In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & the Griffin, Volume 3
by
J. Allan Dunn
Altus Press • 2015
Copyright Information
© 2015 Steeger Properties, LLC under license to Altus Press
Publication History:
“Sign Sinister” originally appeared in the February 4, 1933 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly magazine. Copyright 1933 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1960 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
“The Scarlet Seal” originally appeared in the April 15, 1933 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly magazine. Copyright 1933 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1960 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
“Death Has Its Fling” originally appeared in the December 16, 1933 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly magazine. Copyright 1933 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1961 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
“The Griffin Returns” originally appeared in the September 22, 1934 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly magazine. Copyright 1934 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1961 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
“The Griffin Runs Amuck” originally appeared in the November 3, 1934 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly magazine. Copyright 1934 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1961 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC All Rights Reserved.
“The Six Scarlet Seals” originally appeared in the December 1, 1934 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly magazine. Copyright 1934 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1962 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
“The Griffin’s Gambit” originally appeared in the March 2, 1935 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly magazine. Copyright 1935 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1962 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
“The Griffin’s Living Death” originally appeared in the March 16, 1935 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly magazine. Copyright 1935 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1962 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
“In the Grip of the Griffin” originally appeared in the May 18, 1935 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly magazine. Copyright 1935 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1962 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
“The Seventh Griffin” originally appeared in the October 5, 1935 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly magazine. Copyright 1935 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1962 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Designed by Matthew Moring/Altus Press
Special Thanks to Joel Frieman, Monte Herridge, Everard P. Digges LaTouche, Ray Riethmeier and Jonathan Sweet
Sign Sinister
Airplanes Soared Overhead, Police Patrolled the Penthouse and Gordon Manning Sat with the World’s Greatest Scientist to Protect Him from the Griffin’s Fiendish Death Plot
It was a fit night for plotting a murder, or for committing one. The old trees and the overgrown and untended shrubbery about the ancient house were lashed by the storm until the tortured boughs rasped against each other and the autumnal leaves blew free in gusty drifts.
Thunder pounded like distant, heavy cannonading. Lightning flared in ghastly lavender illumination that briefly showed the tossing tree tops, the high chimneys of the old building and the tilting headstones of the long forgotten dead in the private graveyard; and the hundreds of wild acres that surrounded it; untended, practically unsaleable (although the property was within fifty miles of New York City) because of a clouded title.
The lightning turned a desolate mere into a sheet of purple flame; it showed the family vault of stone, iron-grated and iron-doored, itself lurching forward into the uncertain clay. It was a sinister landscape even when the sun shone. To-night it seemed the setting for a Witches’ Sabbath.
A bolt of levin blazed. There was a crash and the limb of a great elm javelined to the ground, almost grazing the roof of a big black sedan that, expertly driven by a chauffeur with the face of an undertaker, had turned in from the road to the muddy lane and now dimmed its lights.
Three men got out. One, who stayed between the others, was clearly a prisoner and a none too willing one. He was defiant as he was hustled along between the sagging tombstones towards the vault. One man showed the hooded ray of an electric torch and they stumbled among the tall weeds, burred and brambly, over the low mounds and sunken, shallow pits where the water collected above the dead.
“You trying to throw a scare into me?” demanded the captive.
“You ain’t seen the half of it yet,” said one of the others. “If you do get scared, buddy, you needn’t be ashamed of it. There’s plenty reason.”
He touched a spot beneath one of the skulls, carved in semi-relief on the scaling stone façade of the mortuary, and instantly the iron gratings swung out and the iron door slid aside to show the ghastly interior. The two guards thrust him in to the dimly lighted place that smelled of sickly decay, the stench of a charnel house.
The door clanged to, the gratings closed and the lights on the car came on full as it plowed up the lane to the back of the house where it slid, in a controlled skid, into the wide doorway of a great barn. The chauffeur did not come out again. The employees of the Griffin never entered the house that was recently bought by Mr. Silbi, tenanted by a gaunt, gruff couple whose surly silence had been barely broken enough to announce that they were caretakers.
The house was a blind, a cover for life and activities that went on underground—in extensions of the cellars, in cement walled crypts where men labored as slaves—men known only by numbers, men once honored for their proficiencies in the arts and sciences and higher mechanics; now servitors of the Griffin, cowed by his knowledge of their guilty secrets. Men who had been disqualified for malpractice or for chicanery.
There were no orgies here, but there were often grim rituals of experimental surgery, tests of death-dealing machines and potions, the assembly of delicate contrivances to further the mad and evil wishes of Mr. Silbi who was known to a shuddering nation as the Griffin.
An inhuman monster, an insane genius whose bent was all destruction, whose warped ego, inflamed with grandiose dementia, resented all that was constructive and who deemed himself destined to eliminate those against whom he felt envy. Stark mad, but infinitely cunning, cold blooded as a lizard spawned in Gehenna, arrayed against the sons of men even as Iblis, the fallen angel, hurled down from heaven because he refused to salute Adam, God’s last creation.
Iblis, spelled backwards, became Silbi.
Once this mortal Iblis had been cast down, manacled, flung into durance. Gordon Manning, ex-Army Intelligence man, explorer, adventurer, scientist, consulting attorney and, first and foremost, investigator, had accomplished this at the request of the governor and the police commissioner; and the Law, in its blindness, had not destroyed the fiend who had murdered hideously a score of the most valuable citizens, but had sent him to Dannemora, to the institution for the criminally insane.
His cunning had freed him. Like the fabled beast, whose name he used as a symbol, he was free to rend, to claw, leaping and swooping like the creature of mythology, half lion, half eagle. He had
slain and would slay again, until Manning once more bested him, or killed him—unless he killed Manning first.
Perhaps he hated Manning as much as his hellish soul and spleen could hate while his lunatic conceit rated the investigator as the only opponent worthy of him.
To-night he waited in an inner chamber, subterranean, bomb-proof, until the man he had sent for should be brought before him. One he expected to make use of by bending him to his diabolic purpose.
The room was circular. Its wall of reinforced cement was hung with sable tapestries emblazoned with the signs of the zodiac, for the Griffin believed in the influences of the stars upon human destiny and never set the date for a murder without consulting them. Hidden neon tubes gave a soft glow. The ceiling had been made of dark purple glass in which there glowed the constellations, illumined at will by the Griffin.
The door was of steel, also tapestried, so that it blended with the walls. The floor was covered with thick rugs. The Griffin sat at a carven desk, whose legs were supporting griffins, in a throne-like chair. His face was hidden beneath a mask of some close-clinging tissue like goldbeater’s skin, yellow, making him hideous and terrifying, as his high-bridged beak of a nose thrust out, with his protruding cheek bones, his stern chin, his black eyes glittering through slits.
Now he was at his devilish ease. From some source strange strains of music played, barbarically. There was the odor of burning amber, the fumes controlled by the ventilation ducts that kept the filtered air of the chamber at an even temperature.
Before him was a crystal bowl, slowly revolving, lighted from its base. Whorls of colored flame perpetually changed their pattern within the sphere. There was a disk of bronze hung between two crystal rods. Papers lay beneath the weight of a griffin of gold-bronze, superbly modeled, with ruby eyes.
These things, all his elaborate laboratories, his luxuriant living quarters, his unique establishment; Manning had once discovered and destroyed. But the Griffin’s enormous financial resources had not been eliminated. The Griffin was rehabilitated. He had his new aerie, secret, invincible, his corps of groveling slaves. He was Himself again—Iblis, Son of the Morning, the Destroyer of Destinies!
The flat top of his desk was black onyx. On it lay astrological charts. He had worked out a horoscope and the result pleased him as he checked over his reckonings, muttering through the leprous-like mask the names of heathen gods and goddesses connected with the planets that ruled the houses of the Zodiac.
Marduk. Ishtar, Ninib. Nebo. Nergal, Sin and Shamash! Names as old as ancient Babylon, used to conjure with by the priests of the world’s earliest cults.
“This time it cannot fail,” he chuckled. “All the signs point to danger for this upstart, his house is invaded by malign controls. And now, for Manning.”
He touched a point in the heavy carving of the desk and the bronze disk began to hum, to vibrate, while its shining surface clouded. Its pace increased until triple rods of crystal, set in a lute-like frame, the model of an Egyptian sistrum, gave off a clear, chiming note. The Griffin touched another button and the hum of the disk was steadily maintained as he spoke into it, knowing his message would be transmitted to Gordon Manning’s private telephone at Pelham Manor, sure he would find the investigator at home, sure he would be waiting there, keyed up to hear the Griffin’s next murderous, boastful announcement.
Last time Manning had foiled the Griffin. This time there would be no failure.
“Manning? Good! Doubtless you have been expecting me to communicate with you. You were not so amusing in our last encounter, Manning. Much too serious.
Manning, in his own library, listening with grim face to the message, fancied that the Griffin, menace though he was, cunning and powerful, was more erratic than he used to be before he had gone to Dannemora. When the fiendish desire to kill flooded his inflamed brain it seemed for the while to render it super lucid. The phantasmagoria it conceived took definite shape with the means to carry out his wicked will. But it must some day burn up in a spontaneous combustion generated by its overcharge of mad, fevered energy.
Manning made no answer. He waited to hear the name of the man selected as the Griffin’s next victim, the day that the Griffin fixed for what he called his elimination.
“The name, Manning,” the Griffin’s deep voice continued, “is Harvey Allison, the upstart who thinks he can control cosmic forces. It seems that he is now endeavoring to perfect certain experiments on behalf of the government, to whom he has offered his preposterous plan of controlling the force of split atoms in a power that can annihilate, in one charge, the mightiest of armies, of fleets of the sea, the air, or submarine and subterranean activities.
“The supreme hypocrite claims that demonstrations of this power will force peace upon the other nations and that the world’s safety will be accomplished by the United States.
“He does not add what lies behind this screen of altruism. The whole world, paying tribute to those who can thus threaten them! If he accomplishes this thing it makes Allison supreme, even though he pretends he gives it to the United States. He will still carry the secret in his brain. Bah!
“He assumes divine prerogatives, he seeks to harness the heavenly energies. We shall see, Manning, we shall see on the eleventh of this month.
“What makes this particular problem interesting is that certain ultra-socialistic organizations have taken him seriously. They want his secret. So, because of certain attempts, he has been given a police guard. One trusted officer is with him night and day. And now you also will defend him. The attempts have been crude. As I have told you before, Manning, study a man’s habits and it is easy to dispose of him. The date will be the eleventh of this month.
“This time, Gordon Manning, you lose.”
The voice ceased. Manning still heard the exotic music as he sat with the telephone arm gripped in his hand until his knuckles showed white against the tan.
And the Griffin touched the connection and the hum of the disk died now. Again he spoke into it.
“Bring in the man who came to-night.”
The tapestry was pulled aside and a gap showed where the door had opened noiselessly. Through this entry came a strange being. It looked like a hobgoblin of the fairy tale legends. Its head was infantile in size, but wrinkled like that of an old man, set upon an enormous pair of shoulders. The chest showed tremendous development and power and the body was only a torso. It ended abruptly below the hips. The creature’s long arms acted as legs and it came striding in, knuckles to the ground, like some grotesque ape, clad in a shaggy sweater that looked as if it might be natural fur.
This was Al, the Griffin’s devoted familiar, a joke of Nature in a cruel mood, born legless, mute and almost dumb; bought by the Griffin from a traveling circus. Malice could sparkle in Al’s eyes and the strength of his crippled trunk was phenomenal. Now he fawned as he came up to where the Griffin sat, nuzzling like a faithful dog.
Al wore a long, straight-bladed knife in a leather scabbard that was slung about his thick neck, belted about his chest. Its handle was brass, and it was balanced by lead for a throwing-knife. In the circus Al had specialized in a knife-throwing act and his aim was precise and, on occasion, deadly.
Back of him, thrust into the room by two guards who did not enter the chamber, but stood back of the doorway, the prisoner pitched into the chamber and caught his poise adroitly with more than a suggestion of athletic or acrobatic training.
He was dressed in clothes that proclaimed the penitentiary outfit for outgoing convicts. Save for a certain fixed sullenness about his face, there were no other signs. Evidently he had been employed out of doors, for his features lacked the usual waxen pallor of a prison inmate and his hair had been allowed to grow for the time immediately before his release.
He was well built, lean, and not ill looking, save for his sullen expression; defiant rather than hangdog. A man of decided intelligence who might have gone as far along the upward path as he seemed to have descended on
a lower. He glowered at the Griffin.
“What’s the idea of the Chamber of Horrors and this freak out of a sideshow?” he demanded. “I’ve seen bones before—and legless wonders.”
He was belligerent, but as he glanced about the chamber and again at the masked figure of the Griffin, he appeared less confident, impressed against his will by the atmosphere of the place.
“What’s the idea of the snatch?” he went on. “I think I’m met by pals outside the College and then I get a rod shoved into my ribs and I get a ride to this dump. What’s the big idea?”
“Nothing but what may turn out to your advantage,” said the Griffin in his deep voice. “Sit down, Burns. That was, I believe, your latest alias. Make yourself comfortable. You might glance over this dossier.”
Half against his will, the man took the paper offered, sat in the comfortable appearing chair that was indicated.
“I could stand a drink, and something to smoke,” he grunted.
“Presently,” said the Griffin. “Read that first.”
The man looked indifferently at the document, then intently, last of all with a growing fear. Here were set down the intimate details of his life for the last twenty years; things that he believed the police did not know, intimate matters he had been sure no man surmised.
“How the devil did you get this dope?” he muttered.
“My friend, I am the devil,” said the Griffin complacently. “It pays to serve the devil, though you may not have found it so hitherto. You may have heard of me, even in Ossining. I am the Griffin.”
Burns, alias many other names, late 17745 of Sing Sing, with other numbers to his name that penitentiaries had given him, twitched a little. His nerves were shaken. He had heard of the Griffin. In the underground gossip of Ossining the Griffin had loomed large as a master-criminal, a monster of deviltry and cunning. His escape from Dannemora had set him on a pinnacle for those still behind gray walls of stone and bars of steel.
The Griffin beckoned and the two men back of the still open door advanced. They also wore masks, of gray linen, tinted to suggest skulls. It was melodramatic, but in this place they did not seem out of keeping.
In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 Page 1
