[Magazine 1966-­06] - The Vanishing Act Affair - Lynds Dennis (читать книги онлайн полностью .TXT) 📗

In the silence the shaggy-haired people waited.

The satanic-faced man turned to face the fire. He flicked his wrist, passed his hand before the fire. Thin smoke billowed out from the flames. In the room no one moved or spoke as the fumes spread through the room.

They came out of the fire, out of the flames themselves.

A winged monster with the head of an eagle, the body of a lion.

A squat, ape-like figure with the feet of a hawk.

A slavering creature with the yawning mouth of a shark.

A coiled snake, a giant snake, with plumes on its head.

They came from the fire and seemed to hover above the vast stone room.

There was a great moan of pain and yet of joy, and all the people except the satanic man on the stone altar fell on their faces.

All but the sardonic leader—and one man far off in the shadows of a corner.

This one man, a limping hunchback, let his eyes take in the whole scene; then, silently, he limped away and out through a stone archway. He limped on down a dark corridor until he reached a door. He went through the door and along another corridor.

In this second corridor he changed. He straightened up, his limp became less pronounced, and he moved at a quick trot. He reached another door, opened it, and went up a curving flight of stone steps. At the top two shaggy-haired men watched him as he approached.

The man who had come up from below drew a small pistol and aimed it at each of the shaggy-haired men in turn. The pistol sounded twice—short, spitting sounds. Both his targets fell without a sound, not dead but instantly asleep.

The man jumped over them and entered an elevator. The elevator moved upward. When it stopped the man stepped out with his pistol ready. He shot down three more shaggy-haired guards. He ran, now, to one more door, climbed more stairs, and, at the top, pressed a button.

A slab of rock above him moved open. He climbed up and out into the ruins of a building. He ran through the ruins and came out onto the street of a city. He turned left and ducked into a doorway. Then he took a tiny, flat metal case from its hiding place inside the doorway.

He opened the case and pressed a button.

"Overseas direct, Waverly New York. Come in, New York!"

The man hunched over the flat metal case. He did not see the limping figures converging on the doorway where he waited. He did not see the tiny man with the white hair and satanic face who stood watching from just inside the ruined building.

"Go ahead, Agent Morgan," a voice said from the flat tin box.

"Code One, Confidential for Waverly," the man snapped.

There was another silence.

The limping figures reached the doorway.

The man looked up then and saw them.

* * *

ALEXANDER WAVERLY spoke into his microphone as Illya, Solo and the two Interpol men watched.

"Go ahead, Morgan. Morgan?"

A silence, and then, from the distant voice, suddenly filled with fear and panic, "End of the world! End of the world! Red at low noon! Red at—"

And screams, screams, screams—and silence.

In the New York office the five men looked at each other.

From the overseas radio—only silence, the screams gone.

ACT II: COME KILL WITH ME

THE LONDON MORGUE was damp and gloomy. No light came down into its dim recesses from the great city outside. The attendant drew out the body. The CID man, Taylor, turned away at the sight, coughing, walking a few feet from the corpse of Alec Morgan.

"Good God!" Napoleon Solo said, his face ashen for once as he looked at the remains of his fellow U.N.C.L.E. agent.

Beyond a small, quick swallow of his throat, Illya betrayed no sign of what the grisly sight meant to him. The small Russian had lived all his life with violent death, with men less human than monsters. He had learned to show no feeling while he dedicated his life to the destruction of such men.

With a sharp motion, Illya stepped to the body of Alec Morgan. The sharp motion was to tell Solo to come with him. Together the two men looked down at the corpse. Every bone had been broken, hacked, torn as if by wild beasts. Alec Morgan had been, literally, beaten to death and torn limb from limb.

But it was the face of the dead U.N.C.L.E. agent that made Illya and Solo stare in horror. The face was twisted into a mask of terror. The eyes bulged in ultimate horror. It was not pain, there was no sign of pain. Illya looked and was sure of that.

"It's not pain. He looks—" Illya began.

"As if he'd seen the most terrifying thing he could imagine," Solo finished.

Illya nodded. "As if he saw his worst fear. And, Napoleon, I would venture that he was not conscious when this was done to him."

Taylor, the CID man, came back. Pale and almost green, the Scotland Yard chief inspector nodded slowly to Illya.

"Funny, but that was what our people thought," Taylor said. "The medical people said most of this was done after he was at least unconscious, perhaps already dead."

"He was unconscious when he saw whatever made his face look like that," Solo said.

Illya nodded, turned away. "Well, I don't see what else we can do here. We better look at what he had with him when you found him."

"In my office," Taylor said.

But, an hour later, they had learned nothing. The miniature tape recorder had been smashed. There were no papers and no clues as to what had happened to Morgan, or where he had been. In Taylor's office, Illya stared at nothing while Solo listened to the chief inspector talk about Morlock The Great.

"He's a weird creature," Taylor said. "Little more than a midget. But those eyes! I've seen him do things myself that I swear aren't tricks, but we've never proven a thing. He's flirted with half a dozen international organizations, all suspected of various types of criminal activity. But this Things To Come Brotherhood seems to be his main activity."

"Just what do you know about them?" Illya said, his eyes hard beneath his lowered brow.

"A harmless cult of fanatics, we thought," Taylor said. "A bit crazier than some others, but without any potential danger to anyone. Or so we thought. They were small enough, just a small group of poor, half-demented, physically handicapped people. Then, about a year ago, they seemed to begin growing.

"They started chapters all over the world. The main chapter is still here in England, however. They are all unknown little people, all crippled in some way. They go around wearing their hair in great, shaggy mops, almost in their eyes. Some of them seem to bleach it or dye it white! We started to check them not long ago, and while we haven't found a single one with a criminal record, at least a third seem to have been in mental institutions of some kind at one time."

"A third?" Solo said. "Insane?"

Taylor shook his head. "No, not insane. At least not that we can prove. Merely disturbed, neurotics. There's no law against being mentally sick. If there were, ninety percent of the fanatics and cultists would be behind bars. It's not unusual for cult members to have a history of mental trouble. They are almost always poor misfits who join the cult in search for some hope."

"And just what is the hope of The Things To Come Brotherhood?" Illya asked.

Taylor laughed. "To survive. Yes, that's right. They appear to believe that when all the rest of us have blown ourselves to oblivion, they will survive and live happily ever after!"

"Just survive?" Solo said. "On what do they base this, if I'm not asking too much logic?"

"We don't really know," Taylor said. "Cults are like that. They usually have some sort of God-figure—idol, if you prefer—who they think will treat them specially. It seems that our morlocks simply believe that they are ordained to survive. Sort of a prophecy, I think."