories from the ground. They went down a lot of stairs. Then Nellie thrust out her small white hand to make Carmella stop.
Nellie had heard voices in a room to the right. She went to the door.
The room was a sort of library, but there was a hole in the floor at the moment. Down through this was peering a monstrous fat man. He had a smile on his face that the devil himself could have been proud of. His puffy, huge right hand was on the lever at the side of the hole, and he was slowly pressing the lever down.
Nellie hadn’t any idea what this sight meant, but she was willing to bet it meant trouble in some fashion. She was debating what to do, when the sound came.
It was a very peculiar sound, barely to be heard over the storm’s roar outside, and yet unmistakable.
The sound of pigs. But not just a barnyard noise; it had a quality, somehow, to chill the blood!
Nellie saw the man’s huge head jerk up as he listened, saw him scowl instead of smile. Then he waddled toward the door, and Nellie ducked across the hall and into an opposite room.
He was hardly out the front door of the place when she was back in that library, jerking up the lever. She still didn’t know its meaning, but she could look down the hole in the floor and see something like a moving platform that had still been settling downward when she got in, and which stopped when she threw the lever back up.
It began to rise again. There was a momentary lull in the gale outside, and she heard a voice clearly under the movable platform.
“It’s stopped!”
Smitty’s voice!
Nellie raced to find stairs leading down.
CHAPTER XIV
Reunion
A grin was on Nellie’s lips. For once, it was not Nellie who had gotten into difficulty and had to be rescued. It was the other way around. If she hadn’t taken matters into her own hands and come to the island, and if she hadn’t thrown that lever upstairs, Mac and Benson and Smitty would have been pressed flowers by now.
But she did not rub it in; and The Avenger only thanked her profoundly with his colorless, icy eyes, and that was that.
She had unbolted a door under what she judged was the location of the library, and the three men had hastened out, with the ceiling rising behind them. Then Mac had stopped, with an exclamation, and turned his flashlight on a section of wall near the door.
When that metal ceiling had come down, it had caught on a slight projection formed by one of the innumerable fresh strips of cement lacing through all these walls. It had broken out some of the stuff and revealed human bones!
The bones of dead men! Was this whole house built on dead men’s bones?
They went to the stairs. Nellie told of what had happened since she had set foot on the island, ending with the account of the fat man rushing out into the night after the sound of — of all things — pigs.
“Pigs?” repeated The Avenger. His icy eyes were almost frightening as they rested on Nellie. “Pigs!”
Upstairs, he raced for the front door, with Smitty and Mac after him. The two didn’t know what had put that extra grim light in the basilisk eyes, but they knew Dick Benson had sensed some occurrence of great importance.
Nellie stayed in the hall. Carmella came from the rear stairs, where she had been hiding since the little blonde had thrust her back wordlessly on hearing the voices from the library — voices filtering up through that dreadful moving ceiling.
The two girls waited tensely for Benson to get back.
Out in the night, The Avenger circled the house till he saw the hulking owner of the island. The fat man was up on a ledge peering down into an enclosure and fishing for something with a rope that had a running noose on the end of it.