In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 (14 page)

“What can we do? What we
may
do. Clews! We’ll have to pick them up—afterward. But we’ll close in. We’ll trace his agents, one by one. And we’ll keep in touch with them. Some day, supreme madman as he is, we’ll be able to forestall some crime he contemplates. Then, with luck, we’ll get him.
I’ll get him.
I doubt if I’ll bring him in alive. I’m doubtful if I’ll be alive myself. But—
I’ll get him.
I’m devoting myself to this, Commissioner. One could do nothing more worthwhile than to rid the earth of such a monster. I’ll close out my private practice, turn over my clients….”

“I don’t know about your compensation, Manning. There should be unlimited funds for such a purpose, but….”  The commissioner’s voice sounded troubled.

“To hell with that,” said Manning quietly. “I’ve got enough. Give me the men I want when I ask for them. I’ll talk to the governor. Long ago he promised me almost unlimited expenses, if he had to ask for a special appropriation. He hinted at the time that the President was more than interested. But I don’t want Federal aid, as yet. It would only add the fuel of flattery to the Griffin’s madness.”

The commissioner grunted his approval.

“Too many hounds, too much cry,” he quoted.

“We called him mad dog just now,” said Manning. “That’s too mild a term. He’s a ravening, cunning brute who will have to be carefully stalked along a dangerous and bloody trail. He’ll leave his spoor, like any other beast. Now he’s gone amuck, he’ll be careless—and we’ll nail him, nail him with bullets, Commissioner.”

Norbert called Manning directly, later, at Manning’s residence at Pelham Manor.

“The chap that tackled you, Manning; it looks a bit like hyoscine. Only takes a small dose, and it’s hard to trace after digestion sets in.”

Hyoscine, Manning knew, was the same as scopolamine, an injection of which, blended with morphia, was useful in childbirth. A deadly drug. A man given a hypodermic dose of it, perhaps mixed with other drugs, might mistake it for the injection of a stimulant he craved.

Manning visualized the panhandler, cunningly stationed for a day or so, where Manning, always leaving the gym on schedule, would become used to the sight of him; but that day charged with something that would spur him up to and a little beyond a certain hour; and then, with cumulative action and reaction, would destroy him.

He put the question to Norbert.

“It’s quite possible, Manning,” said the Chief Medical Examiner.

Half an hour before midnight, when the amusement-seeking public thronged Broadway, reading the latest news bulletins that snaked in golden, dancing letters about the wedge-shaped building that dominates Times Square; when Venus was setting, as the earth whirled in its appointed flight, this message flamed…

Lorna Fulton, Celebrated Aviatrix, Found Murdered in Her Own Garden on Long Island Under Mysterious and Amazing Circumstances.

The citizens at large had to wait until they got their morning papers to get the fantastic details of the murder. But Manning received them in his own library.

Lorna Fulton, famed for trans-Atlantic and South American flights, had been discovered in the night-blooming garden on her estate at Porthaven, on the north shore of Long Island.

There she had been found by her maid, gazing with eyes that no longer saw at the sky in which she had found her special element.

The cause of death had not been determined, but it must have been a swift dismissal. This time the Griffin was not to be denied.

A note was found beside the body, on heavy gray paper, in an envelope to match. Inside the envelope there was a weight of lead about the size of a silver dollar. This was stamped with the insigne of the Griffin. The message seemed to have been dropped, or pitched, to lie by the body. There was no address on the envelope. No need of any, when the script inside, characteristic and set down in purple ink, was read.

To you, presumptuous one, who would seek the secrets of the sky, the stars decree destruction.

For signature there was a scarlet oval of heavy paper, embossed with the familiar seal.

The press had the news of this before the local police thought of concealment.

The Griffin would read the papers, listen to the broadcasts, chuckle at the thought of a cowering community, of the horror and terror that would stretch across the continent, flash around the world.

It was suggested in the news articles that the message had been dropped from a low-lying plane—sent, as it were, from the stars.

Manning did not accept any such inference. The maid who found her mistress had been sitting with another servant by an open window ever since the murdered woman left the house. They had not seen or heard anything in the air.

The weight, Manning thought, had been merely used to toss the message close to the body, and to ensure the lack of any footprints beside those of Lorna Fulton.

The garden was easy enough of access. It held shrubbery and trees that would prove perfect cover for the approach of an assassin or a messenger. There was no wound upon the body, not even a bruise. The flowers, the rich, soft earth in which they grew, had broken her fall.

The autopsy showed that she had died of strangulation, that for some reason her respiratory muscles and organs had ceased to work, the diaphragm had become paralyzed, and the hormones had ceased to carry oxygen to the blood stream; the lungs had collapsed.

It was barely possible that she might have been saved by an injection of methylene blue, but she had been dead too long before she was discovered.

At Manning’s order, the soil of the night garden was carefully sifted, especially that about certain flowers which had withered unnaturally, their petals seared and blackened.

Minute particles of glass were found, exceedingly thin and brittle. A ball of glass, almost as light and frail as a soap bubble, had been tossed at the victim. What the gas was that had choked Lorna Fulton was hard to determine, possibly hydrocyanic, undoubtedly something concocted in the Griffin’s private laboratories, wherever they might be.

And, beyond the broken glass, the diagnosis, no clew. The garden paths were of brick, they held no sign of an intruder.

One thing stood out, to Manning. The Griffin was repeating himself in his murderous methods. His rage against Manning had temporarily upset his sardonic subtleties for novelty. But Manning did not doubt they would return.

IV

Tall and gaunt in his sable robe, the Griffin paced the chamber in his abode, hung with black tapestries embroidered in gold. The place was an old colonial dwelling, remote and solitary, though no more than fifty miles from New York. It had an evil reputation and was considered haunted.

In one corner crouched the monstrosity the Griffin had bought from an unsuccessful circus and named Al, after certain unsavory demons said to live in Persian deserts. Al had been born legless, mute and deaf, with a head of enormous size. The Griffin, who was his God, had taught him a limited sign language.

The Griffin spoke aloud as he strode to and fro. Al could not understand, but he knew that his God was aroused and angry, and he quivered in reaction as his master vapored.

“They shall see. This Manning, and those he would protect! He dares to offset the decrees of Fate, and he shall perish. But first I will show him, and all the myrmidons of law and order, that they are powerless before me.

“I am the Griffin, the fabled beast of Scythia! I fly, I swoop, I leap, I pounce! I am a mystery and a myth, immortal and invincible, the destroyer of the impudent and arrogant. I will raze them from the earth and utterly abolish them.

“So it is written, so it is decreed. The stars proclaim my invincibility!”

He swung out on a balcony as Al fawned in his corner. It was within an hour of dawn, dark and still. Ancient trees towered against the spangled sky. Beyond them lay a suicidal mere, source of neighborhood legend. Closer, the private graveyard and crypt of the family that had once held the estate through royal grant. It was all steeped in decadence, a fitting aerie for the Griffin.

He flung his arms to the heavens in a pagan conjuration, muttering the names of maleficent spirits. “Satan! Ahriman! Belial! Sammael! Shaitan! Beelzebub!”

His features were half revealed, and half concealed, by a mask of some membranous tissue that showed his beaked nose, thrusting against the leprous stuff, that clung like the half-shed skin of a snake. The heathenish nomenclature flowed from his lips through the fluttering screen as if he were telling a rosary at a Black Mass. His dark eyes glittered through the slits of the mask.

“Shedim! Asmodeus! Moloch!”

No longer did he apostrophize the zodiacal rulers. Sometimes they had betrayed him. Now, in his monomaniacal, murderous obsession, he believed himself supreme, one with the universal pantheon of fallen angels.

“Asteroth! Odin! Abaddon! Apollyon!”

The frenzy lessened, and he returned to the great chamber lined with black. From the desk of a carven table of ebony he brought a list where certain names were erased in scarlet. He read the others out loud.

“All,
all
shall perish, and swiftly,” he proclaimed. “Then there shall be more, many more.”

He put the list away and tapped lightly a bronze disk that hung suspended between two pillars of the same metal. Its vibrations got through to Al. The freak raised himself, balanced on the palms of his hands, expectant.

The resonance of the gong still sounded when the Griffin touched a button concealed in the carving of the table, and there was a softly slithering noise as a section of the black tapestry slid aside, revealing the entrance to an elevator.

He entered it, and motioned to Al, who came like a distorted ape, swinging between his muscular arms, squatting by the feet of his master as the automatic lift descended into the extended cellars of the old manor house.

In one of many subterranean vaults, with roofs, walls and ceilings of reinforced cement, impenetrable as a fortress, a figure awaited the Griffin. It was a man, but it looked like an automaton, motionless, dressed in a brown denim overall stained with grease and acid.

The man’s head was closely shaven. His flesh was like unbaked dough, his eyes hopeless, his face haggard and blank. On the front of his overall a number was stenciled in yellow pigment. The same number was tattooed upon the top of his bare skull.

“You have completed your experiments, Forty-One?” asked the Griffin of his slave. The human robot nodded. “If they succeed in the final test, you shall be rewarded. I will send money to your family. I will have conveyed to them a letter you shall write, stating that you are alive and content but still compelled—by circumstances that they will understand— to remain in retirement.”

The Griffin’s scabrous mask quivered with his silent mirth. The shackled and debased genius groveled in his gratitude. The automaton became a man, suffering, pleading.

“You will have them write to me, to tell me how they are? My wife, my babies!”

“We shall see. Now demonstrate.”

The Griffin’s voice was harsh, imperative. With a sigh Number Forty-One turned to a bench that was crowded, but not confused, with apparatus. There were lathes and elaborate tools, tubes and globes of glass combined with gleaming brass.

He picked up one of two models that looked like a child’s expensive toy, and exhibited it to the Griffin, who nodded but did not touch it. The man without a name showed the second, set it down, touched a disk.

The low hum of a dynamo sounded, there was a flutter of blue light against the hidden lighting of the vault.

The Griffin watched the demonstration closely, hard to please, insistent upon perfection, suggesting various trials. At last he was satisfied. He chuckled.

“You have done well, so far, Forty-One,” he said. He snapped his fingers at Al, who trailed him, propelled between his arms, his calloused hands padding on the stone floors, muscles flowing in the limbs that, covered with red hair, could strangle as easily as a gorilla.

They passed along narrow corridors, all silent as the grave, past doors where the slaves of the Griffin labored at devilish devices. At last they came out into the ancient crypt where old caskets had burst and fallen from their niches and moldering bones were scattered.

The smell of the charnel house seemed to awaken some wild spirit in Al. As they emerged into the graveyard, the moon flung long shadows from cypresses, shadows that wavered because of the clouds moving in a high wind; the freak uttered uncouth noises and commenced unhallowed capers, playing a grotesque and horrible game of leapfrog over the tilted slabs.

The Griffin watched him for a while, the yellow metallic skin of his mask gleaming weirdly. Presently the Griffin snapped his fingers again, and Al slapped along behind him to the front of the house where a dim light gleamed.

A man came to the door, the husband of the couple the Griffin hired to appear as caretakers.

“I am leaving to-morrow. I do not know when I shall return. See that all is in order when I do.”

The man’s weak chin wobbled under the wispy beard as he answered, and his pale eyes rolled fearfully at Al. The Griffin and his familiar went into a paneled room, where courtly dames and gentlemen had once posed and curtsied.

A panel slid at his touch, the automatic lift received them. Strange music ebbed and flowed through the Griffin’s private chamber, his unholy of unholies; the scent of fuming amber sifted in the air. He drew toward him a hubble-bubble pipe.

The Griffin sat enshrined in his carved chair, the arms of which were supporting griffins, his eyes glittered as the smoke rose gurgling and bubbling through the perfumed water, inhaling the pungent fume through a mouthpiece of amber.

“I was hasty in the case of the flying woman,” he communed aloud. “But this next time, Manning, this next time, the Griffin shows his genius, and leaves you, poor fool, gasping!”

Dawn crept into the room above the trees and found him sitting there, tranced in his evil visions, while Al hunkered, doglike and devoted.