In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 (34 page)

The table was not wide. It held on its plain surface a carafe and glasses, folded cloths, and what seemed some sort of case, covered with a square of black silk.

Posts stayed the flooring above. There was something that looked like a frame for growing mushrooms. Earth, several inches thick, was confined in the frame; rich-looking soil, evidently recently prepared, watered.

It was hardly a grave, but it suggested it.

Shadowy figures stood about. Manning counted six of them, without his own two guards, who stepped away from him at a gesture from the Griffin. The six others were dressed in denim overalls, numbers stenciled in yellow on their breasts. Their faces were all haggard, hopeless, abject.

“Sit down, Manning,” said the Griffin. “I should have preferred to finish this matter between us in more elaborate surroundings, but, after all, that is largely your fault. You have made the vicinity of New York an uncomfortable place for me of late. I grant you that. You circumscribed my freedom. So I found this place, where I can be fairly well contented for a time. Until the hue-and-cry that will follow your death, and the exhibition of your body to the public gaze dies down. Until the yapping of the hounds ceases.”

The Griffin was under self-control, temporarily. But red lights came and went in his dark eyes like the gleams in black opals, orange and crimson glints of murder and madness.

“I shall try to comply with any last request of yours,” he went on mockingly. “It is the universal custom. But first, let me explain what I have finally decided upon.”

He plucked the silk square from the case and showed, nested in velvet, an array of gleaming knives. They might have been a surgeon’s scalpels, save for their settings. Each was handled in ivory, stained red, intricately carven. The case was of teak, inlaid about the edges. In the center was one long, thin dagger with a fluted blade, several inches long. The haft was of gray jade, carved to represent a skeleton in a squatting position, the end of it the skull.

The Griffin took this from the case and thrust its tip into the wood.

“You have traveled in the Orient, Manning,” he went on. “You will recognize the cutlery of the executioner. This belonged to a man who once was an emperor’s favorite, a master of the Death of a Thousand Cuts. If that man were alive, and available, I think I should have decided on that for your end. A superb demonstration of surface anatomy. But, to do it properly, one should first give the ceremonial cuts of mercy, removing the ears, the lips, the nose, the eyes, destroying—synthetically, I grant you—the senses of the victim.

“But the correct procedure would mutilate your face, and I want that to be very surely recognized. The body will not so much matter. And I could only obtain a substitute executioner, who proved, upon trial, most clumsy. He would have killed you far too soon, Manning, far too soon.”

Manning looked steadfastly at the Griffin, knowing he could have little effect upon those eyes that regretted the abandoned spectacle of a man dissected, nerve by nerve, every sensitive part of his body quivering in agony as his life leached out from the sliced flesh, with all the main arteries and veins skillfully avoided.

He looked at the
snickersee,
the long-bladed knife with which the executioner of the
Grand Li-Chi,
might, if it were the will or whim of the emperor or magistrate, give the
coup de grâce.

It was close to the Griffin’s reach.

“So,” said the Griffin, “I chose another form of Oriental disposal, wherein one honors an enemy with a lingering death. I have been at some pains, knowing you would soon be in my toils, to obtain the right kind of bamboo sprouts, also to arrange a swift-growing soil of rich humus. I need not tell you the process, Manning. You will be stripped, bound very securely to that frame, face and belly down, after the sprout, already for the purpose, chosen from a score I have been treating, is planted there.

“Within twelve hours at most it will have grown through your softer parts, no doubt with considerable unpleasantness. The tip should show beside your spine, to the right or left. I am not sure how long after that you will continue to live. Perhaps you can inform me.”

VI

Last Request

He leaned forward, his face close to that of Manning over the table, taunting and contemptuous. Manning did not waver. It was a death so fantastic, so excruciatingly agonizing, that only the Oriental mind could have conceived it, only a mad monster like the Griffin have adopted it.

“When you are dead, Manning, I shall take pains to have your corpse placed on public exhibition. It may be found below Washington Arch, or on the Rocking Stone in Central Park. That is a matter of detail. But all the world will know how and why you died.”

The Griffin licked his cruel lips, where once more curds of froth gathered.

“I am Alpha and Omega, Manning,” he half chanted. “I am Apollyon, let lose upon earth to whip back mortals to the knowledge and worship of the true gods, or to destroy them.”

In another moment, Manning saw that the Griffin would lose all control, and could no longer restrain his appetite to see his supreme enemy set to the living torture of the bamboo sprout.

“There was the matter of the last request,” he said, in a steady voice.

“Of course. Name it.”

“If I write a few words, will you see them delivered?”

“They shall reach the hands of the proper party, that I promise you.”

The Griffin grinned beneath the curve of his nose, looking slyly down it. Manning knew the Griffin thought he would write to the woman he loved, and the Griffin could get additional zest over reading the lines that would be Manning’s own epitaph. They would never be delivered, save to the Griffin, considering himself the “proper party.”

“You took a notebook and a fountain pen from me,” said Manning. “I can use them.”

The Griffin cackled. “A leaf from the notebook, yes, but not the pen, not your pen, Manning. You have tricks of your own. The most innocent looking fountain pens have turned out to be gas-guns, even miniature pistols. I will let you use my own pen. You have often read what it set down. What more fitting than to use it for your own last testament, or whatever it is you intend to write? The ink is purple, as you know. Quite fitting the occasion, the—to you—mournful occasion.”

The Griffin was squeezing the last drop of enjoyment he could out of Manning’s predicament. He beckoned, and the case of knives was removed. Manning watched the departure of the
snickersee,
the knife-of-mercy, with longing. Then the Griffin handed over his pen, charged with the vivid ink that Manning had always seen in the Griffin’s communications, which were always intended as death warrants.

Now he was in the toils. His arms were freed, on the Griffin’s order. They were very sure of him. They had him helpless and unarmed. Soon he would be naked, bound to the frame that held the dirt, with the tip of the bamboo sprout; its outer skin armored with vegetable silica, a living dagger; pressed against his navel.

He tried out the pen-point. It was wide, a generous nib, fitted for the Griffin’s striking calligraphy. The Griffin watched him with his face like a mask of malignant derision, his eyes glittering, the tip of his tongue showing between his teeth and his lips like a serpent’s single tongue. Manning told himself he was surprised not to find it forked.

A moment more and he would know for certain if he were going to die horribly or whether he would be able to use the one chance for liberty with which he had provided himself.

He tried the pen again on his thumbnail, as if to test its flexibility. The ink ran freely, left a small purple splotch. But that was not going to matter.

Manning laid down the pen, sighed slightly, while the tip of the Griffin’s tongue protruded, further in pleased malice. He passed his hand over his forehead, his hair, round to the back of his neck, forward across his right ear; his eyes closed, like a man disheartened and perplexed.

The butt of his right palm contacted with something, and Manning’s spirit leaped within him. He was careful to keep his eyes closed lest they give him away.

It was still in place, though he had feared the nets might have rasped it loose.

Manning’s ears were well-shaped. They lay close against his skull, the lobes generous. Behind the lobe of his right ear was a small capsule, attached with a special wax, impervious to moisture. A tiny pellet of gelatine.

But far more deadly than any bullet. The gelatine was thin but tough; the contents were drops of frightful virulence. Here was venom that, once introduced into the blood, meant hideous and inevitable death. Only large doses of anti-venine immediately and copiously introduced could save the victim.

Manning caught the pellet in the crook of his little finger as a thimble-rigger nicks his pea. He clasped both his hands nervously. The Griffin chuckled to see that sign of despair.

“It is hard to know what to write,” said Manning wearily, “I doubt if you would ever deliver it. You seem to win this bout, Griffin, yet your victory will be brief. Madness rises steadily within you….”

As he carefully chose his barbed phrases, he watched the Griffin. The Griffin’s hands clutched and unclutched like the talons of a beast that wants to rend and tear. And Manning transferred the poison pellet from his right hand to his left.

He once more picked up the pen, as if to test it, for the third time.

“Soon,” he said to the Griffin, “you will be a raving maniac, no better than a mad dog. You….”

The Griffin half rose, leaning across the table with his face opposite that of Manning, his lips drawn back in a snarl. The attendants stayed still. It was theirs to obey, not to initiate.

“Write,” hissed the Griffin, “
write,
you fool! Or—”

Manning jabbed the broad gold point of the pen into the capsule. With a movement fast as the strike of a snake, he drove the envenomed nib into the Griffin’s cheek, twice.

Blood showed, mixed with purple ink. The Griffin gasped with rage and astonishment, and with that indrawn breath, his doom was sealed.

“Deadliest venom known, Griffin,” said Manning, coolly but swiftly, so that the Griffin would hear him before the frightful poison took effect. “Venom of the
boomslang,
the South African tree snake. You are a dead man as you stand there.”

Curds of foam were thick about the lips of the Griffin. His voice rasped horribly as he sought to utter words his brain would not confirm.

“You lie, Manning! You lie!”

His eyes showed completely circled by the whites, and then the whites were suddenly congested with red veins, that broke and met until the dark irises seemed floating in blood.

His nostrils flared wide, trying to catch a full breath. His hands clutched at his throat as if he would tear it open to gain oxygen. His vitality was amazing, beyond all belief. Just as the mad monk, Rasputin, fought off poison, so the Griffin resisted the
boomslang
venom.

The attendants watched, spellbound and motionless. They did not know exactly what had happened, save that this had been a duel between two Masters; the Griffin, and the man who was the law to which they themselves were subject.

Manning watched, marveling. He knew the ink could not have diluted the venom. Unlike the viperine snakes, where the toxine destroys the blood corpuscles, the
boomslang,
like the mamba and the cobras, paralyzes the nervous system.

The Griffin swayed upon his feet, bereft of speech now. His face twitched. With infinite effort he moved one hand, one taloned finger quivered in the endeavor to point it at Manning.

There was a hideous cackle in his throat that changed to a rattle. His glaring eyes accused Manning of using cogged dice against his own prepared cubes, in this last gamble in which the Griffin lost.

He seemed to attempt to speak. Then his jaws became rigid, the ghastly grin of death fixed upon them, before he toppled to the floor, his bloodset eyes still staring horribly, his face the hue of old putty.

The slaves still stood silent, servile and irresolute. Their timid eyes moved toward Manning.

“The Griffin is dead,” Manning told them. “You are free. I am the law, but I am not seeking you. After I leave, serve yourselves as best you can. I shall leave you so that you can soon release yourselves. The law may trail you eventually, but I am not your hunter. I have rid you of a monster. I am giving you a break for liberty.”

It might not be ethics, but it was humanity; and not far from justice, he told himself. They all had suffered terribly.

They made no demur as he herded them into a smaller chamber and rolled a heavy barrel against the door.

He put the Griffin’s pen, capped carefully, into his pocket, for a souvenir. The commissioner might like it.

The madness had gone out of the Griffin’s feral features as Manning bent over him. The eyes were dead eyes. It was a magnificent cranium, the upper skull a case that had held a genius some taint had curdled, turning every thought to the desire to destroy all that was good.

Manning realized that the men who had been in the car, like those who had flown the autogyro, might not be so amenable as the numbered slaves. He found the Griffin’s mask in a pocket of the robe he took from the dead body, and now put on. In another pocket was his own gun. He donned the skullcap and went up the stairs to the central hall, imitating the stride of the man who had once worn this garb.

The chauffeur sat there, springing to attention.

Manning snarled at him in a rasping voice, and the man cringed as if struck with a whip.

“The car, fool, the car!”

The car stood at the door with its powerful engines purring like lions in the sun. The driver opened the door—and Manning clubbed him neatly and efficiently with the muzzle of his gun.

He took the driving seat and rolled the car away from the old house.

The Griffin was dead! There was no doubt of that. And all of his slaves and sub-fiends were impotent without the head devil.