Suddenly he heard a footstep on the sidewalk. He jerked his head up and saw a bulky dark form moving slowly toward him. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth and a shuddering hysteria swept over him.
The approaching figure stopped. “All right, buddy,” a voice from the darkness said. “What’s the idea? This ain’t a public park. Get moving?” Harker almost fainted with relief as he recognized the tone of authority and saw, as the man stepped closer, the uniform and badge he was wearing.
A light flashed in the darkness and a stab of illumination leaped into Harker’s face. He blinked in the glare.
“What’s the matter with you?” the officer demanded. “I ought to run you in for loitering here. This is a defense area, you know.”
Fear was again hammering at Harker. In the terror of his immediate predicament he had forgotten that he had the blood of Doctor Zinder on his hands. And the man holding the light in his face was an officer of the law, the law which Harker had brazenly flouted. He couldn’t afford to be arrested now.
“I–I just stopped to rest a minute,” he said weakly. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, get movin’ then.”
Sweat poured out of Harker’s pores as he tried frantically to walk away from the spot. But the leg was as firmly attached to the sidewalk as a stone post.
“What’s the matter with you?” the officer demanded suspiciously. “I told you to get movin’ didn’t I? What are you waiting for? A little help from my club?”
“N — no,” gasped Harker, “it’s just—”
Suddenly the leg came to life again. With a single stride it turned Harker around and started back toward the cross-street. Now it moved more rapidly, more determinedly than ever.
And Harker realized then that the leg had been looking for something. And now it seemed to have found the trail for which it had been seeking; for its strides were sure and steady.
His heart trembled with this realization. A sobbing cry choked in his throat and his eyes were wild and mad with horror.
What was the leg searching for?
He didn’t dare answer this question; his mind recoiled from it in sharp terror.
The leg strode with inevitable sureness and strength through the darkened factory district and headed west toward the deserted waste areas of Chicago’s sprawling southwest side. Saliva drooled from Harker’s slack lips. His face was stiff with blind, unreasoning fear.
For an hour the leg carried him straight west until it reached a vast deserted lot, used by the city as a refuse heap. There it swung sharply and entered the lot, striding heedlessly, blindly, over the heaps of rusted cans, bottles and filth dumped in squat ugly piles over the face of the lot.
Ahead in the darkness Harker could see the bulky outlines of a crumbling wall, sagging with the weight of its years. The leg was carrying him toward the lowest section of the wall, which was hardly two feet high. Harker sank to his ankles in the slime and ooze of the refuse and he staggered blindly with weariness.
Babbling, hysterical words poured from his lips and the sound of the sobbing voice was a weird cacophony that roared inside his head like maniacal thunder.
Something was plucking at his mind. A blind, frantic thought was hammering through the maze of panic that clouded his brain. It was something that had been said to him, but he couldn’t remember what it was or who had said it.
His wild eyes swung over the deserted lot with its piles of dirt and refuse and then to the broken, crumbling wall that loomed closer with each of the leg’s powerful, determined strides.
The wall enclosed a pit. And in that pit something gleamed whitely.
A sobbing scream tore from Harker’s throat.
He knew of this place. Doctor Zinder had told him of this place. And that was the thought that had been flickering on the border of his consciousness.
Doctor Zinder had told of this place!
This was the spot where Doctor Zinder had committed murder and stolen a leg. The leg which was now drawing him irresistibly toward the gleaming whiteness at the bottom of the pit.
Doctor Zinder had told him this, but he had been preparing to kill him at the time and the words had hardly registered.
Doctor Zinder had said: “No remains will ever be found!”
Harker screamed madly as the leg stepped up to the crumbling wall. With every atom of his strength he fought against the leg, but his frantic efforts were unavailing.
Doctor Zinder’s words pounded like a gong in his head.
“No remains will ever be found!” The stench of fumes from the lime pit were in Harker’s nostrils as the leg broke into a stumbling run that covered the last few feet in a faltering rush. Harker screamed, and the sound was a horrible choking noise in his throat. He screamed again as the leg took the last final step and that scream was broken off in a ragged gurgling shriek as his plummeting body struck the cloying waves of corrosive lime...
And in that last horrible instant Harker knew what the leg had been searching for.
The Ghost that Haunted Hitler
First published in Fantastic Adventures, December 1942.
Although this story is presented purely as fiction, author William P. McGivern displayed a strangely fervent eagerness that it be presented to the public at the earliest possible moment. “This story must be published!” he said forcefully. We, as editors, smiled, read the story, agreed that it was a good story. And we publish it here. But the other day we were introduced to a man who spoke with an accent. Later we discovered that this man had “sought out” McGivern. Now we wonder...
Chapter I
A guttering candle flamed in the dank darkness of the cellar casting grotesque shadows against the limestone walls.
Three men sat at a table in that cellar.
The man at the head of the table leaned forward and for an instant his face was strikingly lighted by the flickering candle.
His face was lean and pale. The jaw-line was sharp and hard. A thin nose jutted over a slight blonde mustache. The eyes of the man were only mirrored pools of blackness.
He glanced down at the map lying before him on the table.
“Every detail has been arranged,” he said. His voice was softly cautious. “He will be here, in Prague, tomorrow.”
The man on his left leaned forward tensely. The candle-light caught the blazing glints in his black eyes, the almost savage determination in his grimly clamped jaw. His thick fingers gripped the edge of the table.
“Are you sure?” he whispered. “Can we trust our information?”
The man opposite the speaker, a heavy-shouldered, dark-browed giant, nodded thoughtfully.
“Can we be sure?” he growled. “We will have only one chance.” His eyes turned to the man at the head of the table. “One slip now will ruin everything.”
The man at the head of the table glanced briefly at the two men and a faint, ironic smile brushed his thin lips.
“Yes, we can trust this information.”
He bent over the map deliberately. The candle light penetrated the shadowy caverns of his eyes as he leaned forward, transforming them into yellow pools of strange luminance. There was something haunting about those green-yellow eyes, something about their weird glow in the darkness that was chilling. They were the eyes of a creature of darkness, the eyes of a hunter.
“We can trust this information,” he said. “Underground Intelligence from Berlin transmitted it to me. Heydrich will be in Prague tomorrow.”