The Emperor of Death Read Online Free Page B

to duty, no matter where his heart lay, he turned abruptly away, and, going into the other room, occupied himself with the gruesome task of divesting the dead man of his clothing.
    At exactly three minutes before midnight the Phantom shot a quick glance out of the window of his cab at the illuminated dial of the clock that decorated the marble façade of the Morton National Bank Building. He was two short blocks from his destination; two short blocks from his mysterious rendezvous with Hesterberg, the Mad Red.
    His lips curled in a thin, ironical smile. So be it! At last he was to come to grips with the fatal personality that hung like an oppressive pall over the money marts of the world.
    The ornate pile of the bank loomed up a block away. The Phantom rapped smartly on the glass partition that separated him from the driver with hard knuckles. His cab wheeled into the curb and pulled up short with a harsh grinding of brakes.
    One eye on the hands of the clock that slowly jerked over to three minutes of the hour, Van flung a bill at the cabbie, heard him shift into gear and wheel away. He paused a moment, irresolute, at the curb. The minute hand of the clock moved over another notch. Two minutes to go till the fatal hour struck.
    He experienced a sharp tightening of the nerves along his spine as he traversed the last block on foot. He was aware of a strange eerie tenseness in the air; the atmosphere was super-charged with an uncanny chill of portentous doom.
    Suddenly there was a black hole in the night where the brilliantly illumined dial of the clock had been but a moment before. The abrupt failure of that symbol of financial integrity that had shone down on Wall Street for the past sixty years, came as a ominous signal — a potential warning.
    But of what?
    The Phantom paused in his strides for a moment. And it was then that he realized for the first time that not only the lights of the clock had failed but all other lights along the canyoned thoroughfare as well. The knowledge came to him as a distinct shock. For a panicky second he stumbled forward in an abysmal tunnel of stygian gloom. What a moment before had been a mazda spangled street of granite was now empty of all light.
    Empty of all light, yes; but not of life.
    The nerves of the Phantom snapped out of their momentary lapse. He was distinctly aware of a horde of strangely masked figures rushing by him with purposeful haste. They seemed to materialize out of the very gloom of the street, that a moment before had been empty of all save himself.
    They brushed by him, grotesque, goggle-eyed, long-nosed gargoyles in the heavy pall of darkness. The Phantom sensed without seeing that they were all converging on the massive doors of the bank building.
    He measured stride with the surging throng about him, vainly trying to estimate their numbers. Then, a moment later a sound — a strange and sibilant sound — a sinister sound, pierced through the mental arithmetic of his brain. His finely arched nostrils quivered; his throat was suddenly parched with an acid streak of fire!
    Gas! He understood it all then — those hideous masks for faces. Hesterberg was marshalling his forces to the attack under a barrage of gas. The noxious poison flicked at the lining of his lungs. With a practice and skill perfected in the Argonne he laced his own gas mask over his head and charged up the granite steps of the bank on the double quick.
    A sharp pencil of light from a pocket flash played over the fantastic group of six around the bank’s door. The Phantom’s heart kicked out a steady hundred and thirty as it finally came to rest on him, picking out the bold letter eight on the sleeve of his coat.
    A sharp cultured voice drilled into the Phantom’s consciousness — a voice he was never to forget.
    “Good! Number 8! What word have you received?"
    Some instinct, some cunning premonition told the Phantom that he was being addressed by the Mad Red himself. Twin pulses beat at his