And the silence again swallowed up the echo of his words. There was nothing but the moonlight, the shadows, and the soft velvety silence of a Pacific night. Real anger flamed up in Dawson, and then suddenly the anger was touched by the finger of cold fear. A clammy, eerie sensation rippled across the back of his neck. For no reason at all he suddenly remembered when once as a kid he had fallen out of bed and awakened on the floor of his room. The room was black as pitch, and the feel of the carpeted floor as frightening to him as the feel of a rattlesnake. His yells that night had been heard five houses down the block. But he didn't make a sound now. The very air that he breathed seemed to clog in his throat. And then without warning the strangled cry came to him from out of the depths of the night-shrouded trees that bordered the road on the left. "Dave! Help! Come quick! Dave! Dave!" The last was choked off by what seemed like a gurgling moan that made Dawson's heart stand still, and the blood in his veins turn to ice. For perhaps two seconds he stood paralyzed, and then he spun and plunged into the dark trees. But he had taken only half a dozen steps when something caught him sharply across the forehead. Something else slammed into his right side. And as his head seemed to spin off his shoulders, and the rest of his body to go crashing downward, he was vaguely conscious of hissing sounds, and the dank, musty smell of something crawling and loathsome! CHAPTER NINE _Room Of Death_ When he again opened his eyes, a smell that was something like that of dead and rotting flower blossoms filled Dave Dawson's nose, and seemed to clog up his throat. For several seconds he stared bewildered at a world of murky shadows. Then suddenly he realized that he was in some kind of a room, and that he was lying on his side on the floor of that room. And the air he was breathing was heavy with the smell of rotting sweet things. Like perfume that had turned bad. Or still more like cheap perfume mixed with a dash or two of ether. It stung his nose, and his eyes, and made him gag. "What the heck?" he heard his own voice mumble. The sound of his own mumbling voice gave him the idea to sit up and take immediate stock of his crazy, cockeyed surroundings. But the idea remained just an idea. That is to say, he soon found that he could not sit up. And he couldn't because his wrists were bound tightly behind his back. His ankles were bound tightly, too. And a rope connecting his bound wrists and ankles was drawn so taut that the only movement he could make was to roll over on his face. And that didn't do any good because then he couldn't see anything. And the strain on his wrists and ankles made white dots of pain dance about in front of his eyes.