The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (3 page)

“They are completely genuine, gentlemen,” said Benson.

His voice was as distinctive as his person. It was low, quiet, impersonal—but vibrant with power and authority. The men in that room were all wealthy and had authority themselves, but they were dwarfed by the personality of the man whose face seemed carved out of dead-white metal and whose colorless eyes were like chips of stainless steel—or like holes in the motionless countenance through which you could peer deep into a world of fog and ice.

“These death charms,” Benson went on, “as you perhaps know, have been mentioned several times in picture records of Rameses’ time. We have a pretty complete description of their use by the mad priest Taros.”

Harold Caine’s shallow blue eyes expressed boredom and his vacuous face looked resigned. He wasn’t interested in all this stuff from thousands of years ago. He thought his father was nuts.

Harold Caine looked bored, and looking that way, he got up.

“Excuse me, please,” he mumbled.

He went out the hall door. The rest were hardly conscious of his exit. They were too intent on the words of this master among them.

“Taros was high priest under Rameses. First, for about twenty years.” The Avenger went on. “He was a monster of cruelty. He wore this Ring of Power. The cornelian, as you noticed, is pinkish. The legend was that it had to be dipped into life blood every forty-eight hours. When it was so dipped, it became deep-red, fading slowly to a pinkish color again when two days and nights had elapsed. Then it must once more be renewed in the blood of an innocent victim.

“As long as the ring was worn, Taros would keep his high place. But if he took off the ring, or failed to dip it in blood before a lapse of forty-eight hours, he lost his job and his life.”

Moen and Caine nodded. The curator, and the husky director who was an ex-football star, were the best Egyptologists there, save The Avenger, himself. They knew some of this—but not as much as Benson was telling them.

“Taros also constantly wore the amulets as a guard against evil. But the evil he was really guarding against was the rage of the populace over which he was a tyrant. Anyone in Egypt would have been glad to kill him, but he spread the tale of the amulets and their power to make him deathless, so he kept from being mobbed.

“All this, the records show. And they have also given us a short description of him. He was tall, and thin to the point of emaciation. He had an eagle nose, high-bridged, arrogant and cruel. He was hairless, with a bald skull and practically no eyelashes or eyebrows.

“The appearance of the son of Taros, whose mummy you have just acquired, we do not know.”

They were silent, envisioning the things the words brought up.

The great temple of Rameses. In it, a small army of priests, fattening on the corruption of the Egyptian court, really rulers of the officials of the government, themselves. Over them, this tall, emaciated Taros, with the amulets slung across his chest to ward off death, and with the baleful ring on his finger.

The Ring of Power, keeping its wearer in authority, making him invincible—as long as he renewed that power by dipping it into the life blood of an innocent victim every forty-eight hours.

A death every two days! Murder of an unsuspecting person every forty-eight hours! That was the price of the cornelian ring’s power! It was a dread picture.

And that very ring, stained with the blood of countless sacrifices, was in the strong-box in the next room, with the amulets! One of the most priceless treasures of the museum world.

“Wherever Taros is,” murmured Gunther Caine, “he must be turning over in his grave, or I should say in his mummy case, at the thought of his charms and ring in the hands of those who rifled his son’s tomb.”

Short, fat Evans, and tall, fat Spencer, and burly Moen nodded agreement.

The Avenger’s car was at the curb in front of Gunther Caine’s house. Benson had driven down from his New York headquarters, since nothing in Washington had seemed urgent enough to make the swiftness of a plane necessary, although he could travel at a terrific speed in the great, glittering closed car he used for long-distance trips.

At the wheel of the car sat a man in livery.

The driver of The Avenger’s car was enormous. Even seated, you could see that. Had he been standing, you could have seen even more. And you would probably have gasped a little at the man’s six feet nine inches and two hundred and ninety pounds of solid bone and brawn.

The man at the wheel was Algernon Heathcote Smith, called by people who didn’t want to flirt with annihilation, plain Smitty.

He was a trusted aide of The Avenger, and in addition he was a marvelously capable radio engineer.

Smitty sat at the wheel of the hundred-and-eighty-horsepower car and felt a little bored. He had joined services with The Avenger because he hated crime as much as Benson did.

This trip, on the peaceful mission of examining some musty Egyptian relics, was not to his liking. He wanted action and lots of it—

Suddenly Smitty sat bolt upright behind the wheel of the car. He wasn’t at all bored any more. He was as tense as a coiled spring, and a bit anxious about his sanity. Because it looked as if what he had been thinking about—Egyptian stuff—had somehow become incarnated and was parading before his eyes.

Near Gunther Caine’s house, Smitty saw a tall, thin figure that he couldn’t decide about. He couldn’t decide whether it was really there or not. And he couldn’t decide whether, if it
were
there, it was made of mist or of something more solid.

A tall, thin figure that glided rather than walked. A figure clad in loose, whitish garments that were vaguely familiar to Smitty.

“For the love of—” he breathed.

The garb this tall figure wore, a garment seeming to melt into nothingness at the edges, was priestly raiment. The costume of a priest—of old Egypt!

“I’m screwy!” thought Smitty. “A priest of ancient Egypt trotting around in Washington, South-East! I’m bats!”

He felt a chill touch his spine, but decided that this thing would have to be investigated. He looked at the dashboard clock. Midnight almost to the dot. Benson should be coming out, soon; but Smitty didn’t wait for him before doing something about the Egyptian priest.

He got out of the car, his enormous bulk silhouetted in the backwash of light from the headlamps. He began following the shadowy figure, like Gargantua chasing a wraith of mist, toward the rear of Caine’s house.

There was a ten-foot strip of lawn between the house and the one next door. Smitty slid down that as silently as possible, to the landscaped backyard. He saw the gray shape again, and started running toward it.

The shape disappeared.

There wasn’t any corresponding flight of the shape from the giant’s rush. It didn’t turn and flee. It didn’t duck to right or left.

It just vanished!

Gunther Caine was saying goodnight to the men in his place. It was after midnight, and the man looked tired.

Evans, looking shorter and fatter than ever with a round-bellied derby on his head, shook hands with the curator, and left Spencer, beaming all over his kewpie-doll face, congratulated Caine and, incidentally, himself for being smart enough to get the Taros relics. Moen shrugged his burly shoulders into a topcoat, nodded, and went out.

Harold Caine, the curator’s son, was in the hall near the front door as the directors of the board left. But none of the three men paid any attention to him. Nor did his father.

However, The Avenger noticed him. Those pale, icily flaming eyes didn’t often miss anything out of the ordinary. And Harold’s appearance, to eyes as keen as that, was out of the ordinary.

Harold’s face had a slightly frightened look. At the same time, his eyes were dull, almost glazed-looking—as if he had taken dope.

He nodded nervously as each of the three men went out, playing assistant host in spite of the fact that no one was noticing him. His body was twitchy and his hands wandered around as if he were ill at ease.

Benson, alone in the hall with Gunther Caine and his son, came closer to the curator.

“Those amulets, and the Ring of Power,” he said, “are without price. There are a lot of people who would murder to get them in their possession. Watch them very closely.”

Caine looked startled, then smiled.

“No one will take them from my house,” he said. “I can assure you of that. And first thing in the morning I’ll take them to the museum safe. We will make replicas and exhibit them, keeping the genuine amulets in the vault.”

“That’s best,” said The Avenger quietly. “But the danger will come while they are in your house.”

Benson didn’t put into words the thing that made him speak. That was because the thing was too vague and without substance to warrant words.

The Avenger had spent his life in jungle wilds and impenetrable wildernesses. He had developed a sixth sense that whispered when trouble was near. That sixth sense was functioning now.

With every fiber of him, he felt that something was wrong.

Yet there was nothing that even Dick Benson could put his finger on. Only the directors and Caine and his son were in the house with the Taros relics. The servants were off, having been given a night out because the relics were expected, and Caine didn’t want to subject his employees to such temptation.

Nothing could possibly be the matter. Yet Benson had that feeling. He opened the door, nodded to Caine, and the door was closed as he stepped out.

He saw that Smitty’s giant figure was missing from behind the wheel of his car.

Then he heard a hoarse yell! The yell cracked in the middle and died. It stopped as if cut with a knife.

It had been Smitty’s yell, from down the block.

The Avenger could move so fast, when an urgent matter required it, that he made the movements of normal men seem like slow motion. He moved that way, his body a gray streak as he raced toward the sound of the call.

Smitty had stayed in the backyard of Gunther Caine’s home for a full five minutes after seeing the last of the wraithlike, emaciated figure. He had looked all around for it—and found nothing.

But he found traces of the thing. Traces enough to prove to him that he really had seen something, and not just imagined it.

The night was dewy, and when he bent down he could see a line along the grass, in the moisture, where this thing had moved. So something had really been there.

“But not,” Smitty told himself, “any geezer, in the robes of an ancient Egyptian priest. That’s crazy. That part I must have imagined because I was thinking about the chief and the Egyptian stuff he came here to examine.”

After five minutes of prowling around the backyard, with no results to show for it, Smitty walked back to the glittering car.

He started to get in and saw the tall, thin figure, again.

This time it was down the street, at least half a block away. How it had gotten down the narrow strip of lawn between houses, and out to the sidewalk without Smitty’s seeing it, was a mystery.

There was a high wall in back of Caine’s house so the thing couldn’t get out that way. Unless it was as ghostly as it looked and could walk through things like walls.

“Humph,” growled Smitty. “There are no such things as ghosts.”

He started after the figure again, and it promptly disappeared. But an instant later he got a glimpse of something like whitish mist to the right.

When he got to that section of the block, he found a large vacant lot, with trees sprinkled through it. The trees cast deep shadows, but he began investigating, hunting for the thing.

Probably some maniac was wandering loose under the hallucination that he was an Egyptian priest. He might be harmless. On the other hand he might be dangerous. Smitty thought he ought to be shut up somewhere.

He made his soundless way toward the center of the open space. And then he stopped with a grunt. It was all he could do to keep from sounding out and giving his presence away.