The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master Read Online Free PDF Page B

in.”
    Smitty looked at the fence. A full two stories high, of heavy mesh, with barbed wire slanting outward on the top. It was as impossible to negotiate as the fence around a munitions factory. The big fellow didn’t see how anyone could ever disappear from within that barrier!
    Lila twisted something near the ground beside the gate. There was a small flash as the current was shut off. Then her hand moved again.
    “Pull,” she said.
    Smitty tugged at the great gate, and it swung open. It was just getting fully dark as they stepped inside the clearing. Lila methodically fastened the gate again and turned on the current.
    The laboratory door opened when she passed her hand four times in front of a spot in the wall which Smitty judged contained a photo-electric cell.
    “You sure protect this place,” he said. “Your father must have been working on something very important.”
    “I believe he was,” said Lila.
    “But you don’t know what it was?”
    “I have no idea,” said Lila.
    Smitty frowned. It seemed odd that Morel’s servant, Packer, should have an idea what Morel’s work was about, though Morel’s own daughter did not know.
    The two stepped into the laboratory. They only went far enough to find the light switch controlling the floodlights in the compound, however. Smitty had said he wanted to look over the clearing first.
    The lights blazed out, and he went back outside.
    There was little to observe in the clearing. It was just that—a clearing. Morel, in his anxiety to have an area around his laboratory that couldn’t harbor any trespassers, had cut down every tree and shrub. There was only grass, close-cropped. And in this, the giant could find no trace of visitors who might have taken Morel away with them or, indeed, of Morel’s walk out there itself.
    The thing grew more impossible by the minute, as Smitty walked slowly around the high, unscalable fence and examined the gate, set now so that only from inside the building could it be opened.
    Morel couldn’t have gotten out of here—
    A scream from the laboratory sent the giant jumping back toward the building door. He moved fast. It had been a scream of pure horror, and it had come from Lila Morel.
    Smitty charged through the doorway.
    There was a sort of small anteroom inside the door, and the giant jumped into this and started toward the next door leading into the laboratory proper. He had left Lila in the tiny vestibule. It was in there that the floodlights could be turned on.
    Neither had thought to look back in the lab before Smitty left Lila to look around the yard. Why should they think of it? Nobody could get in.
    And now this scream of horror from the girl. What was after her in there?
    Smitty got through the inner door and into the lab itself. A vast room with a high ceiling and many windows, blazing now with light from the switch Lila had clicked on a moment ago.
    Smitty’s china-blue eyes bulged.
    Lila was doing a kind of fantastic dance near the center of the room on the cement floor, stamping, swaying, starting to run, stopping again to stamp some more.
    She had gone crazy from the strain of grief, Smitty decided sympathetically. Coming up here among her father’s things had revived the memories of him before fate overtook him, and she’d been unable to stand it. He ran toward her, to put a calming hand on her shoulder.
    And then he began to dance, himself!
    If the girl’s dance was fantastic, Smitty’s was like something out of a circus book. The trained elephant, dancing to fast music. It seemed as if even the solid-concrete floor was shaking under his weight, though this was, no doubt, imagination.
    The reason for the dancing was fanged terror at their feet!
    A dozen little tailless forms raged around them, darting in whenever possible, using sharp little teeth on shrinking flesh.
    Lila’s stockings were ripped in several places, and crimson showed on the whiteness of her ankles. In a moment Smitty was in worse shape