The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the Thornton Heights Development Corp. That is, everyone considered him fortunate. He himself didn’t think he was fortunate at all, right now.
    Andrew Sillers was a little over sixty and should have weighed forty pounds more than he did. His neck was like a fluted rake handle, with the cords standing out sharply. His hair was lank and dry-looking. His hands were like claws as they alternately pulled the bed clothes over his terrified head and then pulled them down again.
    They pulled the covers up because he didn’t want to hear that noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Then they pulled them down so he could hear—to discover if they were still making it. Whoever “they” could be.
    The noise was still coming, all right. Anyhow, he thought it was, though he couldn’t swear it was not his imagination.
    It sounded like some restless animal in his bathroom. Then it seemed to be near the window, only to jump to the door an instant later.
    It was a snuffling sound. A majority of people would have recognized it instantly and said it was a homey and cheerful thing. As a matter of fact, Andrew Sillers had recognized it. But the associations it carried just now made it very far from homey or cheerful to him.
    Now the sound seemed to be coming right toward his bed. Sillers whimpered, barely audibly, and flopped the covers up over his head again.
    There was a discreet tap at his closed door; then the door was opened. This could be seen plainly enough because Andrew Sillers had a night lamp on a low stand. That lamp was never out, these nights.
    In the doorway stood a stalwart servant with a gun making a bulge at his shoulder. He’d have made three of little Sillers, and just the sight of him—stolidly chewing gum—should have reassured the thin little man.
    But, somehow, it didn’t.
    “Did you call, sir?” said the big fellow. He stumbled over the “sir.” Obviously, he wasn’t used to using the word; obviously he was no regular servant.
    “No,” said Sillers.
    “I was sure I heard you.”
    “I just cleared my throat,” snapped Sillers.
    “Oh! Everything O.K., then?”
    Andrew Sillers was tremendously impelled to tell the man of that sound. But he dared not. The man would have thought he was crazy. So would everyone else, if they knew.
    Because the sound, Sillers would have sworn, was made by a pig. Or pigs.
    Pigs on the top floor of a building in a congested metropolitan area!
    “Everything is all right,” Sillers said waspishly to his burly guard.
    “O.K.” The man went phlegmatically out.
    Sillers glared after him. If he had heard that sound, and if he could associate it with the things that Sillers was fearsomely able to, he wouldn’t be so confoundedly calm.
    A mellow tinkle chimed out. It was a chime from a Spanish church, originally, stolen and sold to Sillers on a trip abroad. It now meant that visitors were at Sillers’s door.
    The big man popped back in.
    “Somebody to see you, sir,” he said. “Do I let him in?”
    Sillers looked at a clock. Ten minutes after four. Terror showed on his face. It was no hour for honest men to come ringing doorbells.
    “No,” he squalled. “That is, not unless it’s somebody I know very well.”
    However, it was someone he knew well.
    Peering through a freshly contrived peephole in Sillers’s outer door, the guard saw the face of Amos Jones.
    Amos Jones was another of the corporation’s partners. It seemed funny that he’d be calling at such an hour, but he fell into Sillers’s category of “somebody I know very well,” so the guard opened the door.
    Amos Jones came in. Right after him came three guys whose appearance made Sillers’s guard dive for his gun. They looked even tougher than he did.
    “It’s all right,” said Jones blandly. “These are employees of mine.”
    Jones was the kind of man who would do most things smoothly. He was of average height, but he was twice as heavy and twice as pink as most men. His face was set in a