“She is a shrewd young thing and she knows too much for our good. Our safety demands that—but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” He laughed again, as if to rid his mind of unpleasant thoughts. “I can scarcely realize that the Gray Phantom is in our power at last. It’s almost too good to be true.”
“It is true, though. Say, won’t he get a jolt when he comes out of the daze and finds himself strapped to a chair?”
“That isn’t the only jolt that’s in store for him. We’ll give him a glimpse of the big show, just for the moral effect it will have on him. Just a little eye teaser, you know, Somers. Is everything ready?”
“Ready to a dot. Want to have a look?”
The other answered affirmatively, and the two men left the room. The last part of the conversation had been unintelligible to the Phantom, and he did not try to puzzle it out. The unfinished sentence and its train of vaguely disturbing thoughts haunted him. Helen Hardwick was to serve some mysterious purpose. After that—he wondered why he felt a chill as he tried to imagine the rest. The words left unspoken suggested terrifying possibilities.
He opened his eyes. Evidently the two men had extinguished the lights upon leaving, for the room was dark. With the fragmentary sentence still echoing in his ears, he tore at the ropes, but the attempt only bruised his wrists.
Suddenly he sat still, his eyes fixed on a tiny light that had appeared in the back of the room. The point of luminance grew larger and larger, swelling into a circle of pale radiance, and in its center he saw something that caused him to wonder whether he was dreaming a madman’s dream.
CHAPTER XXVI—THE PHANTOM HEARS A SCREAM
Rigid in every fiber, the Phantom stared at the circle of light, which seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. At first small as the head of a pin, it gradually unfolded and expanded, at the same time changing from white into a pale greenish hue that dissolved the surrounding darkness into translucent mist.
As it grew larger, the light wrapped itself around an object of strange appearance. It was gray as ashes and its shape gave forth a weird suggestion that it had once been a living thing. The pale, ghostly light that surrounded it like a nimbus gave it a monstrous character.