In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 (2 page)

“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.

“You have his finger-prints?” asked the Griffin. He received the record, studied them, compared them with others and chuckled. He waved the two men back. The door slid to, the tapestry fell.

The man grew suddenly belligerent, with a burst of anger.

“You trying to frame me?” he cried.

The Griffin grinned and his mask wrinkled.

“You are already framed,” he answered.

Burns started from his chair. Al’s knife rose halfway from its sheath as he gazed for permission from his master to complete the cast. But there came a yelp of anguish from Burns. His eyes bulged from his head, his face twisted in anguish, his hands were clamped about the arms of the chair as an electric current held him there, galvanized, helpless, suffering. The current died and the man sank panting into the deceptive cushions.

“Just a foretaste, my friend, of what may be your ultimate end,” said the Griffin. “If the authorities knew all that paper held it would not be long before you would be in the autopsy room back of the Execution Chamber, after you had squatted in the hot seat. I have the power to send you there, or to keep you free of it, to condemn you for your past sins or reward you for services rendered—to me. Look at this disk of bronze—
look at it!”
—he commanded compellingly—“and tell me if you know this name.”

Burns scowled villainously. He was missing something. Back in the dark, unused recesses of his mind he wondered vaguely if he had been mistaken for his brother—if he were being punished because his brother was on the police force.

Letters appeared in flickering incandescence on the disk. They spelled a name that had not been included in the man’s record. Now he realized the Griffin knew all. His eyes gleamed with a long smoldering hate, fanned to fire by the wind of fury.

“I know it,” he snarled. “The canting hypocrite!”

Again the Griffin chuckled malignantly.

“Good,” he said. “If I give you a chance to serve me, and to even a score with this man, will you obey with eagerness?”

“Give me the chance!”

“The chance is yours if you prove clever enough to pass the test,” the Griffin told him. “Revenge is sweet. Is it not, 17745?”

The man snarled again.

“He sent me there, he branded me with that number,” he cried. “He made a caged beast out of me and called it duty. I’ll measure up. If I could put him where he placed me I’d give the rest of my life to do it.”

“Your wish may be accomplished,” said the Griffin and there was a mocking ring to his tones that the other missed. “Your instructions will commence to-morrow. Meantime you will be well served though your quarters may prove confining and, perhaps, a trifle reminiscent of your recent habitation. But at least the food will be better. There will be liquor and something else I fancy you crave more. Though that is a habit you must keep in hand for the present.”

“You’re going to give me some snow?” asked the other, half incredulously.

“A certain prescription. Be careful of it. It will not be diluted like the drug the trusties slipped you in Ossining. That is all.”

Again the tapestry moved, the door slid aside. At a gesture from the Griffin, Al stalked grotesquely forward to lead the way for the bewildered Burns. Light glowed blue in a curving corridor. The steel door closed again. Alone, the Griffin reached for the silver mouthpiece of a Turkish hubble-bubble. He lit the fragrant weed in the bowl, tinctured with hashish. The air bubbled in the rose-scented water and wreaths of smoke made wispy patterns.

Manning admired Harvey Allison first, then liked the man for his sheer humanity. He was both an advanced intellectual and a gentleman of the utmost courtesy.

He was a rare combination. If his head was occasionally in the clouds his feet were firmly planted on the earth. He was primarily a gentleman and a scholar, far from the ordinary conception of what such an ultramodern scientist might be. He was perhaps the foremost man of the age, since he did not stay at theories, but proved and made them practical and of value to his fellowman and Allison was altogether a charming person to meet.

He had the skull of the born scholar with eyes far apart and seeking, a tolerant mouth; the nose of the adventurer—whether of uncharted seas or unknown cosmic realms.

He was the opposite of the Griffin. Here, Manning reflected, was the true genius, a power for good, while the Griffin was like an evil jinni bent only upon malice.

Allison, if his claims were well founded, and Manning did not doubt them, was possessed of a force that was stupendous, that could not be comprehended. Men thought of it in terms of war, of destruction and it was true that, so used, it would prove irresistible. But Allison looked beyond that. If he could secure world peace, that was but a step in the progress he imagined. That atomic power of his could provide light, heat, energy that would release all men from the slavery of producing necessities and set them truly free for higher efforts. With it he could defeat climate, eliminate present fuels, outleap electricity, harness cosmic forces to the chariot of ascending evolution.

That, he owned, was still his dream, but it was more than a vision. He had isolated the idea and made it concrete. In his brain there glowed a divine inspiration.

Something of this, beyond public knowledge, Manning knew through his associations with the secret archives of the Government. Now that he had met the man he believed in him. Allison had the brow of a prophet, the inner glow of one set apart, appointed.

His workshop was a penthouse, set high on a Manhattan skyscraper, secured to him by special privilege of the magnate who had built the towering edifice as self-tribute to a successful career. These were the days when successful financiers raised buildings, as the Pharaohs erected stele needles and pyramids.

“I’ve heard of you, Manning,” said Allison cordially. “It seems that I am marked down by this maniac who styles himself the Griffin. A fanatic, of course. Star-gazer and so on. Well, I have been threatened before. I could paper my main room with warnings and death warrants from every variety of communist, syndicalist and the generally deluded who think that world progress must be based upon destruction.

“Perhaps you know Dougherty?” he went on. “He has been appointed my special bodyguard to protect me from annoyance and my penthouse from sabotage. I am happy to say that he has become my close friend and also my assistant.”

Manning shook hands with Detective Sergeant Dougherty who laughed at the idea that he was able to assist Allison. But it was clear that the upstanding Irishman was an admiring adherent of the noted scientist and that, aside from science, the two liked each other.

The police commissioner had told Manning about Dougherty.

“He’s due for an inspectorship,” said the commissioner. “He deserves it. There’s not a braver, straighter man on the force than Tom Dougherty. I wish I had a dozen like him. He leans over backwards when it comes to honesty and he’s got intelligence. Allison rates him highly and I miss him badly. He’s been an efficient bodyguard but, if the Griffin’s in on this, we’ll see he’s reënforced. What do you propose?”

Manning was not backward in his proposals.

“Here,” he said, “is a man born once in a century, once in ten centuries. His brain holds value greater than that of all the treasuries of the world. His success means not merely the supremacy of the United States but, far more than that, the establishment of world friendship. He is the outstanding product of modern intelligence. He told me, half jestingly, that he preferred his penthouse laboratory because, if the atoms should run amuck and there should be a catastrophe it would cause least damage on the top of a high building.

“It makes it easier for us to protect. It is most vulnerable from the sky. As for that….”

“I’ll see to that,” said the commissioner, “that the sky is clear not only during the twenty-four hours of the eleventh, but from sunset of the tenth until sunrise of the twelfth. Washington will help us in this. They know the value of Allison. We’ll not let a mosquito get within an air mile of the Whistler Building. And we’ll not let a stranger, we’ll not let
anyone
get on that roof or into that penthouse. Inside, it’s up to you, Manning. You and Dougherty, though of course I’ll give you all the men you want. You’ll be in a state of siege. I defy the Griffin to get through.”

“I defy him,” said Manning, “but I don’t underestimate his resources. He is not an ordinary man. He is a fiend. His genius is as facile for evil as Allison’s is for good. I only trust I can get a glimpse of him.”

“I’m with you in that,” said the commissioner. “Manning, if you get a chance to kill that devil, don’t hesitate.”

“I have no intention of seeing him go to trial a second time,” said Manning grimly. He did not count his chickens before they were hatched, much less the brain children of a griffin. But his hunch told him that the Griffin had counted all defenses, calculated them as a master chess-player reckons the possible moves of a skilled opponent.

The sky might be guarded, all approach to the penthouse protected; but the Griffin had a plan. His mine was planted, the fuse would soon be lit.