Castle of Terror, E. J. Liston [best classic literature txt] 📗

"Too bad, Griffin," Hale Jenkins said to the man alongside. "Now if you'd have just stuck to bank stick-ups, you'd have been all right."

"Nah!" Bud Griffin said, his mouth twisted in a wry grin. "I'd have been all right if you'd have just stuck to being a traffic cop. But you had to show the Commissioner you were on the ball, so he sent you after me. That's all."

The light suddenly flashed over the pilot's compartment with its warning to fasten safety belts. A few seconds later, the stewardess came around with a smiling warning that they were coming over some bad pockets, and that there was no need to worry.

Both men fastened their belts, as did all the other passengers on the giant airliner, and after a while the elevator began its ride. Griffin reached up and pulled the air vent down, so that the cold air of the upper reaches at which they were flying could send its refreshing drafts of air down the vent. Jenkins had been airsick once and didn't want any more of the same. He followed Griffin's gaze, and looked into the grey fog of a huge cloud bank.

Jenkins, to get his mind off the possibility of getting sick again, took up where the other had left off: "Yeah. But like I say, you shoulda stuck to robbin' banks."

His lean, strong face with the unusual bone structure which made it a face of highlights and plane surfaces, broke into a wide-angled grin. He threw the shock of black hair from his eyes, and continued: "Guys like you never learn. Gotta work with a heater."

Griffin's opaque eyes shifted from the greyness which had encircled the plane, and met the dancing grey ones of the detective beside him. Griffin's lips mimicked the grin of the other. But his words were not so light-hearted: "Look, copper! You just got lucky. If it weren't for that dame.... Aah! I shoulda been smart. I shoulda known she'd of sung. No dame can keep her yap shut! But get this. We ain't in yet! So be smart and don't think Bud Griffin's fryin'. Not yet he ain't."

Jenkins was, for a detective, a rather amiable sort. In Griffin's case, however, he could not help but give an occasional needle. The hoodlum and murderer's bragging rasped on Jenkins' nerves.

"Now, don't blame the girl," Jenkins said. "She was just the last step in my trail. The guy who really talked was Bud Griffin. There's a character who'll never stop talkin'. If you hadn't talked to the bartender in that joint on the waterfront, I'd have never found out about Myrtle. But he knew Myrtle and the kind of girl she was; he knew she only went for the hoods who had dough, and no guy who drinks beer like you do and leaves no tips ought to have dough. So when Myrtle walks in with a platina fox jacket and says you bought it, he gets mighty suspicious.

"It was a cinch then, Bud. All I had to do was tell the girl she was going to be named as an accessory after the fact, and she spilled her load."

Pin points of flame suddenly danced in Griffin's eyes. His hands, lying quiescent on his lap, curled into balls of bone and muscle. Griffin had many weaknesses; of them all, anger was his greatest. For in the heat of anger he would do anything, and not care about the consequences. It had proved his undoing many times. His last surge of anger had resulted in murder during a robbery. The victim had resisted Griffin and had been shot in cold blood. As always, that anger showed in visible signs: there came the pin points of flame to the eyes, the clenching of fists, and an odd curling of the mouth. But Jenkins, either because he did not know of these signs, or because he was so wrapped in his own glory, did not notice the other's shifting movement.

When Griffin struck, it was with electric speed. Certainly, he had nothing to gain by his attack on Jenkins. For had he thought it out logically, he would have realized there was no way of escape. Even a fool would have realized that there was no way of getting out of a plane which was flying at ten thousand feet, and coming down alive, unless one had a chute. So it was sheer berserk anger which prompted the attack.

Griffin's right elbow shot up and sideways, and landed with telling force against Jenkins' jaw. At almost the same instant, he slipped loose of his safety belt, whirled on his companion and struck him two savage blows with his fists. Those blows stunned the detective. And like a snake in movement, Griffin's hand reached for the pistol in Jenkins' holster and drew it.

Dazed as Jenkins was, he tried to stop Griffin. The barrel of the gun slashed a furrow in his cheek for the try. The blow rocked the detective's head back, and allowed him to get out of his seat. In an instant he was in the aisle, leaping for the pilot's compartment. He had no plan; he wasn't even thinking. In the background of his mind he knew the panic he had created; he could see it reflected in the face of the woman in the front seat, in the wide, suddenly terror-stricken eyes of the man at her side. But what he was going to do when he reached the closed door that was his goal, he did not know.

There were screams and hoarse commands. From the rear, the stewardess shouted for him not to go beyond the door. Griffin reached it, whirled and faced the length of the plane, a snarl on his lips, and the .38 in his hand, a small-barreled threat of death to whoever was fool enough to attempt to stop him.

And there was one who was going to be a fool.

Whether Jenkins was just dazed by the last blow, or whether he really thought he could stop the other, is a matter of conjecture. But he rose to his feet and started forward in a stumbling run.

"Come on, copper," Griffin grunted, a terrible smile of anticipation on his lips. "I been wantin' to knock you off."

Everyone on the plane froze in horror as the gun muzzle came up. The finger on the trigger tightened in a sort of slow-motion action until it seemed as if the smallest pressure would set it off. And still Jenkins stumbled forward, until only a couple of feet separated the two. Then the grin became a snarl on Griffin's lips, and all knew the instant of death had arrived.

Jenkins must have felt it also, for he took the last few steps in a shambling, wide-armed leap, as if he were welcoming it. It was at that instant that the co-pilot decided to step through the door. The steel door slammed against the bent figure of the gunman just as he pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a roar, and Jenkins hit Griffin like a tackler slamming into a ball carrier.

But louder than the pistol's sound, was the sound from without the plane. It was as if all the fury of hell had exploded out there. The plane became a straw licked upward and outward, sucked downward and inward, in some vortex of sound and fury which was completely unrecognizable. It was as if some external force was venting its spleen on the craft. In the space of split seconds, in the time a picture forms in a mind, the plane and all its occupants lost their meaning.

There was a great rending sound and, following, the disintegration of the great ship into space.

Hale Jenkins felt himself spinning, whirling, falling into a vast empty fog. There was peace and contentment in that fog, and a sort of forgetfulness. There was nothing above and nothing below, just the grey murk. For a last instant of awareness, Jenkins saw not far from him the body of Griffin describing the same gyrations as his own. Then there was a wrenching at his bowels, a tearing at his brain, and unconsciousness slipped over him like the noose over the hanged man.

Odd piping voices penetrated into Jenkins' brain. He stirred and rolled over, and after a few seconds got his hands under him and pushed himself erect. He felt rather than saw the tree close to him, and put one hand out to its friendly trunk, steadying himself against it. His head came up after a second and his eyes cleared of the fog before them. He stared in disbelief as he looked out over a great valley.

In the distance, made plain by the brilliant light of the sun, he saw a tremendous castle with many-turreted immense sides. It shimmered and danced in the brilliant light, like a mirage conjured by a fevered mind. Yet he knew, without being told, that it was real—as real as the three tiny men who regarded him with passionately intent though oddly frightened eyes from a few feet off.

But sight was not the only sense of which Jenkins had the full use. He was aware of an odd, rumbling sound in the distance, as of thunder, yet not quite thunder. He noticed that the gnomes had also heard the sound, for their eyes turned from their intent regard of him, to the castle perched on the mesa in the distance. He could not see their eyes now, yet he was aware that they held fear—cold, numbing fear—fright so great it binds the entrails, makes a stone statue of a man, even a dwarf.

They held their poses even after the dying sounds of the strange rumble had passed in the distance. When Jenkins spoke, it took several seconds for them to bring their attention to him:

"Where am I and who are you?"

Their answering voices were childish pipings, making even less sense of a confused situation:

"I am Loti ..." said the smallest, who wore a fringe of beard from his forehead all the way around a pointed, slat-like chin.

"I am Gaino," said the second. He had a hooked nose so long it almost touched his chin.

"I am Mikas," said the third, who had a round face, a bulbous nose whose color was that of a ripe tomato, flapping pointed ears too large for his face, and a pair of perfectly round eyes.

"Yeah? But where am I?" Jenkins persisted.

"In the land of Gnat," all three piped in unison.

Slowly the brain-fog was clearing for Jenkins. The miracle of his landing safely was still not quite clear, nor could he understand the presence of these odd beings. But as reason returned to Jenkins, it told him something had happened which would perhaps be unexplainable.

He pointed toward the castle and said: "Who lives there?"

"Lucretia ..." they answered again in unison.

Now there's a familiar name, Jenkins thought, while at the same time a horrifying idea occurred to him. If it were Lucretia Borgia, he thought, then he might be dead. Suddenly,