Part 9

An hour later, at two A.M., Dunlap fearfully watched the indicator for Old Tower Number Three. Reports from all other posts had been received. Then, just once, the indicator trembled uncertainly, made almost a quarter turn to the left and snapped back to a vertical position. At three o’clock it did not move. Nor did it move at four o’clock.

A week passed. Not a tremor disturbed the “ghost tower” indicator.

Then, one morning at one-thirty o’clock, an unearthly, piercing scream in the cell house awaked half the men in the building and sent the cell house guard scurrying down to cell twenty-one on the corridor; for it was from this cell that the blood-chilling scream had come.

The bloodless, perspiration-dampened face of Malcolm Hulsey, the “lifer,” was pressed against the bars of the cell door when the guard arrived. The convict’s great hands grasped the bars and his two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bulk, clad in only a regulation undershirt, twitched, started and trembled from head to foot. A horrible fear distended his eyes, his teeth clicked together and the muscles of his face worked spasmodically.

“Sick, Hulsey?” the guard demanded, hardened to such nerve-shattering outbursts in a building full of tortured souls.

“I saw--I saw--” Hulsey began, his teeth chattering and rendering speech well-nigh impossible. “I saw--Oh, Mr. Hill, please give me a cellmate--_now, tonight!_ I--I’m a sick man, Mr. Hill. Nerves all shot to pieces, I guess. Can’t I have a cellmate to talk to, Mr. Hill?”

“What did you see?” the guard asked.

“He was standing right where you are now,” Hulsey whispered hoarsely. “Pointing his finger at me, he was, when I opened my eyes and saw him. Smiling, too. I--I”--a violent shudder--“I could _see through him_, Mr. Hill; could see the bars on that window beyond him. I--”

“Who? See who?” the guard interrupted.

Hulsey seemed to realize, then, that he was talking too much; that he was not conducting himself as the hardest convict in the prison should.

“Why,” he stammered. “I saw--I _thought_ I saw--an old pal o’ mine. He’s been dead a long time. Nerves, I guess. Thinking too much about my old pal and the good old days. Nightmare, I guess.”

“Yeah--nightmare is right!” the unsympathetic guard growled. “But don’t let another blat like that out of you, or we’ll throw you into a padded cell. Got the whole wing stirred up. Get to bed now and forget that good old pal of yours.”

“If I only could!” Hulsey whispered huskily to himself, as he got back into the bunk.

* * * * *

Two weeks passed.

There were no more outbursts from cell twenty-one. The “ghost tower” on the wall was silent, cold.

Then, at two o’clock one morning, Captain Dunlap saw the indicator move. It sickened him, made him wish ardently that he was a thousand miles from Granite River Prison.

The indicator moved slowly, hesitantly, to the left and the bell tinkled weakly. The captain placed the receiver to his ear, but no sound came; the line was dead. The indicator fell back to its original position as the captain replaced the receiver on the crotch.

A few minutes later the yard guard entered the lookout. Bill Wilton, the regular yard guard on the graveyard shift, was away on leave and the substitute guard was new at the prison.

“Didn’t I understand you to say, Mr. Dunlap,” the new guard said, “that there was no one on Old Tower Number Three?”

“You sure did,” Dunlap answered.

The guard pulled his left ear and looked puzzled.

“Funny,” he finally remarked. “Was sure I heard somebody in that tower, singing soft and low like, when I passed under it a few minutes ago.”

“What was he singing?” the captain asked, bending forward and fixing a penetrating gaze on the recent arrival at the prison.

“Let me see now,” said the guard meditatively. “Couldn’t make out much of the song. Something about ‘when I die in the ocean deep,’--No, that wasn’t it. ‘When I die and am buried deep’--that’s it. Then there was something in it about this dead guy coming back to ha’nt people, and a lot of bunk like that.”

“I see,” said Dunlap, as he eased himself out of the chair. “I’m going up and have a look around in that tower. You stay in here until I return.”

Dunlap went outside the walls and up through New Tower Number Three, where he questioned Guard Jim Humphrey. Humphrey had not seen or heard anything unusual in or about Old Tower Number Three.

Captain Dunlap, as he walked over the wall toward the ghost tower, admitted frankly to himself that he was “scared stiff.” Pausing at the door, he glanced nervously through the window.

The yard lights lit up the interior of the tower sufficiently to assure him that no one--or “thing”--was inside. He unlocked the door and entered.

With a flashlight, he thoroughly examined the telephone. Dust had settled on the instrument. The receiver and the transmitter had apparently not been touched since Asa Shores left the tower. Dust had settled on the doorknobs inside. That the knobs had not been touched since Shores’ death was obvious. The one chair, the window-sills, the small washstand and wash basin, all were covered with a thin, undisturbed film of fine dust.

There on the telephone battery box reposed Asa’s old corncob pipe and, near it, a small box of matches. The window latches were just as Dunlap had left them when he closed and securely locked the tower a month before.

It was a puzzled and nervous prison official that left the tower, relocked the doors and returned to the inside lookout.

Next day Malcolm Hulsey, the “lifer” was admitted to the hospital. The doctor’s diagnosis was “nervous breakdown.”

* * * * *

But Hulsey, though his nerves were all shot to pieces, was still capable of shrewd plotting.

His admittance to the hospital had been hastened by a diet of soap. Hulsey was so anxious to get far away from Granite River Prison, and was so certain of his ability to do so if he could only be admitted to the hospital, that he had resorted to the old but effective expedient of soap eating.

Soap, taken internally in small doses, will produce various baffling and apparently serious physiological changes in the body. Hulsey looked sick and felt sick, but he was not dangerously ill.

For many months Malcolm Hulsey had been watching closely the movements of the night guards. During his stay in the hospital, while recovering from the gunshot wound in his shoulder he had “doped out” a possible means of escape, and he was on the point of making the attempt when the doctor pronounced him sufficiently recovered to be returned to the cell house.

The “lifer’s” plan of escape was simply this: At midnight, while Captain Dunlap and his crew were on duty, the yard guard made his round, counted the patients in the hospital and left the yard through the guards’ gate to eat his lunch in the guards’ dining-room outside the walls. When the yard guard returned to the inside lookout he carried with him a hot lunch for Captain Dunlap.

In counting the men in the hospital, the yard guard did not as a rule enter the building. He merely turned on the lights in the one large ward and looked through the window. The convict hospital nurse on night duty stood ready, and when the lights were turned on, proceeded from bed to bed and partly uncovered each patient so that the yard guard outside could see and count them.

There were several factors in Hulsey’s favor now, one being that a new substitute guard was on duty over the guards’ entrance gate during the absence of the regular guard who was away on vacation. There was only one patient in the hospital besides Hulsey. The yard guard must be lured into the hospital, overpowered, his uniform stripped from him, then Hulsey, garbed in the uniform, would attempt to deceive the guard at the gate and be given the keys.

At fifteen minutes to midnight, on Hulsey’s first day in the hospital, the “lifer” quietly rose from his bed while the white-clad convict nurse’s back was turned. Three minutes later the unsuspecting nurse had been neatly laid out from a well-directed blow behind the ear, bound with sheets, gagged, stripped of his white suit and tenderly tucked in the bed recently occupied by Mr. Malcolm Hulsey.

The other patient, a feeble old convict, was gagged and tied down in his bed with sheets. Hulsey then donned the nurse’s white suit and, after arranging the nurse and the old convict in their beds so that they appeared to be sleeping peacefully, the “lifer” lay face down on the floor and awaited developments.

At twelve o’clock the new guard appeared at the hospital window and switched on the lights. Having counted the men in the hospital every hour since eight o’clock, the guard intended now to give the patients a hasty glance and proceed to the gate. There were his two patients, apparently sleeping peacefully. But where was the nurse?

Hulsey’s heart pounded like a riveting hammer as he lay sprawled on the floor. Would the ruse work? Would the guard enter the hospital to investigate, or would he report to Captain Dunlap when he saw the white-clad figure on the floor?

The guard’s eyes then rested on the man on the floor.

“Huh!” he ejaculated. “Funny place for nursie to be sleeping!”

But the nurse’s sprawled form did not indicate slumber. The guard was puzzled. Perhaps the nurse had fainted, or fallen and hurt himself. The guard tapped on the window with a key. No answer, no movement of nurse or patients.

Then the unsuspecting “screw” unlocked the door and entered. An older guard would have reported to the Captain. He was in the act of bending over to turn the pseudo-nurse upon his back when his ankles were suddenly seized and his feet perked from under him.

The guard’s head struck an iron bedstead as he fell, thus relieving Hulsey of the unpleasant job of beating him into unconsciousness.

Several minutes later the “lifer,” wearing the guard’s uniform, boldly approached the gate.

“What’s on the menu tonight, Frank?” Hulsey casually asked, pulling his hat further down over his eyes.

“Same old thing--hash,” the gate guard answered, as he lowered the keys.

Though the suspense, anxiety and uncertainty were terrible, Hulsey whistled calmly as he unlocked the first gate. The large bull lock on the outside gate was not so easily unlocked. Hulsey fumbled, his hands shook, his whistling, in spite of all he could do to keep it up, wheezed, went off key, then died in a discordant wail.

“Say!” the gate guard suddenly blurted. “Look up here! By cracky, your actions don’t look good to me.”

* * * * *

Hulsey did not look up. He gave the key another frantic twist, and the lock opened.

In that short space of time the wall guard had raced into the lookout and seized a shotgun. As he stepped to the door of the lookout, a dark figure disappeared around the corner of a building twenty feet from the gate.

A moment later the alarm in the guards’ quarters rang frantically, and a dozen sleepy-eyed men tumbled from their beds, slipped on shoes and trousers and ran out into the yard.

The gate guard could only tell where he last saw the escaping convict. To capture the man on such a dark night seemed hopeless, considering, too, that the fleeing man had a seven-minute start. However, the half-dressed guards scattered and made for a heavy willow thicket several hundred yards beyond the spot where the convict was last seen.

For five minutes after the pursuing guards disappeared in the darkness, silence reigned over the prison. Then--

From a distant point in the dark thicket a hair-raising, half-animal, half-human shriek of mortal terror shattered the stillness of the night and echoed and re-echoed about the high prison walls.

White faced guards, temporarily unnerved by that fearful wail, crashed through the brush, their flashlights playing about like the eyes of spending demons. Then they found Malcolm Hulsey the “lifer.”

Groveling face down in the mud of a little creek bank, hands clutching at empty air, great spasms of maniacal terror passing through his body, the one time terror of the prison muttered insane, incoherent things.

Two guards pulled him to his knees. Others turned flashlights on his face--a face such as is seen in horrible nightmares; a ghastly face, partly covered with black mud; an avid face where it shown through the grime. The eyes were wide, protruding, glassy.

“_See! See!_” the convict rasped hoarsely, pointing a mud-smeared hand at a dense black nook in the thicket. “_See!_ He stands there and points at me--and laughs! _It’s Asa Shores!_ He’s been in my cell every night for weeks--laughing at me! He sang a death song to me--always sang--always laughed! Wouldn’t let me sleep! _He’s coming toward me! Stop him!_ Please--”

Then another horrible shriek, a shudder, a gasp, and the guards dropped the lifeless form of Malcolm Hulsey in the mud.

By some queer whim of fate, the speechless guards involuntarily switched off their flashlights. Utter darkness, utter silence enveloped them. Then a faint sound was heard.

“Listen!” came the hoarse voice of Guard Jerry Clark. “Do you hear it?”

Very little of it could be heard. It was a faint sound and growing fainter.

“_When I die and am buried deep, I’ll return at night to_ ...”

Then it was gone, and all was still again.

_Here’s An Extraordinary Yarn--_

_The_ Ghoul _and the_ Corpse

_By_ G. A. WELLS

This is Chris Bonner’s tale, not mine. Please remember that.

I positively will not stand sponsor for it. I used to have a deal of faith in Chris Bonner’s veracity, but that is a thing of the past. He is a liar; a liar without conscience. I as good as told him so to his face. I wonder what kind of fool he thinks I am!

Attend, now, and you shall hear that remarkable tale he told me. It was, and is, a lie. I shall always think so.

He came marching into my igloo up there at Aurora Bay. That is in Alaska, you know, on the Arctic sea. I had been in the back-country trading for pelts for a New York concern, and due to bad luck I didn’t reach the coast until the third day after the last steamer out had gone. And there I was marooned for the winter, without chance of getting out until spring, with a few dozen ignorant Indians for companions. Thank heaven I had plenty of white man’s grub in tins!

As I said, here came Chris Bonner marching in on me the same as you would go down the block a few doors to call on a neighbor.

“And where the devil did you drop in from?” I demanded, helping him off with his stiff parka.

“Down there,” he answered, jerking an elbow toward the south. “Let’s have something to eat, MacNeal. I’m hungry as hell. Look at the pack, will you!”

I had already looked at the pack he had cast off his shoulders to the fur-covered floor of the igloo. It was as lean as a starved hound. I heated a can of beef bouillon and some beans, and made a pot of coffee over the blubber-fat fire that served for both heat and light, and put these and some crackers before my guest. He tore into his meal wolfishly.

“Now a pipe and some tobac, MacNeal,” he ordered, pushing the empty dishes aside.

I gave him one of my pipes and my tobacco-pouch. He filled and lighted up. He seemed to relish the smoke; I imagined he hadn’t had one for some time. He sat silent for a while staring into the flickering flame.

“Say, MacNeal,” he spoke at length; “what do you know about a theory that says once on a time this old world of ours revolved on its axis in a different plane? I’ve heard it said the earth tipped up about seventy degrees. What d’you know about it?”

That was a queer thing for Chris Bonner to ask. He was simon-pure prospector and I had never known him to get far away from the subject of mining and prospecting. He had been hunting gold from Panama to the Arctic Circle for the past thirty years.

“No more than you do, probably,” I answered his question. “I’ve heard of that theory, too. I’d say it is any man’s guess.”

“This theory holds that the North Pole used to be where the Equator is now,” he said. “Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know anything about it, Chris,” I replied. “But I do know that they have found things up this way that are now generally recognized as being peculiarly tropical in nature.”

“What, for instance?”

“Palms and ferns, a species of parrot, saber-tooth tigers; and also mastodons, members of the elephant family. All fossils and parts of skeletons, you understand.”

“No human beings, MacNeal? Any skeletons or fossils of those up this way?”

“Never heard of it. Prehistoric people are being found in England and France, however.”

“Huh,” he said.

He pondered, puffing at his pipe, his eyes on the fire. He looked perplexed about something.

“Look here, MacNeal,” he said suddenly. “Say a man dies. He’s dead, ain’t he?”

“No doubt of it,” I laughed, wondering.

“Couldn’t come to life again, eh?”

“Hardly. Not if he were really dead. I’ve heard of cases of suspended animation. The heart, apparently, quits beating for one, two or possibly ten minutes. It doesn’t in fact, though; it’s simply that its beating can’t be detected. When a man’s heart stops beating he’s dead.”

Bonner nodded.

“‘Suspended animation,’” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “That must be it. That’s the only thing that’ll explain it; nothing else will. If it could cover a period of ten minutes, why not a period of twenty or even a hundred thousand years--”

“If you’d like to turn in and get some rest, Chris, I’ll fix you up,” I broke in.

He caught the significance of my tone and grinned.

“You think I’m crazy, eh?” he said. “I’m not. It’s a wonder, though, considering what I’ve seen and what I--here, let me show you something!”

* * * * *

He thrust a hand into his lean pack and brought forth an object that at first glance I thought to be a butcher’s knife.

He handed it to me and I at once saw that it was not a butcher’s knife as I knew such knives. It was a curious sort of knife, and one for which a collector of the antique would have paid good money.

It was a very dark color, almost black; corroded, it seemed to me, as if it had lain for a long time in a damp cellar. It was in one piece, the handle about five inches long and the blade perhaps ten inches. Both edges of the blade were sharp and the end was pointed like a dagger. And it certainly wasn’t steel. I scratched one side of the blade with my thumb nail and exposed a creamy yellow under the veneer of black.

“Part of that’s blood you scraped away, MacNeal,” Bonner said. “Now what’s that knife made of?”

I examined the yellow spot closely. The knife was made of ivory. Not the kind of ivory I was acquainted with, however; it was a very much coarser grain than any ivory I had ever seen.

“That came out of a mastodon’s tusk, MacNeal,” Bonner said.

I looked at him. He was nodding, seriously. He apparently believed what he said, at any rate.

“Nice curio, Chris,” I commented, handing the thing back to him. “Heirloom, no doubt. Picked it up in one of the Indian villages, eh?”

He did not speak at once. He sat puffing, looking at the fire. Once he puckered his brows in a deep frown. I waited.

“I’ve been prospecting, as usual,” he said at length. “Down there around the headquarters of the Tukuvuk. It’s an awful place; nobody ever goes there. The Indians tell me the spirits of the dead live there. I can believe it; it’s an ideal place for imps and devils. And I was right through the heart of it. I believe I’m the first. No matter how I got there; I came up from the south last summer. You see, I had an idea there was gold in that country.

“The place where I finally settled down was in a little valley on one of the branches of the Tukuvuk between two ranges of hills running from five hundred to maybe three thousand feet high. Messy-looking place, it was; all littered up, as if the Lord had a few sizable chunks of stuff left over and just threw ’em down there to be out of the way.

“But the gold was there; I could almost smell it. I’d been getting some mighty nice color in my pan; that’s what made me decide to stay there. I got there about the middle of July, and I spent the rest of the summer sinking holes in the edge of the creek and along the benches above. What I found indicated that there was a mighty rich vein of the yellow metal thereabouts, with one end of it laying in a pocket of the stuff. If I could locate that pocket, I thought, I’d have the United States treasury backed off the map. But I wasn’t able to run the pocket down by taking bearings from my holes, because the holes didn’t line up in any particular direction.

“What with my interest in trying to get a line on that pocket, I didn’t notice that the season was getting late. But I’d brought in enough grub to last the winter through, so that didn’t matter. Just the same it was up to me to get some sort of shelter over my head, so I hustled up a one-room shack about twelve by twelve I cut from the timber on the slopes with my hand-ax. Nothing fancy, but tight enough. I put in a fireplace and cut and stacked a lot of wood outside.

“That done, winter was on me; I simply couldn’t resist the temptation to have one more try at finding the pocket that spewed the yellow metal all around there. As I said, I got no information from the holes sunk, and it was pure guesswork. I guessed I’d find my pocket on the side of a certain hill, about two hundred feet above creek level. A glacier flowed down the side of that hill through a little gulley, and my idea was that the ice ground away at the pocket and brought the metal down to the creek, and the creek scattered it. This theory was borne out to some extent by the fact that my best showings of color always came from a point a little below the conjunction of the creek and glacier.

“It was snowing the morning I took my pan and shovel and started up the side of the hill, keeping to the edge of the glacier. It wasn’t much of a glacier for size; say, about fifteen feet wide. I could see it winding up the side of the hill until it went out of sight through a cleft about a thousand feet up. Fed by a lake up there, probably.

“I had climbed the hill maybe a hundred feet, following the edge of the glacier, when I caught sight of a dark blotch in the edge of the ice. It was about two feet under the surface. I brushed away the film of snow to have a look. The ice was as clear as a crystal, of a blue color. And what d’you think, MacNeal? It was a man’s body!”

He paused and gave me a quick glance. He wanted to see how I took that, I presume.

“The body of a man,” he went on. “And the queerest-looking man I ever saw in my life. He was lying on his belly and I didn’t get a look at the front of him just then, but I knew it was a man all right. He was covered all over with long hair like a--well, like a bear, say. Not a stitch of clothes.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Why, I was that surprised I let my pan and shovel drop and stared at the damn thing with the eyes near popping out of my head. What would anybody do, finding a hair-covered thing like that frozen in a glacier? I won’t deny I was a bit scared, MacNeal.

“Well, I stood there staring at the thing for I don’t know how long. It didn’t occur to me, then, to ask myself how the thing got there. Certainly the idea of fossils or prehistoric men didn’t enter my head. I didn’t think much about anything; I just stood there gaping.

“You know me, MacNeal; I guess I’m pretty soft-hearted in some respects. I’d stop to bury a dead dog I found in the road. I knew I wouldn’t rest easy until I’d cut that thing out of the glacier and given it decent burial. Moreover, I didn’t want it where I’d be seeing it when I went to work on that hillside in the spring; and it would surely be there in the spring, because I imagine that glacier didn’t move an inch a year.

“So I went back to the shack and got my ax, and with none too good a heart for the job turned to and made the chips fly. It took me about three hours to get the thing out of the glacier. You see, as I came down to it I went slow; I don’t care to hack even a dead man.

“Say, MacNeal, can you imagine what it meant to me, digging a corpse out of a glacier down there on the side of a hill in that devil-ridden country? No, you can’t, and that’s the truth. You’d have to go through it to know. It was hell. I don’t want any more of it in mine. Nor what followed, either.”

“What was that?” I asked when he deliberated.

“You’ll hear,” he answered, and went on: “I got the thing out at last, little chunks of ice clinging to it, and dragged it ashore, if a glacier has a shore. It froze me to look at the thing with those little chunks of ice sticking to the long hair. Once, at Dawson, I’d seen a man pulled out of the Yukon, ice clinging to him. That was different, though; at Dawson there was a crowd to sort of buck a man up. I turned the thing over on its back to see what it looked like in front.”