Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Detective/Hard-Boiled
His brain seemed flooded with burning blood, the whole world reeled about him as he jabbed the needle into Al’s neck, thrust it home.
There were lights all about him. Headlights, spotlights, moving flashlights. A police surgeon was kneeling beside him, saying something about a pulmotor.
Manning heard himself speaking faintly and hoarsely, felt his voice rasping his raw throat.
“Never mind that,” he said. “Let me up. Give me a drink.”
The liquor seared his gullet, but it revived him. He gulped air. Saw the commissioner in a sort of halo of intermingled rays.
“We waited an hour, then came on,” said the Head of the Police. “Rounded up a bunch of beggars in the basement, but there was no sign of the Griffin. Then we found you in the bushes, with this Coney Island exhibit. What did you do to him?”
“What did he do to me?” Manning echoed wryly, gingerly feeling his neck. “I gave him the same dose the Griffin meant for me. And, if he spoke the truth, the freak will be well out of it all. He won’t even know what it’s all about, with what he has for a brain. They should have chloroformed him when he was born. The Griffin’s got away. But it will upset him a bit when he finds out I’m still in the game.”
“That’s all that counts, with me,” said the commissioner.
“Thanks,” said Manning grimly. “But I think I’d be willing to pass out, if I knew the Griffin was ahead of me. Or with me. It’s likely to come to that, some day, and, if it does, I’ll be content.”
In the Grip of the Griffin
For Manning There Seemed No Escape from the Den of the Griffin—It Was Either Death from the Claws of the Hooded Fiends or Death in the Flaming Tunnel
I
The Tool That Ate Glass
The man in the mask worked swiftly and expertly on the side window of Gordon Manning’s villa at Pelham Manor. He had a small blueprint of the interior of the house and he had selected this window for several reasons.
It was, as he knew, the window to the service pantry, from which he could gain easy access to the big, double-storied chamber that Manning used for living room, library and dining room. There were three other doors in the big chamber. One of them opened on a winding stairway that led to Manning’s bedroom.
The lights in the house had all gone out an hour ago. All the inhabitants—Manning and his two Filipino servants—were inside.
The man in the mask was an expert at burglary. The one blot on his career, as he saw it, was when he had murdered a somewhat prominent householder. He considered the killing had been forced upon him. He had escaped, and the police had been baffled. But there was one person who had evidence that could send him to the chair.
That person was the driving force behind his present attempt. It was the inhuman, insane monster known as the Griffin.
The man in the mask, whose name was now merged in the number given him by his amazing master, knew there were no electric alarm fittings connected with this window. It was like all the other windows in one thing—the glass was thick, laminated, bulletproof; too tough to be tackled with a diamond cutter.
It was two o’clock in the morning, and the restricted neighborhood was sleepily silent. There were police patrols, but Number Thirty-Nine had discounted them. Manning’s house was detached from its neighbors. Trees grew in front and broke up the rays of an arc-lamp half a block away. Trees masked both sides of the little estate.
Number Thirty-Nine had never speculated that there might have been some irony in the bestowal of his number by the Griffin. He did not possess much imagination, he was not especially superstitious, and he had not considered that thirty-nine was three-times-thirteen, and might be thrice unlucky.
He knew he was on a dangerous job. Reward had been promised him, if he succeeded. Failure meant death.
He was working well in the shadow. A buttress in the brick wall hid him from the street. He worked by the light of a compact electric lantern, strapped to his left wrist. He wore gloves of oiled silk.
First of all he attached to the center of the window pane a contrivance that was like the leather handle of a suitcase, save that the two ends were attached to rubber suction disks.
Above this he made a narrow gutter of specially-prepared putty. The gutter was to prevent the acid he was using from trickling down the glass and eating into the suction disks. He was a precise craftsman. He believed in neatness and efficiency.
He sprayed the acid from a device made in the Griffin’s private laboratory. The whole affair was the combination of a once famous chemist—now Number Twenty-Three—a mechanic who once designed carburetors—Number Seventeen—and a suggestion of Number Thirty-Nine. It looked like a plumber’s blowtorch. The vacuum chamber forced out acid instead of flame, but the acid was a fluorine compound that melted the tough glass under the fine spray as if it were ice beneath a jet of steam.
There was only the slightest hissing sound, as Number Thirty-Nine directed the jet with the precision of a master etcher. He passed a fine blade of steel through the completed slit, and repeated the process below the leather handle. Then he made other putty cups, to catch the excess as he united the horizontal slits with vertical ones. He shifted his light to his right wrist, and used his left hand for the spray on the left side, his right hand lightly and firmly holding the leather grip.
A square of glass, almost exactly twelve inches in each dimension, came cleanly away. Number Thirty-Nine cleaned up the glass, put away the acid-blower in a luncheon box. He reached through and opened the patent catch. The window went up, noiselessly.
Thirty-Nine stood in the butler’s pantry of the house of Gordon Manning, arch-enemy of the insane, homicidal genius whose fiendish murders had shocked the world with the fiendish destruction of those the world could least spare; benefactors of humanity that the Griffin conceived, in his grandiose dementia, should be eliminated from his realm.
Manning, sworn by will and duty to destroy the Griffin, had captured him, once; but the law, with its medieval conceptions of insanity, had sent the monster to Dannemora. The Griffin had not stayed there long before he escaped.
Then, once again, Manning had almost got his man, barely escaping his own annihilation in the attempt. The Griffin had fled, not unaware that Manning was closing in. Somewhere he was in hiding, preparing a new aerie where he could study the horoscopes of his chosen victims and supervise in his laboratories the labors of his slaves in preparing for new atrocities.
All the venom in him was now directed against Manning. He was like a frenzied scorpion that stings itself with its own tail. So furious was his resentment against the ex-Major of Military Intelligence and renowned explorer that he had forborne to consult the stars and choose the time when the astral influences were hostile to Manning. Manning must be swept from his path—at once!
Therefore Number Thirty-Nine crept through the house, his light now in one hand, in the other a pistol whose poisoned, dumdum bullet was discharged by highly compressed gas. The weapon made no report. The bullet need not be fatally aimed. Once let it enter the flesh of the target and the victim was doomed. A shot that scored an immediately mortal wound would be merciful. The poison meant an hour of supremest agony, of helpless, strangling, burning and convulsive torment.
Thirty-Nine tried the swing door from the pantry. It swung easily, and he advanced, the beam from his lantern darting here and there. He stepped towards the door that led up to Manning’s bedroom, listening, smelling, tasting, looking; every sense alert.
He was like some feral beast, prowling from the jungle into an open glade, pad-footed, tensing for the kill. His face snarled and twitched back of his mask, puckered it into black wrinkles. Suddenly he stooped, his scalp crawling, while his heart missed a beat.
He had heard a slight
click
that seemed to come—as it did come—from several places in the room. It sounded a little like the cocking of a trigger, but he knew that modern weapons have hammers that rise mechanically, silent and deadly as the lift of a cobra’s head.
He did
not
know that he had stepped into an invisible ray, that back of every door in the big chamber another door of steel had slid into place. Behind the drawn curtains the same thing had happened with the windows. That he was a prisoner.
He realized he had walked into a trap when he heard a calm, cold voice speaking. Behind him, somewhere.
“You are covered, my friend. Don’t move a muscle. Your hands will do just as they are. Keep very still. It would be unfortunate—for you—if you should sneeze, or even cough.”
Thirty-Nine stood as if petrified. He feared to breathe. The bland assurance of the voice was far more sinister than the dread pronouncement of a judge sentencing a convicted murderer.
It was the voice of Manning, but it did not issue from the lips of Manning. It had, once. Now it was merely a phonographic record, started when Thirty-Nine intercepted the eye that never slept, Manning’s tireless protector.
The ray flowed from a photo-electric cell. An intruder’s shadow would almost have sufficed to interrupt the flow and break the current. The impulse so created was magnified by a grid-glow tube, relayed in two directions. To the delicately-triggered mechanism that released the steel doors and the one that started the phonograph.
Thirty-Nine was trapped. He stood frigid with fear and suspense. Into his brain arose a tremendous hatred of the Griffin, who had forced him into this.
II
The Pawn Moves
There were actually three relays to that electric impulse, though two of them were connected. Close to the ear of Manning, as he lay in bed, a buzzer sounded, its vibrations pitched to a key that instantly aroused him.
He touched a button and flooded the bedroom with concealed light. His blinds were drawn. He got out of bed with the ease of motion that told of perfect coördination and condition. He stood on the floor in one effort, as a panther rises from its lair.
His lips twisted in a slight grin. He was in contact with the Griffin. He did not doubt that for an instant. But he feared it was only an agent with whom he had to deal.
Dealing with the Griffin’s agents had always proved difficult. But Manning had not given up hope of persuasion. In his last encounter, one of the slaves had turned against his master, or Manning would not now be slipping on dressing gown and slippers, with the grim smile on his lean, brown face, beginning to be lined a little these days.
The case of the Griffin was not so severe as the responsibility that Manning felt. It was a relief to realize that, this time, the Griffin was after
him,
and not some innocent, and invaluable, factor in the advance of civilization.
Manning looked through a masked peephole and saw the black-masked man standing motionless. He tucked an automatic pistol into the pocket of the dully brocaded dressing gown of cedar-green silk and twisted a bit of carving in the paneling that rose from floor to fluted ceiling. Manning was partial to paneling. This room was lined with the woodwork of an Elizabethan manor. The secret section that opened up had been designed by the original architect, in the years of court cabals and lovers’ strategies.
Manning sauntered through it, leaving it open. He went down a spiral stair of steel. His main chamber had coved corners that concealed such avenues. They did not show on the blueprint that Thirty-Nine—and the Griffin—had relied upon.
The Griffin had the cunning of the madman. And, in his insane precocity, he was inclined to underrate Manning. Which was a weakness. But Manning did not underrate his erratic enemy.
To deal with the Griffin, Manning often fancied, was like stalking some wild and weird survival of the reptilian world; armored, alert, unknown; a creature that lived in more than one element. One never knew how it might act. Its retreat might be a ruse. It would be almost invulnerable, responsive to instincts incomprehensible to a normal man.
But this black-masked intruder was not the Griffin. Only an emissary, now at Manning’s mercy.
He did not feel very merciful, as he went down the shipstairs, with which he had replaced the wornout treads of the English casing.
There was another panel in the library, of Manning’s own devising. He stepped through it, noiseless in his un-heeled slippers, set the muzzle of his gun exactly over the right kidney of Number Thirty-Nine.
Thirty-Nine quivered from head to foot.
“Switch off your lamp,” said Manning. “There’s a lounge in front of you. Pitch it onto that.”
The chamber had been lighted automatically when Manning entered. Thirty-Nine blinked through his mask. He had not realized his lamp was still on. His wits had stopped working. As a slave of the Griffin he knew nothing of invisible rays. He heard no news, read none. He was not even certain of the passing of the days, the months, the years. He knew that he was gray, and growing old, and that was all.
In his prime he had been a master-cracksman. He had recognized a super-master when the laminated glass was shown him, and the means of eating through it; easy to him, who had petered safes with nitro-glycerine and putty gutters.
Now he was caught.
“The gun to your left hand, very gently,” said Manning. “I’ll take it. It looks like a novelty. And now, sit down in that chair to the right of you.”
Thirty-Nine marveled as he watched Manning. He told himself that if he had ever seen this man before he would never have tackled the job—and knew he lied. Manning might be the deep sea, but the Griffin was the devil.
Manning was mixing a drink of Scotch and seltzer in a long glass. He was tall, and almost thin. His skin was tanned. He was a little helmet-bald at the temples. He had the nose of a hawk and the eyes of a hawk—questing, indomitable.
“You’ll take this without ice, and like it,” he said, with a smile that was almost genial. “The room is temporarily sealed. You couldn’t get out of it, even if you got the better of me—and that phase of the situation is negligible. It’s good Scotch. Do you good.”