The Banshee Murders

CHAPTER XVIII

LAMONT CRANSTON had just heard from Margo Lane and she had told him some amazing news.

Old Sylvia Selmore was taking a sincere group out to Central Park to await the appearance of the banshee, which in her language was spelled Gwrach y Rhibyn.

When Cranston told this to Phil, the latter didn’t believe it.

“The police would be crazy to allow it!” exclaimed Phil.

“On the contrary, they think otherwise,” expressed Cranston. “I just talked to the commissioner.”

Phil’s eyes went nervous as they looked toward Yuble’s body.

“I didn’t mention what happened here,” stated Cranston. “The commissioner was too busy. He’s letting Miss Sylvia have her fling on the chance the banshee will appear. The police will have a cordon formed about the place.”

Phil began to grasp the idea. Then:

“What gave Miss Sylvia her present notion?”

“She went to another medium,” Cranston explained. He was picking up the telephone as he spoke. “The result was what they term a direct voice message, telling Sylvia to visit the banshee haunt and take her friends.”

“Somebody bribed the medium to pipe that yarn?”

“Very probably,” acknowledged Cranston. “It seems to be the custom. All done anonymously, though.”

A voice was answering from the number that Cranston had dialed and the voice belonged to Margo Lane. Glad that Lamont had called, Margo gave a breathless report which Cranston then relayed to Phil.

“A friend of yours is going along,” said Cranston. “Arlene Forster. Somebody phoned her and gave my name, inviting her to join the party. She phoned Sylvia and Margo was there to learn about it.”

“So that’s the stunt!” exclaimed Phil. “It will give Arlene her chance to work the banshee game. I get it now; somebody is after old Sylvia’s money!”

“That’s what the police think,” agreed Cranston. “The commissioner is so keyed up that he’s forgotten Ames and Older. He just won’t believe they’re linked with Central Park.”

“It’s Ronjan’s work!” expressed Phil. “I’m going out to that banshee pool myself -”

“You’re going along with your friend Vincent,” interposed Cranston. “He dropped by to see me today and told me how he’d helped you out last night. A capable chap, Vincent.”

Forced to agree, Phil gave a nod meaning that a team-up with Vincent would suit him.

Cranston was making another phone call, this time to an old carriage factory, to ask them if they’d finished a repair job on an old hansom that had been sent there. Learning that they had, Cranston ordered the vehicle sent to the Chateau Parkview.

Going out with Phil, Cranston locked the door of Ronjan’s suite leaving it for the police to find Yuble’s body in due course. Downstairs, however, Cranston scorned the usual lobby door. Instead, he guided Phil to a telephone booth in the alcove.

“From things that you and Arlene mentioned,” said Cranston, “I thought it a good idea to check on this. Watch.”

Stepping into the booth, Cranston vanished. Unable to believe his eyes, Phil came alert, tugged at the door and found the booth quite empty. Crowding in for a better look, Phil heard the door jar behind him. There was a sharp click and Phil was reeling through the wall, into an empty corridor of a narrow building next door to the hotel.

It was Harry Vincent who stopped Phil’s stagger. Finding that Phil was quite undamaged, Harry nodded and said:

“The gas load wasn’t there tonight.”

“You mean that’s what happened the other time I came through?” queried Phil. “Why I was so groggy and didn’t wake up until I was out in the park somewhere?”

“That’s right.”

“Smart of Arlene,” decided Phil, with a grim nod. “She faked the stunt the night before. Just a buildup so when the thing happened to me, I’d look back and think she had the same experience. Say - do you think Ames and Older each got a whiff of that stuff?”

“One in a taxi,” stated Harry, “the other in a hansom. Let’s start out and see if we can find them.”

“Where do we begin?”

“At the old Watch Tower, up about the middle of Central Park. That’s where the flashes came from tonight. They thought they had us licked; that we’d go moving all around the park, thinking the glimmer was from one side or the other. But we did some quick triangulation and located the source. Maybe the big shot is there in person tonight.”

Eager to go, Phil followed Harry out through a door that opened on the street, but had no outside knob. He realized then how easily someone had shoved him in a waiting carriage for there were several along this curb.

Phil was thinking too of Thara and how she had tried to help him. Perhaps that was why he didn’t notice the hansom cab that was right now pulling away from the curb. In that hansom was Lamont Cranston, lighting another of those long thin cigars.

Other eyes though must have noted Cranston, for it wasn’t long before signals blinked, away out in the park, in answer to some relayed message.

Meanwhile the hansom was proceeding deep into the park, its driver lounging sleepily in the high box, where he couldn’t see what was going on within. Prowlers among the bushes were following the hansom’s slow curve. Lamont Cranston leaned forward, looked out and blew some clouds of cigar smoke. Then, leaning back into the hansom, he became The Shadow.

Therewith, The Shadow vanished.

Great speculation existed about The Shadow’s vanishing methods. Men of crime had seen him disappear from their very midst. People like Madame Mathilda claimed that The Shadow had the faculty of literally dematerializing himself. Of course there were times and occasions when The Shadow could cloud men’s minds, as was done in Tibet where he had learned hypnotic methods from the Lamas, but in usual practice, The Shadow’s way was to simply blend with blackness.

He had blackness in plenty, here within the hansom, and now being fully cloaked, The Shadow was capable of using it. But that brought up another moot point. If Cranston became The Shadow and then vanished as such, would anything that typified Cranston vanish with him?

Of course it would, when enveloped within the cloak that merged so fully with the dark, but the rule could hardly apply to one of those very fine panatella cigars that were Cranston’s favorite smoke, even when he was The Shadow.

To the question of whether the cigar would vanish with him, the answer was it didn’t.

Like a tiny beacon, the tell-tale cigar showed its glows from within the hansom. As the hack went between the two halves of a low embankment, moving figures saw the light which told them that The Shadow was still there. Four of them, two abreast from each flank, came headlong through the air, like leaping leopards, which they indeed resembled, thanks to the spotted costumes that they wore.

The cigar glowed a greeting as they arrived in a cluster that shook the hansom deep down to its springs. A moment later they were clawing, knifing for the man at the end of the cigar, only to find the end of a curved metal pipe instead!

The Shadow was gone and completely, but from behind the cab came the sharp outside click of a bolt closing a special trap door, which the carriage shop had built into the seat. Up on the high box, Burbank, his face hidden beneath a hack driver’s plug hat, gave a tug at what looked like a brake lever.

Down from the top of the hansom’s open front rolled a blind that looked like a rain curtain, but wasn’t. This was a steel curtain that locked solidly when it hit the bottom. At the same time, Burbank removed a pipe stem from his mouth, along with the length of rubber hose that he had been drawing through, to complete the illusion of a smoker inside the hansom.

Burbank simply plugged the pipe stem into a little tank resting in the driver’s box and turned the knob that released a hissing flow of compressed gas. Four tight-packed leopard men took the full benefit of that knock-out vapor, inside what was now an airtight cell.

A weird laugh stirred the darkness from behind the hansom. From where he had dropped through the self-acting trap, The Shadow came erect and moved into the moonlight, packing away the automatics that he hadn’t needed.

Burbank would take that leopard crew into some port where the police would duly find them. Having extracted four fangs from the very jaws of crime, The Shadow was bound elsewhere, with other work to do!