The Spectral Strangler by Brant House

Book Details

The Spectral Strangler (1934) – Silent, horrible as the crushing coils of a serpent were those unseen fingers that blotted out men’s lives. A criminal of satanic proportions had risen —the “Black Master,” whose victims fell with livid, hideous faces and protruding tongues that seemed a ghastly mockery of the fate they had suffered. Along this terrible murder trail Secret Agent “X” gambled with the Dice of Death.

Secret Agent “X” is a master of disguise and his true identity is never revealed. He adopts several different identities in each story. What we do know about “X” is that he served in the War (World War I) in intelligence and was wounded from which he got an X shaped scar. He is a dedicated crime-fighter working undercover for the U.S. government, although this is unknown to local police who consider him an outlaw. His true role is known only to newspaper reporter Betty Dale and his mysterious Washington controller, K-9.

Chapter I – Murder in the Night
Chapter II – A Daring Disguise
Chapter III – Murder Club
Chapter IV – A Cipher Solved
Chapter V – Greenford’s Double
Chapter VI – The House of Mystery
Chapter VII – The Tigress!
Chapter VIII – Leaden Threat
Chapter IX – The Black Master’s Threat
Chapter X – A Brilliant Gathering
Chapter XI – The Dead Are Silent
Chapter XII – The Ninth Victim
Chapter XIII – Guns of Death
Chapter XIV – To the Death
Chapter XV – Taken for a Ride
Chapter XVI – The Black Master’s Orders
Chapter XVII – Flowers of Death
Chapter XVIII – The Man Hunt Begins
Chapter XIX – The Spies’ Nest
Chapter XX – The Spy’s Bargain
Chapter XXI – The Chamber of Death
Chapter XXII – The Man Behind the Mask
The Secret Council – Behind the Scenes with Secret Agent “X”

Brant House was a “house name” of Periodical House, Inc., the publishers of the Secret Agent “X” magazine. There are four recognized authors that used the pseudonym Brant House. The author of The Spectral Strangler was Paul Chadwick (1902–1972), the originator of the character Secret Agent “X,” the man of a thousand faces.

The Spectral Strangler was published in the March, 1934 issue of Secret Agent “X”.

The Spectral Strangler has 8 illustrations.

Files:

1. House-TheSpectralStrangler.epub

Excerpt: The Spectral Strangler

Chapter I

Murder in the Night

WARNING prickles raced along Federal Detective Bill Scanlon’s spine. A hunch told him he was being followed. He was a little man grown gray in the service—gray hair, gray mustache, and thin, grayish features. He looked slight—almost weak. Yet, in the long years he’d worked for Uncle Sam, he’d built up a reputation for courage and ability that few men in the D.C.I. could equal.

He turned his head alertly, stared back, and something seemed to move behind him in the long shadow cast by the trunk of a leafless maple.

For a moment he stood uncertainly, then retraced his steps.

There was no fear on his face, but his eyes were watchful. He slid the flat bulk of an automatic out of his side pocket and held it against his thigh, moving forward cautiously like a man walking on eggshells.

He came close to the big maple, sidestepped around it — but no one was there.

A puff of night wind clattered branches overhead. They were sheathed with ice and made a dry rattle like skeleton fingers clicking together. Bill Scanlon stood waiting.

Then he relaxed. A cat with coal black fur and glowing green eyes spat at him and slunk away. It might have been an evil omen, but Scanlon wasn’t superstitious. He thought it was only the cat he had seen.

Pocketing his gun, he set off up the street again. There was some one on it he wanted to see—some one who might be a valuable witness in a mysterious murder and kidnaping in which the government was interested.

A shadow detached itself from the blackness of a house stoop opposite the maple. Slinking spiderlike, the shadow moved after Scanlon, stalking from tree to tree, hedge to hedge, and stoop to stoop, drawing closer— always closer.

Scanlon turned to stare again, but he saw nothing. The shadow was crouched as still as death. There was something deadly, something horrible, in the purposefulness with which it drew nearer.

Scanlon moved on. The person he wanted to interview lived on this block.

A twig covered with ice snapped behind him. He turned a third time, starring, his breath rising like steam in the cold night air.

Still no one was in sight, but the skin along Scanlon’s scalp began to tingle. He grasped the butt of his gun, holding it in his pocket, his finger crooked through the trigger guard.

On his left was a hedge of evergreens shielding the lawn of a darkened house. The evergreens were covered with hoarfrost. There was a gap between them that seemed as black as the cavernous opening in the front of a skull. Scanlon stared toward it for seconds.

Then the pupils of his eyes widened. He crouched, opened his lips as if to speak—but no words came.

Somewhere in the darkness behind the hedge there was faint, quick movement. It seemed no more than the blurring of a shadow against another shadow. No one appeared. No hand came into sight. But suddenly Scanlon uttered a hoarse, rasping gurgle and reached toward his throat.

His body jerked spasmodically. For a moment he gave the impression of a man dangling horribly at the end of a taut rope. His shadow writhed and leaped on the icy sidewalk beside him. He slipped, skidded, made choking sounds, his finger tightening involuntarily on the trigger of his automatic.

The gun belched flame in his pocket. It made a report that blasted the silence of the winter night. The bullet struck the icy pavement and whined away into the darkness.

Scanlon had both hands at his throat now. He appeared to be clawing invisible, horrible fingers away from his neck; appeared to be fighting a losing battle with some hideous unseen strangler who had held him in an unearthly grip.

But he wasn’t a man to give up easily. His struggles became more desperate, more frenzied. He tore at his coat, ripped open his collar with fingers as taut as talons. His shadow mimicked every movement he made, leaping like a dancer pirouetting to some mad, macabre rhythm.

Then at last he slipped and fell to the pavement, his face purpling, his eyes bulging out. He continued to writhe, but he made no sound now except the terrible wheezing of air fighting to escape through an aperture too small for it. The mottled, hideous purple of his skin deepened until his complexion had the hue of an overripe plum. Livid spots appeared on it where veins stood out. They seemed ready to burst sickeningly as blood pumped through them from his wildly laboring heart.

His movements grew slowly feebler. Then from his open mouth his tongue protruded grotesquely, horribly, as though he were mocking the unseen, silent thing that had struck him down.

ECHOES of the shot fired by his dying fingers whispered along the night-darkened street. A light flashed in a house diagonally across from the spot where he lay. A man came out on the porch, peered around, saw Scanlon’s body, and ran across the street to it.

For seconds the man stood bareheaded, staring down; then he turned quickly, his eyes dark with fright, and ran back into the house to the telephone.

Silence descended on the street again—a silence that was punctuated only by the skeleton clicking of the ice-coated branches. They seemed to be sounding a monotonous, macabre rhythm—a dirge of death.

The rhythm was interrupted at last by the wail of a police siren up the long street. Headlights flared on the icy pavements. A slim, green roadster shot into view. It was a radio cruiser come in response to the bareheaded man’s telephoned message to headquarters.

The cop at the wheel was leaning sidewise, staring out. He jerked the car’s nose toward the curb and brought it to a halt beside the body of Scanlon. He and his companion jumped out.

They bent down, opened Scanlon’s coat, and pulled papers from his pocket—then stared in surprise. The taller of the two cops spoke grimly.

“A Federal dick. Call headquarters quick. They’ll want to know about this.”

Excerpt From: Brant House. “The Spectral Strangler.”