In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 (4 page)

The face of Dougherty was suddenly transformed. His lips curled back and showed his teeth in a snarl. He thrust his right hand high, but his left—the sinister hand that had halved the fruit, darted for his right side.

His second gun—the first one known to Manning and revealed several times as a service weapon in a holster as regularly worn—came from the inner pocket of his coat. It spat fire twice before he fell with Manning’s bullet in his chest. The shock of the slug and its placement had knocked him down. Manning was bored through his shoulder, high up, his collarbone was broken.

The sergeant, still snarling, dying even then from the wound, fired again, left-handed, but the shot went wild as Manning’s relentless aim crashed lead into the man’s skull. It was a duel to the death, though he would have preferred to take his man alive.

But the Evil lurking there had materialized too swiftly. The Griffin had struck. Two men lay dead. One of them Allison.

There was pounding at the stairway door and Manning opened it. Officers came in, stood amazed and aghast.

“Who killed him?” demanded an inspector.

“He killed Allison, I killed him,” said Manning quietly. The game was over. The Griffin had lost a pawn, but he had called checkmate. “Get the commissioner right away,” Manning ordered. “And the Medical Examiner.”

“Dougherty killed Allison? That’s impossible,” said the inspector as another officer went to the telephone, a third knelt beside and between the dead men.

“I’m not contradicting you,” Manning answered. “Get a set of Sergeant Dougherty’s finger-prints sent up from the official file. Get a print man here, too. Ask the Identification Bureau if they’ve got any other prints similar to Sergeant Dougherty’s. They should be not far from identical.”

“I don’t know what has happened to Sergeant Dougherty,” Manning said to the police commissioner. “I hope he’ll show up, but I doubt it. The Griffin got him, inside of the last forty-eight hours, during the time I relieved him. He was going to see his girl, poor devil. As for this chap, you can see he’s the double of the sergeant. He fooled you, and it was easy for him to fool Allison and myself. Look at those sets of finger-prints. Nobody but twins could have them so alike. Did you know the sergeant had a twin brother, Commissioner?”

“God help me, I did,” said the commissioner. He had come up from the ranks and his knowledge was wide in police affairs. Now his seamed face was troubled. “But I had forgotten it. We all agreed to forget it, years ago. Dougherty’s twin was a bad lot. Tom got him out of trouble time and time again when they were both lads, but he couldn’t stop him. It was Tom who recognized him eight years ago in New York and turned him in. He was wanted for homicide. He got ten years. It was hard on Tom, but he did his duty. And his brother cursed him for a canting hypocrite. We never spoke about it, we forgot it for the sake of Tom’s feelings—and his promotion. I should have thought of it. I blame myself for this, Manning.”

“It was not your fault,” Manning tried to reassure him. The commissioner pulled himself together.

“I don’t see now how it was done,” he said. “They both ate the fruit.”

“It’s not entirely a new method,” said Manning. “Not often used outside of the Orient. It’s a Malay trick. The killer mixes poison with honey and smears it on the underside of a knife. Then he shares a meal with his victim, divides a melon with the poisoned blade and is careful to eat only the upper and harmless portion. The method is common in Treggannu and they use either cyanide or physostigmine, which is taken from the Calabar or Ordeal bean. He was nervous and he used his left hand to cut the melon, as he did to shoot with afterwards. I think you’ll find Tom Dougherty’s twin was left-handed. Of course he disguised it at first. Then I saw his eyes. He had taken dope to nerve himself. It was too late then, but I knew what had happened when Allison started to pronounce the word ‘honey.’

“The Griffin knew, of course. He knew of the killer’s hatred against his brother, and he undoubtedly had something hanging over him that forced him to revenge himself on his brother and also kill Allison. He was probably given the choice of being given over to the police or doing this job for a big reward he would never have collected. The Griffin would figure the odds of his capture, though it was a smart move of his to offer to get a doctor.”

The Medical Examiner reserved announcement on the poison used until the melon was analyzed.

“No doubt as to what killed the other one,” he said. “Either bullet would have done it.” He opened the clothing over the murderer’s chest and showed the wound. It was not bleeding much, but there was a brighter crimson mark on the opposite breast, too regular for a birthmark.

It had been recently tattooed there. The upper half of a griffin in scarlet ink, indelible and sinister.

The Scarlet Seal

Manning Gets an Invitation to a Murder, to Watch an “Ingenious Method”—an Invitation Sealed with the Terrible Scarlet Griffin

The little graveyard was a place forgotten. A private cemetery, no longer visited. Its tombstones sagged and some were fallen. The stone had flaked and the inscriptions were illegible, if anyone had cared to read them. Sumach and thornapples and blackberry brambles discouraged investigation. Old yews and native cypress shadowed the dismal spot. There was a vault of stone that was still intact, though it had tilted as the soil had shifted with the centuries on the slope which the vault crowned. The vault had a gate of wrought iron secured by a rusty chain and padlock, and a door that seemed to await the Resurrection morning.

Behind the slope, across neglected pastures, stood a house of brick and stone that had been nobly designed but had suffered the wear of the elements for fifty years without human occupation or reinforcement. Once there had been a garden and still a few roses bloomed, stunted, and hedges once trimmed grew wild.

The land was part of a great grant by King George to one of his overseas subjects. Most of it had been sold. This had been a portion bequeathed to a minor heir. At the back of the house were great, gaunt lilacs guarding an alley where once George Washington had walked in his unsuccessful wooing of Marion Philipse, visiting there.

There was a cloud about the title. The old, proud family had gone into oblivion. But someone had recently risked buying the forty ragged acres. The house was almost a ruin, with its rotting sills and leaking roof, its sagging shutters and mouldering paint, within and without.

To-night, dim through the driving, persistent rain, a light gleamed downstairs. Some thought the newcomers were merely caretakers for the purchasers. They made no attempt to farm, little to offset the impending ruin of house and land. They were a tall, taciturn Yankee and his equally lean and silent wife; they attended strictly to their own affairs, paid their bills in cash.

The place had long been dismal, desolate and deserted. The light in the window did little now to dispel its dreariness. Rain dripped from the dark trees, beat upon the sunken mounds in the pale gleam of a sun that fought and failed against the gloomy, swiftly gathering night.

The new owner was recorded as a Mr. Silbi. A foreign sounding name, surely not New England, like that of Cyrus Allen, now living in the house. None locally had ever seen Mr. Silbi.

Surrounding this forty acres was more deserted land, also with clouded title. Two big tracts of it, wooded and hilly. On one of them was a weedy mere that had once been a lake. No one ever fished there. Once a girl had drowned herself in it. These wild acres had been considered by real estate developers with an eye to summer bungalows and country homes, but the uncertain titles checked them and the land lay slowly reverting to wilderness.

They said the ghost of the suicide haunted the mere, that weird blue and green lights flickered above the graves—corpse-candles lighting the phantoms back to their beds of clay. Some swore that a party, taking the back road by mistake, had seen the vault open, with an unearthly glare revealing broken coffins and scattered bones, and a fearful goblin, capering, hairy and legless, its head neckless and tiny; walking on its hands, in the midst of the charnel place.

An owl hooted its melancholy note. A nightjar swooped with a screeching whistle. A few bullfrogs croaked in sheer defiance of the rain. Thunder muttered and lightning flickered incessantly as the smouldering sunset died.

The state road was two miles away. The dirt lanes were little better than quagmires, rutted by those who stole the timber from the old Luddington Grant. Few passed after nightfall.

A mighty, closed car came surging through the slush, driven by an expert who used the power of twelve tremendous cylinders with consummate judgment, whose steel wrists and fingers controlled their force with ease as the big black sedan threatened to skid and swerve.

Behind drawn blinds a man sat who was dressed—as his chauffeur was—in black. Sable, from wide-rimmed slouch hat, turned down, to his shoes. He was wrapped in a black cloak like a condor with folded wings. His vulturine features, half hidden between upturned velvet collar and the brim of his sombrero, were offset by a close trimmed Spanish beard, twin-forked and upcurled mustachios. His eyes were yellow of iris, his high-bridged nose was thin and bony, like a bird’s beak.

This was the mysterious Mr. Silbi and he sat couched in the deep cushions with an expression infinitely feral, evil and content.

The sedan slowed, turned to a miry rise, plowed up a lane, its headlights spraying through the darkness and the filtering rain, now beginning to slacken.

The driver showed no hesitation. This was not his first visit. Mr. Silbi did not tolerate mistakes. He was well served, as was Iblis, Prince of Darkness, cast out by God because he refused to abase himself before the latest creation—Adam.

Iblis, the Moslem Satan, becomes Silbi when spelled backwards. No one in Grangers’ Mills had noticed it. Nor, as yet, elsewhere.

They surged about the house across the muck of an old byre and the car disappeared in the dark maw of a staggering barn, still held together by its frame of timbers hewn two hundred years before from forest giants. The driver stayed there. Silbi emerged, his black cloak flapping in the wind and rain, only his beaklike nose showing. He ascended a rear stoop and rapped on a door that was instantly opened and closed behind him.

The lean, bony woman who was the consort of Cyrus Allen held an oil handlamp as they passed on to a front room with a blotched Empire mirror over a black marble hearthplace, old, blistered and blackened portraits on the walls, furnished with chairs whose brocade was mildewed and frayed, chairs by Heppelwhite, a loveseat, a spinet, an inlaid sideboard by Sheraton upon which stood a tarnished empty candelabrum.

“Put down the lamp, woman,” said Silbi imperatively. “Bring another, with your husband. Have him fetch kindling and logs and light a fire. It should have been laid. It is colder than the soul of Lucifer. Begone!”

II

There was a dramatic and tragic air about him, an aura of force, the hint of a dynamic will never at rest within; that made his somewhat stilted phrases not unfitting as he stood wrapped in his cloak with his yellow, evil eyes gleaming in the lamplight while his distorted shadow fell upon the paneled wall like the shadow of a swooping bird of prey, hunting carrion.

There was a touch of madness in his lambent orbs that stared the woman down as she looked at him with a certain latent rebellion that dissolved like ice at the gate of hell.

He chuckled hideously as she turned away, in a low but frightful cackle of malice and satisfaction. Then he turned impatiently to the empty hearth, chafing his hands. For all the vigor that seemed to seethe within him, his face was pinched and carved with suffering, and the hands he chafed were cold. There was a ring upon one long, clawlike finger, a ring of gold with a deeply incised design of a demi-griffin, its eagle wings outspread, with tufted beak and pointed ears, its lion’s tail showing above the sheer line of the coup.

There came a shriek from the woman in the dark hall and Silbi laughed noiselessly with intense enjoyment, his red tongue tip showing between his teeth. He knew the cause.

The next instant a strange shape came into the room, a creature with a microcephalous head, no bigger than an infant’s, set neckless upon the shoulders of a blacksmith. The body ended at the hips, it swung between two enormous arms that raised the trunk clear from the floor with hands set knuckles down. Silbi’s grotesque fancy had dressed this unfinished being in a sort of turtle-necked sweater with long hairs woven into it like those of an Angora goat. There could not be much intelligence in that contracted cranium, but the eyes showed delight and obedience.

The freak was mute, but it babbled inarticulately as it came noiselessly to the side of its Master, the man known to a horror-stricken world as the Griffin, the monster once caged but kept alive by the law of the land for the criminally insane. Now he was free again, launched again upon his fanatical crusade against those whom he envied, or fancied had done him wrong; always the choicest citizens.

The Griffin patted the monstrosity as if it had been a dog. He called it by its monosyllabic name and the creature lip read the title and fawned with hands that could crush a potato to pulp, stroking those of Silbi, the Griffin.

Al—that was its name, the Griffin’s title for the misbegotten object he had bought from a traveling show. Al—one of the gruesome group of demons in Persian mythology that sit in sandy places meditating impure designs.

This Al was peaceful enough now, but it was not hard to imagine it surcharged with malevolence, handicapped but horrible. It could travel from beams or trees with the effortless ease of a chimpanzee, it could have wrestled on even terms with an orangutan with those long, sinewy arms where the sheathed muscles scarcely showed more than the constricting muscles of a boa. It could walk and even run on its arms as well as an ordinary man could travel on his legs.

The Griffin motioned it to a corner where it stood squat in the shadow with eyes still twinkling from the fright it had given the woman.