The Secret Agent didn’t answer. There were lights of strange intensity in his eyes. Wild and fantastic had been the description of the people in the store, and the snatches of hysterical conversation in the street. Nightmarish they had seemed. But now the man before him, Jim Hobart, his own operative, whose powers of observation he trusted absolutely, was repeating the same thing. Darkness, as black as night, as black as hell, had fallen. And those fear-stricken people, those dead men and women and children, proved that under its cloak hellish things had happened.
“There was looting,” Hobart continued, “like I told you. I could hear windows smashing and people yelling. What a story it will make, chief! Better hurry before the other sheets get in on it.”
The Secret Agent made an angry, impatient gesture. Hobart hadn’t seen those children, those slain innocents back there. He didn’t know how horribly death had struck in this street of mystery.
“Wait!” he said harshly. “First I must see—” He left the sentence unfinished, gave no indication of what it was he hoped to find. But there was a bank building in the precise center of the block. The Agent hurried on toward this.
Dignified marble columns rose above the pavement. Granite steps led up to the bank’s facade where polished bronzed plates were set. It, too, had apparently come under the dread shadow of the terror fog, the darkness that none could explain. For when the Agent climbed the steps he stiffened abruptly.
The glass in the big front doors was broken, shattered. Behind them there were other signs of ruin. Windows along the tellers’ cages had been smashed. No employee of the bank was in sight. But at the far end of the main corridor, a crowd of depositors stood huddled, men and women who turned their fear-blanched faces at him, like dazed and frightened cattle herded into a pen.
The Agent strode swiftly toward them, and suddenly stopped in shocked amazement, clenching his hands at his sides. For these people had been treated like cattle. Searing welts showed on the features and hands of many. Plainly they were the marks of whips. Whips that had streaked out from behind that cloak of darkness. Whips with metal studded ends that left not merely welts, but jagged crimson cuts. And they had been plied ruthlessly.
A half-fainting girl cowered against a wall desk, her dress torn to ribbons where the sharp lashes had fallen, her white body was a crisscross of angry welts. She had been struck again and again as though some fiend had held the whip. One blow had landed on her cheek, laying it open, making a cruel wound that might disfigure her for life. She could only whimper now, and cower, dabbing a handkerchief to her crimson-stained face. But a man in the trembling terrified group addressed the Agent with hysterical shrillness.
“The police!” he screeched. “Get the police! This bank has been robbed. Those devils who whipped us — while the darkness came — have looted the vaults! They’ve murdered the tellers!”
A noise sounded as he spoke. It was a man’s groaning curse. Agent “X” whirled. A bank employee in a gray coat was getting up, reeling into sight. He had been lashed into helpless, pain-racked terror. And behind him the great door of the main vault was open, papers scattered across its floor, every metal compartment emptied of currency and coin.
A second depositor spoke then, words grating bitterly from between bruised and lacerated lips. “They grabbed my wallet!” he snarled. “The bank’s cash wasn’t enough! They took even the money I’d drawn out.”
Others nodded agreement, complaining that they had been robbed of all they had. Agent “X” stood tensely silent. He was not thinking of the reports of robbery — except that they confirmed his startling suspicion. Man, not nature, had made this hideous darkness!
Mysteriously, abruptly as it had fallen over one whole block in the very heart of the city at high noon, somehow human hands and human brains were responsible for it. A great theft had taken place. Ruthless raiders had gone about their sinister work, unseen, yet able to see.
Those accidents, those stampeding crowds, those pitiful, trampled bodies had been only indirect results. Back of this inhuman carnage — was human greed.
Chapter II
AGENT “X” left the bank quickly before police detectives arrived. They would have their opinions. But there was one whose opinion “X” wanted to hear even more. He returned to the spot where the blind beggar had stood. The sightless man, Thaddeus Penny, was still there, and once again his face lit up as he heard the Secret Agent’s steps.
Months ago, in the disguise of “Robbins,” Agent “X” had done Thaddeus Penny a great service. And Penny had become his friend for life. He had helped “X” often with his power of identifying men by their steps, his trick of never forgetting the tone of a voice, his strangely acute intelligence. He was one man the Agent could come to in any disguise, since it was “X’s” speech which identified him to the blind man, and the Agent was always careful to use the same voice in addressing him. Yet in spite of this “X” sometimes suspected that Penny knew more than he let on, and was aware that the man called “Robbins” was a unique and mysterious being.
The Agent asked an abrupt question, “Tell me just what you heard as you stood here, Thaddeus. Exactly what were the sounds?”
The blind man was silent for a moment. His expressive face showed that he was recalling unpleasant impressions. He spoke slowly, sadly. “There are things a man would rather not hear, Mr. Robbins. People were hurt. They screamed, trampled each other. And I, a blind man, could do nothing. They spoke of darkness. But I am not afraid of the dark. I told them not to be afraid, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“But the bandits?” “X” urged. “Did you hear them come?”
Thaddeus Penny looked puzzled. “I heard them talking. I heard one give orders to the others. But they didn’t sound like crooks, Mr. Robbins. They spoke like gentlemen — men like yourself.”
“I see,” said the Secret Agent. “Thank you, Thaddeus.”
The blind man clutched his arm suddenly, seemed to be looking off into space with his sightless eyes. “There’s one thing, sir, that I almost forgot to tell you. It seems — funny! All around me I heard people shouting that it was dark, pitch dark. And yet — the sun was shining all the time.”
Agent “X” stared at the sightless face. “The sun — but how could you be sure of that, Thaddeus?” he asked sharply. “This is winter. The sunlight is weak.”
“Those who have no eyes must learn to feel many things, Mr. Robbins. I always know if the sun is out or not, no matter how feebly it shines. My skin tells me. And the sun was shining today at noon, while people screamed about darkness. I swear to that.”
Agent “X” was tensely silent. What utter madness was this? The sun shining, while a thousand human beings cried their terror in abysmal darkness, while his own operative Jim Hobart spoke of the fearful night. Was it the product of Thaddeus Penny’s brain — or had a blindman’s delicate senses “seen” what normal eyes could not?
LATER that day Secret Agent “X” crouched over a desk in the small office of “A. J. Martin.” He was alone. Newspapers were spread before him. Black headlines screamed the story of the bank robbery which the metropolitan press had rushed into extras. A dozen theories had been put forward to explain the darkness under which such hideous things had happened.
A smoke screen, vaporizing quickly, some said, had been thrown over the block. Still others claimed that a restricted, radio-induced solar eclipse had occurred. That the thing was man-made all agreed.
But the press and the police were equally baffled. There was no inkling as to the fiendish criminals’ identity — no clues save those bloody welts on the faces and bodies of those who had been close to the scene of the crime.