It was a desperate hazard. Manning could imagine the Griffin’s men hidden below, their powerful generators set up and invisible in some barn or house, or among the woods, sighting the superbly serene Bannerman, concentrating the ray until, like a pencil, like a long finger, it touched that noble heart, passed on and left it still.
Bannerman had said that one might not avert his fate. Perhaps fate would be kind. There was one thing in their favor. A race of sloops was in progress, half a score of dainty yachts tacking, reaching, directly off Windy Ridge and occasionally passing in front of the target. This gave them more time to search.
They saw nothing. Manning spoke through the audiphones and they swung back.
And then—
He saw gulls wheeling, skimming, rising and falling in their search for food, their pursuit of a surface school of fish. And even as the test-doves had dropped in the Griffin’s secret room, so a gull dropped, wings outspread; then another. They had not been shot. But something had killed them. The ray!
Manning took swift bearings, called through his phone, sighting a glint of metal, something that looked like an averted eye, leveling from the preliminary projection that had killed the gulls.
Out of a barn, half hidden by trees, a long slit cut in the clapboards!
The pilot stepped on his foot controls, thrust his wheel-stick forward, worked his ailerons. They swooped, as a sea-eagle spreads its pinions and swoops to rob a lesser bird. They zoomed in a sharp upcurve not twenty feet above the treetops, seventy above the shingled barn.
There was a futile spatter of shots from flurried men, suddenly aroused and alarmed. They ceased. Manning had flung his bombs in swift succession, winged darts charged with destruction.
The barn fell apart. Plumes of yellow smoke rose, then scarlet streaks of fire.
The pilot swung the plane in a sheer bank. Three men, two of them injured, scurried to a car, got into it and sent it hurtling along a lane. The barn was burning. The infernal projector was destroyed.
“We’ve got to get those men,” said Manning.
The pilot nodded, but misunderstood. He roared down, soared above the car, behind it for the moment. Then he took part in the proceedings with the loosing of his machine gun. The car swerved, lolled into a ditch, lay there, with three dead men inside of it under the riddled top.
“I meant alive,” Manning said to himself, but did not speak to the pilot now.
The Griffin had been foiled. Bannerman was saved. And, unless he was mistaken, the already diseased reason of the Griffin would totter on its throne, his colossal ego unable to accept failure.
Quantro quailed before the frightful fury of his master, for once unmasked, mouthing, frothing at the lips, his eyes aglare with absolute madness as he howled into the brazen disk.
Manning sat in his library, listening, accepting the final challenge, knowing the Griffin utterly insane at last, his powers unhinged.
“Next time I shall not fail, Manning. Luck was on your side. Curse you! I was watching. It was the gulls, the cursed gulls! Now you no longer amuse me. I have upset the board, the men are scattered. It is the end—for you—and for Eleanor!”
A giant hand seemed to constrict Manning’s heart. For himself he was not afraid. But for Eleanor, the girl he loved, as the Griffin knew. He blanched.
Then he pulled himself together. Deliberately he set down his telephone, cut off the talk. The Griffin was a raving maniac. Dangerous in purpose, but no longer the supreme antagonist. Manning had a clew to the whereabouts of his aerie, or his lair. He could take immediate measures to protect Eleanor.
And then?
He took a deep breath. The deeply sunk lines in his face shallowed. Here was the chance of fairly even combat. Once routed, the Griffin, even if he did not realize it, was in retreat, in confusion. Now was the time to strike.
The Menace of the Monster
In the Heart of the Madman’s Lair Manning at Last Meets the Griffin Face to Face
As he picked up the too familiar gray envelope with the purple script sprawling over the heavy weave, Manning saw that his long held expectation of the Griffin’s mania turning to a violent dementia had come to pass.
It showed in the characters of the writing. Once eccentric but firmly shaped, notable to a graphologist for their indications of powerful if unusual mentality, the strokes and curves and crosses now showed an incoherency, an uncertainty, that was clear to Manning.
Beyond question the failure of the Griffin’s last attempt at murder, when he had been baffled by Manning’s pre-solution of the method to be used, had broken up the peculiar coördination of that brilliant though fiendish brain.
No longer would the plots of the Griffin be laid with the diabolical genius that had hitherto inspired them, that had enabled him to eliminate, in the insane conceit of the monster, a score of the world’s greatest men.
It had been grandiose dementia originally with the Griffin. Now it would be nearly a delirium, a frenzy, centered on one object. His whole hate now would be centered on Manning, the man who had finally foiled his machinations, shattered his colossal ego when he had tried to kill America’s greatest poet with the Odic Ray.
In his foul aerie, somewhere on the shore line of New York State’s mainland, the Griffin still held captive the men who worked out his designs, the slaves of his will, the men of genius whose brains he used to elaborate the satanic schemes hatched in his own perverted mentality. These he could still command in his madness.
Manning had been lucky—and careful. It was different now.
He opened the letter, breaking the seal on the flap, a cartouche of scarlet wax, red as blood, in the oval of which appeared the impression of the Griffin’s special device; the design of the heraldic and mythical creature, half lion, half eagle, the Griffin had chosen as his emblem and his name.
Again the letters sprawled, unsymmetrical, out of alignment, the size of the words variant. A madman’s letter—but a madman centered on one desperate and devilish design. The usual somewhat pompous style was lacking, with the sardonic sentences. This was an epistle written in such rage that the hand holding the pen had at times trembled, spilled blots of the purple ink.
Meddler:
You amuse me no more. Your fate is sealed with the seal of the Griffin, the beast that rends and tears, that can swoop and leap and fly. You interfering fool, you have signed your own warrant to a death that will not be pleasant. Nor will it be short.
I shall not tell you when, or how. I have turned the glass of your life’s span and the sand is running out. You have dared to balk me, you have presumed to check the revelations and the ordinations of the stars. Your doom is sealed. The Griffin crouches. Soon the Griffin strikes, presumptuous tamperer with Destiny!
For signature the Griffin had drawn, as he had often done before, the upper part of a griffin’s body, in the style known to heraldry as issuant. Formerly this had been well done, now it was out of all proportion, certain sign of his agitation.
II
Manning put the letter back into its envelope and filled his pipe. It was a raw night with a mist that was almost rime. He was in his own library at Pelham Manor in front of an open fire that crackled cheerfully. It was in this room that the Griffin himself had once peered in at him through the window.
At least Manning thought it was the Griffin. It might have been an impersonation, but he doubted if the Griffin would let any one assume the yellow mask of something like goldbeater’s skin that half hid and half revealed the hawklike features of the monster.
There was a new pane there now to take the place of the one through which Manning had fired—and missed, for once. Involuntarily Manning glanced at the casement and saw nothing but the murk of night. Something, perhaps a scrap of loosened mortar, perhaps a spurt of rain, fell down the chimney and hissed into the fire.
His setter started up, neck hair bristling, uttering a low whine that was half howl, melancholy, portentous. Manning did not move. His pursuit of th
e Griffin had taken toll of him. He had lost weight, lines had grimly registered in his lean, brown face, and his nerves had begun to get too tense, but now they were unassailable.
The issue was at hand. He would get a chance at the Griffin, face to face. The Griffin would want to taunt him, torture him in his own presence. He would want Manning alive. There was little doubt of that. This insanity would demand a personal vengeance, not a long distance murder.
Manning had not the slightest intention of dodging it. He set the matter of his own risks aside as of no importance compared to this chance to dispose of a creature who was more fiend than man.
He patted the head of the dog as it came close to him. It did seem as if the air had grown colder and there was a strange and ghostly suggestion of weird and primitive music in the room. It must come from the radio set. It was the sort of music that came over the telephone when the Griffin used it, employing some synchronizing device to get through and prevent tracing. He would be up to such tricks if they entered his brain, to try and break down Manning’s courage.
“There’s one thing, Dan,” said Manning to the setter. “We don’t have to worry about anybody else this time. And I doubt if he has any definite plan, if he is even able to devise one. Our side may win the game and clear the board. We’ll do our best.”
Dan, the setter, crept closer, shivering a little, whining once more. Manning patted him again. There was a flurry of wind in the breast of the chimney, like a moan, and the fire lifted. A log fell. The setter howled mournfully, low but long, with his neck outstretched until Manning clamped his muzzle and told him to “charge,” when the dog lay still, save for shivering.
“Damper needs fixing. Too much draft, Dan boy,” said Manning. These sounds were ordinary, stressed by circumstance. The music—that was the Griffin. Static kept it down. A bad night for transmission.
A good night for a murder!
That thought rose unbidden to Manning’s mind and he grinned, spoke the next one aloud.
“Good time for a drink. Sorry you don’t like Scotch, Dan.”
He touched a button, relit his pipe, which had gone out, pressed the ebony disk once more. He had three Japanese servants, all devoted to him. Two of them were away to-night, until midnight, their usual evening off. But Ito, the second boy, should have answered. He set down the button a third time, listening, catching its faint buzz in the distance.
A slight frown came to his face. He rose and slid the automatic that he always kept handy into the side pocket of his smoking jacket.
The pantry was empty. There was cube ice in a brass bowl, a siphon set ready with a tall glass on a serving salver—as if Ito had known what was wanted, started to serve, or had, as he often did, anticipated a call. The ice was slightly melted.
There was a pane of glass inset into the swinging door leading into the kitchen, as also with the pantry door through which Manning had just come. A light in the kitchen. Manning peered through and what he saw made him swing the kitchen door wide with a kick on its brass base plate.
Ito lay on the floor in his white linen clothes, curled up on his side. His knees were drawn up, his hands clenched tight. On his brown, usually impassive face was a look of agony whose distortion death had not yet been able to erase.
All outer doors were locked. On the narrow shelf outside a kitchen cabinet was a dish of Japanese food, a salad of daikon, seaweed and bamboo sprouts. It was partly eaten. The fork was on the floor. There was a bottle of soy with which sauce the salad had been seasoned. It was newly opened, used only once, Manning fancied. His boys ordered their own food likings from a Japanese store in New York. It was sent by parcel post. There had been a delivery that afternoon. Yamamoto, his butler, had brought him the bill that came with the goods.
Manning picked up the bottle, sniffed at its sourish contents and set it down. His face was grim. There had been genuine affection between him and Ito, extended to the absent couple.
“Next time I get a shot at you, Griffin, I shan’t miss,” said Manning. He had no doubt as to who was responsible for this. The means did not immediately matter. And it was an irrational move, the taking of a pawn who was not actually on the board. It was meant, perhaps, to scare Manning, to reveal the Griffin’s power, a cat’s-paw trick.
Usually the Griffin did not waste life. He liked, he claimed, to do his work neatly, to use no unnecessary moves. But he had struck and he had killed Ito.
“It’s my move,” said Manning aloud. But it would be a move in the dark. The Griffin knew where he lived, shadowed his movements, and Manning knew only about where the Griffin’s lair was located.
Manning took a cloth from a drawer and laid it over the corpse of the poisoned Japanese.
He returned to the library and the cowering dog and took up his telephone to call headquarters in New York. It had to be reported. Once more the Griffin had scored and Manning had failed to protect.
“It’ll be the last time,” he told himself.
Even as he lifted the body of the instrument there came a sound of barbaric music with the well-known voice of the Griffin speaking through it. Manning had always hoped to trace the Griffin some day through that deep and vibrant tone, but it was changed now, changed in pitch and in steadiness. It was the voice of a maniac, close to raving, incoherent, almost unintelligible, uttering dire but vague threats, ending in a burst of uncontrolled laughter that suddenly ceased. The music kept on for a few minutes, then ended abruptly.
Manning got his connection.
“Give me Spring seven—three one hundred,” he said in even accents. “In a hurry.”
III
Quantro, the Haitian dwarf and mute, bodyguard and familiar of the Griffin, cowered against the curving wall of the private chamber. He squatted, gibbering like a baboon, his hands, at the ends of his long, hairy arms, resting, knuckles down, on the rich rug, his bizarre costume of turban, robe and sash infinitely grotesque.
He rolled his eyes in terror as he muttered uncouthly, watching his master. The Griffin was to him the Overlord of All Wizards, greater than any Papa of obeah and voodoo, all powerful, all wise. He feared him and he worshiped him, much as Moloch might have been worshiped.
But now he could not understand. He knew, as a dog might know, that things were wrong, terribly wrong, with the Griffin, that his master was in a towering and unreasonable rage that had lasted for days and might at any moment vent itself upon Quantro. It had already made victims of certain of the unfortunates, known only by numbers, who were incarcerated in the subterranean laboratories of the place. They had vanished, and the rest were uneasy, almost mutinous, broken in spirit though they were.
The Griffin gave none of them new tasks, did not care for any inspection or test of the old. The man who cooked their poor food for them had run short of provisions, and the Griffin had ignored his request for more supplies. The Griffin himself had eaten little and slept less, and Quantro, always a glutton, bewailed that condition.
He hardly ventured to cast a glance at the Griffin, seated behind his carved desk in the circular room that was concealed in the midst of the house set on a summit of a wooded hill that overlooked the sea. To the ordinary observer who might catch a glimpse of the house when fall stripped the boughs of their leafy screen it was seemingly an ordinary semicolonial home, built probably in the late fifties.
It did not look like the house of horror and mystery that it was. It was a small domain, but the Griffin ruled there supreme. In the bowels of the hill were the laboratories, the clammy quarters of the nameless ones who never saw the sunlight. A deep shaft ran from the Griffin’s private room, where he made his decisions, worked out his horoscopes against his victims, and studied the details of his murderous plans against them. It was a smooth steel tube and it reached to a natural cavern through which ran a subterranean stream whose existence none even suspected.
A strange chamber, this unholy of unholies, where the Griffin evolved his diabolical schemes. The walls curved in a complete c
ircle that showed no break. They were of steel, covered with gold-woven tapestry; the floor was of steel, fireproof, soundproof.
The whole was concealed in the middle of the partly dismantled house so cleverly as not to be noticed. It was, in fact, built in the well of the original circular staircase of the home, now supplanted by a lift. The chamber had its own elevator to the basement.
There were no windows, but the air was pure. There were no visible means of illumination, but daylight seemed to serenely light the place. In front of the Griffin hung three disks of bronze, the central one the largest. Before him was a sidereal chart, with sheets of horological logarithms, special maps of the zodiacal signs, papers covered with calculations.
He sat there with his yellow mask upon him and, beneath it, veins crawled like worms. His eyes gleamed through the eyeslits like windows through which may be seen darkly the fires of Hades. His mouth worked, his hands clenched and unclenched, and there too the veins stood high and seemed things alive under the skin.
In his fear, Quantro tried to lip-read something of the swift, harsh torrent of words that flowed from the mouth of the Griffin. They were not far from raving, but their threats were still backed by a definite purpose.
In the domed ceiling tiny golden pricks showed as the Griffin touched a button. The belt of the zodiac was limned there in gold, with the signs, the pricks were the assemblies of the important constellations in connection with the pseudo-science that the Griffin implicitly believed in.
He never set the date for a victim’s death, never ordained that demise, unless his calculations showed him that the stars in their courses were favorable for his ungodly enterprises.
He glared at his casts and recasts of Manning’s horoscope, knowing the day and hour of his birth. The stars mocked him. They showed Manning protected by his stellar destinies.
The faintly intoxicating scent of amber floated through the room. From somewhere came the strains of music that were primitive yet ultra modern; music that seemed to hold the rattle of sistra and the clang of cymbals, the sonorous voice of horns, the boom of mighty drums and the blare of trumpets. Music that embraced and embodied all centuries, all time, from the hollow log, the conch and gourd of the cave dweller to the latest device for stirring the vitals and the spirit of mankind. It was an evil tune. It suggested more than merely evil things. It stirred the blood and roused the pulse to unclean, unhallowed impulses.
Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 Page 3
