The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (12 page)

The deep sleep was pulling harder at heavy eyelids. She missed some moves, then. But again, dimly, she saw the doctor, after a lapse of time. She could not guess how long it had been.

She was jarred a little out of her strange and painful coma by what she saw.

Marlowe had been transformed. He was now in strange robes, the garb of a priest of old Egypt. It was amazing what the garment did for his own appearance. His face was suddenly something that might have floated off the frieze of an ancient tomb on the Nile. The uncanny conviction was borne home that the man was more than merely dressed in Egyptian priests’ robes; he
was
an Egyptian priest, straight out of the dim past.

He moved toward Nellie, rather like a sleepwalker, yet with something demoniac and alien in the large, glazed pupils of his eyes.

Even deeper pain wove red strands through the black unconsciousness that was cloaking Nellie Gray. Her whole body felt as if on fire; as if dipped into a vat of acid.

That was her last conscious sensation.

When Benson had phoned orders to his aides in the Bleek Street headquarters, he had told Josh to bring the black suit.

The reason for that was apparent, now.

Josh was in the Braintree Museum, but from ten feet away, in the dim lighting, you would hardly have known it. All you’d have seen would have been a deeper shade in the shadow cast by a certain cabinet.

The suit Josh wore was a standard black one such as people use in mourning. Thus it would excite no particular attention if seen. The fact that it had lapels higher than most would not have been noticed.

With those lapels, Josh could cover whatever collar he happened to be wearing. And when he did that—Josh practically ceased to be, if it were dark around him.

Josh was pretty dark himself. Dark skin and dark fabric made him blend with shadow so that he wasn’t discernible at all, unless he grinned—in which case the ivory of teeth and the white of eyeballs appeared amazingly out of thin air.

But he wasn’t grinning at the moment. He was grim and watchful.

The cabinet in the shadow in which he was lurking was that containing mummy and mummy case of Taros’ son. Josh was in the Egyptian wing.

He had spent half of last night there, after first receiving The Avenger’s orders. Now, the first half of this night was gone—and nothing had happened.

Josh felt cold, although it wasn’t at all cool in the great stone barracks. He felt cold—and lonely.

He was the only soul in the place. The night watchman replacing Casey really had quit after that second hectic night at Braintree. A successor hadn’t been picked up yet. There was just Josh.

Josh had prowled the place on the hour, almost like a conventional night watchman, himself. All windows, all doors, had been covered to make sure no one had tampered with them in the preceding sixty minutes.

The phrase, “all doors,” was misleading, however. There was just one entrance in all the museum. That was the great front entrance with its massive bronze slabs. These had locks a Houdini couldn’t have picked, Josh had decided; and on every round the locks had been untouched.

He had made sure, at about one o’clock in the morning, the last time. Now he was again at the station that seemed to contain most danger.

The Egyptian wing, next to the mummy of Taros’ son.

Josh had thought about the mummy a lot, during the dark hours. There was nothing else to think about.

He had decided that perhaps the thing really had talked; Benson seemed to think so, and the chief was almighty as far as the colored man was concerned. But that the mummy had
walked
—that was an egg of another breed! That was impossible! Also it was impossible that the mummy ever could have got out of its case. Josh had hung around the cabinet long enough to know that it had not been opened recently—could not have been, or marks would have showed.

The reports of the watchman about the mummy getting out and moving around were simply the figment of an imagination excited by words coming from it.

Josh slid from the shadow at the side of the cabinet and looked into the front of it, through the glass lid. And then Josh bit down hard on a cry.

The mummy case was empty!

It was simply impossible! The mummy had been in there five minutes ago, when he returned from the regular inspection of doors and windows. He had looked hard, to make sure, just five minutes ago.

Now it was gone. There wasn’t even the mummy case in the oak cabinet. That was gone too. There was only black emptiness.

But he had been standing right next to that cabinet during every moment. He had been practically touching it. Nothing had come near it, and—his hair-roots tingled at even the thought—there had been no stirring within it. If there had been, he would have heard.

Yet in that five-minute interval, the mummy had gotten out of its sealed and airtight cabinet!

Josh began to sweat. What next? The watchman had not only told of the mummy’s getting out, but also of its
walking.
Surely that, at least, had been a delusion.

From the far, blank end of the wing, Josh heard footsteps.

They were measured, neither loud nor soft. They were a little padded, as if made by feet that were not wearing shoes as we know them. They were funereally slow.

Josh turned his head rapidly.

From the opposite end of the wing, from the door leading out to the next room, had come another sound. This was not footsteps, it was music.

Strange, slow music that seemed a chant of words—and yet you couldn’t make out syllables. Funeral music, with a satanic undertone.

Josh, though he didn’t know it, was listening to the chant that accompanies the bearing of the ark of Typhon, the Evil One, back to his temple.

Behind him, the measured, slightly muffled steps sounded louder. Ahead of him, the ominous chanting also sounded louder.

Josh didn’t know which way to face.

Through the doorway floated a dim shape. It was tall and gaunt. It had a face the color of putty. It had a dome as hairless as a vulture’s, and a high, eagle-beak nose. It was garbed in the robe of an Egyptian priest of thousands of years ago.

The priestly figure had hands up, shoulder high, and was bearing something. Soon it had come through the doorway enough for Josh to see the burden.

It was a kind of box, obviously heavy, with a peaked lid. Like a little house. But a house that was carved all over.

Two other shapes in priestly raiment were helping bear the box forward. One of these was a slender figure with a face that had a low, broad brow and cheekbones almost as high as those of the high priest himself. Josh hadn’t seen Doctor Marlowe, or he would have noted the striking resemblance.

The other closely resembled a person most informed people would have recognized because his face had appeared in papers and magazines so often. It resembled in body and countenance the well-known Senator Blessing.

Josh stared numbly. He had seen the pictures many times, too. But never before had he noted what he did now: the face of Senator Blessing was eerily like the faces often depicted by Egyptian sculptors, thousands of years ago.

Straight toward him came the three priests of Egypt, chanting their weird song of hate, bearing the ark of Typhon. Behind them now could be seen a fourth shape.

This was that of a girl, tall, slenderly rounded, with a body half-revealed through misty robes. Her eyes were wide and dreaming, her movements like those of a sleepwalker. She was chanting too, and her voice was sweet; but in its clear soprano was a cold note that was somehow dreadful.

Josh was fumbling for his gun. But his movement was without heart. He felt instinctively that an ordinary gun would do little harm to such as
these—

The steps behind him were now so close that he was forced to turn, though every fiber of him rebelled at turning his back to that grim little procession.

Now, for the first time, he saw the thing that had made the steps.

He saw a shape coming toward him that was swathed in yard on yard of ancient, yellowed linen such as embalmers used along the Nile. The mummy of Taros’ son. Walking as a living man walks.

The legs were swathed, too, but there were no bands binding them together as there usually are. Bands were off the thing’s face. There, looking more fantastic on the shoulders of ancient death than any skull could have looked, was a
young
face. It was a cruel, shallow face, with shallow, not very intelligent eyes.

The mummy of Taros’ son slowly passed the Negro, without a side look, and advanced toward the head priest bearing the ark. The three figures lowered the ark to the stone floor.

The mummy raised its linen-swathed right arm in a sort of salute. The high priest, so bizarrely like the descriptions of old Taros in the tomb murals, raised his arm in reply.

Father and son, dead these thousands of years, greeted each other!

Josh couldn’t take any more of it. He got his gun out. He lunged toward the sinister group. He leaped openly, realizing that they already knew of his presence.

He never got to them.

High priest Taros faced him squarely. There was a glint from under his robe, where a copper knife swung. But he made no move to draw the weapon.

He raised his gaunt arms like a specter invoking a dread curse.

Josh stopped. He tried to go on, and couldn’t. He tried to raise his arm and level his gun—and couldn’t.

His body began to burn all over, as if some one had bathed him in vitriol. His very brain seemed afire in his skull.

Blackness descended on him. He fell, with the vision of the terrible figure with upraised arms as the last thing limned in his mind.

Monotonous chanting. An ancient, funereal song with only vowel sounds pronounced.

This beat on his eardrums with the regular insistence of dripping water. He stirred just a little and opened his eyes.

He didn’t know how long he had been unconscious. Quite a little while, he thought. But in that time the scene in the Egyptian wing of Braintree Museum had changed only in one respect.

There was one more figure in here now.

There had been three priests, and a priestess. Now there were two priestesses.

Blinking, trying foggily to see better with eyes that still felt as if dipped in flame, Josh saw that the new figure on the scene was that of a girl, all right, but not that of an Egyptian priestess. Anyhow, she wasn’t robed as one.

This girl had on an ordinary, modern street suit of some dark material. Her head was bare, but her tawny-gold hair was tousled as if a hat had been there and had been torn off.

She was limp in the arms of the vulture-like high priest. She was quite small, and seemed very fragile as she lay there. She—

Josh felt an almost animal growl of rage rise deep in his throat as his eyes brought him ever a clearer message. He knew that small, fragile-looking creature.

It was Nellie Gray.

Nellie Gray, unconscious, hanging limp in the arms of the thing from the tomb, which was bearing her slowly toward the ark of Typhon.

The ark had been set down just inside the second doorway of the wing, almost under the ancient stone lintel from the Nile. The high priest, with a kind of hellish reverence, laid the girl there, before the carved, peak-ridged box.

His bony hand went to the fold of his robe. Some of the robe seemed to disappear as Josh watched. There was a dark, golden flash, and a heavy dagger appeared in the gaunt fingers.

Taros had drawn his copper knife!

The chanting was louder, more triumphant. Without a shade of expression in their faces the two other priests, and the tall, slender priestess, watched the spectral arm of Taros raised above the girl. On his left hand flashed a ring of light crimson, glowing as if it had lights within its evil heart. In his left hand glinted the dagger.

Josh’s hands had been fumbling at his belt. His gun had been taken from him as he lay there; but he had one more weapon, of a sort.

That was the cunningly contrived little belt radio. He had taken it from his waist, in the gloom, and switched it on.