Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 (28 page)

“A name? Hardly a christened one. His parents disowned him. His mother left him in a sack when he was a few hours old. I imagine she was too frightened to strangle him. You see, he was born without legs and that head of his must have been very small and rather alarming at that time. I rescued him from the ignominy of being exposed as a freak. I bought him from a sideshow.”

“That mighty good of you, Mr. Silbi.”

“Ah! Philanthropy is usually selfish at base. Suppose we call him Al. Not short for Alfred or Albert. Al was one of a very gruesome and impure group of demons in Persian mythology, found sitting in sandy places, plotting beastliness. I think Al is a very good name for him. Come, Al.”

The creature half hopped, half swung into the elevator, squatting there, grotesque and obscene, as the lift ascended.

“I expect a visitor, soon,” said Silbi. “You might let him use the elevator. He can walk downstairs,” he added, and the sentence was a statement of fact rather than a suggestion.

Al followed his master into the vast studio, three high rooms made into one, others adjoining. His restless eyes took in the curious conglomeration of carved furniture, weapons, a suit of armor, lamps swung from the ceiling with amber and ruby lights, lounges, deep rugs. On a desk there was a globe of crystal. Low, weird music started to play as the lights went on. Incense rose. Stars shone golden on a field of black where the signs of the zodiac slowly circled, emblazoned in silver inlay.

The man whistled again and snapped his fingers. He preferred to communicate with Al by signs rather than promote his intelligence, if that were possible. He led the way to a tiled room that seemed part kitchen, part laboratory. There were locked steel cabinets against the walls. Next to the room was a closet with a high skylight.

“I’ll get a cot for you, though you hardly need it,” Silbi said aloud. “Rugs would be better, with a cushion or so.”

He motioned for Al to stay there and the deformed creature fawned on him, stroking the hem of his cloak. Silbi locked him in, returning presently with a rug and a pillow. Al lay on his back, lumpish and inert. Silbi left him there.

In the main studio, Silbi stripped off his cloak, long-haired wig and artificial beard and mustachios. He filled a Turkish hubble-bubble and seated himself to smoke before the fire of cannel coal. By its glow his face looked more than ever sinister, Satanic.

There were signs of suffering there, and ever-snarling hate, close to the surface.

It was the face of the incarnate fiend in human form known as the Griffin, the being whose killings of distinguished men had terrorized a continent, a monomaniac of murder.

He picked up a radiator ornament from a tabouret and fondled it. It was a casting in golden bronze of the fabulous creature whose name he had adopted; half eagle, half lion, symbol of swiftness, rapaciousness, cruelty. He held it as a talisman, remembering bitterly the aerie he had built, where there had lain a golden griffin as a paperweight upon a great table in his circular room of steel.

He remembered his slaves who had worked for him in subterranean caverns, bound by his knowledge of their guilty pasts, scientists, artisans and artists. He remembered endless days and nights in Dannemora, crippled, celled. He remembered the man who had shattered his organization, cast him into prison. Gordon Manning.

His face grew more cruel, more like the profile of the sculptured griffin radiator cap. Then, as he mused, a look of devilish contentment supplanted wrath. His newest plans were maturing. Soon he would challenge civilization again, challenge Manning to a game of wits and action.

The tobacco in the bowl of the Turkish pipe was mostly ash, the smoke bubbled slowly through the perfumed water, when there came a knock upon the door.

II

The Griffin had refilled his hubble-bubble, deliberately, while his visitor waited, ill at ease, tall and gaunt, a haunted look upon his sensitive Latin face.

“Ah, Raspetti,” said the Griffin at last. “Guido, my good Guido, I am well pleased with you.”

“Signor,”
replied the man, speaking in Sicilian dialect. “That name is forgotten. I am Pietro Volenta.”

“As you please. Let us trust the other name is forgotten. There is only one in this country, outside of your wife and perhaps your children, who knows of Guido Raspetti. Pietro, then; our little experiments have been very successful. Soon they will achieve their ultimate purpose.”

“Dear God,
signor!
You have not—you will not….”

“Did you think I used your skill to kill a cat? You have well earned the money I promised you. I shall send it to your family. It is only for them you exist?”

“I will take it to them,
signor.
I…”

The Griffin checked him with a gesture.

“Pietro. You can never tell. Something might happen. I might have another errand to send you upon.”

Raspetti stiffened, slumped to an attitude of desperate pleading.

“Signor,
if I have done well, dismiss me. Ask no more. Always I have dreams. My head burns and spins. Sometimes I think I shall go mad.”

“If I dismiss you, what would you do? Return to the position in which I found you, or rather refound you, after my—illness?”

“I do not know if they would take me back. But I can get another. I am an expert analyzing chemist. I….”

“Also an expert toxicologist. In medieval times the Borgias would have protected you—as I protect you—they would have proclaimed you the perfect poisoner. Even in their day such secrets were known, brought from the Orient by Marco Polo. Pietro, or Guido, if they knew in Rome that you were here, even my power could not save you. If you are going mad, how can I let you go? You have that fatal complaint, a conscience. Some night you will babble my secrets, you will confess them to your wife, or to a priest. And I do not trust either priests or women. Your formula has been tested. It establishes your research, your wisdom. It answered to the day, aye, almost to the hour. You have killed again, by proxy. So….”

“Signor.
I would not betray you….”

The Griffin’s sensitive nostrils widened, his eyes were arrogant and luminous.

“No. I do not think you will betray me. You say your head spins. I have a cure for that. Behold this globe. Gaze on it, Guido.
Gaze!”

The crystal orb clouded and then was shot with sudden fires. They whirled in spirals, changing like a kaleidoscope. Raspetti’s look became a fixed stare. Again he stiffened in his chair, clutching it by its carven arms. Such a chair as Cesare Borgia himself might have occupied.

“So,” said the Griffin, softly but with infinite force. “So, my Guido. I will cure your headache. Your brain holds too much. You shall not betray me. Relax, Guido, relax, and listen….”

The Griffin leaned forward, his look compelling.

“When you leave me, Guido, you will walk down the stairs, very quietly, very carefully. If you think anyone sees you you will pause and not go on until the way is clear. Thus to the street, thus to Fifth Avenue. The subway is running now. There will be few to enter or alight. You will look forward when you hear the rumble of the train, like a dragon in a cavern, its green eyes gleaming. So—you lean out, your foot slips, you
fall,
before the oncoming monster. And that, Guido mio, will be the end. The end! Now go.”

The hypnotized man arose, moved like a sleepwalker to the door. The Griffin listened to his retiring footsteps, along the hall, softly down the stairs. Then he closed his portal and returned to his water pipe.

The coals flickered and made wavering, changing arabesques of light and shadow on the walls, the vapor from the herb bubbled through the rose-scented water; the incense, fragrant of amber, wisped about the great chamber while the exotic music rose and fell, swelled into a barbaric chant, dwindled to a desert lullaby.

The Griffin roused himself at last.

“He has gone into limbo,” he muttered. “He was useful but he outlived his utility.”

He moved to where the stars shone and the zodiacal belt gleamed, on the sable setting, turning the crisp leaves of parchment in a tome that was bound in heavy leather.

The Griffin was casting a horoscope, choosing a day for murder when the stars might be favorable to death.

Gordon Manning, explorer, ex-Major in Army Intelligence, now, by avowed profession, consulting attorney, sat in the library of his own house at Pelham Manor. He had forced his mind to the solution of certain legal problems and he set aside the papers somewhat wearily.

He had been commissioned by the New York Police Commissioner and Governor of the State to combat the Griffin after the police had failed. It had been an arduous task to which he had often thrilled, of which he had sometimes despaired. He had unearthed the monster, had seen him sent to the State Institution for the Insane at Dannemora, when he should have been destroyed. Now the Griffin was loose again. Twice he had struck; once he had killed, once Manning had foiled him.

Manning’s commissions were still in force, he was still the champion against the madman, a modern St. George, but it was an unequal combat, one that never let up. He fought against one whose brain, inflamed by insanity, was superhuman as a maniac’s strength.

The Griffin chose to style it a game. In his conceit he named his victims and the day of their death, but only after he had made all his plans.

It was weeks since he had returned to his hidden lair, weeks in which his craft had plotted a killing which, this time, must be perfect. Failure would break him down, destroy his always excited coördination. Once before it had led him to collapse after strenuous encounters. But that had been at the end of tremendous stimulation. Since then, the Griffin had rested.

Soon, very soon, he would leap once more, winged, almost invincible.

In lonely places, where danger crouched, Manning had perfected his senses to super-reception. He was attuned to the vibrations of evil.

He reached for his pipe, for charged water, ice, and the decanter of good liquor set out by his Japanese butler. He mixed himself a long, cold drink, sipped it, raised a match to his pipe. Even before the sound was manifest to the outward ear, he knew the telephone was ringing; knew who it was on the wire at that hour of the night.

“Manning? It is the Griffin. Need I tell you? You scored in our last encounter but it was a fluke. This time there will be no flukes. I have done much in the past weeks, Manning. I have practically reorganized my corps. Even now, Manning, I am cutting in on your wire as I used to, so do not waste time in trying to trace me. On my part, I shall be brief, for it no longer amuses me to talk to you. I think, Manning, that you annoy me.

“If I decide so, I shall annihilate you also after I eliminate Haydn Shirley, on the twenty-fourth of this month. Twenty-four hours on that twenty-fourth day, Manning. In one of them he will cease to exist. You may accompany him across the Styx. Your horoscope does not indicate entirely his amount of peril, but the signs are sufficiently malignant to indicate that you may no longer furnish me with even a halfway satisfactory opponent.

“Until the twenty-fourth, then, five days from now, farewell! My only fear is that when you inform Haydn Shirley of his certain demise, he may disappoint me by a premature collapse. I trust not. I have designed and arranged a somewhat spectacular death for him. He has the instincts of a weasel but the heart of a mouse.

“He pretends to be a philanthropist and uses charity as a cloak for his chicanery. Even you, Manning, can hardly defend him in your mind, though I trust you will endeavor to do so with your body.

“Good night—and pleasant dreams….”

The deep voice died away. The weird music that had been its background swelled suddenly like an organ. Then that subsided as Manning sat with the telephone arm still in his hand. There was a burst of mocking laughter and—silence.

Haydn Shirley! The multi-millionaire. He had endowed many institutions, he was ardent in the cause of prohibition, of the suppression of vice. He controlled the rubber industry. Haydn Shirley!

The untimely death of the man would complete the depression threatening the land. Securities would tumble, including the Shirley holdings. The foundations he had established would suffer. It would be a national disaster!

The Griffin might have been bitten by participation in Shirley corporations.

It did not matter. If Shirley died incontinently, hundreds of thousands, already harassed and impoverished, might find themselves destitute.

A hard man to reach. Surrounded with guards who might scoff at Manning’s warning.

Manning called Centre Street and got an inspector. His name and reputation insured the connection he wanted. The home of the commissioner was equipped with special alarms. Soon the head of the police was on the phone.

“Haydn Shirley! Good God, man, you don’t mean it! I don’t know. The best thing to do is for me to come straight to you. Shirley is at Haydn Manor, on Long Island. We’ll get through to him, somehow.”

III

It was no easy matter, getting through to the elderly plutocrat. The grounds of Haydn Manor were walled, the walls topped by spikes. There was a gatekeeper, and all of the men working on the gardens were part of his retainers intended primarily to preserve his privacy, rather than his life. There was a butler who was harder to convince than a king’s sentry; secretaries who declined to transmit messages, who had blocked any attempt to reach Shirley by telephone.

The chief of these, when they had at last won to him, seemed frankly cynical of the suggestion that Haydn Shirley was in physical danger.

“We have our own precautions,” he said. “They have proven eminently satisfactory so far. We do not care for the interference of the police authorities, nor do we need their protection.”

His manner toward the police commissioner was condescending. He clearly regarded both him and Manning as unwarranted intruders whose persistence should be snubbed. Manning had advised the commissioner, who did the talking, not to mention the Griffin unless it became imperative to do so. The Griffin had got past defenses as adequate as these. He might have an agent now on the premises.