In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 (21 page)

“We’ll see what our friend Manning makes of
this
opening,” he murmured. Al could not hear. The chauffeur, driving like an automaton, heard nothing.

He was not only servant, but slave to his master, who held him in unrighteous thrall, as the Griffin held all who served him, fearful of his power, his knowledge of their hidden lives.

II

The Voice of Evil

The lifeless, strangled body of Martha Everest, eminent psychiatrist, was found this morning by her personal maid when she brought her dead mistress her usual tray of tea and toast and orange juice.

On the brow of her mistress was the crimson insignia of the homicidal madman known as the Griffin; a red cartouche embossed with the design of an heraldic griffin, rampant, showing the upper half of the mythical monster, half-lion and half-eagle.

The maid, Susan Robinson, who has been in the service of Dr. Everest for many years, retained her senses long enough to call the police. They arrived to find the rest of the household unconscious of the tragedy, and the maid in a profound swoon.

Aroused, she stated, and the two other servants of the household corroborated her story, that there had been no alarm in the night. The doors of the house were found locked, the entrance gate fastened. A Belgian police dog was discovered poisoned, apparently by cyanide.

There were faint tracks on the lawn, but dew had plainly fallen later. The police….

Manning, at breakfast, tossed aside his paper as the telephone sounded. With its first tinkle he knew, aside from what he had been reading, that the Griffin had struck again. Without warning. Then the mocking voice spoke to him, with its inevitable, faint accompaniment of eerie, barbaric music.

“My dear Manning, you will have learned by now that I have made my opening move in a fresh game, and established my gambit. I attended to this matter with my own hands. It seemed to me quite a personal matter, and I must admit that I got distinct exhilaration out of it.”

The voice paused, as if hoping to draw some retort, some expression, from Manning. But Manning did not answer. He was pledged to destroy the Griffin. Manning had caught him once, and the law had judged him insane, placing him in Dannemora, where his fiendish ingenuity devised means of escape.

“That vaporing harridan, Martha Everest, had the temerity to refer to me as an outstanding example of dementia praecox. I sealed her lips and brain forever. She was a strong-minded woman, but I almost spoiled my own purpose. I almost frightened her to death before I strangled her. There have been times when I should like to strangle you, Manning, but I have thought of many other more ingenious ways of disposing of you. You were born under a lucky star, but some day the signs will properly assemble, and you will cease to bother me—though, mostly, you have amused me.”

There had been times when Manning had actually lifted a chalice of death to his lips, others when he escaped by the breadth of a hair. It would always be so until he annihilated the Griffin or the Griffin played an unbeatable gambit and swept Manning from the board.

“I am reverting to previous methods in my next move, Manning,” continued the Griffin. “You will hear from me within twenty-four hours. I shall send you the name of my next candidate for elimination, also the date of his demise.”

Then came the taunting laugh, tainted with madness, tinged with infinite malevolence, laughter that would fit well in the horror-haunted halls of hell itself.

The laughter blended with the exotic music, died away.

Gordon Manning, ex-Major of Military Intelligence in the World War; adventurer, explorer and also counsellor-at-law, though he never appeared to plead a case, had been commissioned by both city and state to uncover and annihilate the Griffin.

But he did not now bestir himself to aid in the search for the murderer of the woman. He knew that once the Griffin had struck—given a clean getaway—he would not be traced by any ordinary methods. The police would do their best.

Manning was gradually gathering a force of under cover agents to offset the Griffin’s slaves. Manning’s recruits knew no age limit. He chose them for their aptitude. They included boys and men in all walks of life, one or two girls, and one woman. Not all of them knew to what end they worked, or even that they did police work.

A lot of them seemed slender threads to weave a net about such a monster, but Manning was the weaver. Slowly, but he hoped surely, Manning’s agents worked to the final end of discovering the Griffin’s lair.

Manning adopted the method of the honey-hunter, who, capturing a bee, let it fly and marked its direct flight to the hive. The ultimate crossing of the angles would locate the hidden spot, where the Griffin had regathered his forces since his escape from Dannemora.

So far, Manning had gathered odds and ends of information that seemed to show that the Griffin’s powerful car invariably headed towards a destination not far from New York. Such a car was fairly conspicuous, but not unmistakable. No doubt he shifted his license numbers, but there was a limit to that dodge.

Also, Manning had spotted a few of the men who had worked with the Griffin in the execution of his crimes. He might have discarded them, and they were watched, but Manning watched them also.

So now Manning waited to hear from these agents of his. In the hours before the message of impending doom arrived he meant to store up energy. He did not dismiss the matter from his mind entirely. That was a nervous impossibility. The Griffin’s evil impulses broke through any attempt at assuming a genuine serenity.

Manning had breakfasted in dressing gown above his pajamas.

But he did light a Burmese cheroot and selected a volume from the handy shelves of the library.

The book was an early edition of Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” He riffled the pages to the place where Christian encountered the “foul fiend, Apollyon.”

“So he went on, and Apollyon met him. Now the monster was hideous to behold: he was clothed with scales like a fish, and they are his pride; he had wings like a dragon, and feet like a bear, and out of his belly came fire and smoke, and his mouth was the mouth of a lion…. Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter. Prepare thyself to die; for I swear by this infernal den that thou shalt go no further; here will I spill thy soul.”

Manning did not liken himself to the redoubtable “Pilgrim,” but he fancied that the Griffin might be comparing himself to Apollyon. And Apollyon finally got the worst of it.

That chuckle was not so confident in the late afternoon. He had a certain book in his hand when the Griffin’s expected message was delivered. That might have been coincidence, but it was somewhat uncanny. In the light of what happened, Manning began to wonder about the intimate knowledge the Griffin revealed of his private life—if it were privy against the power of that perverted genius.

The message came at dusk, normally enough delivered. Manning considered the uniformed messenger boy genuine, though he would check up on that without hope of learning much. To trace the Griffin by such clews was about as useful as trying to trace the course of a fish in the water.

The letter, with its envelope, was on the familiar heavy hand-made gray paper, the bold writing in purple ink. Its general style was the grandiloquent and autocratic manner the Griffin always affected. But the form of address had varied. The epistle was headed with the name of the Griffin’s next victim.

It was a name that Manning knew well. A man he knew, respected, and admired; with whom he had actually adventured along wild trails.

Bayard Harding.

In “Who’s Who,” Harding was set down as a zoölogist, but he was also an explorer and anthropologist of note.

His latest dictum had stirred not only the scientific, but the world at large. The gorilla, claimed Harding, had almost given up entirely its habit of living in the trees. Its nests were now made upon the ground. It no longer traveled by swinging through the boughs. Its arms were shortening, legs lengthening, and it maintained an upright position as its natural gait.

Soon, very soon, as science measures time, the gorilla would begin to follow the course of natural evolution, it would become a kind of man.

This statement of Harding’s had provoked anger in some quarters. But the Griffin appeared to be more virulent than any other critic. To the Griffin, star-gazer, necromancer, caster of horoscopes, and ardent believer in zodiacal influence; Harding was a blasphemer, seeking to asperse the principle of astrology, to mock at the signs of the heavens. Therefore, Bayard Harding was to be eliminated.

The Griffin wrote:

This man, seeking notoriety, would pretend that the positions of the heavenly bodies and their courses through the starry universe are linked up with the destinies of brutes. He offends the gods and I, their appointed arbiter and agent, shall destroy him.

The date, my dear Manning, shall be on the seventeenth of this month. That give you time to prepare your important defenses. Nothing on earth may save him.

I am also granting you a pawn. Here is a hint for you. If you ever read the analects of Lao Tsze you may remember the following:

“To know the habits of your friend is not always wise, lest that make you despise him. To know the habits of your enemy enables you to defeat him, even to easily compass his death against all opposition.”

I know some of your habits, Manning, as well as those of Bayard Harding. Beware your own destruction.

There was no signature, only the heraldic device of a demi-griffin, rampant, showing the eagle beak and wings, the lion’s mane and claws.

Manning set down the letter, looked at the book he had been reading when the telephone had tinkled, and brought to him the premonitory thrill of evil and peril.

It was a small volume, beautifully printed and bound in vellum. The title was deeply stamped in gold: “Analects of Lao Tsze.”

There was small doubt that the Griffin did not boast when he said he knew some of Manning’s habits, little question that Manning was being spied upon. Yet he would have risked his life upon the integrity of his two Japanese servitors. Soon, that was going to be proven.

As for the Griffin, despite his phrases, Manning knew that his main grievance lay in the suggestion that he, the chosen of the gods, an immortal of a thousand reincarnations, should be compared, however remotely, with an ape. That, and the fact that he was insanely jealous of anyone, or anything connected with progressive achievement.

Harding had to be seen, and warned. Manning knew how his friend would take it, victor over scores of desperate risks against savage men and beasts, and the forces of nature. None the less, Manning believed that he could persuade Harding to let him take every precaution that would not insult Harding’s manhood.

He could not get a man like Bayard Harding to hide himself, to surrender his ordinary affairs. And the Griffin, when he killed, had penetrated even to the most modern of vaults and claimed his victim.

The clew was in that pawn the Griffin condescended to give his opponent, it lay in the “Analects of Lao Tsze.” Through some habit of Harding’s that might also be a habit of Manning’s, the fatal blow would materialize. And a man’s habits were legion.

There was the commissioner of police to be informed, but not the press. Time enough for criticism if the Griffin’s gambit won the game.

III

The Poison Is Tested

The Griffin, in his long robe of sable silk, embroidered with cabalistic symbols in gold, descended by the concealed elevator from his private chamber to the cellars where he had set up his laboratories.

His face was masked with the clinging stuff that looked like goldbeater’s skin, half screening, half revealing his saturnine features. He looked like a pharaoh risen from his sarcophagus.

Al, the legless, deaf and dumb freak, ambled after him, like a familiar spirit. He knew to what such a visit tended, the rudimentary soul in him delighted in the horrors he would witness.

As they left the chamber it was redolent of burned amber, of hasheesh-tinged tobacco, filled with faint strains of strange music.

A man in denim overalls, whose face was bloodless, like something that had grown in a dungeon, a man with the cranium of a genius, but whose eyes were dull with despair, was waiting for his master. He had no name, only a number stenciled on the overalls.

“I am conducting an experiment,” said the Griffin. “It is a dangerous one, Number Twenty-Four. I wish you to stand by, to use every effort to resuscitate any one who may be affected. You are to do your utmost. I wish you to gather your apparatus and your materials in readiness.”

The voice of Twenty-Four was hollow as an echo in a tomb.

“I must ask the nature of the experiment,” he said. “At least, what I must expect to combat.”

“Asphyxiation covers it, broadly.
This
will be the agent.”

The Griffin gave the ex-physician a slip of paper on which chemical symbols had been set down by another unnamed slave, once a famous chemist, whose disappearance had never been solved, though it was accounted for officially by the sudden death of his unfaithful mistress. The Griffin had offered him a haven.

Number Twenty-Four glanced at the paper.

“This is an intensely toxic, volatile and rapid poison, classed as protoplasmic,” he said. “Employed in this form, which should prove difficult, I doubt if the victim could be resuscitated.”

“Nevertheless, you will do your best,” the Griffin told him, his tones like sharp steel, rasping on sharp steel. “Your mention of poison and victim is untimely, Twenty-Four. I do not know that an accident may happen. If it should, tell me your treatment.”