The Nemesis of Evil Page 15

  Nick Naldini flapped his long arms and shivered.

  “Cold as the top drawer of a refrigerator out here, dressed like this,” he complained dolefully. “Menlo, old sock, you’re the miracle worker around here today — any chance of rustlin’ us up some clothes?”

  “Yeah,” grinned Doc Jenkins happily, delighted at the unexpected resurrection of his friend. “For a guy that can come back from the grave, it ought to be a cinch to find us something to wear. I’d feel pretty silly, wadin’ in to a fist fight with Lucifer’s boys, dressed like a nudist who can’t quite bring himself to go all the way!”

  Menlo Parker sniffed spitefully. “The way you dumb bunnies just stood around twiddlin’ your thumbs and let them crooks carry me off kickin’ and screamin’ and hangin’ on to the bottom of that dad-ratted helicopter, it’d serve you right if I let you spend the rest of the day in your skivvies! But I just can’t expose a delicate young female to all them skinny knees and bowlegs and flabby tummies, no sirree! You’ll find a buncha these red bathrobes down in the room at the end. But for gosh sakes, don’t disturb the guy I left snoozin’ there! He’ll be awful grouchy when he wakes up, on account of the goose egg I give him when I conked him on the noggin.”

  It didn’t take the Omega men long to climb into the robes they found in the jailer’s room. Within minutes they were slinking down the corridor, their hoods drawn up to cover their faces, with Elvira Higgins in the rear.

  Doc Jenkins had kicked the jailer’s chair apart so that they could all arm themselves with the kindling, which for the most part made pretty hefty cudgels. With considerable reluctance, Menlo had yielded his Bowie knife to Ace Harrigan, for the young aviator had picked up quite a knack at knife fighting during his vagabond years of knocking around the globe, and in his skillful hands the gleaming blade was a deadly weapon. Besides, Menlo now packed a .45, which he had shamelessly pilfered from the dead guard whose robe he also wore.

  None of them had any idea where they were going, but with great good luck they did not happen to encounter any of Lucifer’s thugs.

  They suddenly turned a corner and found themselves staring upon a scene of dramatic confrontation.

  There sat- Lucifer on his high throne, two tall, towering Nubian guards at his side, their rifles leveled at the gray-clad figure who knelt at the foot of the throne.

  None of them could possibly not have recognized that characteristic gray suede jacket and slacks or that bare skull with the pale golden hue. They knew their master when they saw him, or, at least, they thought they did.

  “They got the chief!” roared Scorchy. “They’re gonna shoot ‘im down!”

  Menlo whipped out his gun, leveled it at the bigger of the two guards, and snapped off a shot, winging him in the shoulder. The tall black went down, but in the same swift flurry of action, Lucifer whirled around behind the stone chair and vanished. The other guard lifted his rifle and fired at them point-blank. In the high-walled stone chamber the crash of gunfire resounded deafeningly.

  What happened then was incredible — as incredible, that is, as it was unexpected.

  The boom and gobble of echoes roared in the enclosed space.

  The long, dangling, stony spears of the stalactites quivered like tuning forks and broke free. They fell like huge stone knives. One cracked the skull of the guard who had fired on the Omega men, and the other dropped to impale the kneeling figure in gray suede.

  Horror sprang into the eyes of Menlo Parker. He stood as if he himself had been transfixed by one of the cold, sharp spears of stone. Dazedly he looked first at the man in gray, pinned to the ground like a moth under the quivering stalactite, then down at the smoking gun in his fist.

  “O my God,” he quavered, “what have I done?”

  Chapter 21 — Flaming Doom

  Behind the great stone chair a trapdoor had been cut into the floor of Lucifer’s throne room. It was covered by a stone slab that had a bronze ring affixed thereto so that it could be raised at will.

  Lucifer had learned many years ago that it was wise to always have an escape route at hand. You never know when you are going to need one. So, even in his throne room, where he sat in state amid his secret fortress inside Mount Shasta, the mastermind of supercrime had an exit at hand.

  When the red-robed men clustered in the doorway had fired, bringing down his trusted guard Mongo, the crime lord had seized the momentary distraction to get around behind the big stone chair. There, safe from flying bullets, he dragged open the trapdoor and vanished from view.

  A black tunnel had been sunken down deep into the interior of the mountain. Steel rungs were clamped to one side of this vertical pit. Closing the trapdoor and bolting it securely above him, Lucifer descended into the darkness, rung by rung.

  At the bottom, the tunnel opened out into a horizontal stone corridor, which the genius of crime followed to its end. There a fully equipped chemical laboratory was housed in a square stone chamber. Porcelain benches drawn up along the walls held a sparkling array of crystal tubing, flasks, crucibles and Bunsen burners. It was in this room that Ching prepared the subtle poison that was the secret of the Hand of Death.

  Here, too, a televisor screen was set into one wall. Lucifer crossed over to it and peered within its glowing circle. The Omega men, he observed grimly, had seized the upper hand and were rapidly gaining control of the entire system of tunnels and rooms that comprised the secret headquarters of Lucifer.

  Manipulating the control verniers, the big man looked into room after room. He saw Ching and Mongo in shackles, the Eurasian wounded in the rockfall being bandaged by the Omega men. Switching to views of other parts of his stronghold, the crime lord saw that Menlo Parker had put to good use his hours of freedom. The wrinkled little scientist had led his comrades to the central controls, and even as Lucifer watched through the glowing televisor screen, steel grilles were clanging down to block passageways and seal off rooms, cutting Lucifer’s horde of red-robed thugs into small, helpless, captive groups. Parker had only to release the sleep gas into these rooms and the hidden citadel was conquered.

  But all was not yet lost! Lucifer still lived and was hidden. And there were still certain weapons that were his last aces in the hole. The dynamite charges buried beneath key pillars and walls, for example. All he had to do was to close the red switch at his left hand, and the peak of Mount Shasta would be rocked by a sequence of explosions so destructive, so devastating, that none of them would escape with their lives.

  Lucifer reached out to grasp the red lever. As he did so, a steely voice spoke from behind him.

  “It will do you no good; the wires have been severed.”

  Lucifer turned. Zarkon stood there, still wearing the red robe he had taken from Ching, when he had quickly changed clothes with the unconscious Eurasian back in the power room.

  “I have made the dangerous mistake of underestimating you, Prince Zarkon!” said Lucifer, gravely. “I beg your pardon for having done so. This round is yours, I admit.”

  Zarkon nodded, saying nothing. In one hand he held a revolver.

  “I understand now that you switched clothing with my servant, Ching,” said Lucifer. “Doubtless, this was accomplished in the few short moments the televisor lenses were blinded by the gush of anesthetic vapor into the power room. But, tell me: How did you escape from the room? I had already closed off all exits from the chamber by lowering the steel grilles.”

  “I did not escape at all,” said Zarkon. “I merely retreated from the path of the vapor and concealed myself behind one of the big turbines in the far corner until the gas dissipated. Then I simply waited until your thugs entered the chamber, and mingled unobtrusively with them until such time as I could leave the chamber without anyone noticing my movements.”

  “And how came you here, might I ask, to my most secret and hidden adytum?” Lucifer inquired in a stony voice.

  Zarkon rarely smiled, but in this instance his magnetic, black eyes twinkled with something approaching humor
.

  “By accident,” he confessed. “I really wasn’t trying to find your hiding place of last resort at all, I was simply trying to keep out of sight. I passed the throne room, looked in, and happened to spot the trapdoor. Just then your two tame giants —”

  “Mongo and Simba? My Nubian blacks?”

  Zarkon nodded. “It must have been them. They came into the throne room. I ducked down behind the dais and decided to go down through the trapdoor before they got a glimpse of me. Quite frankly, I had no idea of what this place was, other than that it was your laboratory for chemical experiments. I had no idea you would come ducking down here yourself, before very long.”

  “I see,” Lucifer nodded. “Again, sir, my congratulations! You are far more resourceful and ingenious than I would have believed. I fail to understand, however, how your agent, Dr. Parker, survived the Hand of Death unharmed....”

  “I discovered the nature of the poison when I performed an autopsy on the bodies of your murdered henchmen,” Zarkon replied quietly. “As you must know, the pharmacopoeia contains a common drug that is a specific against the poison. I took a bottle from the police laboratory and gave my men a dose in their coffee before we left the headquarters. The dose was sufficient to immunize them for several hours, at least. Since I had already come to suspect that the newspaper publisher, Ryan, was a member of your organization, I said nothing about the immunization to my men at the time, of course.”

  “So Parker was quick-thinking enough to fake the convulsions, even though he had no advance knowledge of the fact that the Hand of Death could not harm him,” mused Lucifer. “A clever man! You are the master of a superb organization, Prince Zarkon ... if only I could persuade you to join forces with me! Together, we could conquer the world; together, we could share its rule.”

  Zarkon shook his head without hesitation.

  “That can never be,” he said. “It was to destroy such dreams of empire, by such men as you, that I was sent here in the first place. We must forever be adversaries, Lucifer, until one of us destroys the other....”

  Lucifer grinned, snatching up a heavy glass beaker filled with virulent green fluid. His action was so swiftly performed, so perfectly timed, that it took Zarkon unawares.

  “An event that may take place much sooner than you think, Prince!” he sneered. Zarkon elevated the revolver.

  “I can shoot you where you stand,” said the Ultimate Man quietly.

  “If you do, my friend, you will destroy yourself, as well as me,” smiled the bald, bullet-headed man in the voluminous silken robes whose color was the hue of human blood. “For this beaker contains a powerful acid of my own invention! Were I to hurl it at you — which I would do, if even with my dying breath — you would be destroyed instantly. While I might well survive your bullet. You have, of course, no way of telling whether or not I am wearing a bulletproof jacket underneath these robes of mine.”

  “That is true,” admitted Zarkon, lowering the revolver slowly.

  “Very well, then. Drop your gun and kick it over to me. All I wish is to escape from this place. I am willing to let you live, as well, for I envision that on another day we shall both cross swords once again. Drop your weapon, I say, and you may leave here unharmed — attempt to put a bullet through me, and I will destroy you with this chemical. Choose: but quickly! My patience is nearly at its end.”

  .Zarkon stared thoughtfully at his archenemy. He stared also at the Bunsen burner just behind Lucifer on the porcelain table from which the mastermind of crime had snatched up the flask of acid.

  Without a word or the slightest flicker of expression, Zarkon bent down and deposited the revolver on the stone floor.

  “Ah!” exclaimed Lucifer, with satisfaction. “Now you are acting wisely, my friend! Come, kick the pistol over to me....”

  Zarkon did so. Lucifer half turned to set the beaker down on the table, and in the next moment he would have stooped to pick up the revolver that Zarkon had surrendered. But the act was never completed.

  As he half turned, the voluminous sleeves of his robes brushed the Bunsen burner, where a small gas flame burned unnoticed. The thin silken fabric of the scarlet robes caught fire instantaneously.

  Lucifer’s robe became a mass of flames!

  The mastermind of crime screamed once, his grim, powerful face distorted with rage and pain and horror. He thrust his hands out blindly, as if to stave off the doom whose seething flames enveloped him.

  But he still held the acid beaker!

  It crashed to the floor at his feet, and burst into a thousand glittering shards against the smooth stone.

  The flaming hem of Lucifer’s robes touched the spreading pool of acid, which hissed as it ate into the smooth rock of the floor.

  The explosion rocked the room and brought the roof crashing down.

  Only a split second before the explosion, Zarkon sprang into action. Moving so swiftly that to the human eye his flying form would have been but a blur, the Lord of the Unknown whipped out of the room and into the corridor beyond.

  There he whirled, diving behind a stout stone column about as thick as the trunk of a mighty oak.

  The explosion resounded deafeningly. A sheet of flame blazed through the open door. It licked out for many feet, and had Zarkon still been traveling in that direction, his own scarlet robes would have been ignited and consumed. As it was, although stunned by the explosion and momentarily deafened, he was otherwise unharmed.

  Retreating back down the corridor, the Ultimate Man took one last look into the laboratory. It had been transformed into a raging inferno. Nothing could possibly have lived for more than an instant in that roaring holocaust. It was like looking into the open mouth of a blast furnace.

  If Lucifer was still within, his body must have been burned to ash by now.

  The words of ominous warning that Lucifer had earlier uttered to Menlo Parker were now proved prophetic. His devilish cavern world truly contained hellfire. And in that seething inferno, Lucifer himself had been consumed!

  Although a grim and ghastly fate, it was a fitting end for the ruthless mastermind of criminality, who had dared assume the name of the archfiend as his pseudonym.

  Lucifer, the Prince of Hell, whose dominion is the Inferno itself!

  In that searing hellfire, the archenemy of civilization had suffered his final defeat, ending in self-destruction. It was a termination to his career in crime that Zarkon found curiously apt. It could almost have been called “poetic justice.”

  But Zarkon was not exhilarated by his victory. The tall man stood somberly, a brooding expression on his classically handsome features. His eyes were enshadowed by an emotion that was almost regret.

  Was it regret for the maniac whose madness had first perverted and then destroyed a brilliant intellect, a great career, a life of enormous potential value to mankind?

  Or was it the gentlemanly instinct of the sportsman, who acknowledges the demise of a great adversary, the passing of a foeman worthy of his steel?

  No one can say. At that moment his face was unreadable, an enigma, sphinx-like in its inscrutability.

  Chapter 22 — The Case is Closed

  Yes, Zarkon would not have been Zarkon had he not regretted the passing of his archenemy, Lucifer. That so brilliant a brain had destroyed itself seemed to him lamentable — almost as lamentable as the fact that a genius of science had transformed himself into a genius of crime. Had Lucifer been taken alive, it was not beyond possibility that his mighty intellect might have been converted from the paths of criminality to the service of humanity. His death had made an end to a career of great though evil deeds. Zarkon was relieved that the tyranny that Lucifer schemed had failed to enslave the civilization of the world, but he was saddened at the destruction of such a giant intellect.

  And yet it was to destroy such men as this that Zarkon had been sent here, years ago.

  The secret of Zarkon’s mysterious origin was known to but a few. It must forever remain a secret.
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br />   Zarkon turned his back on the burning laboratory that had become the funeral pyre of Lucifer and his mad schemes of world domination, retraced the narrow tunnel to its beginning, and climbed the steel rungs to the top. Unbolting the trapdoor, he opened it, climbed out, and surveyed the wreckage.

  One of Lucifer’s two black bodyguards had been shot, but not fatally, from the noise the ebony giant was making as Ace Harrigan attempted to bandage his wounds.

  Ching, too, had somehow managed to survive the crippling descent of the pointed stone stalactite. The brittle point of the dangling spear had broken his shoulder and pierced the muscles, but had narrowly missed severing the great artery that leads to the heart. Had he been kneeling a handbreadth to the left at the moment the explosion of gunfire brought the jagged stones crashing down, the suave little Eurasian would not have survived to pay the penalty for his complicity in Lucifer’s dreams of empire.

  Menlo Parker had succeeded in stanching the flow of blood, and had extracted the point of the stalactite. Now he knelt at the side of the unconscious little man who had been unwittingly cast into the role of Zarkon and whose imposture had gone unexposed until the last moment. The oriental chemist lay still, breathing stertorously, his amber complexion waxen from shock or loss of blood.

  Menlo glanced up, jumped, and swore.

  “Chief! Where the Sam Hill’d you come from? Dang near scared the life out of me, popping up out of nowhere like that!”

  Zarkon nodded in the direction of the trapdoor.