The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns Read Online Free PDF Page A

vital urge drove her on up the dark and deserted street to the fateful door.
    A.A. Ismail.
    She looked at the name as if she had known it before, but had located the house by its appearance alone. And then she looked at the house.
    Not a light showing. No more than there had been on that night of death for Smathers. Empty and ominous, it loomed before her; a shabby frame shack set between two high brick commercial buildings, waiting to be torn down for a newer, larger building to take its place.
    Harriet tried the door, flinching at the noise made when the rusty knob creaked around. The door was locked, naturally. She stepped to a window and tried to look in.
    If she’d thought the street was dark, she knew better now. The street blazed with light compared to the pitlike blackness beyond the window.
    She shivered again but pried at the window. And it went up.
    Anyone practiced in that type of entrance would have paused a long time on finding that window unfastened. Because it shouldn’t have been. Empty houses are locked and shuttered as tightly as possible, normally, to keep out vandals. The fact that Harriet seemed to feel no emotion but relief indicated that she was an amateur at burglary.
    She stepped soundlessly into the blackness beyond the window, and she did have sense enough to almost close the sash behind her so that an illegal entrance wouldn’t be guessed by the first person to walk past.
    Then she stood there, letting her eyes become accustomed to the darkness. And gradually forms became visible.
    There was a great, tattered sofa abandoned by whoever had moved out of here last. There was a double doorway leading, evidently, to the old living room and to the next room toward the rear which, correspondingly, must have been the dining room or library.
    There was a smaller door to the hall on which the street opened. And eventually Harriet went for that.
    She moved like a frightened rabbit, with feet as light as her fear could make them. She took seconds for each step. But finally she reached the hall. She listened, and then jumped a foot.
    From down the hall to the rear, it seemed she could hear a sound.
    It was a faint, rasping sound. It might have been made by the dry rustle of scales as a big snake moved. It seemed to have nothing human about it.
    Then Harriet decided it was her imagination, because minutes of wary listening didn’t bring any more sound to her straining ears.
    There was something frightful about this empty place in the blackness of the night. But she flitted silently across the hall and went up the stairs.
    This was a true ordeal. Because half the steps made a squeaking sound under her weight. It was like the squeaking of a flock of bats.
    When she reached the top, she took a tiny flashlight out of her purse; and now it became evident that she had come here to search the place where Smathers had died.
    There were four small rooms upstairs, and she went over each, foot by foot, with the little light held so that no one outside could catch its glow through a window.
    She tiptoed to the low, unfinished attic and looked into that.
    Then she stole down the stairs again, with the treads making the little batlike squeakings under her feet.
    She turned at the foot of the stairs and went toward the rear of the house on this, the ground floor. And as she drifted noiselessly down the narrow hall, something detached itself from the shadows at the front door.
    The thing seemed to be a shadow itself—a human-sized shadow that had leaned back against the closed portal and watched from its cave of blackness while Harriet descended. Now, still like an insubstantial shadow rather than a human, it followed after the girl.
    After her, down the hall!
    Harriet got to the end door and opened it. Cracked plaster showed in the walls; cracks in the dingy ceiling. The floor was inches deep in dust.
    But there was a long smear in the dust, almost like a path, streaking from the center of the room to the threshold where