10-Story Detective Magazine Cover — page 65: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

- door. It also meant that the murderer must have had access to the door earlier in the evening, unless there was another entrance which Jarvis didn’t know about. He decided to have -a look. HE windows offered no possibili- ties, They were all guarded by ‘strong iron grillwork. It would take a blow torch to break througt. them. He passed along the main corridor, each shadow making his blood run colder. He half wished he’d never un- dertaken this crazy idea, but he was in it up to his neek now. Making his way back to the long, dismal eorridors of the museum, he could feel a cold clamminess overcom- ing him. There was the laboratory in which a man had died—with his throat gruesomely cut. In the utter silence, he could almost hear the man moaning. The atmosphere tended to distort every shadow, every slight tapping sound. Jarvis knew a thousand places he’d rather be than right here. There was a row of mummies. Men and wom- en dead for thousands upon thuusands of years. The big sacrificial altars which had once dripped with blood. He shivered and. knew more than ever that any group of men who de- voted such sums of money and so much time to assemble a musezm of horrors like this, were certainly wacks. ' Occasionally a shadow flitted across a wall. Reflections from cars on the ‘street shining through the stained glass windows, Jarvis knew. Yet that knowledge did little to quell the fears rising slowly in his fancy. He was a hard-boiled detective, accustomed to ferreting out criminals. Invading their hideouts at the risk of being shot or knifed in the back, but that danger was small compared to the eerie influ- ences of this tomblike place. Jarvis no longer wondered why the old watchman had refused to remain here any longer. The place was enough _ to drive a man insane if he put in — night after night of patrolling it. Then Jarvis stopped and forgot to breathe for a2 moment or two. From one wing, filled with replicas of the medieval years: where torture was a fine art, came a very gentle tapping. This wasn’t a building creak, nor even a sound made by mice—if any mice could exist in this grave above the ground. It came again—as if in a series. Then Jarvis heard a slow, steady grinding noise as if some torture in- strument, rusted over the centuries, was being put into operation again. He drew out a gun, fanned back the trigger and felt more like making a straight line to the exit, than inves- tigating the source of that sound. He moved forward very slowly, keeping well into the center of the wide cor- ridor so that if an attack came, the murderer would be forced to cross a considerable amount of cleared area before he could land any kind of a fatal blow. Jarvis wasn’t greatly afraid of being shot in the back. That stone image, fashioned after his own like- ness, indicated that the murderer would try to render him powerless at first. Then, with the police positive which Jarvis now gripped, the killer would fire a bullet through the detee- tive’s head. See to it that the wound would be in the identical spot where the hole had been fashioned in the image. The killer had so far aspired and reached perfection in his work. He’d keep up that tendency, Jarvis felt certain. He reached the entrance to the wing and tried to penetrate the gloom there. It was impossible. He walked forward grimly, alert every instant for the slightest sound. There was always that gentle, tapping noise though. It seemed to come from one of the dark- est corners of the wing—a corner made prominent by one of those iron maidens. A coffin with a spiked lid into which victims were crushed and pierced to death. Maybe the creaking noise was me - i ; oe eu hs ee k Jlctala Sri Sty Aa re ab \) gt oy yd ‘ AY. Pe Fi AE Bb AN) ihe i 4 < aT ee, YS Ag” te ge Pal " eit Rt | Dis ae ey . ony Waa, Fai We AT SG Fs ; bY nvak Te 1 As We eh Val " s) y +) Nth MATER rf ’, PAN HAV it At Ae a dy ‘a Wy NF Dy ADE it) Wy tray : vi 7 . Hi)