The Bizarre Murders, page 50
“Let him go!” she cried. “You’ve the—the wrong man! Let him—”
The giant released her shoulder and clapped his paw, redolent of sour dirt, whisky, and cordage, over her mouth. Then he lowered Kummer to the gravel and hooked the fingers of his other hand into Kummer’s collar at the nape. Kummer choked, fighting to regain his breath.
“March,” rumbled the giant, and they marched.
Rosa made inarticulate sounds behind the steel hand; once she tried her teeth on it. But the giant merely cuffed her mouth lightly, and she gave up, tears of pain in her eyes. They marched, their captor between them, gripping Kummer’s collar on one side and cupping Rosa’s mouth on the other. In this way, and in a silence broken only by the assaults of their shoes on the gravel, they made their way awkwardly but rapidly back along the road. They walked between walls of sheer cliff, towering above them on both sides to form a geometric canyon.
At last they reached the point in the path where it branched off to the left in the wide ascending automobile road. In the shadows of the cliffs just before this branch stood an old sedan, without lights, and already turned around to face the main road leading out of Spanish Cape.
The giant said evenly: “Miss Godfrey, I’m goin’ to take my hand off your mouth. Scream, an’ I swear I’ll shove your teeth down your throat. You open the front door of that there auto. Mr. Marco, when I let go that collar o’ yourn, I want ye to jump into the front an’ git behind the wheel. I’ll climb in the back an’ tell ye where to drive to. No noise, either o’ ye. Now do as I tell ye.”
He released them. Kummer fingered his throat gingerly and essayed a pallid grin. Rosa wiped her lips with a dainty cambric handkerchief and flashed an angry glance at her uncle. But Kummer shook his head the slightest bit, as if in warning.
“I tell you,” whispered Rosa desperately, whirling on the giant, “this isn’t John Marco! It’s Mr. Kummer, Mr. David Kummer, my uncle. You’ve caught the wrong man. Oh, don’t you see—”
“Uncle, hey?” said the giant with a low chuckle of admiration. “He ain’t Marco, hey? Jump in, girlie; I’d hate to have to mess ye up. Ye’ve got guts.”
“Oh, you stupid oaf!” she cried, but she pulled the door open and crawled into the car. Kummer stepped in after her with sagging shoulders; he seemed to have felt a presentiment of his dark destiny even then, and perhaps he was husbanding his strength for a final struggle. That was the impression Rosa, her brain a stew of panic, received. She twisted in the front seat and glared balefully at the giant. He had opened the back door and set his foot upon the running-board.
She realized with a start that the moon had risen, for the gravel road was dimly illuminated now and there were patches of silver light on the striated walls of the cliff looming up to the face of Spanish Cape. And then she saw the giant’s foot…It was shod in ripped black leather; it was his right foot; and on the inner side there was a hole and a bulge, where a bunion of gargantuan size grew. A foot of such dimensions that she blinked. It was simply incredible that a human being…Then the foot vanished as the big man thrust himself through the doorway and crashed down upon the cushions. The screams of the springs made the girl want to laugh. She checked herself with a horrified consciousness of her incipient hysteria.
“Git movin’, Mr. Marco,” said the bass voice. “Ye’ll find the key in the switch, an’ I know ye can drive by that yaller roadster o’ yourn.”
Kummer leaned forward, touched the light-switch, turned the ignition-key, and stepped on the starter. A quiet motor hummed, and he released the hand-brake. “Where to?” he asked in a dry, cracked undertone.
“Straight ahead off the Cape. Right smack through the sunk road here, acrost the neck, straight through the park, an’ out onto the main stem. Turn left there an’ keep goin’.” A note of impatience crept into the heavy voice. “Come on, come on. An’ you give one move I don’t like an’ I’ll choke the life out o’ ye. You keep still, girlie.”
Rosa shut her eyes and sank back as the car trundled off. This was just a bad dream. Soon she would shudder into wakefulness and laugh at the whole preposterous thing. She’d find David and tell him about it, and they would laugh together…Then she felt Kummer’s rigid right arm next to hers, and she shivered. Poor David! It was brutal for him, unnecessary, a cruel caprice of fate. And as for her…Her skin crawled. She was too sick to encompass all the possibilities.
When she opened her eyes they had left behind them the narrow strip of parkland beyond the neck of the Cape, and were turning left into the main highway. Across the road, directly opposite the entrance to the park-road, were the lights of a filling-station. She could see the white-overalled figure of old Harry Stebbins stooped over the gasoline tank of a car, gas-hose in hand. Good old Harry! If she only dared scream, once…And then she felt the hot sour breath of the monster on her neck and heard his warning rumble in her ear and sank back, nauseated.
Kummer drove quietly, almost humbly. But she knew David. Under his black thatch there was a keen brain, and she knew that it must be working furiously. She prayed silently that he would concoct a plan. It would take gray matter to defeat this ogrish creature. Brawn, even Kummer’s, would be futile against the man’s negligent power.
They skimmed along the concrete highway. There was a good deal of traffic; cars headed for Wayland Amusement Park ten miles up the road. Saturday night…Rosa wondered what the others were doing at the house. Mother. John Marco—Was David right? About John? Had she made a hideous mistake after all? But then—It was quite possible, she reflected bitterly, that it would be hours before she and David were missed. People were always wandering off at Spanish Cape, especially David; and of late she herself had been moody…
“Turn left here,” said the giant.
They both started. Surely something was wrong? They had travelled barely a mile since turning off the Spanish Cape road. Kummer muttered something beneath his breath, but Rosa could not hear. Turn left—That must be the private road that led down to the Waring shack off the public beach—in sight, almost within reach, of the cliffs of Spanish Cape!
Again they swept through deserted parkland, and all too soon were out on the road in open country. The bathing beach…They began to skim along beside a high fence, and the ground turned to sand beside the road. Kummer switched on the headlights; directly in their path stood a little cluster of rather decrepit buildings. He slowed the car.
“Where to, Cyclops?” he said quietly.
“Lay off. Smack up to them there buildings.” Then the giant chuckled at Rosa’s gasp. “Don’t bank on anything, girlie; ain’t nobody here. This here Waring owns the place ain’t been here pretty near all summer. Shut down tight, she is. Go on, Marco.”
“I’m not Marco, you know,” said Kummer in the same quiet voice; but he drove on, slowly.
“You, too?” growled the giant in disgust. Rosa sank back in despair.
The car rolled to a stop beside a cottage, unilluminated and obviously deserted. Beyond it lay a small building which looked like a boathouse; and nearby another which might have been a garage. The buildings were quite near the beach. As they got stiffly out of the car they could see the towering black cliffs of Spanish Cape across the moon-flecked water, only a few hundred yards away. But it might have been a few hundred miles away, for all the good it could do them. For the cliffs were perpendicular, and at least fifty feet high, and at their base lay sharp tumbled rocks against which the lashing tides raged. Even here, on Waring’s beach, there was no approach to the Cape. The cliff stopped high above the little structures, and there was scarcely a handhold in its entire side, which was only slightly less high than the cliffs in the sea.
Off to the other side, where the public bathing beach lay, there was nothing but paper-littered sand. The sand glistened under the moon.
Rosa saw her uncle casting quick secret glances all about, with what seemed to her desperation. The giant stood slightly behind them, his one eye tolerantly watchful. He acted as if he were in no hurry at all, but permitted them to inspect the deserted premises to their hearts’ content. A ramp-like structure led from the boathouse to the water’s edge, and half in the surf lay a small powerful-looking cabin cruiser. Several rollers lay scattered about in the sand, and the doors of the boathouse stood open. Apparently, then, the giant had broken into the place, rolled the boat out himself, in readiness for…what?
“That’s Mr. Waring’s boat!” exclaimed the dark girl, staring at it. “You’re stealing it, you—you monster?”
“Never mind about the names, lady,” said the giant gruffly, almost as if he were offended. “I’ll do what I damn want to. Now, Mr. Marco—”
Kummer had turned and was walking slowly toward his captor. Rosa, catching sight of his blue eyes glinting in the moonlight, saw that he had determined to act upon some last desperate plan. Resolution was written all over his hard, clean face. There was no fear in it at all as he stalked the immense figure of the man in sailor’s costume, who stood watching him quite expressionlessly.
“I can give you more money than you ever saw in—” began David Kummer in a smooth conversational voice, as without haste he strolled toward the giant.
He never finished; Rosa never learned what he had intended to do. Struck dumb with horror, she could only feel her legs go weak beneath her and marvel dully at the extraordinary monster who had kidnaped them. For, so swiftly that her dazed eye barely followed, the giant lunged forward with upheld fist. The huge club of bone and skin thumped soggily against something, and the next thing she saw was Kummer’s face sinking below the fixed level of her stricken eyes. And then he was sprawled on the sand, very still.
Something snapped in the girl’s brain and with a scream she flung herself with clawing fingers at the vast back of the giant. He was kneeling calmly by the unconscious man, listening to his breathing. When he felt the weight of her body he merely rose and twitched his shoulders, and she fell off to land in a sobbing heap on the sand. Without a word he picked her up and carried her, weeping and kicking, toward the dark cottage.
The door was locked, or bolted. He tucked her under one arm and with the other heaved against the panels. They gave with a splintering crash; he kicked the broken door open and strode in.
The last thing Rosa saw as her captor toed the door shut behind her was David Kummer’s face on the sand before the silent cruiser under the moon.
It was a living-room, quite habitable, as she noted with glazed surprise in the ray of the giant’s flashlight. She did not know Hollis Waring, had never met him; he was a New York business-man who occasionally spent a week or a few days there. She had often seen him cruising about beyond the Cape (as she told Mr. Ellery Queen later) in the very boat beached outside—a tiny fragile gray man in a linen cap, always alone. She had known vaguely that he had not visited his cottage since the beginning of the summer, long before John Marco had appeared in his yellow roadster with multitudinous luggage; and some one—her father, she vaguely recalled—had mentioned that he had gone to Europe. She had never known that her father and Waring were acquainted; certainly they had never met here at the shore; for that matter they may merely have known of each other through a business connection; her father had so many…
The giant set her on the rug before the fireplace. “Sit down in that there chair,” he directed in the gentlest of voices. He set the flashlight on a divan nearby so that its powerful beam concentrated on the chair.
Silently, she sat down. On a small table not three feet from her elbow stood a telephone. From the appearance of the instrument she saw that it was a local telephone, on which service had probably not been discontinued. If she could reach it, snatch off the receiver, shriek for help…The giant took the telephone and put it down on the floor ten feet away, stretching the cord to its utmost. She wilted in the chair, finally beyond resistance,
“What are you going to—to do with me?” she asked in a dry, small voice.
“Ain’t goin’ to hurt ye. Don’t git scared, girlie. It’s jest this here Marco bird I want. Took ye along to keep ye from raisin’ an alarm. Ye would, too.” As he chuckled admiringly, he took a coil of heavy cord from one of his pockets and began to unwind it. “Sit still now, Miss Godfrey. Be good an’ ye’ll be all right.” And before she could move he had, with his incredible quickness, tied her hands behind her back and to the back of the chair. She tugged and pulled in sudden desperation; the knots only tightened. Then he stooped and bound her ankles to the legs of the chair. She could see the coarse grayish hair beneath his cap, and an ugly depression covered with old scar-tissue at the back of his ruddy neck.
“Why don’t you gag me, too?” she demanded bitterly.
“What for?” he chuckled, apparently in good humor. “Screech your head off if ye like, lady; won’t no one hear ye. Up we go!”
He lifted her, chair and all, and carried her to another door. Opening it with a kick of one huge foot, he carried her through into a stuffy little bedroom and deposited her and the chair near the bed.
“You’re not leaving me here?” she cried, appalled. “Why, I’ll—I’ll starve, I’ll suffocate!”
“Now, now, ye’ll be all right,” he said soothingly. “I’ll see to it ye’ll be found.”
“But David—my uncle—that man outside,” she panted. “What are you going to do with him?”
He strode to the door to the living-room, making thunder in the small chamber. “Hey?” he growled, without looking back. His back expressed sudden menace.
“What are you going to do with him?” shrieked Rosa, frantic with fear.
“Hey?” he said again, and went out. Rosa sank back in the chair to which she was tied, her heart pounding painfully in her throat. Oh, he was stupid, stupid—a hulking, murdering clown. If ever she got out of this—quickly enough—it would be easy to track him down. There could be only one like him in the world; such travesties on the human form, she thought bitterly, do not happen in pairs. And then—if only it wasn’t too late—revenge would be sweet…
She sat there, a helpless trussed fowl, listening with all the power of her small ears. She could hear the monster plainly enough as he tramped back and forth in the living-room. And then she heard something else: a minute tinkle, crystal-clear. She frowned and bit her lip. What was—The telephone! Yes, she could hear the metallic click of the instrument as he dialed some number. Oh, if only she could—
She tried desperately to rise and succeeded only in achieving a sort of squat, the chair lifting a bit from the floor. How she managed she did not know, but she found herself making painful progress toward the door, one foot after another in a waddle, the chair bumping alone derisively behind her. She made a good deal of noise, but the giant in the next room apparently was too absorbed to hear.
When she reached the door and set her ear against it, trembling more from excitement than exertion, she heard nothing. He couldn’t be through already! But then she realized that he must be waiting for the connection. She concentrated all her energies in a single fierce application of will. She must hear what he said, if possible find out to whom he talked. She held her breath as the vibrating tones of his voice rumbled through the door. But the first tones came through garbled, indistinguishable. He might have been asking for someone. If he was, she could not make out the name. If it was a name…Her head spun with vertigo and she shook it impatiently, biting her lower lip until the pain cleared her brain. Ah!
“…job’s done. Yeah…Got Marco outside now. Had to slug him one…Naw! He’ll keep. When I slug ’em they stays slugged.” Silence. Rosa wished for wings, second sight, anything. Oh, if only she could hear the voice of the man or woman at the other end of the wire! But the giant’s bass reached her again. “Miss Godfrey’s all right. Got her tied up in the bedroom…Ain’t hurt. No, I tell ye! Only better see she don’t have to stay here too long. She ain’t done nothin’ to ye, has she?…Yeah, yeah!…out to sea an’ then…You’re the doctor…All right, all right! I tell ye he’ll keep…” For a moment she could hear nothing more than a blurred vibrato of hoarse sound. Wouldn’t he ever mention that murderous creature’s name? Anything, anything. Some clue…“Okay. Okay! I’m goin’ now. Marco won’t bother you no more. But don’t forgit about the girl. She’s got guts, that one.” And Rosa, with a sickness in her stomach, heard the crash of the instrument and the giant’s slow, stupid, rather good-natured chuckle.
She sank back again, exhausted, closing her eyes. But she opened them again quickly; she had heard the slam of the living-room door. Had he gone out, or had some one come in? But there was only silence, and she knew that the giant had left the cottage. She must see…She squirmed back, opened the door, and in the same awkward duck-like fashion waddled across the floor of the living-room to the nearest front window. The giant’s flashlight was gone and the room was pitch-dark; she bumped into things and once bruised her strapped right arm painfully. At last she reached the window.
The moon was high now, and the white sand of the beach before the cottage and the calm surface of the sea acted like reflectors. The whole beach was smothered in a gentle glow of silver light; visibility was perfect.
She forgot the pain in her arm, the needles stinging in her cramped muscles, the dryness of her throat and lips. The scene outside the window was so perfect, so brilliant, so flat in its lights and shadows, that it might have come from a motion-picture reel. Even the figure of their gigantic captor looked small, as if some invisible director had ordered a long shot. At the moment Rosa reached the uncurtained window he was stooping over the figure of David Kummer, who lay in precisely the same tumbled, unconscious position as when she had last seen him. She watched the mountainous creature lift Kummer without effort, sling the limp body over his shoulder, and stalk to the beached cruiser. He dumped Kummer into the boat with little ceremony, dug his huge feet into the ramp, set his shoulders against the hull, and shoved…
