Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 (2 page)

“Another racket bump-off,” said the cop, conclusively. Manning did not contradict him. There was no evidence. Shreds of human flesh cannot talk. And Manning was not disposed to. Not yet.

III

Manning had no appetite for the savory meal his Japanese servants had prepared and served him. He was used to awful sights, to carnage, to dreadful spectacles. It was his soul that had to steady itself in its citadel. There were moments when he almost wondered if the Griffin was really human, not some hideous conjuration of evil, an atrocious creation of a modern Frankenstein made from materials gathered from graveyard and dissecting room. Even a materialization out of hell itself!

He set those fantasies aside, lighting the tobacco in the brier-root bowl. Frankenstein’s monster destroyed itself. So it might be with the Griffin.

One failure to make good his predictions, and the man’s inflamed brain might well give way like rotten wood at a firm touch.

But he had scored to-night!

There seemed to be a stirring in the air of the room. The logs on the fire fell in, flame leaped and the room grew darker. This was his library. As yet, only one shadowed light suggested the rows of books, the furnishings. Manning himself was deep in a wing-chair that faced the window.

He saw there, pressed against the panes, a face—hideous, devilish. A light from without played on it; its owner was using an electric torch to illuminate it.

There was some sort of close-clinging mask over the high features; nose, cheek bones, eyebrows, chin! The light made the mask look like a leper’s countenance, or as if the skin was shedding, as a snake sheds.

Filmy yet close, like goldbeater’s skin, the mask clung; revealing but screening, giving suggestions of a hideous, triumphant mirth heightened by eyes that shone like green phosphorescent growths, the cold glow of a firefly, of a fungus, of sea-flame.

Instantly, with a movement too swift to be anything but a blur, Manning snatched the gun he had tucked down beside him in the cushion of the chair, and fired.

Followed the crash of glass, the stillness after the shot, smoke wisping in the room! And, this time, surely there came the sound of a laugh, infinitely disdainful and assured.

The face was gone. Manning, who seldom missed, knew that this time he had not scored. His grounds were inclosed, but there was no sign of intrusion, nothing to show that his alarm was anything but illusion—except for the oval of scarlet paper, like a blotch of bright blood, affixed to the window sill.

The sign of the Griffin. His symbol and unholy seal!

Manning knew well enough that the Griffin always deliberately tried to weaken him, to upset his poise. His nerves seemed sensitive as the shrouds of a ship suddenly plucked by a malignant wind. He forced himself to normal as he waited for the message he knew must surely arrive.

The failure of the little revolt might well hasten the Griffin’s next move, or it might not.

The days passed, and no message came. Manning was constantly waiting, half dreading, half welcoming the belated challenge to a test in which he was inevitably handicapped.

Meantime, the Griffin was conducting certain important experiments.

Gordon Manning was right. The Griffin held in subjugation men who served his purposes, carried out the orders of that distorted mentality that still was controlled by the mad will within.

The Griffin imagined himself maltreated by the world. It did not appreciate nor understand him. It had injured him, and he was out for deadly reprisal.

His madness conjured up monstrous things, reacting to what he learned of modern experiments. Whatever science devised and perfected, the Griffin twisted to his own criminal intents, exploiting his slaves to carry out his ideas.

He sat in his thronelike chair back of the massive, carved desk. In front of him swung a suspended disk of bronze upheld between two fluted pillars, each of which was topped by his device of a griffin’s head. The symbol was repeated in the inkstand that held purple ink, in a paper weight.

The chamber was circular, seemingly without door or window. The lighting was hidden, the air was kept pure by a ventilating system, though now it was tinged with the fragrance of the tobacco—containing a modicum of hasheesh—that he was smoking through a Turkish hookah pipe.

Hung with golden tapestries, the walls were of steel, fire-proof, bulletproof. So were the floors beneath the rich rugs. There was a faint sound of strange, exotic music, in curious rhythm, barbaric and sensuous.

The Griffin was clad in a long gown of black brocade. His features were disguised beneath the thin mask that set off the high-arching nose and cheek bones, the despotic chin. He looked not unlike some mummied priest or monarch of Old Egypt, upon whose face the golden face mask was still undisturbed.

Quantro, the Haitian dwarf, squatted on the floor, grotesque in his vividly hued turban, sash and robe; his arms long as an ape’s, his misshapen head too big; a deaf and dumb familiar and bodyguard; perpetually fingering the long blade thrust in his sash, the knife he always longed to use. To him the Griffin was God. A Papa of obi and voodoo.

The music ended. At a sign from the Griffin, Quantro got to his feet with his apish, agile awkwardness, and took the cloth off a wicker cage. In this were two ringdoves. Quantro opened the door, tapped the bars until the doves flew out, circling the room while Quantro squatted again.

The Griffin spoke certain key-syllables at a fixed pitch into the disk of bronze. A low humming commenced, like the sound of a distant dynamo. The doves found no handy perching place. They continued to circle the room. The Griffin watched them with his glittering eyes, hard as onyx orbs.

Suddenly, out of midair, one dove fell lifeless, as if shot, though its feathers were unruffled save where one wing was outspread. The other flew on and then, in turn, tumbled.

The Griffin spoke again. The humming ceased. With a chuckle indescribably fiendish, the Griffin picked up the two dead birds and examined them. Quantro watched with leashed excitement.

“The finger of Death has touched them, Quantro,” said the Griffin aloud, while the dwarf tried to lip-read his meaning. “They are quite dead, and the death was swift and merciful. I am always merciful, though I may be dramatic. You, my Quantro, like to mangle and worry and rend. You lack artistry. But I kill instantly and I never repeat the process.

“This is a far different fate from the one that overtook those two foolish, would-be Judases the other day. Them I annihilated. They could not even hold a coroner’s inquest, for the lack of remains. It must have been amusing to watch Manning’s face. He is not a fool. He is persistent, and, if he comes too close for comfort, he must be eliminated. I may give that task to you, my Quantro. It would be a pretty play to witness.”

He broke off, chuckling.

Then he touched a button and entered the lift, whose door suddenly appeared in the curving wall. He was taking the dead birds to his underground laboratories, where his slaves labored for him—men without names, numbered robots. Men of science among them, expert craftsmen.

One was working at a laboratory bench in a chamber of cement-lined brick. He was once a surgeon, though now he practiced only for the Griffin.

He looked at the doves, ran a long finger almost tenderly over their plumage, touched the rings on their necks, muttering:

“And the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.”

“Don’t wander, Number Nineteen,” said the Griffin sharply. “Dissect these. I want to see what has happened to their vital organs. See if you can tell how they died.”

IV

AT last the message had arrived.

Manning looked at the familiar and ominous envelope, square, of heavy gray paper. His name and office address were written there in bold, characteristic chirography that yet, to an expert, betrayed the unbalanced but powerful mind of the writer.

Manning turned it over, breaking the scarlet cartouche with its embossed symbol. Red as a blot of blood.

“Who now?” he asked himself.

My dear Manning:

Once again the board is set, the pieces assembled, and you and I are adversaries. I trust that, by now, you will have recovered from any shock you suffered witnessing the abrupt termination of the lives of my renegade agents. It was foolish of you to think I am so remiss as not to countercheck the moves of those whom I employ.

The next person I shall remove, release from this mortal coil, has annoyed me by his mouthings, his writings, his ultra-altruism.

An old man, but still dangerous. In fact, his powers seem to ripen as his body declines. He has lived too long.

The finger of Death is pointed at him. The stars in their courses decree that celestial protection will be weakest for him on Tuesday next, which will be the seventeenth. On that day the frozen, fatal finger of the Universal Harvester will touch him, unless you, Manning, can usurp the place of the Heavenly Powers, for neither steel nor stone may protect him.

The name is Eric Bannerman.

By the way, Manning, don’t try and play the “game” off the board. Though even that effort was amusing. But it cost two lives. That means nothing to me, but you are inclined, it appears, to consider life valuable.

The signature, the Griffin, was appended, with the seal in crimson wax.

Manning felt a wave of revulsion engulf him.

Of all people, Eric Bannerman. Nearing seventy, a singer of the true things of life, of lofty ideals and inspirations. Bannerman, the uplifter, a poet who knew the heart of people and of Nature and reconciled them. A true poet of the people!

And, on the seventeenth, five days away, Eric Bannerman, who lived the simple life and, though close to three-score and ten, had many years of useful, invigorating, enlightenment within him, must die.

By the Griffin’s whim, the time for the deed might occur at any moment within midnight of the sixteenth and midnight of the seventeenth. It amused him to keep his victims and their would-be guards on tenterhooks.

Manning had learned by now that most of the Griffin’s successes had been consummated through his close attention to the habits of the men he doomed.

Eric Bannerman was wealthy, made so by the will of a spinster admirer who had found in his poetry, his company, and his conversation, an uplift. She had left him, with ample means to support it, her summer place in Connecticut, close to the shore.

There was a group of younger, more or less immature poets, who styled themselves as his “disciples” and called Bannerman “master.” Simple as was Bannerman’s nature, he had a shrewd faculty of testing others and sifting the fraudulent from the true, unerringly.

He received the homage of his followers with a twinkling eye, alive to their faults and frailties, teaching them much, not merely of poetic technique and license, but of things and thoughts that were clean and beautiful. To him poetry was a supreme art that should never be desecrated and his school was one of direct and lasting benefit.

There were seldom less than a dozen house guests at Windy Ridge, usually twice that number staying in the neighborhood.

Windy Ridge looked south across the Sound to Long Island, east to the broad Atlantic. It was sheltered by trees whose boughs were rocked and tossed by the vigorous sea breezes. The house was commodious and comfortable.

There were terraced lawns, shrubbery, flowers that grew at random in the grass, a rose garden, blossoming bushes. It was a refuge for birds.

On the highest of the terraces, in front of the house, with a magnificent vista spread out before it, was a seat of marble of exquisite proportions, simply but beautifully carved by a sculptor-admirer of the poet. It curved, and the center was deeply recessed and higher backed than the rest, to make a throne.

Here, cushioned and enthroned, Bannerman sat every afternoon when the weather was fine, to sometimes read one of his own poems, or one written by one of the disciples who showed true merit.

His pupils sat on either side of him, or threw themselves on the grass to listen, to hear the master descant on the beauty of poetry, the duties and responsibilities of all true bards.

So Gordon Manning found Eric Bannerman an hour before sunset, surrounded by his court.

Manning had obtained an introduction, but he found there was little formality to Windy Ridge. He stayed back, listening, after he had come to where the Japanese boy showed him the group. It was a simple but dignified and peaceful scene with the bearded poet and his noble face, the rapt pupils.

Save for the modern costumes, it might all have been set in Ancient Rome or Athens upon some verdant hillside.

Bannerman’s deep, sonorous voice was declaiming. Manning caught the lines; a somewhat turgid composition of one of his scholars.

“…the shouldering seas,

Shadowed beneath the sweeping argosies of cloud.

The cliffs, upstanding, arrogant, as they defy

The steady onslaught till the tide retreats

In broken, sullen ranks that will reform

To charge again in the unending conflict

’Twixt sea and shore.”

Manning introduced himself, as the poem ended. The mutual acquaintance had already communicated with Bannerman, earlier in the day. Bannerman remembered it.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “I understand you wish to see me upon business personal and private to myself, business of the utmost importance.”

Manning bowed.

“Vital,” he said.

“I can imagine nothing more vital or important than a gathering such as this,” said the poet, with a wave of his hand.

The clouds were marshaling for sunset in the west, already taking on tinges of the glorious hues they would presently assume. The wind rustled the trees; the Sound was a stretch of sparkling, wrinkled blue; Long Island, twenty miles across the water, seemed ethereal in azure, purple and pearl gleams.