Holocaust House by Norbert Davis (best e books to read txt) 📕

Holocaust House

by Norbert Davis

1940

CHAPTER I. WHERE WAS I?

WHEN DOAN WOKE up he was lying flat on his back on top of a bed with his hat pulled down over his eyes. He lay quite still for some time, listening cautiously, and then he tipped the hat up and looked around. He found to his relief that he was in his own apartment and that it was his bed he was lying on.

He sat up. He was fully dressed except for the fact that he only wore one shoe. The other one was placed carefully and precisely in the center of his bureau top.

“It would seem,” said Doan to himself, “that I was inebriated last evening when I came home.”

He felt no ill effects at all. He never did. It was an amazing thing and contrary to the laws of science and nature, but he had never had a hangover in his life.

He was a short, round man with a round pinkly innocent face and impossibly bland blue eyes. He had corn-yellow hair and dimples in his cheeks. At first glance—and at the second and third for that matter—he looked like the epitome of all the suckers that had ever come down the pike. He looked so harmless it was pitiful. It wasn’t until you considered him for some time that you began to see that there was something wrong with the picture. He looked just a little too innocent.

“Carstairs!” he called now. “Oh, Carstairs!”

Carstairs came in through the bedroom door and stared at him with a sort of wearily resigned disgust. Carstairs was a dog—a fawn-colored Great Dane as big as a yearling calf.

“Carstairs,” said Doan. “I apologize for my regrettable condition last evening.”

Carstairs’ expression didn’t change in the slightest. Carstairs was a champion, and he had a long and imposing list of very high-class ancestors. He was fond of Doan in a well-bred way, but he had never been able to reconcile himself to having such a low person for a master. Whenever they went out for a stroll together, Carstairs always walked either far behind or ahead, so no one would suspect his relationship with Doan.

He grunted now and turned and lumbered out of the bedroom in silent dignity. His disapproval didn’t bother Doan any. He was used to it. He got up off the bed and began to go through the pockets of his suit.

He found, as he knew he would, that he had no change at all and that his wallet was empty. He found also in his coat pocket one thing that he had never seen before to his knowledge. It was a metal case—about the length and width of a large cigarette case, but much thicker. It looked like a cigar case, but Doan didn’t smoke. It was apparently made out of stainless steel.

Doan turned it over thoughtfully in his hands, squinting at it in puzzled wonder. He had no slightest idea where it could have come from. It had a little button catch at one side, and he put his thumb over that, meaning to open the case, but he didn’t.

He stood there looking down at the case while a cold little chill traveled up his spine and raised pin-point prickles at the back of his neck. The metal case seemed to grow colder and heavier in his hand. It caught the light and reflected it in bright and dangerous glitters.

“Well,” said Doan in a whisper.

Doan trusted his instinct just as thoroughly and completely as most people trust their eyesight. His instinct was telling him that the metal case was about the most deadly thing he had ever had in his hands.

He put the case carefully and gently down in the middle of his bed and stepped back to look at it again. It was more than instinct that was warning him now. It was jumbled, hazy memory somewhere. He knew the case was dangerous without knowing how he knew.

The telephone rang in the front room, and Doan went in to answer it. Carstairs was sitting in front of the outside door waiting patiently.

“In a minute,” Doan told him, picking up the telephone. He got no chance to say anything more. As soon as he unhooked the receiver a voice started bellowing at him.

“Doan! Listen to me now, you drunken bum! Don’t hang up until I get through talking, do you hear? This is J. S. Toggery, and in case you’re too dizzy to remember, I’m your employer! Doan, you tramp! Are you listening to me?”

Doan instantly assumed a high, squeaky Oriental voice. “Mr.

Doan not here, please. Mr. Doan go far, far away—maybe Timbuktu, maybe Siam.”

“Doan, you rat! I know it’s you talking! You haven’t got any servants! Now you listen to me! I’ve got to see you right away. Doan!”

“Mr. Doan not here,” said Doan. “So sorry, please.”

He hung up the receiver and put the telephone back on its stand. It began to ring again instantly, but he paid no further attention to it. Whistling cheerfully, he went back into the bedroom.

He washed up, found a clean shirt and another tie and put them on. The telephone kept on ringing with a sort of apoplectic indignation. Doan tried unsuccessfully to shake the wrinkles out of his coat, gave up and put it on the way it was. He rummaged around under the socks in the top drawer of his bureau until he located his .38 Police Positive revolver. He shoved it into his waistband and buttoned his coat and vest to hide it.

Going over to the bed, he picked up the metal case and put it gently in his coat pocket and then went into the front room again.

“Okay,” he said to Carstairs. “I’m ready to go now.”

It was a sodden, uncomfortable morning with the clouds massed in darkly somber and menacing rolls in a sky that was a threatening gray from horizon to horizon. The wind came in strong and steady, carrying the fresh tang of winter from the mountains to the west, where the snow caps were beginning to push inquiring white fingers down toward the valleys.

Doan stood on the wide steps of? his apartment house breathing deeply, staring down the long sweep of the hill ahead of him. Carstairs rooted through the bushes at the side of the building.

A taxi made a sudden spot of color coming over the crest of the hill and skimming fleetly down the slope past Doan. He put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and whistled. The taxi’s brakes groaned, and then it made a half-circle in the middle of the block and came chugging laboriously back up toward him and stopped at the curb.

Doan grabbed Carstairs by his studded collar and hauled him out of the bushes.

“Hey!” the driver said, startled. “What’s that?”

“A dog,” said Doan.

“You ain’t thinkin’ of riding that in this cab, are you?”

“Certainly I am.” Doan opened the rear door and shoved Carstairs expertly into the back compartment and climbed in after him. Carstairs sat down on the floor, and his pricked ears just brushed the cab’s roof.

The driver turned around to stare with a sort of helpless indignation. “Now listen here. I ain’t got no license to haul livestock through the streets. What you want is a freight car. Get that thing out of my cab.”

“You do it,” Doan advised.

Carstairs leered complacently at the driver, revealing glistening fangs about two inches long.

The driver shuddered. “All right. All right. I sure have plenty of luck—all bad. Where do you want to go?”

“Out to the end of Third Avenue.”

The driver turned around again. “Listen, there ain’t anything at the end of Third Avenue but three abandoned warehouses and a lot of gullies and weeds.”

“Third Avenue,” said Doan. “The very end.”

CHAPTER II. EXPLODING CIGAR

THE THREE WAREHOUSES—like three blocked points of a triangle—looked as desolate as the buildings in a war-deserted city. They stared with blank, empty eyes that were broken windows out over the green, waist-high weeds that surrounded them. The city had been designed to grow in this direction, but it hadn’t. It had withdrawn instead, leaving only these three battered and deserted reminders of things that might have been.

“Well,” said the taxi driver, “are you satisfied now?”

Doan got out and slammed the door before Carstairs could follow him. “Just wait here,” he instructed.

“Hey!” the driver said, alarmed. “You mean you’re gonna leave this—this giraffe…”

“I’ll only be gone a minute.”

“Oh no, you don’t! You come back and take this—”

Doan walked away. He went around in back of the nearest warehouse and slid down a steep gravel-scarred bank into a gully that snaked its way down toward the flat from the higher ground to the north. He followed along the bottom of the gully, around one sharply angling turn and then another.

The gully ended here in a deep gash against the side of a weed-matted hill. Doan stopped, looking around and listening. There was no one in sight, and he could hear nothing.

He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted: “Hey! Hey! Is there anyone around here?”

His voice made a flat flutter of echoes, and there was no answer. After waiting a moment he nodded to himself in a satisfied way and took the metal case out of his pocket. Going to the very end of the gully, he placed the case carefully in the center of a deep gash.

Turning around then, he stepped off about fifty paces back down the gully. He drew the Police Positive from his waistband, cocked it and dropped down on one knee. He aimed carefully, using his left forearm for a rest.

The metal case made a bright, glistening spot over the sights, and Doan’s forefinger took up the slack in the trigger carefully and expertly. The gun jumped a little against the palm of his hand, but he never heard the report.

It was lost completely in the round, hollow whoom of sound that seemed to travel like a solid ball down the gully and hit his eardrums with a ringing impact. Bits of dirt spattered around his feet, and where the case had been there was a deep round hole gouged in the hillside, with the earth showing yellow and raw around it.

“Well,” said Doan. His voice sounded whispery thin in his own ears. He took out his handkerchief and dabbed at the perspiration that was coldly moist on his forehead. He still stared, fascinated, at the raw hole in the hillside where the case had rested.

After a moment he drew a deep, relieved breath. He put the Police Positive back in his waistband, turned around and walked back along the gully to the back of the warehouse. He climbed up the steep bank and plowed through the waist-high weeds to the street and the waiting taxi.

The driver stared with round, scared eyes. “Say, did—did you hear a—a noise a minute ago?”

“Noise?” said Doan, getting in the back of the cab and shoving Carstairs over to give himself room to sit down. “Noise? Oh, yes. A small one. It might have been an exploding cigar.”

“Cigar,” the driver echoed incredulously. “Cigar. Well, maybe I’m crazy. Where do you want to go now?”

“To a dining car