The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (10 page)

“Headaches?” he said loudly. “I don’t have any headaches. Never had one in my life.”

“You said the other night that you had left the library to get aspirin for a headache,” Benson pointed out. “You said it was a very peculiar headache, that it felt as if your brain were on fire.”

“I said that?” Harold exclaimed, eyes trying to evade Benson’s. “Why, you must be mistaken. I don’t have any—”

His words trailed off at the look in the icy, fearsome eyes. But the set of his lips continued to be obstinate. He had admitted having had an odd headache. Now, for some reason, he was anxious to take back that admission.

Nellie Gray had reported what she had seen and heard just before Benson came to the rendezvous with Harold. That, too, was about headaches. Benson decided to try to couple the coincidence and apply it to Gunther Caine’s son.

“You do have headaches, almost nightly,” he said, voice as cold and clear as his eyes. “Odd headaches. You feel as if your brain were burning up in your skull. Then you feel yourself drifting off into a deep, deep sleep. The sleep may last a long time, or just a little while. It varies. But just before you fall asleep, you have a queer feeling that you are being emptied, that something is taking over control of your body.”

Harold Caine was white with terror. His eyes were wild. He was panting hoarsely.

“How do you know that? Are you a devil, or a man? How could you guess—”

With a tremendous effort he pulled himself together. Shaking all over, he faced the man with the dead face and the eyes of ice.

“I don’t have any such headaches. I never have had. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The Avenger’s colorless eyes were diamond drills.

“Do you know the lawyer and collector, Farnum Shaw?” he asked, with an abrupt shift.

Harold was startled into saying, “Why, yes. I know him slightly.”

“You are usually overdrawn on your allowance—short of money—aren’t you?” said Benson evenly.

Harold moistened his lips and said nothing,

“Farnum Shaw would give a great deal of money for the Taros relics,” Benson went on. “And if you had such a sum, you wouldn’t have to worry about allowances.”

Harold was literally holding his breath.

“Did Shaw ever hint that he’d pay you well for the relics?”

Amazingly, Gunther Caine’s son nodded.

“As a matter of fact, he did. He didn’t make a direct proposition, but he put over the idea that he’d like to buy the relics, that he didn’t care who from, and that I had the run of my father’s house and was trusted by him.”

If The Avenger was surprised by the sudden frankness, his eyes didn’t show it.

“You turned down the proposition?”

“That’s insulting even to ask me,” snapped Harold, drawing himself up with a virtuous look. “I’d have punched him in the nose if he hadn’t been an older man, and I told him so.”

Benson nodded.

“Now about those headaches—” he began.

Harold’s bluster and air of virtue melted like snow in the sun. He was pale, shaking again.

“I tell you I never had any such headaches,” he almost screamed. “Never, never, never!”

He turned and practically ran.

Benson let him go. The youngster walked in mystery—and in peril. But, as yet, there was nothing to be done about it.

At Braintree Museum, the night watchman taking the place of murdered Bill Casey had not resigned as he’d intended on his first night. The museum officials had been lenient about his not punching in at his rounds; daylight had lent him courage again, and he did need the job.

The courage of daylight was draining with the darkness. It had been leaking away since his entrance into the place at ten o’clock. Now, at past midnight, it was practically nonexistent.

But he was making his rounds, forcing his feet to bear him shrinkingly over what seemed miles of stone floor that echoed hollowly under him. The echoes rang into far, dark places filled with shadows.

Even as Casey had done, the new man had taken to talking aloud to himself for company.

“Lousiest place I ever heard of,” he said. “Why don’t they put a few lights in here?”

Even as he spoke, he knew the answer. There’d have had to be thousands of lights really to dispel the shadows from that mammoth place of statues, pillars, cases, and stuffed animals. The place was designed for daylight.

The watchman punched his clock at a box under a rib of a dinosaur’s skeleton.

“Nothin’s going to happen to me,” he mumbled. “I thought I saw a mummy case empty, then filled again. I thought I heard words come from the case. I was nuts, that’s all. So’s the guy with the dead pan,” he added stoutly.

He went at last toward the Egyptian wing. He had punched all the midnight boxes but that one. He’d have preferred a beating to going in there, but he was trying to hide the fact even from himself.

He went over the threshold, and was under the tremendous stone lintel, supported by the gigantic red sandstone pillars brought from the Nile. He had the same odd, suffocating feeling that if he didn’t step very fast, the pillars would spread and allow the stone slabs to fall down on him.

He stepped fast and scuttled between the four big pillars like a scared rabbit, fairly broadjumping onto floor with good old American ceiling above it. Then he started at a half-run toward the call box under the elbow of one of the statues.

“Gee, the things are
alive!”
he panted, staring at the big stone images.

He felt like a gnat in the presence of eagles. But next moment he had something else on his mind—something a lot more pressing than the statues. The mummy of the guy he’d been told was the son of some old priest named Taros! He had to pass that case, and he started to do it at a dog-trot. Then he stopped, as if jerked short with a rope tied around his waist.

Words were coming from the mummy case.

“My father’s charms must be returned without violence.”

The watchman screamed aloud. Words again! Words, from a thing so long dead that it was hardly more than dust!

“He must give all that he hath, to retrieve the charms. All that he hath to receive forgiveness for his blunder.”

The guard ran in earnest, then, getting out of the Egyptian wing so fast that he looked like a streak.

He went to the phone.

“Mr. Benson? I must talk to Mr. Benson at once!”

The drawling voice of a Negro answered his frantic summons of the Sixteenth Street mansion.

“Mistuh Benson is out jus’ now. Any message?”

“Tell him the mummy talked again,” said the watchman wildly. “Tell him—”

He had never heard anything change so rapidly as the voice of the Negro. At one moment it had been sleepy, deep South. At the next it was crisp, and the words were uttered as a college professor might have spoken them.

“I will get in touch with Mr. Benson the instant I can,” said Josh Newton. “Meanwhile, I would suggest that you return to that mummy case, and watch and listen. There may be more words.”

The watchman backed away from the phone as if it had been a living thing.

“Oh, no!” he said. “Not me! I wouldn’t go near that thing for—”

There was a slight sting in Josh’s voice.

“Words can’t hurt you. And you must, of course, have a gun. Stand near the case with your gun drawn. It is important that we know all the mummy may say.”

The man hung up. He was shivering a little. But he remembered the cold, awful eyes of the man with the white hair and the dead face. This command, figuratively at least, was coming from The Avenger. The watchman decided that he was more afraid of those eyes, if he disobeyed the order, than he would be of the mummy case.

He went back to the Egyptian wing.

With his gun in his hand, he went to the case, to stand beside it. He’d listen and see if Taros’ long-dead son spoke again. Meanwhile, if any man or thing came close to him—

He waggled the gun determinedly, and stood next to the case. And then the gun dropped from his nerveless hand.

The case was there, but the mummy was not!

Once more the mummy of Egypt’s priest, Taros’ son, was gone, and the glass lid opened to his gaze only black emptiness.

There was the sound of a step from the blank end of the wing. Then more steps, in measured tread. The watchman whirled.

He was far past screaming, now. He could only sway there, mouth slack, eyes crazed.

The steps were as regular as the ticks of a clock. They were made by a thing that was swathed from head to foot with ancient linen bands of the type Egypt’s embalmers used.

The mummy was walking steadily toward the watchman. As it moved, it slowly raised its swathed right arm, and an extended finger pointed at him.

There were more steps.

From behind a tremendous statue of Typhon, god of evil and of death, came three figures in flowing white. And after them came the figure of a girl, a priestess, in gauzy, transparent robes.

All the figures bore down slowly, inexorably on the watchman.

He saw the face of the mummy now. The linen bands were off the face. He saw shallow, blue eyes, and unintelligent features, set and rigid like those of a sleepwalker, but with something fiendish deep in them. It was the face of the curator’s son, though the watchman did not know that.

The others raised right arms and pointed, too, like the mummy. And the watchman fell unconscious to the floor.

For some time there had been no reports to police headquarters of seeing people dressed in nighties or old Egyptian garb, slinking around Washington’s streets. So when the officer on the Connecticut Avenue beat saw a misty shape flit half a block away toward a big old house with a most important occupant, he rubbed his eyes and decided at first that he was seeing things.

The house was leased to a veteran senator from Idaho. The senator, James Blessing, was a determined, independent man who had made a lot of enemies. It was the officer’s standing orders to keep in the neighborhood of that house quite a bit, in case some crackpot decided he’d like to eliminate Blessing from the American scene.

The patrolman decided at first, when he opened his amazed eyes and saw that the misty shape was still there, that he was seeing some mysterious assailant. But then he began to get the details, and he knew differently. This was either a madman—or a ghost.

The flitting shape was tall and very thin. It wore no head covering, and its skull was as hairless as a vulture’s. There was a bird beak of a nose that furthered the smile. The thing raised its left arm, and the cop saw a ring for an instant that glistened with a funny, pale pink light.

“Hey, you! Stop!” he yelled.

The shape kept on, toward Senator Blessng’s door.

“Stop, I said!”

The cop started running, with gun drawn.

The figure vanished.

It had been moving just out of range of light from a street lamp. It passed into shadows. But the shadows were not enough to account for its disappearance. You could see beyond the clear rim of light, even if not very distinctly.

Yet the cop couldn’t see the emaciated shape. It had completely vanished.

He stopped still, gun hanging in his hand.

“Now, look,” he reasoned with himself. “If there’s somebody there, I oughtta be able to see him. If there ain’t, then I didn’t see him in the first place. But I did see him,” he added, less certainly, “and now he ain’t there.”