Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Detective/Hard-Boiled
The mask was of some pliant parchment, like goldbeater’s skin. It seemed like a leprous tegument, or the face-mold of a mummied Pharaoh come to life, inspired with supernatural vigor.
He spoke with malignant chuckles, using Al as a focus for his thoughts as a necromancer might address a familiar spirit. Al was a deaf mute, with whom his master sometimes communicated in signs. Now he hunkered, rapt, aware of evil in the making.
“A rare stroke, Al. To threaten four, and kill one! I have Manning on the hip, while he still mourns for that chess-playing fool, Harland.
I
play with souls. While they still inhabit their bodies, fearing death. Even the most enlightened. Their wives and children, Al, they also fear the Griffin, the Appointed Destroyer of the Arrogant.
“Which shall it be? And how? They will sit amid their guards, relying upon Manning. Ha! And the Griffin will pounce and strike, and utterly destroy. I shall give them time to cringe and pray, perhaps to hope a little—and then—”
He seated himself at a desk of carved ebony, supported by Griffins, and took from a drawer a list of names. Some were scored through in scarlet. The Griffin set down four on a separate sheet.
Shackelford Chandler
Osgood Beale
The mask quivered, as if the hellish hate engendered within him was being emanated in a wave of venom. He muttered the names of maleficent spirits.
Feverishly he set down a cantrip charm upon a strip of parchment, droning an age-old spell. Excitement racked him.
Zaare! Zaare, Zaam, Zaare!
Zaare ssleqer Bohorum, nabarayn
Uessally—uessredaza—asseyan—Haurahe
reamue—ayn latinum quene:
draytery, nuyyeri, quibari, yeh ay
hahanny ymkatrum hanitanery vyerym
caruhe tahuene cehue beyne!
The leprous mask quivered, and puckered into his mouth as he lipped the gibberish. His glittering eyes shone red. He sat rigid in a trance, while the freak gazed timidly and made an uncouth whimpering.
There was a perfume of burning amber in that chamber, hid in an old Colonial house barely fifty miles from New York. Barbaric music, lilting, now of lutes, and now of strenuous trumpets and pulsing drums, drifted through the room.
The Griffin shuddered, stirred, came back to life, like an unhallowed Lazarus. Al, furtively and placatingiy, swung himself on his arms towards a hookah watching his master. The Griffin nodded.
The fumes rose through the scented water of the hubble-bubble as the Griffin inhaled the hasheesh-tinctured weed.
“There is but one way, the
certain
way,” he said in a low voice. “Now, if the heavens will confirm the incantation, not Manning, not Lucifer, nor even Jahveh shall balk my vengeance.”
He rose, and turned to a screen of inlaid teak where the signs of the zodiac were set in a circle that spun as the Griffin touched it. He watched the revolutions for a few moments, and then returned to his desk. With a pen made from the slit plume of an eagle, dipped in purple ink, he worked out his unhallowed problem.
Beale received Manning and the commissioner with unaffected composure in his library. “I do not underestimate the danger,” he assured them, “but if I know this madman, it will not be easy to avert my fate. Not that I believe in fatality. I believe in my work. It must go on. I cannot consent to be made a virtual prisoner for an indefinite period. My projects cannot be blocked. There are too many dependent upon them. I am tying up loose ends, in case….”
He smiled at them serenely. Manning felt the innate goodness of the man. It was a hideous, but not an incredible thought that the evil plot of a madman, a man possessed of a devil, might prevail.
“I must go about my business,” Beale went on. “Humanity in this country is aroused. At last we begin to understand what national economy means. Through tribulation, Truth prevails. But, of course, I shall try to help you in your efforts to once more trap this….”
A shriek of utter terror, of panic, bloodcurdling and horrifying, rang through the house. It came from above.
Beale came to his feet, his ruddy, placid and benevolent face blanched with fear.
“That is my wife,” he gasped.
Manning was first in the room. The commissioner stayed to warn his outside men. It was still early. Doors were opening. Servants appeared, conscious of peril. Three youths, from twelve to eighteen, were on the stairs, with two girls, in their young ’teens. Manning sternly ordered them off. The two inside detectives drew their guns, and he bade them wait outside the door, whence the screams still issued.
Beale’s wife was sitting up in bed, her eyes seeming enormous, rimmed with the whites, pointing with one shaking hand at the latticed casement, where vines clung, tapping on the glass with the light wind. The fingers of the other hand were thrust into her mouth, as if to quell her clamor.
She gazed at Manning.
“There, there!” she whispered hoarsely. “The face! The shining, grinning face! On the balcony!”
She sank back amid her pillows.
“Get a doctor,” Manning snapped at Beale as he made for the window, struggling with a stubborn fastening.
The balcony was ornament rather than anything practical. It was vacant. The bough of a tree rustled, but the breeze might have caused that. Manning looked out into darkness. Nothing there.
And then he saw it—the face of the Griffin, lit with some livid fire, peeping at him between the branches of the tree, a little above the level of his face. The face of a fiend, with a nose like a beak, and a slitted mouth. Eyes that were luminous balls of fire.
Manning knew it was not real, that it could not be real; that the Griffin was not climbing trees. He got his gun clear and fired automatically, as a man might sneeze. Fired, and knew he had hit the target, though it barely moved.
A man shouted from below. The tree was shaking, then the one beyond it. Something was passing through the boughs, agile as an ape. Manning called to the detective who, in turn, hailed his fellow. Red stabs of flame bit through the blackness. Manning swung from the balcony and dropped to the lawn.
But whoever, and whatever, it had been in the trees, had vanished. The detectives had not even glimpsed it. They had shot at a sound, rather than anything visible, above their heads. The neighboring houses had plenty of trees. It might well enough have been Al, Manning told himself, remembering past acrobatics of the apelike freak. And he had escaped once more.
The detectives got a gardener’s ladder and retrieved the mask, made of papier mâché treated with luminous paint. It was attached to a lazy-tongs arrangement that had permitted it to be thrust forward, to press its livid horror against the window of Mrs. Beale’s room. Likely enough the beaked nose had tapped there. It was sufficient to send any nervous woman into hysterics, when backed by the frightful history of the Griffin, and his threat toward that household.
The doctor quieted her with an injection, and was serious about her condition, present and future. Manning told him what had caused it, and he shook his head.
“I have been the family doctor for almost twenty years,” he said. “So long as this threat is undispelled, there is grave danger, not merely to her health, but her sanity. That danger is far greater, with her type, than if the threat were aimed at herself.”
Manning nodded understandingly. Here was a woman who was mother, not only to her children, but to their parent, to the man she loved.
“We’ll make this place Griffin proof!” cried the commissioner. “There must be no loophole here, Manning!”
“The Griffin works from within, rather than without,” said Manning. “He has killed in a sealed vault before now.”
The commissioner said nothing for a moment. “Evidence of security may save her,” he said. “We must make a show of it.”
But neither of them was convinced. This menace of the shining mask might be only a feint; or the Griffin, reasoning they would so regard it, might return.
The odds were still three to one. In favor of the monster.
V
The Horoscope
Before midnight they had seen Chandler, in Central Park West, where he occupied an eleven-room apartment overlooking the park. It was on the eighteenth floor and with proper precautions seemed murder-proof. The commissioner installed detectives in the elevator Chandler was to use. Two more men were always on duty to watch the corridor outside his rooms. There were six floors over his head. Manning gave instructions about food and cooking. Chandler, alert and highly intelligent, promised to meet these conditions.
“We’ll be duly careful,” he said, “but I think I’m just on the list to make it more difficult, like the Englishman’s stork that barked like a dog.”
Manning liked his attitude, but warned him that the Griffin was out for a kill, that he struck like lightning from an unexpected quarter to an undetermined spot.
“There is no cause for jesting when you consider him,” he warned.
The famous chemist apologized. “I am not jesting here,” he said, as he tapped his breast above his heart. “I have no wish to die. A wife and children do not tend to make one foolhardy. I have my career, also.”
It was much the same at Astoria, where they roused Shackelford from sleep. He was a rugged man, sturdy as his forests. His son resembled him, a man of thirty, a civil engineer on vacation.
“I have fought savages,” said the son. “One of us will always be awake, vigilant. This house sits in the open, as you see. There are your men to help us. My sister has adventured, also, and dad is, as you know, an old explorer.”
“I have been in jungles myself,” said Manning. “And felt much safer in them than I do with the menace of the Griffin on my threshold.”
The younger Shackelford looked at him, saw his bronzed, lean face, his steadfast eyes. He made a gesture that was a half salute. “I’ve heard of you, sir,” he said. “I respect your warnings.”
It was well after dawn when they drove into the estate of Clive Osgood. The commissioner’s men were on the job, and reported all was well, but Manning was not content until he had spoken with the elderly but vigorous Osgood. Only one of his three daughters was living with him, but both the others had arrived, with their husbands; leaving their own homes to stand by their father and mother. Mrs. Osgood was a New Englander of old stock.
The jurist kept them for breakfast. More thoroughly than the three others marked for death he surveyed the situation, brain to brain with Manning and the commissioner.
“It would seem,” he said, “that the Griffin might have more cause to rid his imaginary legion of enemies of me than the others. But his cunning might use me as a blind. Use me as a decoy, if you wish. It would seem to me a good plan. I shall go on with my usual habits of living, but there will be your men, and my own little army. I have three menservants, besides the maids. All have been in my service for years. I am not afraid to die, gentlemen, but I do not intend to make myself a too-shining mark. Every care shall be taken that we can devise, but let us leave some not too-obvious loophole, and see to it that there is a trap set within it.”
Manning and the commissioner looked at each other. Here was their own plan, duplicated by a lively brain.
While driving back to the city, Manning was preoccupied. The commissioner did not disturb him. The chief felt that all had been done that might be humanely contrived, and was like a general who had made the grand rounds, knew his sentinels on the
qui vive,
his forces ready for battle. But he watched Manning keenly, knowing his brooding might hatch a flash of genius.
Manning was driving swiftly.
The commissioner expected Manning to return to Pelham Manor, but once across the Fifty-ninth Street bridge, Manning swung south. The commissioner’s car was still in Manning’s garage. But he said nothing until they arrived at Centre Street. Both lacked sleep, but they were used to it. Manning had been in Military Intelligence, and the commissioner had also learned to banish fatigue in the war.
They went straight to the commissioner’s private office. He gave orders not to be disturbed. Manning pulled the straw from a Burmese cheroot and lighted the fragrant roll, inhaling the powerful and pungent fumes for a few moments.
“I think I’ve got it,” he said. “Commissioner, you’ve got a lot of fortune tellers on your file. Is there any one of them—he must be a man or woman who casts horoscopes—who takes himself, or herself, seriously?”
The commissioner cocked an eyebrow. “Taking you also seriously?” he asked.
“In deadly earnest.”
The other said no more. As Manning sat smoking, the commissioner touched a button, made crisp inquiries of the man who answered.
“Ali Abdullah should be your man,” he said at last. “He’s a faker, of course. Some sort of Levantine who calls himself a soothsayer. He’s predicted some rather surprising things. Gives the credit to his star-gazing. Probably uses clients’ gossip to put two and two together. But he’s not altogether a humbug. We’ve investigated him. He gets by through the practice of an alleged science. He actually casts horoscopes.”
Manning rose to his feet.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s get hold of him. Bring him here. Reassure him, as I shall, commissioner. He’s the man we want.”
“You believe in the stars, Manning?”
“No, but the Griffin does. The birthdays of those four are in ‘Who’s Who.’ We’ll have Ali Abdullah do what I believe the Griffin did—what he certainly has done before. In all his communications, almost without exception—not counting these last four—he talks of the destiny proclaimed by the stars. Send for Ali. If one of these four is charted by the zodiacal signs to be in danger—there you have the man who is picked for death.
“I absolutely believe that I am the only one against whom the Griffin has moved without consulting the stars. He may have excused himself for his failure to destroy me on that account. Some day he will cast
my
horoscope—and he may realize that the ancient chart of the constellations, projected on the plane of the ecliptic, is no longer precise. Owing to precession, there is, these days, a discrepancy amounting to the breadth of a whole sign. The sign Aries of the ancients is now occupied by the constellation Pisces. But astrologers still stick to the old formulae. That does not matter. Get Ali Abdullah.”