The Shadow - 314 - Model Murder by Maxwell Grant

Author:Maxwell Grant [Grant, Maxwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Street & Smith
Published: 1947-06-30T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VII

IT WAS an impasse. Laugh canceled laugh. The man did not move. All The Shadow could see of him was a gloved hand pressing down on the switch that had flashed the light across the room. The light, luckily, was about three feet away from where The Shadow lurked. Otherwise he’d have been pinned by it like a moth on a collector’s needle.

The man pushed against the black box from which the lance of light poured. The light flickered and flashed across the room. The Shadow dropped soundlessly to his knees. The light cut right through where his head had been a moment before.

Reaching under the stygian cloak. The Shadow drew a .45. Heavy in his hand, it was a solacing addition to the scene. Eyes narrowed, The Shadow watched as the man pressed a dial on the side of the box.

The quality of the light changed. From a constant stream it became a pulsing light that flicked on and off, something like a lighthouse but with the intervals from light to dark, spaced about a tenth of a second apart.

Eerie enough on its own, the flickering light added something even more outre to the scene. For the menacing shadows cast by the machinery now became flickering moving spots of blackness. This couldn’t go on. The Shadow moved restlessly. The light was sure to catch him sooner or later.

Better take the bull by the horns. The Shadow stood up. The man across the room gasped when the light flickered across the black form. There was something so weird about the man hunter’s silhouette that it was frightened of itself, even if the figure had not been loaded with menace because of the reputation that The Shadow had made in the underworld.

But the man recovered fast. His arm came up with the blackjack whirling at the end of it. The Shadow slashed out at the hand with the muzzle of his gun.

In old vaudeville you could see a dance act climaxed by a slow motion run across the stage. A flickering spotlight with a shutter in front of it accounted for the slow motion quality. The dancers would deliberately slow down their actions so that the effect of the flickering spotlight was enhanced.

This was exactly what happened here in this room where death had struck such a short time before. The vaudevillians achieved their effect by the slowness of their actions and the slow flickering of the light.

Here in this room where two men were fighting to the death, the light flickered faster than the vaudevillian’s which in turn slowed down their lightning fast motions.

It was as though the scene were being shown in a theatre by a slow motion camera. An arm would rise, as though weighted down by tons of water. The response, although in reality fast as could be, seemed to be insanely slow in coming. The grunts of the men as they parried and fought seemed silly. There didn’t seem to be anything in the quality of what they were doing to cause any exertion.

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