He drew it out of the staple, dropped it to the floor, and began on the second lock. This should be easier, now that he knew its secret.
But his race with death was getting close. A tongue of flame licked up the attic stairs. Far below in the fiery maw of the old building there was a thundering, like the rumble of an earthquake. The ladder squeaked under his feet as the floor beneath it slanted. In another few seconds he would drop into that inferno of raging flames.
Hardly able to see because of the smoke pouring into the room, “X” opened the second lock. He flung it from him like some poisonous thing, climbed a step higher and heaved up on the scuttle above. Paint broke loose, the scuttle rose, seemed to lift out of his hands as heat exploded it outward. The fire below gave a deep-throated, warning roar. Imprisoned heat shot skyward. Sparks and burning embers whirled past Agent “X” as he sprang onto the roof.
He could feel the tar covered roofing sag under him where supports had given way. It was blistering hot, the tar boiling up in black, sticky, smoking masses.
He leaped to the top of an adjacent house. As he did so the roof over which he had come sagged crazily, one corner fell in with a rumbling crash, and flames volcanoed upward.
The Agent was safe, safe from the death his captors had planned. For he sensed their double motive in firing the house. They wanted to destroy all clues; and they wanted his life as well.
He ran across two adjoining rooftops, found a fire escape snaking down an empty building, and made his way along it to a back yard. The street was cluttered with the hurtling red forms of fire engines. The air was lurid with the wail of sirens and the shrill clang of bells.
But Agent “X” did not linger. He knew the bandits might have a watcher posted. And he wanted them to believe he had been consumed in the flames as they had planned. Let them think Hearndon was gone forever.
In a taxi, he hurried to one of his hideouts. Here he changed his disguise to that of Martin, replaced his sooty clothing with a fresh gray suit, and went directly to the raided bank.
Traffic was moving through the streets again, but there was a police line around the bank itself. Throngs surged about it, jostled and kept back by police. The Agent’s eyes darted on all sides. He saw many excited newspaper men, men from the newsreel syndicates and press photographers, then his gaze wandered to a building opposite the bank.
THERE were small shops along the street floor of this, apartments above. Behind a “vacant” sign in one of the apartment windows Agent “X” glimpsed a familiar face. Instantly he crossed the street and entered the building. Tenants stood in the open door. He brushed by them unnoticed, climbed the stairs.
In an empty third-floor front apartment Jim Hobart was waiting, his movie camera with him. He had used a set of skeleton keys with which “X” had long ago provided him, and had come here before the falling of the fearful dark. But he shook his head when he saw the man he knew as Martin. His face was pale, his voice husky.
“I did what you said, boss — cranked away. But it got dark, so dark I couldn’t see my own hand. And I’m afraid—”
“Let’s have the films.” There was tense excitement in the Agent’s tone. He took the metal drum of celluloid that Jim Hobart handed him, thrust it under his coat, said: “Take care of the camera, Jim,” and was off.
He slipped through the excited crowd around the bank, went to his coupé again. In fifteen minutes he was closeted in a dark room in one of his hideouts. There was elaborate equipment before him. Reels for winding movie film. Trays of chemicals, developer, fixative. The precious drum that Hobart had given him was being slowly unwound, run through its acid baths, for “X” in this small compact chamber could turn out work as finished as that of the laboratories of any movie studio.
For nearly three hours he worked. Then he took, from the reel of a special dryer, a printed, transposed celluloid of the film Hobart had made. He went to a larger room outside the dark chamber, removed a small movie projector from a box and put the film in it. A six-foot screen was on the opposite wall. With tense fingers, knowing already that Hobart’s film, taken in utter darkness had picture impressions on it, he focused his projector on the screen and switched on the electric motor that turned it.
Then the Agent leaned forward in enthralled interest. For Hobart had begun to crank his camera just as the darkness had started to descend. And there on the silver screen before “X’s” fascinated eyes, tiny, weirdly helmeted figures were visible. He stopped the projector once to look at a shot which plainly showed a helmeted head.
Mad crowds of terrified people showed in the street. “X” saw the black car that the raiders came in, saw something else that made his eyes widen. This was a small electric truck that looked like one from the city’s lighting company, and which had parked along the curb not far from the bank. The tiny line of a black cable led from the truck’s end to an open manhole. Then, as the amazing scenes of the raid unwound on the screen, “X” saw the bandits’ black car drive off, after small helmeted figures had carried sacks of loot to it.
More interesting still, he saw the figures of two men in workman’s clothes descend unhurriedly into the manhole; remove the black cable and coil it into the truck. While the whole block was held in icy terror, while a sinister raid was in progress, these men, tapping the city’s electric current, could work calmly. There was only one explanation of that. They were part of the raiding gang, and that light truck housed the strange mechanism which had made the darkness.
But what of the darkness itself? Here on the screen was proof of Thaddeus Penny’s amazing statement, proof that the sun had been shining, did shine, while that darkness fell. The movie camera’s lens had not been hampered by it. The sensitive film, impressionable to light, had functioned normally. Only human eyes had been affected, blinded. Only they could not see. And Agent “X” had uncovered a riddle that seemed too deep to explain.
Chapter VIII
HOURS later, Agent “X” was moving stealthily across the velvet smoothness of a wide lawn. Ahead of him loomed an ornate, old-fashioned mansion set amid thick clumps of shrubbery and tall, leafless trees. Behind him was the high brick wall which he had scaled a moment before.
It was night, starless and black. He was on the property of Roswell Sully, famous utilities man and admirer of Vivian de Graf. For over an hour he had followed her, and she had finally led him here.
There was grim purpose in the Agent’s eyes. Even this clever, provocative woman could not escape justice if she were in league with the criminals. Innocent Ellen Dowe had met an unthinkable fate. Pain had stolen her young life away by inches as she lay helpless and writhing under the sadistic lash of a human fiend. Her death and the deaths of those children must be avenged.
Agent “X,” in his daring battles against crime, had met other women, as beautiful as Vivian de Graf, whose charm had been only a cloak for untold evil; women who used their wit and beauty as bait to gain some unholy end. Vivian might be such a woman. He didn’t know, but he was going to find out. And besides his own direct suspicion, based on the episode in the bank, there were certain facts against her.
She was the wife of brilliant Emil de Graf, professor of science at the university. But she preferred the company of other men. For years Roswell Sully had danced attendance upon her. Unescorted by her husband, she had often been a guest at the unwholesomely gay parties for which Sully was notorious. Her wit and beauty had made her a sought-after favorite with the set of careless ne’er-do-wells who were Sully’s intimates.