As they took the bend, Phil saw an odd thing ahead. The cab containing Ames was performing badly on an S-turn, as though its speed had thrown it out of the driver’s control. It looked as though it had careened clear from the road on to a slant of hard-baked open ground, only to come ricocheting back to the driveway.
The cab was completing its gyration when Phil spotted it and that would have ended the episode, but for the added factor. Whizzing up beside Phil’s cab and passing it came The Shadow’s speed-built job with Shrevvy at the wheel. The Shadow too wanted to see what was happening beyond the bend and in passing Phil’s cab, Shrevvy revealed an added item of the scene.
Shrevvy’s headlights slanted across the sun-baked terrace and momentarily picked out a ghost cab that practically evaporated under the glow!
Phil would have considered it an optical illusion produced by a peculiar reflection of Shrevvy’s headlamps. The Shadow, however, did not think in those terms, even though the sight was fleeting. He spoke an order to Shrevvy, who promptly cut across the path of Phil’s cab and hit the hardest soil.
Shrevvy calculated that swerve down to a matter of inches. If Phil’s driver had gauged as well, he would have kept straight ahead, clearing Shrevvy’s rear bumper cleanly. Only Phil’s driver didn’t see it that way, so he did the instinctive thing. Cutting his wheel he swerved hard, letting the cross-clipping cab drive him from the road, so that side by side the two vehicles went lurching over the hardened ground like a scene from an ancient chariot race.
Thus began a series of complications.
It happened that The Shadow was aiming after the ghost cab. By rights, Phil should have continued the chase of the cab that had gyrated and then continued along the driveway, whether it still contained Ames or not.
As a matter of fact, it didn’t contain Ames, because it wasn’t his cab at all. Ames was in the cab that had disappeared across the terrace, namely the ghost cab. The other was a substitute cab that had purposely scooted from some lurking spot to replace the original and carry on a blank trail.
But Phil didn’t believe in ghosts, particularly when they took the shape of cabs. He presumed that Shrevvy had run him off the road just so he couldn’t keep after Ames. Thus, as Phil’s cab halted at a clump of trees right beside The Shadow’s, Phil was not only ready, but literally aching for action.
Not knowing that Shrevvy’s cab contained a passenger, Phil sprang out to grab the only person that he saw, the driver. Even Shrevvy, a quick, darty chap by nature, wasn’t able to get clear of Phil’s clutching hands. With the expert precision of his army training, Phil hauled Shrevvy out from behind the wheel and would have started choking information from him if something hadn’t intervened.
The something was solid blackness that came with the speed of a whirlwind, the impact of a battering-ram. Phil Harley had met The Shadow.
When Phil rubbed his head, his own cabby was propping him and speaking across his shoulder.
“You must’ve run into a tree or something,” the fellow said. “You just kinda bounced right back.”
Looking around, Phil saw that the other cab had pulled back to the drive and was starting away. Phil’s own cabby decided to do the same and invited Phil to get inside. Phil would have, if the cabby hadn’t dropped a remark.
“This place reminds me of that banshee talk,” the cabby said. “Only when a taxicab does banshee stuff, I’m not the guy to believe it.”
“What taxicab?” demanded Phil.
“The one that was rolling in here ahead of both of us,” the man explained. “The blackness sorta swallowed it up and when we got here to the trees, it was gone. I still don’t believe it, but the thing was spooky.”
Phil still couldn’t swear that it hadn’t been an optical illusion but this testimony, coupled with his own recollection, made him decide the thing was real. Stepping half into the cab, he hopped out again and slammed the door as the driver was backing to the drive.
Then, with his own cab departing by the same route as Shrevvy’s, both far behind the trail that a third cab had taken on the one-way drive, Phil stole back toward the darkness of those thick-clumped trees. He moved rapidly but cautiously for he didn’t want to run into the living figure of blackness that had sprawled him not long before.
Maybe he’d have to fight that invisible foe again, but first Phil wanted to find what he erroneously supposed The Shadow was protecting, namely the thing that Phil had first mistaken for a ghost cab.
For now Phil Harley was confident that the wayward cab was real; that it was actually the one that he had seen leave the Parkside House; that most important of all, a missing man named Winslow Ames had been spirited away in that very vehicle!
MYSTERY cleared itself, at least in part, as Phil Harley reached the trees. There he found a gap among them and realized, as he came into the midst of the clump, that he was following what could have been once a narrow road.
Moreover, the narrow clearing ended in a style that established the fact. It stopped at a broad brick building, which had a large, sliding door. Looking up, Phil distinguished by the trickly moonlight that the building was of brick; from its cupola, he judged it to be an old fashioned stable, now deserted.
Phil tried the door and it rattled freely, but proved to be fastened on the inside. Off to the left and far below, Phil caught a passing glitter of light and decided to learn what it meant. If he’d known Central Park, he wouldn’t have been puzzled.
The stable was built atop a transverse; what Phil saw was the passing light of a car down in the deep underpass. Other lights sped by in the same fashion, indicating that traffic was as usual down there, despite the mystery of the ghostly phenomena above.
Except that it wasn’t ghostly any more.
To Phil, the explanation was quite palpable. The missing cab, with Ames in it, must have rolled right into the old stable. After that, somebody had barricaded the door. But when Phil peered through the small-paned windows of the old stable door, he didn’t see a cab inside.
That meant it would be a good idea to look around. The way to look was to the left, where the lights were slithering through the transverse, which Phil didn’t know as yet was just a roadway. Phil thought that those lights indicated some strange subterranean manifestations. He could have soon corrected that impression, but he didn’t.
Something else intervened.
Just as Phil was about to start around the left side of the building, he heard the music. Considering that Phil’s head was still ringing from his brief but jolty encounter with The Shadow, he began to think that his ears deceived him.
But the music persisted, though muted, and it came from the right of the building, not the left. So Phil started in that direction.
Just around the corner of the building, something slithered across Phil’s path and tripped him. The thing had the swift, crawly touch of a snake, which by its size must have been something resembling a boa constrictor. So when Phil sprawled, he rolled over twice, to get away from the reptilian hazard and his roll carried him into a cluster of shrubs.
Rising gingerly on hands and knees, Phil disentangled himself from the bushes. He could still hear that muffled music, somewhere to the right, while from behind him came the slicking sound that he classified as a passing snake. Central Park was quite a place in Phil’s present opinion, which only proved that he had no idea of what the future might hold in store.
The crawly sound dwindled off in the direction of the music, which suddenly ceased. Then, from the right side of the building came the clatter of an opening door. Dropping behind the bushes, Phil saw some huddled figures emerge from the building; the door that they used was smaller than the one in front, too small in fact to accommodate the missing taxicab.