Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Detective/Hard-Boiled
The doors of the cab were locked. So were the windows, the sliding panel. Manning could not budge them. A shutter had blanked the window in the back of the car, working outside the glass. He could not see whether Tierney’s car was in sight. The glass was all unbreakable. It was doubtful if he could have crawled out between frames, even if he could have smashed it, but he might have got a shot at Thirty-Nine, and let in some air.
It was too late now. Thirty-Nine had been swallowed up by the big gates. The car was a trap of steel and crystal. Even the roof was steel. Manning hammered at all of it with the muzzle of his gun. Then with the butt. The glass shivered, seemed to become frosted—but he could not break through.
He fired at a window. The only result was to star the bulletproof pane and fill the space where he sat with choking powder fumes.
Next there would come carbon monoxide gas—the engine was still running. That would be a nasty death, but Manning expected it. It looked like the end. He would strangle like a woodchuck in its hole as the trapper pumps in the deadly fumes.
The car began to move, of its own volition, as if a ghost were at the wheel—or Death.
It backed, swung to the driveway, moved inexorably toward the archway. There came a voice, resonant, deep, infinitely mocking. It came through the radio transmitter of the car. It was plain, despite the closed panel. The voice of the Griffin!
“Welcome, Manning! Quite a leaf out of your own book—the laminated glass! You should have brought along my agent’s acid-blower. But to cut your way out would have taken too long. You will remember, I think, that I have driven a car by remote radio-control before. I do not often repeat my methods, but, in this case, the idea seemed appropriate—and useful.”
Into the mental vision of Manning there flashed, like lightning at midnight, the memory of a self-driven car crashing into that of a famous physician who had incurred the Griffin’s malice. That had been a hideous death, but a sudden one, comparatively merciful. Manning wondered if his would prove as easy—and doubted it.
The voice ended with a chuckle as the car swung into the driveway beneath the arch, and the grim gates opened. Now the car was in a courtyard, black as a cave. The gates closed in well-oiled silence. Manning could barely make out the loom of the old stables, of high brick walls.
His only hope was that Tierney had marked the car swing in. Tierney might have been able to see the crimson tail-light through the fog. If it had been lit…. If Tierney had not been lost on the road. It was a slim hope.
Manning was in the grip of the Griffin.
The car halted.
“I am going to open the doors, Manning. If you will then step out, with both arms well extended, there will be no immediate trouble. Do that within the next sixty seconds, or else the monoxide fumes will be diverted from the baffler that now protects you.
“They will sift in slowly. It will be a slow stupefaction, a long struggle for oxygen, while your lungs burn like fire. The sort of thing they do to guinea pigs in the laboratories. Guinea pigs under glass, as you are. And I shall watch your death throes with keen interest, Manning, with exceptional interest, I assure you.”
The Griffin’s derisive chuckle came again, as a spotlight from either side the car stabbed through the darkness, dazzling Manning, revealing him pitilessly—every move, every shift of expression.
There was a click as the windows and doors of the pseudo-taxi unlocked.
“While there is life, Manning, there is always hope.”
The sentence, as the Griffin spoke it, was nothing but a sardonic sham, yet it appealed to Manning’s aggressiveness.
Here, in the heart of the greatest, the most modern metropolis on earth, he was as helpless, as removed, as if he were in some medieval
oubliette,
deep underground, forgotten. But so long as he was able to prolong life, even though it only became something for the Griffin to torture, he meant to stay alive. The Griffin would torture him mentally, psychologically, at first; to break down his courage. Sooner or later, the fiend’s latent insanity would rouse him to sheer sadism.
Manning holstered his useless gun and stepped from the car, elevating both arms. Instantly two more spears of light lanced the gloom and centered on him. He could see nothing, no matter where he turned. The direct rays were blinding. He could see when black robed and hooded figures passed in front the spots, took his gun, and frisked him expertly, patting him from shoulders to ankles in search of other weapons.
Then he was allowed to lower his arms. A hood of felted cloth was pulled down over his head. He was marched across the flagged courtyard, up carpeted stairs, through spaces that smelled dank and musty. They held him by the elbows. Manning thrust his hands into his trousers pockets, and went willingly enough. There was nothing else to do.
IV
The Horoscope of Hell
Then he was vaguely conscious of a rare perfume, the fumes of amber. Strange, exotic, barbaric music sounded softly. His hood was snatched off. The concealed lighting illuminated the room with a curious wave-green tint.
The Griffin sat in a carved, high-backed chair of ebony, inlaid with pearl and ivory stars. He wore a long robe of sable brocade into which cabalistic signs were woven in dull gold thread. He wore a skullcap of black velvet. His face was fantastically hideous.
The beaked nose, high cheekbones, the jutting chin, showed through a mask of gleaming yellow fabric that looked like the shedding skin of a snake, or the diseased tissues of a leper. It was thin, plastic, slightly transparent. It wrinkled with every change of expression, and distorted it. It puffed out from his lips when he chuckled or laughed through the mouth-slit. Through it his eyes gleamed wickedly. Dark eyes, with strange murky glints in them, like the lights in a black opal; fiery flecks of orange and red and blue; hideous and hellish.
The eyes of a madman, a murderer, a monster!
There was a table in front of him. Its top was black marble, its legs were crouching Griffins, with their eagle wings outspread, their lion claws clasping the rich oriental rug.
There was a gong, or brazen disk, suspended between two rods of brass. Under a paperweight of silver-gilt, in the shape of a crouching Griffin with ruby eyes, were sheets of parchment. In front of the Griffin, on the table, there was a single sheet of heavy paper inscribed with a long list of names.
Some of these had been crossed off with a crimson pencil.
It was the death-list of the fiend. Manning wondered if his name appeared there. Those scored through in red had been killed. The Griffin would say, “Executed.”
There was another seat opposite the monster. Manning took it as the Griffin gestured. The hooded men disappeared.
The high and spacious chamber still held much of its original furnishings. The table, of course, was the Griffin’s own. Also a great sky-globe, on a stand that brought the celestial sphere to the height of a tall man’s head. It represented the heavens as seen both north and south of the equator.
About it ran a great circle that was the ecliptic, the apparent pathway of the sun amid the stars. And this line was the center of a belt—the zodiac, divided into its twelve houses, depicted with its twelve signs. The globe was, in all, divided into twelve sections. Halfway up the stand, a slanting platform made a desk on which was a pad of paper, printed with the design of a planisphere.
These were the blanks used by an astrologer for casting horoscopes. The top one had a sign set upon it. It looked as if the Griffin had been at work, trying to decide which of his victims was next ordained by the stars to die—at the hands of the Griffin, the “Avenger of the Universe.”
There was one thing missing that had once been familiar as the Griffin’s shadow. This was Al, the legless freak the Griffin had employed as buffoon and bodyguard. Al was deaf and mute. He had had about the intelligence of a chimpanzee, but the Griffin had found him useful.
Manning had eliminated Al. It was one reason for the Griffin’s desire to do away with Manning, aside from the fact that Manning was sworn to the Griffin’s capture and annihilation.
The Griffin set the jade mouthpiece of a hubble-bubble pipe through the mouth-slit of his mask. The rosewater in the container bubbled as he sucked the smoke, emitted it. Coming from that ghastly countenance, it seemed like hell-vapor outbreathed by a devil.
“This is but a temporary place, Manning; I must apologize for receiving you so poorly. But I will make the reception as warm as I can. I have been very busy lately; too busy to get properly settled, thanks to you.”
His derision turned to hatred in the last three words, bitter and venomous as the bite of a mamba.
Manning regarded him serenely. He felt helpless. Hope was a rainbow dying in the dark, but his spirit held strong within.
“I feared,” said the Griffin, “that Thirty-Nine might be baffled by some safety device of yours, installed too recently for me to know about. So I planned a second offense, that looked like a defense, on the principle of
judo.
And you fell for it, like the dupe, the simpleton, the
gobemouche
that you are. Once you amused me. Now you weary me. Any time I cared to concentrate I could have destroyed you. I have let you run, like a cur on a string. Now—it ends. Despite all your vaunted ability as an investigator, all your police, all your press, all your precautions. You are going to die, within the hour, Manning—and not at all pleasantly.”
He hissed the last words with concentrated hate, the mask fluttering before his lips.
Manning looked at him steadily. He had faint doubt that this was his death warrant. The room seemed close. The amber fumes, the hasheesh, with which the Griffin tinctured his Turkish tobacco, were a little overpowering.
He took the handkerchief from his left cuff and patted his forehead. He remembered the sweat on the brow of Thirty-Nine, and was not ashamed to find it on his own.
But his hand was steady, his voice was calm, as he tucked the handkerchief into his breast pocket, looked at his wrist watch. The Griffin surveyed him mockingly. He had enjoyed that show of sweat. It was the first sign that he had affected his prisoner.
“It is a bit warm in here,” Manning said. “You mentioned ‘within the hour.’ Am I to understand that my death is one of those appointed by the stars, that the Lord of my House had been careless, or cannot defend his domain against the aspects of evil on this night?”
It was his turn to jeer subtly at the Griffin’s supreme belief in the omnipotence of the stars as controllers of fate.
“This is
my
vengeance, Manning. I have appointed the time myself.”
“I see. By the way, I wonder if you noticed the recent announcement by astronomers that the obliquity of the ecliptic slowly changes? And that this upsets the astrologer’s ideas as to what sign of the zodiac rose above the horizon at the particular moment of anybody’s birth. Astronomy, as against astrology. I do not venture to declare which is the more exact science.”
Manning had method in his talk. There was faint hope of successful interference through Tierney’s tailing; very faint. But if he got the Griffin tangled in the erratic beliefs, he might cajole him long enough to play the hidden card he carried.
Already he had made movements he had feared he wouldn’t be permitted. They had disarmed him, but he was sure he was being watched closely; that the first sign from the Griffin would start the final move.
He could see the mask pucker on the monster’s forehead. It would not do to excite him too much.
“Astronomers! Einstein, and the rest! All charlatans! The stars have predicted every great event. They dominate all lives. It is proven.”
“Nevertheless,” Manning argued, “is it not true that there is now a discrepancy in the zodiac amounting to the breadth of a whole sign? That—”
The twitching mask smoothed out. The Griffin sat back, pulled on his hubble-bubble, and chuckled.
“You are trying to pull my leg, Manning; to make me angry, so that I will have you slain swiftly, and without much pain. But I refuse to be drawn out. That was a good move; the move of a brave man who does not fear death. But you, my Manning, will know fear, and agony, before you die. Your death has naught to do with your horoscope. It is the will of the Griffin. I, who am myself, alone. Unlike all others. The Destroyer! The ‘Appointed One’ of Abaddon and Apollyon.”
Tiny flecks of froth broke through the mouth-slit, clung to the jade mouthpiece.
“I do not doubt your omnipotence,” said Manning. He took the handkerchief from his breast pocket, dabbed his forehead, replaced the linen in his left cuff once more. “After I, of minor importance in your scheme of things, am blotted out; who comes next?”
“Ah-ha!” The chuckle was almost friendly. “So that you may win yourself recognition in the Land of Shades, by predicting an early entry? No, Manning. That I will not do. I have not myself entirely ratified the selection. I shall finish that horoscope after I am through with you—
rid of you, Manning!”
The outbursts of maniacal fury that broke his speech were proof of his lessening control.
“But I will read you the list of those who will be chosen, each in their appointed hour.”
It was to satisfy his own colossal vanity that the Griffin read his roll; of those who had died, and those who were about to die if his career of crime could not be checked. He gloated over the knowledge that the one man who might have accomplished that, listened, powerless.
Manning heard that roster of brilliant names, condemned by a madman to have their careers cut short, with far more emotion than the Griffin’s pronouncement of his own death had stirred. For these men and women were geniuses. To slaughter them was to maim all humanity.
Once more he dabbed his forehead. Now he held the handkerchief crumpled in his right hand. The Griffin set down the list of those he had marked for death.
“As for you, Manning,” he said, “I have devised several means of shuffling you off this mortal coil. You have evaded some of them. This one you will not evade. These buildings are a part of old New York. In those old days, men went to see terriers tossed into a rat-pit. The terriers usually won, though terribly bitten, because they were equipped by Nature with punishing jaws, with the necessary teeth.