The house of the missing

by Sinclair Gluck

“Hands up and stop where you are!” he shouted, and leveled the two revolvers he held.

The queer music in the air died out in a sudden discord. And at the same moment there came the whine and thud of bullets about us and a man beside me shrieked once and fell, writhing.

“Scatter!” shouted the Chief over his shoulder to us, for we were bunched together in the doorway and offered a beautiful target. Then, while the girls on the barge shrieked and shrieked, cowering down among the rich hangings, there followed a battle wildly confused and confusing.

Some of our men slid along the walls of the banqueting hall with the idea of surrounding the place. Others dashed back into the dark main hall, their guns spitting vicious flames, while they hugged the walls to be out of the light from the luminous pillars. The doorway was cleared in an instant, the Chief and I ducking behind two of the pillars to shelter our backs while we covered the servants.

But there were fifteen or so of these brown-skinned attendants, some of them in the corridors and some in the water. And when they realized that they had only a few men to deal with, they suddenly broke and scattered in all directions. The Chief and I sent shot after shot in their wake, bringing two of them down and whipping up the waters of the tank into tiny fountains that set the lily pads to rocking wildly. But the rest of those in the water clambered out into the corridor, ahead of our men who had started to encircle them, dashed through doorways and disappeared. The servants in the corridors had already vanished.

I left the Chief and ran back into the darkness of the main hall to see how things were going there, keeping close to the wall as I went. Heads, dimly visible in the reflected light from the banquet room, were popping out of doorways and revolvers spat and cracked from all directions, while direct and ricochet bullets whined and screamed up and down the place incessantly. Some of the heads took our bullets back with them, but our men were falling too. With the uproar of the firing, the smoke of it and the groans and cries of the wounded, it was hard to get a clear idea in the confusion of how things were going. But presently I saw that our men were fighting their way slowly forward, flinging open the doors off the hall as they came to them and rushing through. And being far better marksmen than our enemies, they caught and killed the Chinamen and Russians in the different rooms like rats in a trap.

Through an open door I caught a glimpse of one such duel. In the dim-lit room crouched a Chinaman, his yellow, snarling face upturned and his hand flung back with a knife glinting in it, then the darting flames of two shots from a corner just within the door seemed to transfix him. And as I watched, the yellow face stiffened into a ghastly grin, the knife fell to the floor and the huddled figure slowly collapsed, as one of our men stepped out into the hall again, methodically reloading his gun. The Chief’s forces were all picked men, and they gave a wonderful exhibition of fearless determination and devotion to duty that night.

Finding that we were getting the best of things in the main hall, I turned back to the banqueting room. As I reached the big doorway I saw that firing had now broken out here too, bullets whipping up the water here and there, and some of them whining through the doorway into the main hall and placing us between two fires.

Some of the servants had returned with guns and were popping out from behind the pillars on the far side of the room, firing at the Chief and his men. I joined the Chief behind the pillar and took stock of the situation as well as I could in the confusion. I was in a frenzy of anxiety, for our opponents were poor shots, as an occasional scream from the barge testified—and I could not tell whether Natalie and Margaret were among those cowering girls exposed to the flying bullets.

In a moment, however, I saw that the Chief’s men were holding their own and were gradually carrying out an encircling movement around both sides of the room. I felt pretty sure that our men in the hall were getting the best of it. So I jumped forward to the edge of the tank, and in spite of a warning shout from the Chief, I stepped down among the wildly rocking lily pads and spouting little geysers, where bullets whipped up the water, and started wading toward the barge, firing as I went, whenever I saw a leg, an arm or a head behind one of the far pillars.