Robert Wallace - The Dancing Doll Murders

In that instant before the shoulders and helmeted head began the downward movement into the pool, Van’s.45 automatic appeared in his hand. The gun belched flame. The report sounded like a thunder clap in that tiled chamber. A white chip flew from the front of the Chief’s round observation glass. The helmeted head bobbed back a few inches under the impact of the bullet.

But Van was bitterly disappointed. That first shot told him that the glass was convex and had a lenslike thickness, It could be chipped by lead. It couldn’t be shattered or pierced. Another shot brought a second white pockmark. The head bobbed again. But now it was submerging and, between Van’s bullets, came the mocking, gloating voice.

“Blackie wouldn’t have done that! Blackie’s a coward! Good-by to you, too, Phantom!”

Rage, a feeling of helplessness shook Dick Van Loan under the lash of that taunting voice. He aimed straight at those vanishing shoulders, heard bullets slap against case-hardened steel. And he emptied his clip to the accompaniment of jeering laughter.

The head was almost gone now, a black, sinister blob barely showing above the water. Satan himself seemed to be sinking into the pool. And, goaded by the knowledge of his failure, Van did a suicidal thing.

In one movement he peeled off the outer clothing of Blackie Guido. In the next he dropped his gun on the chair and leaped toward the pool. A burst of gunfire sounded from the billiard room as his body arched up and down. The police had arrived, were breaking into this den of human jackals. But the worst criminal of all was escaping before Van’s eyes.

He plunged through space in a clean dive with his arms stretched straight toward the man who mocked him. His own head struck almost under the shadow of that goggling glass eye. He went on down through the fetid, stale water till his hands locked around a metal-armored form. He clung with reckless desperation, clung, and was dragged many feet below the surface.

For the pool was deep, deeper than Van had realized. His feet and knees brushed an iron ladder. He tried to thrust his shoes between the rungs, tried to stop the Chief’s descent. But the gravitational pull of the steel-weighted suit was too much for the Phantom. He reeled sideward off the ladder with the Chief on top of him. He fell six feet farther into a nightmare world of stagnant water. He struck, and it seemed that all the breath was being crushed out of him.

But he still had a grip on that thrashing body. His smarting eyes opened. In the dim glow that penetrated downward from the overhead lights he saw a twisting air line. He tried to reach it, tear it from the back of the Chief’s helmet. But the man in the suit struck at him.

JUST in the nick of time Van caught a blurred flash of steel. The Chief had a knife. He had drawn it from his belt. He was lunging at Van with it. The bulky suit made his aim awkward; but Van barely escaped. He felt the blade slice his shoulder; knew that the monster he was fighting was trying to drive it straight into his back.

Van’s fingers clenched over a steel-armored wrist. He held on with a grip of death. His face was close to the chipped lens of the goggle glass. Even now it seemed to him he could see the flash of sinister eyes. The eyes of an octopus! The eyes of death looking at him! And Dick Van Loan realized that his lungs were almost bursting.

He was a good swimmer, had trained hours on end in all the niceties of aquatics. But the only air he had was what he’d come down with. And half of that had been squeezed from his lips in that first plunging fall.

The man in the diving suit seemed to sense Van’s peril. Instead of trying to break away, the Chief locked his left arm around Van’s body. While his right sought to thrust the knife in, he held Van savagely. And the sheer ponderousness of his movements was now in the Chief’s favor.

The suit’s steel armor weighted Van down like reptilian scales. He tried to break loose, and the Chief only clutched tighter. Van knew he was weakening. He dared not free his right hand from the other’s right wrist.

And yet, without his right arm to aid him, he was powerless to break away. Blood from his shoulder wound made a filmy plume behind him. The Phantom fought with aching lungs, pounding heartbeats, and with each fraction of a second bringing him nearer death.

MURDERER’S EXIT

EVEN Van’s brain was throbbing. A thousand devils with hammers seemed to be beating inside his skull. He concentrated his attention on wrenching away that knife. For a moment he locked both hands around the Chief’s right arm. One at the wrist, the other high up. He twisted like a madman, forced the Chief’s elbow out.

They struggled there, two plunging, writhing ghost figures in a shadow world. And, while the Chief breathed easily through his air line, every moment added to the Phantom’s torture.

It was only a matter of time now, before he went unconscious. Van knew it. He had been on the borderland of drowning before. He gathered his will, concentrated it, whipped his muscles to a titanic effort. He succeeded in getting the Chief’s arm out still farther, twisting it still more.

The armor protected the Chief’s flesh from bullets, but it was no protection against Van’s tendon-wrenching tug. The Chief’s fingers opened. The knife dropped to the tiled bottom of the pool. Van caught the steel glitter of it as it fell, saw it still gleaming like the upturned belly of a thin silver fish.

But he couldn’t get it. The Chief saw to that. The man in the metal-plated suit had locked his arms, both of them, around Van’s body. He was clinging now with the desperate evil purpose of keeping Van submerged until he drowned. Ordinarily Van might have broken free. But he was weakened now, his lungs aching and shriveling for the want of life-giving air. And his clenched fists beating on that steel-lined suit made no impression.

The snaky air line brushed Van’s face. He could see the serpentine shadow of it curling down, looping on the tiles. For an instant he felt it like a squirming body under his foot. And with the touch of it there burst in the Phantom’s tortured brain a bombshell of hope. His arms were pinioned helplessly. His foot alone could make no impression on that line. But there was still something – something that might save him by breaking the hold of this homicidal monster. There was the thin, gleaming blade of the knife!

Van ceased to struggle. He gave up trying to free his hands and fingers. Husbanding the last shreds of his failing strength he swayed like a man sinking into the depths of unconsciousness. He was so close to it that it required no real acting. But one foot, his left, moved out and planted itself on the handle of that knife. With the other, in a cautious staggering turn, he gathered in a length of the looped air line. He brought it closer, closer, with the edge of his toe.

Now! He teetered forward, brought his full weight down on the knife handle, pressing it to the tiles. He held it so, forced the air line under the blade with his left foot, and suddenly lurched sideward.

The abrupt, unexpected movement unbalanced the Chief. The sideward jerk drew the rubber air line tightly against the edge of the steel. As both men stumbled, a column of dancing bubbles rushed past their eyes. They leaped up from the pool’s bottom, escaping from the end of the severed air line like a school of tiny silvery fishes darting out of a miniature cave.

And, as the bubbles fled upward, the Chief relaxed his hold on Van and staggered back. Van’s dazed brain told him that the Chief was breathing in water. His helmet was filling up. Instead of oxygen he had sucked in a lungful of the stagnant death of the pool. But Van was almost beyond the point of conscious reasoning. His knees were giving way. His eyes were throbbing centers of torment hammered on by his brain. Dimly he saw the Chief’s grotesque figure move off in the shadows.