The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (8 page)

Moen, heavy-set, muscular ex-football halfback, was not to be drawn out, either.

“Gunther Caine is more than the curator of Braintree Museum. He
is
the museum. We have about a million dollars a year to spend on expeditions and purchases. Gunther handles every cent of it, trusted blind. If he wants to keep the Taros relics a few days and gloat over them, it’s all right with us directors.”

But about the son he only said, indifferently.

“He’s a little spoiled, I guess. And Gunther has had to get him out of several jams. But he’s just a kid. He’ll be all right when he matures.”

To the husky Moen, The Avenger put another question.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?”

Moen frowned perplexedly.

“For example,” said Benson smoothly, eyes pale and brooding in his white, still face, “do you think old Taros could somehow get back to earth, perhaps in another’s body whose spirit he has temporarily dispossessed?”

“You’re joking,” said Moen.

“No, it’s a serious question.”

Moen paced up and down for a while.

“To anyone else,” he said at last, “I’d say the idea was insane. But to you— Well, I’m fairly well up on Egyptian history and religion, myself. And I know, as you do, that much is made of their beliefs that just such a thing can occur. Yet I’m hardly ready to say I believe in reincarnation.”

The Avenger started back to his temporary headquarters. His eyes, as always, were as unreadable as ice in his death-mask countenance. Whether he had learned a lot, or nothing, from talks about Harold Caine with the three Braintree directors could never be known from his expression.

In the Sixteenth Street home, Josh and Nellie Gray and Rosabel sat listening for the radio call from their tiny belt sets, so cunningly designed by the dull-looking giant, Smitty. The chief was out; and when Benson walked abroad, things were apt to happen.

The thing that happened next, however, came from Fergus MacMurdie instead of The Avenger.

Mac was out prowling the compact grounds of the place. He was hoping that perhaps one, or all three, of the bizarre priest-figures Benson had told about might come back here, and that he could get his hands on them.

Thousands of years dead, or modern and alive, past or present, the three that had attacked the chief that morning were killers. And the bitter-eyed Scot lived only for the grim pleasure of getting his hands on killers.

If only those three skurlies dressed as priests of thousands of years ago would show up again—

A figure suddenly came staggering from the south, along the sidewalk. Mac darted toward it.

However, the figure was not dressed in ancient garb, nor was it murderous. It was the figure of a man in ordinary business clothes, who seemed very ill. So Mac’s intended attack changed to a solicitous grip on the other’s shoulder.

“Whoosh,”
said the Scot. “What’s wrong with ye, mon? Are ye drunk, or sick?”

There was no smell of alcohol, so that question answered itself.

“What’s wrong with ye?” Mac repeated, peering into the other’s face.

He was a man of forty-five or so, well-dressed, well-built. His face was blank, and his eyes glazed. Mac stared harder at the blank countenance.

It was a curious face when you studied it. The forehead and rather broad nose made a straight line from widow’s peak to nostrils. The cheekbones were a little higher than usual. It was a foreign-looking face. Mac got it after a minute. It looked Egyptian. Yet not like the faces of modern Egypt.

“Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,” mumbled the man.

“What?” said Mac.

“Doctor, lawyer— The Avenger.”

“Now wait a minute, mon,” rasped Mac. “The first is rigmarole. But the rest— You’re looking for The Avenger?”

“Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief.”

Mac drew him toward the door.

“The Avenger . . . must find The Avenger.”

Mac led the man into the hall. He didn’t seem to have any idea where he was going; he followed the Scotchman blindly.

“What have we here?” asked Nellie, lovely eyes warm with sympathy. “Mac! What a queer face he has. Like—like—”

“Like the face ye might see carved on the frieze of an ancient Egyptian tomb,” nodded Mac. “I’ve noticed, Nellie.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know,” said Mac. “But he started out wantin’ to see Muster Benson. Must have lost his memory on the way here.”

“Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,” crooned the man with the blank, exotic countenance and the dulled eyes.

Then he fell. He had fainted.

Mac carried him to a divan in the drawing room. They found out a little about him from the things he had on him.

His name was George Snead. He was Washington manager for a big rug and carpet company, dealing largely in imports from the Orient. His home address was a club, which proved that he was a bachelor.

These things, Snead’s possessions told for him. The man, himself, told nothing. He continued to lie in a coma on the divan.

There was a new man taking Casey’s place at the museum that night.

He was younger than Casey, and had never been a cop. But he was a good man, nevertheless. He was burly, broad-shouldered, experienced as a night watchman and had plenty of courage. That went without saying. It took courage to take over the post of a man murdered on that post.

The man was unaware of Casey’s aversion to the Egyptian room. He knew nothing of the nature of the murder. Casey had been killed in the main museum rotunda, a long way from the Egyptian wing.

Therefore, when the new man came to the Egyptian room, and felt a chill go down his backbone, that could not be laid to imagination springing out of what had happened to Casey. It was something inherent in the place itself; in the very air.

The new watchman looked around, standing on the threshold of the great chamber. He looked at the cold, cruel faces of the great statues soaring up near the gloomy stone ceiling. As impersonal as the stars, staring straight ahead. He shivered a little.

He looked around at the tiers of mummy cases, each with its withered kernel that had been a man. He gazed at the great stone sarcophagi from which the cases had been taken.

And the new man suddenly didn’t like his job at all. But he had a wife and kids and needed the dough.

He went through the doorway, and became aware that there was a sort of second doorway.

More than statues had been brought here. Four huge pillars had also come from the Upper Nile. Temple pillars, from a massive entrance. Over the pillars, solid, immense slabs, also from the temple, were laid to form a lintel.

The watchman went under the stone slabs as fast as possible. Pillars and lintel had just been assembled like kids’ blocks, with finely cut stones piled on each other without cement. The surfaces were so close-fitting that cement wasn’t needed; nevertheless, the man got the panicky feeling that maybe those tons of rock would fall on him if he were not careful.

He literally jumped under the slabs, twenty-five feet above his head, and hurried to the time-box in this room, to punch his watchman’s clock.

Casey had always traced his steps to pass the mummy of Taros’ son last, because the thing gave him the creeps. The new man didn’t know anything about an old duck named Taros, or that he had had a son, at all. So he passed the mummy case first, on his way to the box under the elbow of one of the statues.

That is, he started to pass the case. But when he got abreast of it, he stopped, and gulped.

There wasn’t anything in that case.

The cabinet was empty of either mummy case or mummy! Through the glass lid you could see only empty blackness.

The watchman hadn’t the faintest idea who would want to steal a mess of ancient bones wrapped in moldering linen bands. But he did know that the mummy was probably of great value. It had been stolen his first night on the job.

He leaped for the phone, to get the police. Then he stopped. It would mean the loss of his job, if he reported such a theft. First, he’d see if by any wild chance the mummy was still around.

He tore from room to room of the vast hulk of the museum. No mummy! He went at last to the great main door, unlocked it, and went out to the grounds. A mummy is neither small nor easy to handle. He might surprise whoever was making away with their grisly burden.

Behind him, in the gloom, the faithful replica of an old Egyptan temple came alive!

In through the great door, left open by the watchman in his frenzied search, drifted a figure robed in gauzy white.

The figure was that of a girl—tall, slender but well-rounded. The robe was that of a priestess of Egypt, and it appeared that priestesses of old Egypt didn’t wear much.

The girl’s face was dreamy, with wide eyes seeming like those of a sleepwalker. The line from the peak of her forehead to the tip of her pretty nose was straight. Her face was startlingly like the faces depicted by ancient Egyptian sculptors.

She moved through the main rotunda, seeming to float rather than walk.

From the direction of the Egyptian room came strange music. It was chanting, or singing. The song was one long forgotten by mankind. With the sound came the regular shuffling of feet.

The girl got to the room just off the Egyptian wing. There she saw three figures. They were men, in priests’ garments. They marched slowly, in a funereal rhythm, toward the double doorway into the Egyptian wing. They were carrying something on their shoulders, a sort of box with a V-shaped roof on it, heavily carved in bas-relief. Handles from the box allowed each of the three to help carry it, which was necessary, because the box was obviously heavy.

That box, a scholar could have told, was the ark of the Egyptian desert or death god—Typhon. Carrying it into the temple was a preliminary to strange, mad rites in its honor.

The priestess fell into step behind the three priests, and marched as they did. Also, she chanted as they did, a low, strange song which was only a succession of vowel sounds.

The procession passed through the doorway of the Egyptian wing. There was a pause as the second doorway—that of an Egyptian temple brought to Braintree stone by stone and set up again—was reached. The head priest stood under the massive lintel saying something in a weird tongue.

The figure leading the little procession was tall and emaciated. Its skull was hairless. The face, the color of putty, was lank and lantern-jawed and there was an eagle beak of a nose.

From the far corner of the wing came a sound. The sound was followed by movement, and from behind the tallest of the temple statues stepped a figure that made the strangeness of the others seem tame.

This newcomer was swathed from head to foot in the yellowed linen bands of an embalmed body. The outer bands binding the legs together were gone, so that it could walk. But each leg was swathed heavily. The head and body were also wrapped, save for a space in the front of the skull where most of a face could be seen.

The walking mummy came to meet the procession. Its slightly exposed face was visible for an instant in the dim light.

It was the face of Harold Caine, line for line.

From far in front, where the great main doors swung, there was a clang as those doors thudded shut with the re-entrance of the watchman. With the clang, the Egyptian temple surroundings, so faithfully reproduced in another land after thousands of years, lost its fantastic life.

The lights overhead seemed to dim. When they burned brighter, again, there was nothing moving in the great room.

Walking mummy, priestess, three priests, ark of Typhon, the Evil One, were gone.

The watchman had his jaw set as he came back into the wing, innocent of all knowledge of what had just been visible. He was resigning himself to losing his job. For there had been no trace of the stolen mummy outside—as he had really known there wouldn’t be before he started to look. He’d have to report it to the police.

But first, he was going to look into the mummy case, once more, to be sure he hadn’t been blind or nuts when he looked before and found it empty.

So he looked into the empty case—and found it was tenanted!