THE CASE OF THE ACCURSED AMULET
A Phantom Sleuth Adventure
First published in Apeshit!, 2013
Part Four
Despite the rising water, the Sleuth smiled. For Byron Twain was an ardent student of
escapology, and had studied the secrets of such men as Harry Houdini, John
Nevil Maskelyne, and Major Zamora.
Having his limbs lashed to a chair by mere ropes was no challenge to
him. His nimble fingers worked the knots
free long before the water had risen to his knees.
The Sleuth ascended the stairs, found himself in a
subterranean storeroom. A rickety wooden
staircase rose to the building above.
Crates and barrels were pushed up against one brick-lined wall across
the room from a tangle of pipes with a dripping valve-wheel. The chamber was lit by a single lantern that
sat on a crate beside an arched tunnel.
Having heard no creaking complaints from the wooden
stair, the Sleuth guessed that the villains had escaped through the shadowy
tunnel. With nary a hesitation, he
charged down the dark corridor as quietly as his squishing shoes would allow.
After twenty yards of bricks reinforced with wooden
support beams, the tunnel widened into a vast chamber. The Sleuth gawked in astonishment at the wide,
lantern-lit dock beside the subterranean canal.
Lao Shiang waited on the pier, the monkey at his side, as two of his
underlings prepared a small boat for castoff.
The Sleuth reached for his gun but found it missing. With a sneer curling his lip he charged
across the short distance between him and the Chinese ringleader. The golden-haired monkey turned at the sound
of squishing footsteps and screeched.
The Sleuth brought his fist around and knocked the Dragon’s Claw to the
boardwalk as the monkey scurried away, screaming.
The two Chinese henchmen scrambled to the dock as the
Sleuth scooped up the ornate box from Lao Shiang’s hand. The Sleuth stood, threw a haymaker that knocked
one goon into the canal. He ran back for
the tunnel, pursued by the second Chinaman who was spurred on by Lao Shiang’s
wrathful command: “Kill him! And retrieve the pendant!”
The Sleuth was nearly to the tunnel when arms wrapped
about his waist. The tackle threw him
and his attacker off their feet. The
Sleuth rolled onto his back, saw the Chinese thug springing up from the boards
and diving at him again. The masked hero
lashed out with both feet, struck the villain in the chest.
The henchman slammed into the wall beside the tunnel,
dislodging a lantern. The oil splattered
as the light clattered on the floorboards, setting fire to the dock, and the
Chinaman’s changshan. The Sleuth and the
thug both jumped to their feet, pulled back their fists to continue the
fight. Then the Chinese brute paused, eyes
widened. With a shriek of pain he
slapped at the flames on his shoulders in futility. Screaming, he ran across the dock and jumped
into the canal, even as the other thug pulled himself out of the water.
Seizing the opportunity, the Sleuth darted into the
tunnel as the fire climbed up the heavy support beams at the mouth. He ran for the sub-basement beneath the
laundry. Halfway there, a sharp pain
erupted on the back of his head. He
recoiled in pain, crashed against the left wall. He paused for one deep breath, then urged
himself to continue. He looked back to
check on his stalker and a fist struck him between his masked eyes. The Sleuth hit the hard bricks again and fell
to the tunnel floor, the box tumbling from his feeble hand.
Groggy, the Sleuth lifted himself up and reached out in a
lame attempt to stop the Chinaman from plucking the box from the floor. The thug then uttered some pithy remark in
his native tongue, and dripped his way back to the canal.
Powered by sheer stubbornness and determination, the
Sleuth pulled himself to his feet and stumbled down the tunnel in pursuit. The pounding in his head was like a dozen
drummers, each beating a different tune on his head. Ahead of him there was a thunderous
crash. He looked up, tried to blink away
the stars and saw the flaming support beams had fallen along with a heavy rain
of brick and dirt.
As the cloud of concrete dust dissipated, the Sleuth saw
one of Lao Shiang’s dripping henchmen, an iron crowbar in hand. Behind
him, the Dragon’s Claw stood in the boat with the ornate box in his bony
grasp. The Chinese mastermind barked out
a curt order and the henchman, scowling at the Sleuth, dropped the crowbar in
favor of another lantern. Without pause,
the thug threw the new lantern at the debris, adding fuel to the fire then
turned and rushed to the getaway boat.
Lao Shiang raised the box as though offering a
toast. “I should have guessed that hasty
deathtrap would be insufficient for the likes of you.” His underlings scrambled about the boat,
preparing for launch. “But in the end,
your escape was for naught. In a way, I am disappointed, for I expected
better. However, I suppose even the
Sleuth must lose once in a while.” Then
he slid the lid off the box and gasped in surprise.
“Looking for this, Lao?”
The Dragon’s Claw looked at the Sleuth, trapped in the
tunnel behind the flaming debris, the pendant of Mo Tzu dangling from his
fingers. Growling with lethal wrath, the
crime lord looked about the underground dock with beady eyes. In a loud, clear voice Lao Shiang issued a
statement in the language of his homeland.
The Sleuth could only wonder at his words for a fraction
of a second. Then a ball of golden brown
fury burst through the flames and landed on his chest. The impact threw him to the tunnel floor once
more, this time with the sinister skull-faced monkey snarling down at him. The ancient pendant, too, hit the floor and
with a pop shattered in two equal
halves. Both the Sleuth and the killer
monkey looked with curiosity and saw the folded scrap of paper that had been
concealed within.
The monkey recovered first, screeched into the Sleuth’s
masked face, then snatched the antique note in its paw. It jumped up to a supporting timber, the
Sleuth scrambling after it. The monkey
leapt up and grabbed one of the beams on the ceiling. The Sleuth, still dazed, tried to wrap his
arms around the furry thief, but failed.
The monkey jumped through the fiery blockage once more,
scampered across the dock, and jumped aboard Lao Shiang’s boat as it was
paddled toward the nighttime harbor. The
Sleuth watched with disappointed eyes as the Chinese crime lord took the
historic note from his pet.
With a gloatful grin, Lao Shiang held up the note for the
Sleuth to see, then eagerly unfolded it.
The grin melted from his face and he crumpled the brittle note in one
talon-like hand. Fuming, he glanced hither
and yon about the subterranean canal as he thought, until his eyes fell upon
the Sleuth, still watching intently from the tunnel.
“For the sake of closure, I shall tell you that I have been thwarted today, though not by
you,” said Lao Shiang at last. “Sometime
in the long history of the pendant, some other found its secret before me, and
in its place he left…” The mastermind
cast a hateful glance down at the hand with the crumpled paper. “…a rather surly note. So, alas, my efforts here have born me no
fruit. However, if you have truly come
for the pendant, then I bid you take it and go.” By now, his unlit boat slipped beyond the
light of the lantern-lit dock, vanishing in the darkness of the subterranean
canal. “I bear you no ill will, and
apologize for your inconveniences. It
was interesting to finally meet you, O Sleuth!
Who knows? Perhaps we shall meet
again in the future, under better circumstances! Farewell!”
The Sleuth squinted into the shadowy waterway but could
no longer see the escaping boat, nor Lao Shiang’s golden robes. With a sigh, he frowned down and snatched the
two halves of the pendant from the floor.
A cursory examination showed him that the pendant was undamaged. He deduced it was cleverly designed to be
hollow, and was meant to open thus. With
careful fingers he snapped the two halves together, marveled at the trinket for
a moment, then slipped it into a pocket.
He frowned once more at the waters beyond the fiery dock,
and nodded grimly to himself. For he
expected to cross paths with the Dragon’s Claw again, he was already planning
it, and he did not expect the circumstances to be any better. A gut feeling told him that next time, it
would be much worse.
The End
Tune in next time for a NEW adventure!
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