Free The Avenger 33 - The Blood Countess by Kenneth Robeson Page A

injections.
    “Must have been feeding me intravenously, too.”
    What Dick Benson didn’t know at that moment was that the unexpected arrival of Cole Wilson at the castle had forced Erika Mowler to postpone her usual evening visit to him. The delay of that visit and the shot she had meant to give him resulted in the Avenger’s awakening.
    “This must be somewhere in the temple,” he told himself.
    That was his last clear memory. He’d entered the temple in pursuit of the cloaked figure. Then he’d fallen through a trapdoor in the corridor.
    He been knocked unconscious when he hit.
    Nothing else from then to now.
    “Well, do you feel like making a try at standing up?” he asked himself.
    He was sore and stiff in all his joints, and his legs felt numb.
    But he got to his feet. He swayed for a moment, seeing again those dots of light that were like hundreds of ghostly butterflies flickering in the air.
    The Avenger had exceptional resiliency. He began to snap back from all that had been done to him. He was not quite himself, but he was getting there.
    With careful steps he began to walk, to explore the darkness. “Let’s not fall into another hole.”
    Ten paces brought him to a wall. Rough stone. With his hand against it he began to pace around his dark prison.
    The stone room was nearly square. It took ten paces to cover the length of each wall. That meant about thirty feet for the dimension of each one.
    He had not felt, as his fingers brushed along the stone blocks, any indication of a door or an opening.
    “Has to be a way out,” he said, “since there’s a way in.”
    Hands on hips, he craned his neck to look up toward the ceiling. He could see nothing, but he got the feeling the top of his cell was quite a way up.
    “This could be,” the Avenger reflected, “the same room I fell into originally. In which case we know there’s an opening up above someplace.”
    He pressed his palm against the rock wall once more and began a slower circuit of the room.
    “Got to be another door, though. My medical attendant can’t be coming down through the roof every time he gives me a shot.”
    There was a little wider crack than usual between two blocks of stone. Benson traced it with his finger, then tried to wedge the finger in deeper. The stones did not budge.
    He bent, getting momentarily dizzy again, and felt at his lower leg. At the place where he kept his knife strapped. It was gone, as was his .22 pistol.
    Bending further, the Avenger took hold of the heel of his right shoe and twisted. With a faint click the heel swung aside. The hollow heel held, among other things, a lockpick. He removed it, and a few other items, and snapped the heel back into place.
    Inserting the pick into the crack, he twisted it back and forth. One of the stone blocks seemed to move a fraction. Benson ran the pick down the crack. It was present between several of the blocks, all the way to the floor.
    “This must be their door,” he decided. “The thing is, how to get it open from this side.”
    He felt the stones, probed with the lockpick, and found another wider crack about three feet from the first one. This was definitely the door, then. But there seemed to be no way to open it from this side at all.
    Benson felt the things he’d removed from his heel compartment. He located a pellet that contained an extremely powerful explosive charge.
    “But is it going to be strong enough to knock down a stone wall?”
    He was still thinking about that when the trap in the ceiling snapped open and Smitty and Mac came tumbling down.

CHAPTER XX

Walking Through Walls
    In the darkness Cole jumped. The candle bracket was where he thought it was on the stone wall. Catching hold of it, he swung up and out of the way before Erika could try another shove.
    The girl stumbled and gasped, feet sliding on the steps. “I . . . I’m going to fall!”
    Cole stayed where he was, hanging from the bracket. His chivalrous instincts prompted him to come to