Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Detective/Hard-Boiled
“You have good teeth, Manning, but they are not those of a bull-terrier. One annoyance of this place is that it is infested with rats. I have caught many of them, or had them caught. I have placed them in a special cellar, kept them hungry, but not so starved that they have become too weak. When they started to eat each other, I considered them sufficiently ravenous. I have kept them that way, for you.
“I am going to drop you into that rat-pit, Manning, as you are, unbound. And I shall enjoy the spectacle far more than Nero ever relished the casting of a Christian maiden to the lions. I hope you put up a good fight, Manning. There will be a spotlight—”
He half rose, in his mad frenzy. The jade mouthpiece fell from his lips. The flecks of foam clotted on the mouth-slit.
“A rat, devoured by rats—”
Manning moved the crumpled handkerchief, as if to stuff it automatically into the cuff of his left sleeve. His fingers worked for a moment.
“Not to-night!” Manning challenged.
The Griffin subsided into his throne-chair. He was not too mad to notice what Manning held in his right hand, brought from the elastic holdout on his left arm. The searchers had missed it, he held his arms aloft in the courtyard.
It was the pistol Thirty-Nine had carried. And it was pointed, with a hand that showed not the slightest tremor, at the Griffin.
“Sit down, and sit quietly,” said Manning. “The aim, I think, is not very important. You know best what the poison will do to you. I think the rats will wait. I tested the trigger, and eased the spring. It will take but the slightest pressure to release the charge.”
The mask stiffened. The eyes of the monster glared through.
“You are going to take me out of here,” said Manning. “You will have to be very careful, for I shall be liable to mistake your intentions, being set on my own. To deliver you to justice, which, in the person of the police, will welcome you far more readily dead, or dying, than alive. All the psychiatrists in America will not suffice to send you to Dannemora again. It has been a long time since there was a lynching in New York, but—”
He was sure the Griffin had made no move, but suddenly the bronze disk clanged out a clamor of alarm.
“Sit still,” said Manning. “I think the police you so recently derided are closing in. I had my own
judo,
my own second line of offense.”
The yellow mask quivered a little.
“Get up, turn your back to me, make no false move. We shall go out arm-in-arm,” Manning ordered.
The disk quivered with its message of imminent danger.
Slowly the Griffin rose, and turned his back. He uttered a high-pitched cry. And suddenly the wave-green light went out. The room was plunged into absolute blackness.
Manning heard the slither of robes, sensed the inrush of the Griffin’s myrmidons. He pressed the trigger, but there was no spurt of flame, no sound. The compressed gas discharged the poisoned missile, but he could not tell if he had scored a hit.
He had to pull back a cylinder to recharge, a clumsy arrangement in the dark. He would have given much to swap this murderer’s weapon for his own good gun.
The brazen gong ceased its discord. The Griffin had fled, careful not to expose himself against any light, fearful of the poison-gun he had himself devised.
His high-pitched call had not only summoned his men, but by a sympathetic vibration, had put out the lights. It had been an emergency mechanism.
It seemed as if Tierney must have made contact. The commissioner must have closed in. But that was not getting in.
There was a faint draft of air, suddenly shut off. The room was filled with unseen shapes.
The Griffin had left his creatures behind to kill Manning. He was in a rat-pit after all.
How many underlings Manning might destroy with the poison-gun would not count with the Griffin. He was ready to sacrifice them. If they guessed that, they would not show any mercy to Manning.
A voice sounded in the room, seeming to come from the ceiling.
“Kill!” it commanded. “Kill! He has betrayed you all.”
His back against the long table, Manning awaited the onslaught. He could hear their breathing, feel their motion. Then, with a rush, they were on him, swarming from all sides. They panted and grunted, uncouth, hideous and deadly, grappling with him, striking, clawing, seeking to get him down, to tear him apart.
V
The Strangling Horde
Manning fought for his life. Most of the Griffin slaves were weak and emaciated, but they seemed a legion. They knew him by the feel of his clothing, which they snagged and ripped to tatters.
Twice they got him to his knees, and twice he staggered up again, blood streaming down his face where their long nails had torn the flesh. Time and again he shook them off as they clung to his arms and legs. He struck out, and hit flesh and bone. Once he cracked two skulls together. The celestial sphere toppled, the table was upset.
Once, when someone he smashed fairly tripped over a connection, there was a brief flare of blue lightning. It showed him a score of gibbering faces, hollow of cheek, eyes blazing. They used their teeth and fought bestially. Only the darkness and their own numbers, which made them block each other, added to his own prime condition and fighting ability, kept Manning on his feet. Once down, they would trample him to death, mutilate him beyond recognition.
The greatest horror was the fact that they did not speak. They only uttered feral noises. He felt their hot breath on his cheeks. They stripped the pistol-gun from his grasp. He was just as glad to use his free fist. The gun was of little use to them in the darkness. It fell to the floor, trampled and kicked.
Manning began to weaken under the buffeting, the blows and kicks. He had no definite goal to fight for. All sense of direction was lost. For all he knew, the Griffin had deliberately shut them in there to finish him; locked them in, and left them to whatever fate would ultimately come to them.
His throat was scraped and bruised. A dozen times he tore loose strangling holds.
Then one man closed with him again. He was of different quality from the rest, better fed, perhaps, or naturally more muscular. He seemed to have held off cunningly, reserving himself until Manning was worn down. His hands grappled Manning’s windpipe, shutting off air and blood. Manning thrust his own thumb at the base of the man’s neck, thrust with all his force.
This was
judo,
the deadly Japanese defense for a frontal attack. The man choked, an agonized rattle came from his throat. Then he collapsed, the tiny hyoid bone crushed. He went limp, dying in Manning’s arms.
Manning was tired, but so were the others. Their courage had long since been leached out of them by the Griffin.
Manning charged them, and they fell back. He barked his shins on the edge of the overturned table, but he strode over it, carrying the man he had killed.
To the rest the table was a formidable barrier in the dark. They gave him a moment’s respite while he crouched, stripping the robe and hood from the dead man, putting them on himself. A disguise might be useless, but if he ever got out of here alive—
The voice came again from the ceiling.
“Come, the way is clear! Leave him if you are sure he is dead. If not, finish him! But hurry!”
A subdued light began partially to illuminate the big room. The Griffin had calculated the horror of that unseen attack, the advantage that any light would have given to Manning, with his gas gun.
The Griffin had gone to see what the alarm might mean, to set his defense against violent attack and entry; to prepare for his own escape. He had found flight necessary.
One of the doors was opening. There was a faint glimmer of light beyond it.
Now Manning saw that all these forgotten, nameless men, had numbers stenciled in white on the back of their black robes. Most of them showed wounds that he had inflicted or where he had damaged them. They stared about, bewildered, in a huddle, looking at the dismantled room, seeking the stranger they were bidden to destroy.
He had disappeared. Manning had his hood well pulled about his scratched face. Some of them started uncertainly for the door.
Manning led them. He was first through into the passage. A robed figure came hurrying towards him. Motioned him back. The wide sleeve only partly concealed an automatic pistol.
“Get back. I am to make sure of him,” said the man harshly. His features were only a blur in his cowl, but Manning knew the voice, knew the man.
He stood aside as if to let the other pass, then flung himself upon him, left arm crooked about the neck, a knee set in the spine, right hand grasping the wrist above the gun.
Manning set out all his force, all the reserve strength that came surging to his aid. He felt the vertebrae snap in the small of the other’s back. He heard him groan, and let him fall forward; to his knees, then full upon his face, while Manning tore loose the gun.
His own gun! With which the man had meant to give him the
coup de grâce.
The white figures on the back of the gunman showed plainly enough. This was—or had been—Number Thirty-Nine.
Black forms blocked the doorway, irresolute. They were unarmed. Thirty-Nine was a murderer. The other man had been killed in a fight where the odds were with him.
Manning did not want to kill again—except the Griffin.
He fired over their heads. The heavy gun roared in the passageway. Plaster came falling down. The reek of powder was in the faces of the slaves as Manning turned and raced down the corridor.
That single shot, if the Griffin heard it, would be taken as the one that finished Manning. The Griffin would surely linger to know that his enemy was dead.
Manning prayed for that. He was willing to trade his own life in if he could know that the mad monster would commit no more murder.
Gun in hand, he hurried on. The passage ended in a door, unlocked. Beyond there was a flight of worn stone steps that led down to a hall of stone. It was dimly lighted with a single electric bulb. From it there led another passage, dotted with faintly glowing bulbs. On each side there were small chambers, like cells.
Manning knew where he was. This was the mortuary, the crypt below the ancient foundations of St. Jude’s-in-the-Fields. He stopped for a moment. He fancied he heard a vague murmuring ahead.
Looking back, he thought he saw black figures, like shadows, wavering and uncertain.
They must know who he was now, and they were afraid of him. They had attacked him in a pack, hysterical, rather than hostile. But they were cowed now.
The corridor led into what must have been a chapel for the dead. The chapel was paneled to the groined ceiling, in conventional, ecclesiastical design. There was a spiral stair that led up, but it was solidly blocked off with masonry. That had led to the church. What of the other exits? He was sure the Griffin had come this way.
The black-robed slaves had trailed him to the entrance to the chapel. They stood there timidly, like so many phantoms. They knew he had killed two of them, and had the means of shooting more.
“Any of you know how to get out of here?” demanded Manning. “If you do, I’ll not interfere with your own getaway.”
They barely moved. They might have been shrouded corpses, stacked against the wall.
“We do not know,” said one of them in a hollow voice. “It would do us little good to go free, while the Griffin is alive.”
“He won’t be for long, if I can get at him,” rasped Manning, exasperated at these remnants of manhood. “Haven’t any of you got any nerve left?”
It was, he knew, an idle question. The bulbs were growing more and more dim. Manning fancied them fed by a storage battery of limited capacity; enough for an escape, insufficient to help a pursuit.
There was one thing he had brought away, and that was the knowledge of the Griffin’s next intended victim. In his egoism, the Griffin had called off the list. And Manning had noted the sign upon the planisphere. The shallow curve above a circle that represented Taurus, the Bull.
If on that list there was one born between April 19 and May 20, that man or woman must be protected immediately, even if he or she had to be shipped secretly to the Gobi Desert.
Provided Manning did not get the Griffin.
In the end the police would break in, rescue him, capture the hooded slaves—unless the Griffin had prepared, which was likely enough, some final trap to cover his retreat, a contact-mine of some sort that would wreck the houses, the cellars, and all within them.
The bulbs gave a final dull flicker, went out.
VI
The Smear of Blood
Manning was not afraid of being attacked again by the nameless ones. His own gun would be a real weapon, even in the dark; and the spiritless creatures had been already defeated. They thought themselves doomed. He snapped on his cigar lighter and began to search the paneling; sure there was somewhere a concealed outlet. The Griffin was on the other side. With every second the chance of getting him grew fainter.
He passed his lighter up and down the edges of the panels, bordered with Gothic carving. It seemed useless, but suddenly the flame wavered, blown by a draft that drifted in through an imperceptible opening at the side of the panel.
Manning tried every projection in the carving; rosette after rosette, with no effect. The paneling was heavy oak. He doubted if he could splinter his way through with his gun. Not without ruining the weapon.
He tried the other side of the corridor. There was a creak, and wood gave at last to his pressure on the center of a boss. The draft blew strongly, with a gust of cold air as the panel slid back. His lighter was blown out.
Light was of little use in the passage ahead of him.
He held out his hands and found stone masonry as he felt his way down a short flight of stairs. He touched the frame of a metal door, and groped out into a vast space.
Far away, down a mighty corridor the roof of which was upheld by massive, square pillars, he saw lights moving, electric torches and lanterns that now revealed, now hid a group of robed figures who occasionally showed the numerals on their backs.