In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 (26 page)

Mizu came with the square bottle, where flecks of gold danced in the liqueur he poured into the tubelike glass.

“Prease, I hope nothing wrong,” he said anxiously.

“Nothing wrong, everything very right, Mizu.”

Manning let the slick potion glide down his throat. He drank silently to the confusion of the Griffin, to his death. The world would breathe easier. This insane, satanic monster had disrupted social and financial circles, had destroyed the most worthy. His demise would be the resurrection of public confidence. While such a fiend stalked free, the very stability of government was threatened.

He picked up the letter again. The gray paper had changed color, or seemed to. So with the ink. The writing was no longer firm. Everything was fading.

And Mizu was standing, watching.

Manning fought with the lethargy that surged upon him. He forced his tongue to speak, his will to function, while swift thought rocketed through his brain.

The Griffin had not named the hour. He had not
meant
to give enough grace to Manning to “put affairs in order.” He had designed a “unique death!” This was not it. It was only the preliminary. After all, the Griffin had struck first.

“Mizu,” said Manning with his stumbling tongue, his thickening speech he strove to make distinct, “what have you done? What did you put in this drink?”

He looked at Mizu in a haze that grew denser. He heard Mizu’s voice, mocking.

“Mister Manning, I verree sorree, but my honoraber nation not rike your American nation. You try keep us verree down. Pretty soon we fight. Pretty soon we take. Me, I am officer on staff of Imperiar councir. Here I am butrer, but rearry major. Pretty soon generar, I think. I rike money to back Japan. My famiry not rich. Money arways good for man with ambition. The one who sent that retter give prenty money to me and Yamato. Now we prenty rich.
Sodiska.
”

The final sentences faded out like shadows in the sun. Mizu, and Yamato, smitten by dreams of grandeur, even as the Griffin, had betrayed him.

Manning slumped in his chair.

All was blurred until he felt himself reviving. The rim of a glass was between his lips. A man stroked his throat, inducing swallowing. He gulped, involuntarily, and his head cleared. But there was no vigor to his limbs.

He looked up into the masked face of the Griffin, gloating behind the screening skin, his eyes glittering through slits.

“False move, Manning. You thought you were a roving pawn, moving across the board to where you could move, as the queen moves, and close the game. But I castled. It is checkmate. Now I’ll tell you what I am going to do with you.”

Manning wondered what the time was. Not much more than ten o’clock. Two hours until midnight. They would wait for him at Farmers Mills, delay indefinitely. Meanwhile—he was lying on a table in a crypt with cemented walls. He could not move. He was bound, hand and foot, and the drug still gripped him, though the effect was passing.

He saw the Griffin, robed in sable, masked with a leprous film. He twisted his neck painfully and saw Al, the freak, squatting like a creature in an obscene nightmare. Two figures in overalls, with numbers painted on them. One number was Sixty-Seven. The man was bald, pallid, wrinkled, with weird, mad, blue eyes back of powerful lenses. This one felt his pulse, nodded.

“I’ll tell you about the fitting death I have devised for you,” said the Griffin. “You have the distinction of being the first to experience it. You know, of course, of the Hymenoptera—the stinging and social insects. Bees, wasps, hornets, ants. In your travels you must have encountered them. Some of them, most of them, are carnivorous, cannibalistic. They feed their young and themselves upon the bodies of their victims which they sting into paralysis. That venom has the rare, antiseptic faculty of being able to preserve the meat they drag into their larders.

“Another case of the spider and the fly. I had a notion that you meant to come into my parlor, Manning, but I have forestalled that, and brought you here. Taking an advantage of the misunderstanding between Japan and America, of the perhaps inflated ideas of certain Japanese loyalists, who are overeager for a final adjustment.

“Bees have stung men to death. The digger-wasps possess a vicious venom. They belong to the genus Sphex. The
pepsis femoratus
stores its burrows with the great tarantula spiders, highly poisonous themselves, but less agile. As
you
have been less agile. Sometimes they kill, mostly they reduce their prey to a state of immobility. That is the method I have adopted, concentrating their venom with the expert aid of number Sixty-Seven, here present, who will now inject you with the toxin.

“I shall leave you a living corpse, Manning. Even if you were found, you could not be restored. Your brain will function for a few days, as you recount your sins, your follies, your stupidity in pitting yourself against the Griffin.

“The Zodiac declares that this is the time when the heavenly powers desert you. I am going to place you in the mortuary of this manor, in an empty coffin, from which I have strewn the bones that thought they claimed it. Later, I may arrange to have you found, exhibited, living but dead, until corruption slowly decays you.

“In the meantime, since you may have been too active, and be traced too soon, I am departing. For some time I have sought and found a better place for my righteous activities. But you”—the Griffin’s mask quivered with the intensity of his hate—
“you
will no longer irk me. You will cease to exist, save as your brain knows you are doomed, like an envenomed larva. Inject him, Sixty-Seven.”

Manning saw the bloodless countenance bending over him, felt the prick of a needle in his arm.

“You will stay here,” the Griffin ordered his slave, “while I conduct the final preparations for leaving. Then you shall be freed. Manning, you have made your last move. The game is over.”

Manning waited for the paralysis to set in. A light burned low in the ceiling of the crypt. It was shadowed by the figure of Sixty-Seven, who bent over him.

“You are his enemy, the man who seeks to destroy him? You are Gordon Manning?” whispered Sixty-Seven.

Manning nodded. The blue eyes were glaring down. How did this serf know of Manning? As if he read the thought, the other answered.

“He told me who you were. His enemy—and mine. You represent the law. Now you are helpless. Never mind who I am—or was. If I free you, if I help to deliver him to you, will you help me?”

Manning made no compromise, though it was not his own plight he considered. Whoever this Sixty-Seven might be, might have done, he was an angel compared with the Griffin.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I need money. I need clothes. Then I can escape. I did not inject you with the real venom. I will release you. We can both get away.”

“I’ve got money with me,” said Manning. “I’ll change clothes with you. I don’t know who you are, how you came under the Griffin’s power. But we want
him
more than you. Do you know what time it is?”

“Night. But what day, what week or month, even what year, I cannot tell. Only let me go free.”

“We’ll change clothes,” said Manning, “but how do you get out of here? As for the time, I’ve got a wrist watch.”

“There is no ventilating system,” said Sixty-Seven, “but I have studied the drafts. There is a way to the open. I have seen him and that unhallowed freak of his pass out, and smelled free air. If he leaves he will not bother with us who live underground. We are all condemned. We cannot tell who he is or where he goes. It’s eleven-fifty, by your watch.”

In ten minutes the commissioner would be assembling his forces, seven miles away. How long he would wait for Manning was hard to say.

Sixty-Seven severed Manning’s bonds with a scalpel. They changed clothes swiftly, crept out to a corridor.

“The exit is this way,” said Sixty-Seven. “I can feel the air. Do you want to come with me? I have freed you. There is an elevator to his quarters.”

“It will be an automatic,” said Manning, “I’ll go with you. I suppose I’m compounding a felony in this.”

“Listen,” said Sixty-Seven. “I killed her. I admit that. She deserved it. When I’m away, it won’t be where they’ll extradite me. I’ll write the truth. Not about this. But I’ll give proof that she betrayed me. And, take this.”

He pressed a small metal case into Manning’s hand.

“This is the hypo, charged with the wasp venom. You may need it. Stick it into that fiend, if you get the chance.”

It seemed to Manning a fitting instrument, but he doubted if he would have the luck to use it. The place was a labyrinth. It was quiet enough. The Griffin was above, making his getaway. His slaves were asleep below, or seeking surcease.

Sixty-Seven, strange in Manning’s clothes, his bald head topped by Manning’s own hat, wetted a finger, held it up.

“The air current blows this way,” he said. “We can trace it.”

It seemed to Manning that hours and miles passed by in the dank silence of the passages. None accosted them. The Griffin believed him inanimate. But he might return at last, to give Sixty-Seven his freedom. For the slave had known what the Griffin meant by that. Those who served the Griffin were no longer useful to him once they achieved his purposes. The Griffin never repeated his methods. And, if this slave destroyed his greatest enemy, he would in turn be blotted out. Or left to his fate. The Griffin’s word held more than one meaning.

The cold air-current guided them along the corridors. They came at last to a high grating where a figure stood on guard. Sixty-Seven stood back, and Manning, in the garb of Sixty-Seven, the numerals on his overall the clearest thing in the dim light, moved on.

“I’ve orders to set a body in the mortuary,” said Manning, in a muffled voice.

“Well, I’ve had no orders,” said the other surlily. He did not wear an overall. Manning saw he was belted, with a gun in a holster.

“Look at this,” he said, and thrust forward his half closed hand.

The other stooped, and Manning’s fist caught him in a swift uppercut to the jaw. As the man swayed, Manning hit him again and let him slide to the floor. He took his gun, searched him, found keys. One of them fitted the lock to the grating. Manning opened it, and there was a rush behind him. Sixty-Seven, who was Sixty-Seven no longer, was in full flight.

Manning bent over the guard. He was a typical thug, a hood. He snorted through his nose, knocked out. Manning bound his arms behind him, with his own belt, tied his feet together with the laces on his shoes, left him lying. He would stay out for a while.

The grating had closed off a mortuary. The inside bulb showed vaguely shelved caskets, others on the floor, broken and empty.

Here the dead, forgotten, owners of the manor had been set in their last sleep. Here the Griffin had meant to store Manning.

Ex-Sixty-Seven was scrabbling at another grille.

“Get me out of here,” he said. “Let me out.”

Manning sorted the keys, found one that clicked back the wards. There was moonlight outside, a medley of tilted head-stones. Sixty-Seven was gone, vanished in the night.

He turned towards the house and saw the only light vanish. He heard the whir of a motor, and ran through the graveyard towards the front of the manor. Its back was to the cemetery. There was a sort of lane between tall trees.

Gun in hand, Manning reached the driveway in front of the house. The moon glinted on the high varnish of a big car. Its headlights were turned on. It began to move, to gather speed, making for an exit.

Yet the graveyard faced the highway. Manning now knew that the Griffin had restored an oldtime road, that he had a perfect getaway. There was but the one car. He might have already transported his slaves. Or he might have left them, knowing they could not betray more than was already known, as he fled to his new retreat. Doubtless the caretaker and his wife had gone already. The big house was dark.

Manning shot at the car, aiming low for the tires. He was groggy and his aim was none too good. He realized that, as the car winked its red tail-light at him derisively before it vanished.

He had emptied the weapon. He was powerless. The Griffin had escaped.

But the Griffin had thought Manning left to a living death, and Manning was still very thoroughly alive, if helpless for the moment.

Something whimpered, leaped out of tall weeds, launched for Manning’s throat. Hands clawed at him, at his windpipe. The fury of the attack bore him backwards. He tripped over a bush.

It was Al. The Griffin had discovered his meddling, had discarded him. Mute and unhearing, the freak could disclose nothing, knew little. But he was still faithful, like a dog that has been kicked, but still knows only one master.

He knew that this man had fired at the car, had tried to stop the exit of the God, his Master. Al was in a frenzy of fear and rage. His Master might come back, forgive him, if he found he had killed this man he grappled. This side of the house was in shadow. Al did not see the numerals on the overall. His dull senses blended to only one idea—to slay.

He slavered as he wriggled his torso on Manning’s chest, his powerful fingers sinking deep. His thumb was compressing the jugular vein, the fingers of the other hand on the vagus nerve.

Manning, hardly over the drug Mizu had given him, strove with failing strength to release that deadly grip, knew that he could not. In his fall he had lost the emptied gun but he groped for it in the dirt, hoping to use it as a club.

With every slowing beat of his labored pulse he was losing energy. He tried to roll uppermost but the freak clung like a bloated leech.

Something prodded Manning’s leg, halfway between hip and knee. A last, flaming flash of comprehension came to him. It was something in the outside extra pocket of the overall, used by mechanics for a rule, by Sixty-Seven for other purposes.

He clawed at Al’s face and nostrils, got half a gasp of air, a temporary release upon his throbbing blood vessels, before the freak clamped down again.

His fingers closed upon the metal case, opened it, found the needle, jerked the plunger.