His attention was drawn to the monitor showing the cell with the barrel balancing trick. An Amazonian beauty in weird garb had just stalked into camera range in that cell. She wore thigh-high boots of glossy black leather and a tightly laced corset affair that sucked her into an hourglass from armpits to hips. Cutouts at the chest provided a free and high projection of magnificently sculpted breasts. Thick black hair descended in a free fall to her waist. Grotesque facial cosmetics conveyed a convincing impression of satanic evil. She must have stood six feet tall even without the high-heeled boots, Bolan guessed, and she carried the inevitable black whip.
A well formed young man occupied the balancing platform. His back was to the camera; he was imprisoned by the wrist irons with his face to the wall. The devil girl went directly to the task at hand, lashing out energetically against his nude flanks with the whip. He reacted with a believable display of pain, lunging away from the stinging tips of the lash, losing his footing, clawing desperately at the chains to relieve the harsh pressure at his wrists—just about as Bolan had visualized the thing earlier.
The performance was too realistic for Bolan. He supposed that the whip was made of some sort of trick material, but it was still too much for his stomach. He whirled away from the console, wondering what had become of Charles and what had prompted the old man to desert his station and leave it wide open. This was obviously a party night at the museum, certainly no time for the security watch to be relaxed.
Bolan made another quick inspection of the entire basement area, returning none the wiser some minutes later to the control room. During his absence the black man had left the stage in the party room and another act had replace him. This consisted of two young men lashed nakedly together back to back and two girls bound to each other in a side-by-side arrangement. The nude foursome's problem of the night was an erotically obvious one, and their frantic attempts at resolving it were acrobatically ingenious.
Bolan's attention was suddenly diverted from the Siamese-twin act by a peculiar movement across the screen of one of the cell monitors. A satanic Amazon had uncharacteristically staggered past the camera lens, her face showing genuine shock and revulsion as she hurried out of the little room. Bolan bent closer to the monitor. The scene there, at first look, seemed a typical one. A "victim" was imprisoned in a variation of the stocks—a particularly evil device consisting of a small platform raised a few inches above the floor, in which were set ankle holes for imprisoning the victim's feet; just behind this was another platform slightly higher off the floor, with holes for neck and wrists.
Bolan had noticed the contrivance on his trip through the maze, and there had been no puzzle as to its function. The victim would be required to bend over double, standing in the stocks in a grotesque position with his head practically between his feet. Too much bodily fatigue, vertigo, dizziness, or any other circumstance which would cause the victim to sway too much in any direction would undoubtedly choke him. Total imbalance would result in a broken neck. Bolan had gathered all this in one quick glance, the previous night. Now he realized that he had not grasped the full diabolicalness of this device. In its present usage the victim was doubled over backwards, and an extra feature had been added. A narrow platform, resembling a sawhorse with steel spikes along its back, was thrust under the arched spine. If this had been a staged act, the role would have called for a contortionist.
But this victim was no contortionist. The closer inpection sent chills along Bolan's spine and sucked all the moisture from his mouth. This victim was no performer. He was quite an old man, and there was simply no way to feign the racking distress of that distorted body. The camera angle was in bad relation to the lighting, besides which only the back of the victim's head showed—but Bolan knew immediately what had become of Edwin Charles.
An animal growl rumbled past Bolan's lips and he was out of there and running up the stairs to the ground level before his thinking mind took charge. He erupted into the small room which lay just beyond the clubroom and smashed through into the party chamber. The scowling black clad figure with submachine gun in hand went virtually unnoticed through the crowd. Indeed, he looked no more out of place there than anyone present, and he received his first challenge at the labial doorway.
Two of the leather-clad Amazons guarded that portal, standing stiffly spread-legged with crossed arms and dangling whips. The satanic-pretty faces registered puzzlement at Bolan's aggressive approach. At the last moment, one of the girls expertly curled her lash about Bolan's chest and the other stepped into his path. The whip, he found, was of soft and harmless nylon. The girl herself was something else, as big and strong as she seemed.
Bolan snarled, "The old man's in trouble!" and pushed the girl roughly aside. He went on through and up the stairway, with one of the girls right at his heels and panting along in hot pursuit.
He had only a vague idea as to his destination as he hurried through the cellular maze, but he knew he was getting warm when he spotted a devil girl crumpled to the floor in a doorway.
To the girl following him, Bolan snapped, "Help her!"
He stepped over the unconscious girl and into a reality much more horrible than could be gathered by a TV camera. The unmistakable smell of blood was mixed with the acrid odor of burnt flesh to overpower the atmosphere of the tiny airless cell; death had come there to release human agony and misery, and Bolan knew it the moment he stepped through that door.
Here was one old soldier who had not merely faded away. Edwin Charles had died hard.
The sawhorse affair was built of adjustable wooden legs and an iron crosspiece with conical protrusions along its top. The iron section had recently been intensely hot, and still was radiating considerable warmth. A blow torch lay discarded on the floor in the corner of the cell. Bolan decided that this had been used to heat the iron of the medieval device, which was then positioned beneath the arched back of the old man and probably slowly raised in height until the brittle old spine could no longer accept the demands placed upon it. He had sank back onto the red hot iron, and it had literally eaten its way into him.
It seemed likely also that the spine had snapped, and perhaps other bones as well. The red heat of the iron bar had probably cauterized and sealed ruptured blood vessels as it advanced into the body, but bleeding of an internal nature had found its natural exit through both the bowel and the mouth of the victim. It was a macabre scene. Bolan could understand why even the devil girl had fainted.
He grimly inspected the remains and muttered, "The things men do to one another." Then he stood there for a moment in angry contemplation of a grand old soldier's final moments. What was it the old fellow had said about the museum? Something about a deeper meaning, a sign of the times.
Bolan grunted, "Yeah," and went back out. He found the two devil girls leaning weakly against each other in the next cell.
"Is he dead?" whispered the girl who had chased Bolan up the stairs.
"He sure is," Bolan muttered. "Just how long has this party been going on?"
"Since eleven," the girl replied in a funereal whisper.
Bolan looked at his watch. The time was then shortly past midnight. He shook his head and said, "I don't know how long the old man has been in that room, but he hasn't been dead for more than half an hour."
The implications of that decision hit him immediately. Edwin Charles had died with his agony on full display in the party room below, the reality of the gruesome scene concealed by the bogus suffering going on all about him. Quietly, Bolan told the girls, "He's been dying through half of this nutty party."