The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (15 page)

“Really—” panted Caine.

The Avenger paid no more attention to the curator than if he hadn’t been there.

His hands, slim and of average size but with such steely power in their long fingers, lightly touched the yellowed linen bands around the mummy’s legs.

Some of the fabric crumbled at the mere touch. More of it broke, like dry-rotten paper.

Josh had said, and The Avenger believed it, that the swaths around the mummy’s legs had not kept it from walking. Well, these bands would. To permit the thing to walk, the bands must have been taken off the separately bound legs.

But that fragile, age-old fabric could never have been unwound and wound back again, and stayed whole.

Benson stared closely at the mummy’s swatched skull.

The ancient bands had been said to be off the “face” too, exposing it. But here the yellowed linen was even more fragile than at the legs. A little cloud of dust, that had been linen, rose and settled at the tick of Benson’s fingernail. There was a lot of dust behind the mummy’s skull.

The mummy’s head could not have been partially exposed. Yet Josh had sworn it had been.

With his eyes like pale points of flame in his paralyzed face, Benson turned from the cabinet and went toward the statue under whose elbow was the watchman’s call box.

A gurgling scream from Caine drew him swiftly back.

Caine pointed at the mummy with a shivering hand. His lips worked for several seconds before he could make words come out.

“It talked!” he babbled. “I heard it! The mummy talked!”

Benson stared at him as if seeing clear through his fuzzy brown eyes to the back of his skull.

“You’re sure of that?”

“Good heavens! Of course I’m sure!” Caine wiped sweat from his forehead. “I heard it as plainly as I hear you now.”

“What did it say?”

“I couldn’t quite make out—”

“Did it say: ‘The charms must be retrieved without violence, by all the loser’s worldly goods’?” asked Benson evenly.

Caine’s jaw dropped.

“How did you hear that, from twenty feet away? It was barely a whisper. Yet you heard—”

“Were those the words?”

Caine sighed raggedly.

“Yes! Those were the words.”

The Avenger nodded. He had not repeated the message because of the fact that his hearing was far keener than other men’s. He knew what the words were because it had been his voice that delivered them—not the mummy’s.

But now came more words, louder.

“Death shall visit those who interfere.”

Caine stared at the mummy with the look of a crazy man. The Avenger’s diamond-drill eyes fastened on it with equal intensity.

This time the words were not his.

“Death! Death! Death!”

There was a slight premonitory quiver, a small sound—and a ten-foot square of the ceiling crashed to the floor within a yard of the mummy case.

The ceiling of Braintree, like the floor, was made of thick stone slabs. Throughout, the building was constructed of materials designed to last for hundreds of years. The section that fell weighed probably half a ton.

It splintered the floor where The Avenger had been standing. It almost crashed through, as the Egyptian pillars had caved in the night before. Anything caught under that mass would have been pulverized.

But Benson wasn’t under it.

He had spent his life, since his teens, in jungle and wilderness, as has been said. Times without number his existence had been spared by his swift realization of something a little wrong, and his breath-taking quickness of physical reaction.

This was one of those times. With that first faint quiver, he had leaped like lightning as far from the spot as possible. From five yards away, he stared at the jagged heap that had been cut stone in a ceiling, and at the shivering, moaning Caine.

The Avenger’s face was as dead as a glacier in moonlight. But his eyes were alive; pale terrors in his death-mask countenance.

In Nellie’s mind was vividly fresh the picture of the face that had bent over her when she lay, a sacrificial victim, beside the ark of Typhon.

The repulsive, hairless head, the eagle beak of a nose, the putty color of the lank, lantern-jawed countenance—these were things she kept seeing again and again.

Therefore, when she turned toward the Sixteenth Street mansion that evening to report a futile afternoon spent in watching Marlowe, and when she saw that same face on a gaunt body half a block ahead of her, she passed the door of Benson’s temporary headquarters without a second thought and went after the owner of the face.

Taros loose again! The high priest of ancient Egypt, wearer of the Ring of Power!

Only now the figure didn’t look much like old Egypt, or anything else mysterious.

Farnum Shaw, hairless skull covered by a modish gray felt hat, thin body clad in impeccable and very modern gray tweeds, looked like just what he was—a prosperous lawyer with a big corporation practice in the nation’s capital.

Nevertheless, there was that face, pleasantly molded now, but a mask of devilish murder last night. It seemed impossible that it could be the same face, and yet—

Nellie had more courage than most steeplejacks. And was more capable than most police captains. She trailed the owner of the amazing countenance without even a qualm at the thought of possible danger.

Shaw, it seemed, was out for a walk as much as merely to get somewhere. He went for at least a mile and a half across the diagonal streets of Washington dotted with small park-circles, before he got to his home. There, he took out his keys leisurely, not even looking around, and then went inside.

Shaw’s home looked bigger than it was, at first glance. That was because from the rear of it extended a big wing that was attached to the house and yet was not actually a part of it.

A second glance showed that it was a separate addition, almost along museum lines. In here, Nellie guessed, the man kept his Egyptian collection.

Nellie kept right on toward the house, and up to the front door. That door, she knew, was not locked. She knew because her pretty ears were almost as keen as The Avenger’s.

She heard the slam of the door when Shaw carelessly closed it, and had also heard the click of the lock. The click was flatter, less metallic than it should have been. She was pretty sure that it had not quite latched.

She tried the door and her conviction was confirmed. It swung open a little at her push. She stepped inside the place.

There were voices at the rear of the hall, then steps. Nellie quickly slipped into a downstairs closet as a man in butler’s livery came toward the front door.

The man reached in with the gray felt hat, and hung it on a peg, with his hand almost brushing the girl’s shoulder. Then he was gone again.

Nellie came out.

There was a rear door that, from the layout which had impressed itself on her mind from the outside, must lead into the large rear addition. She stole toward it. There was a cough as she got to the door. It seemed to come from her very elbow. But while she gazed rapidly around, she placed it.

Shaw was in the room behind the closed door, at her right.

With the coast clear, she opened the rear door and went in.

It was as she had thought. It was crowded in here with Shaw’s Egyptian relics. A regular private museum.

There were two mummy cases and mummies, almost as good as Braintree’s own. There was a carved sarcophagus. There were many cases of Egyptian jewelry, scarabs, seals, and the like. There was a corner literally walled with bits of fine bas-relief from ancient temples. There were other cases, only partially filled as yet, with ancient weapons.

Shaw, it was plain to be seen, had a very fine collection indeed. Now, if he had the Taros amulets—

The fact that the cases with Egyptian weapons in them were only partly filled, suddenly struck Nellie with a grave significance. It began to seem extremely important to her.

Her dainty hands went to her waist, and the belt radio came out. She dialed The Avenger, waited.

At Sixteenth Street, Benson sat before the table on which, some hours before, the atomic bombarding cylinder had been set up. He was staring straight ahead, with a look in the pale and awful eyes to give you the creeps. And he was talking, almost like a man in a state of self-hypnotism.

Quite often, in the unfolding of a deadly riddle he was working on, The Avenger would sum up what had occurred to date, and from the strange array of facts draw conclusions that usually no one else—that early in the game—could follow.

He was doing so now.

“The old Egyptians believed earnestly in reincarnation,” Benson’s cold, quiet voice enunciated. “They believed that the spirit of a strong man might live again and again, through the ages, in different bodies. The things that have happened here in Washington lately might almost seem to prove that.

“It looks as if the spirit of the high priest Taros had followed his amulets and the Ring of Power from the tomb of his son, across the Atlantic. It looks as if that spirit could inhabit at will the body of Farnum Shaw, whose physical appearance is strikingly like that of Taros as described in tomb murals. Furthermore, it would seem that other age-old spirits could control the movement of other modern men—Snead, who still lies in a coma, and Marlowe and Blessing. Furthermore, Smitty and Josh and Nellie have seen at least twenty others who appear to have leaped the ages from Rameses’ time. Reincarnation, in a way—”

Smitty gritted his teeth as he remembered the fantastic horde he had seen the night before. And he clenched his great hands as he remembered how nearly they had gotten diminutive Nellie Gray, who could twist the giant around her fragile fingers any time she pleased.

“There is the fact of the talking mummy,” Benson went on. “No mummy can talk. There wouldn’t be vocal cords or tongue to enunciate. Nothing could be heard, save by shrieking, through a heavy cabinet. Yet the son of Taros has been heard by several people, among them, myself.

“The mummy has also been observed to walk. Josh saw it, among others. Yet the mummy of Taros’ son could not possibly get out of the cabinet without leaving a trace. Also, if the linen bands were cleared from its legs to allow locomotion, and from the face to expose it, those bands would certainly show the disarrangement. And there are no such signs. The cabinet has certainly not been opened recently, save by myself, and the linen bands have not been touched.

“Again, every one reporting that the mummy had gotten loose, leaving only an empty cabinet behind it, has also said that the mummy
case
was gone, too. Not only the bandaged figure, but the heavy, gilded container in which he was lifted from his sarcophagus.

“The exposed face of Taros’ son has been reported as looking remarkably like the face of the son of Gunther Caine, curator of Braintree Museum.”

The Avenger followed that track for a moment.

“Harold Caine at first said he had suffered a curious headache. On a second occasion, he reversed his story and insisted that he never had. Harold Caine was the one person in Gunther Caine’s home that first night who was in a position to take the Taros relics. He has acted suspiciously ever since. So, in the last thirty-six hours, has his father.

“Finally there is the repeated message of the mummy, to the effect that the charms must be retrieved
without
violence and by the sacrifice of all ‘worldly goods’ which ‘he,’ the loser—in other words, Gunther Caine—hath. That message has been repeated several times for emphasis. Yet why would ancient Taros, if his is the voice that speaks through his son’s desiccated form, put such emphasis on lack of violence? Taros was one of the bloodiest priests in Egyptian history.”

The glacial, immobile voice stopped. The pale, intense eyes became as impersonal as the dead face. The Avenger was through with his mystic revery.

As usual, his aides felt as if they should know all the answers, after having the facts arrayed. And as usual, they didn’t glean a thing from them. The Avenger had. They knew that. But then the genius behind the death-mask face was far ahead of normal intelligence.

Benson took out his belt radio.

“Yes?”

Smitty listened too, on his own tiny set. Nellie was not here. This must be from her. And anything concerning Nellie concerned the giant.

“Chief, I am at Farnum Shaw’s house, in the addition in the rear, where he keeps his Egyptian things.”

Smitty scowled at the words in the dainty, sweet voice. That little blond hellion. She had been ordered only to watch Marlowe. He knew, because he had heard the order. But now, as she had done so often before, she had plunged into trouble on her own hook—

“I have just noticed something about that collection that I thought you might find interesting,” came Nellie’s guarded voice. “Some of the cases—”

There was no more. Nellie’s worlds shut off as if a blanket had been dropped over her! There was no concluding sound at all. Not even a crash.

Just a sudden, ominous silence.