The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (14 page)

There was a man called Samson. He destroyed himself and his enemies by the incredible feat of pushing two vast pillars apart and bringing a temple crashing down.

Smitty hadn’t quite that terrific a task, because the pillars were set only stone on stone, without cement, and bore only the stone slabs of the lintel instead of an entire building. But he was doing something that perhaps not another man alive could have done, just the same.

Under the mighty power of his massive arms and shoulders, the pillars were moving a little. You could hear the stones grinding together.

The left pillar tilted a very little, and the great stone slabs above slid with the move. And the racing horde of white-clad figures slowed and stared with dull eyes at the lintel.

Then they came on. Impossible for any mortal to move that mass.

Nellie could hear a low, continuous moaning sound of effort from the giant’s lips. She could see a few drops of blood squeeze slowly from around his fingernails as sinew and muscle refused to take that pressure unharmed.

“Get behind me,” panted Smitty.

Josh and Nellie squeezed past the straining form, and into the room beyond the Egyptian wing. There was a final heave of the big fellow’s body, with a snapping of tendons and a ripping sound as his arm muscles tore out the sleeves of his coat.

Then there was a low, beginning rumble.

The charging horde stopped so quickly that they almost fell. Then they began to scramble back.

Back away from the four pillars and the stone slabs.

Smitty leaped backward, too, across the threshold over which Josh and Nellie had just retreated. The giant was a near-three-hundred-pound mass of slabs of muscle, but he could move like a flyweight when he had to.

That agility saved his life now, which made him one up on Samson, who had destroyed himself as well as his enemies.

There was a final grinding noise, and then the roar of pillars and slabs as they smashed down like an avalanche on the museum floor. There was a second roar as the stone floor and the tons of rock fell into the basement.

A hole ten yards across yawned between Josh and Nellie and Smitty, and the white-clad horde. The three were saved. They made their leisurely way, with the temple murderers raging futilely behind them across the chasm, to the big bronze entrance. There they unbolted the ponderous locks and walked out.

In the case Nellie had carried down from the Bleek Street headquarters at The Avenger’s request, were many odd bits of apparatus. It was so light that a girl could handle it quite easily. And yet it had carefully selected utensils and chemicals that enabled Benson to perform marvelous laboratory feats.

He was performing one now, though his aides could not yet read the answer to the riddle.

The Avenger had set up a small atomic-bombardment cylinder that would have made any professional in the field of scientific research weep with envy and awe. Under the quartz lens at the open end of the light cylinder, on a slightly tilted little platform, Benson had placed a most common object.

It was an ordinary glass water tumbler, thick, plain—of the type to be picked up in any dime store. The tumbler was empty.

Josh and Mac, Smitty and Nellie and Rosabel, had discarded their belt radios. The invisible atomic bombardment would have ruined them if they were too close. But now they were all together, anyhow, so there would be no radio appeal for help from one of their number.

No such appeal as Smitty had barely heard, on his way to join Mac at Blessing’s house, and which had sent the giant racing to Braintree Museum like a vengeful landslide.

The atomic bombardment was snapping and crackling. No light came from the quartz lens, yet you got an impression of something streaming out just the same. That was because the rays given off as a by-product of the breaking down of uranium were invisible to the human eye.

The Avenger was slowly moving the lens back and forth, in a careful straight line, along the tilted side of the glass water tumbler. The molecules of the glass, exposed to the tremendous power of the atomic disruption, were, in theory at least, supposed to be rearranged by that slow and repeated movement. They were supposed to rearrange themselves in countless straight lines, by being, in a sense, “combed” smooth. Much the same result is achieved in polaroid glass by different methods.

Benson passed the odd lens up and down a hundred times or so. Then he repeated the process, but moved the vibrant cylinder from side to side, as if to comb the unseen molecules of glass forming the tumbler from a series of lines into a sort of screen.

The snapping and crackling stopped. The weird light from the upper end of the cylinder, that turned the normal room into a chamber that was like a look into the far future, died out.

Benson snapped on the ordinary lights. Then he went two rooms away and got his belt radio.

He warmed it up, and spoke into it.

“Hello!”

His aides looked at each other, puzzled.

Benson’s voice had seemed blurred. There had seemed to be an echo contained within it. It was as if, precisely as he said hello, someone else in the room had said something like “ayo.”

“How did you make your voice sound like that?” Mac asked, looking perplexed.

The Avenger did not answer. With the tiny radio in his hand, he left the room. They heard him go far down the hall, heard a door open and close in the far end of the house.

They looked at each other again.

“What on earth—” began Nellie.

A tinny, hardly recognizable voice sounded in the room. It said:

“Ayo.”

Smitty whirled on Mac.

“You Scotch joker,” he said. “What’s the idea of playing tricks on us?”

“Tricks?” said Mac. “Arrre ye daft? What tricks would I be playin’?”

“You said ‘Ayo,’ or something like that. You said it when the chief said hello a minute ago, and again now.”

“Whoosh, ye’re soft in the belfry—”

“Ayo!”

This time the sound had come even as the dour Scot—who was about as far from a joker as it is possible for a man to be—had been talking. So, he was ruled out.

Both Mac and Smitty whirled on Josh.

“Not guilty,” said the Negro.

He said it abstractedly, however, and he wasn’t looking at his astounded colleagues. He was looking at the now lifeless cylinder with the quartz lens, and at the water glass.

Mainly at the water glass.

“Ayo.”

The tinny sound came from the tumbler. Everyone in the room suddenly knew that. All five of them drew near it, fascinated.

And once more sound came from the commonplace thing that could be picked up in any dime store.

“Ayo.”

The door opened, and Benson came back in.

“Chief,” stuttered the giant Smitty, “th-that tumbler. How could it—”

He didn’t finish the question. And none of the others spoke.

The Avenger’s face was a frozen, cold waste of menace—toward someone. His eyes were like small ice disks with pale light behind them. When he looked like that, even his trusted aides dared not speak to him unless spoken to first. And it was when he looked like this that you forgot his normal size and build, and were convinced that he was a colossus who towered even over the tremendous Smitty.

Benson turned to Josh. There was no word about the tumbler.

“Josh, you say you saw the mummy, Taros’ son, walking last night?”

“Yes, sir,” nodded Josh emphatically. “I certainly did. It may sound impossible. But I’d swear to it before any jury—”

“You say the face was exposed,” mused Benson, eyes pale flares in his dead, white face. “From the description, it closely resembled the face of Gunther Caine’s son, Harold. But that’s not the important part. The significant thing is the exposure itself.”

“The linen bands were off the face,” nodded Josh.

Benson took up the phone, and called the curator, Gunther Caine.

“Please meet me at the museum as soon as you can,” he said crisply. “Yes, I know you told me there was no more to be done about the Taros relics. But I am going on with the investigation, just the same.”

There was a sound of Caine’s agitated voice. Then The Avenger spoke again. From his tone, this time, there was no appeal.

“You will meet me, Mr. Caine”—the words were like drops of ice water—“at the museum as soon as possible.”

The museum was peopled with its usual day-time crowd of information seekers. There were designers, busily stealing dress and industrial designs from the masterpieces of ancient peoples. There were students. There were the usual casual sightseers who didn’t know a broadax from a tibia but enjoyed roaming through the wonders of the past just the same.

The Avenger threaded his way among these, with Caine at his side.

Gunther Caine had repeated his insistence that the investigation be dropped, till the icy, deadly eyes swung on him. Just once! Now he walked silently beside Benson, glancing up at the death-mask face now and then, moistening dry lips, but making no more protests.

The Egyptian wing was closed, of course. Behind the barricaded door, workmen were repairing the collapse of the flooring that had occurred when four great pillars and two equally ponderous stone slabs fell on it.

Everyone agreed that the collapse of the pillars was most unusual. They had stood for six thousand years in their native Egypt, and had seemed as solid here in Washington, D. C.

Another odd thing was that this morning the museum’s prized ark of Typhon had been found in here, instead of in its accustomed place, two rooms away, where the history of religions was traced.

“Open the door,” said Benson to Caine, “and tell the workmen to leave for a few moments.”

Caine’s lips parted for a last request that nothing more be done about the lost amulets, but closed again meekly without a word. The Avenger’s pale, infallible eyes were on his like diamond drills. He couldn’t say what he wanted so badly to repeat.

He opened the door. The foreman of the crew knew him by sight, knew his position as head of authority at the museum.

“Good morning, sir,” the foreman said. “We’ll have this done by late afternoon, I think. Them columns made a mess when they fell, all right. The stone flags of this floor are four inches thick, and the columns smacked through ’em like they’d been paper—”

“Call your men out of the room for a moment, will you, please?” commanded Caine, after a nervous pause.

“Out of the—” muttered the foreman, looking surprised.

“Yes! Just for a little while. You can go in the next wing. I’ll call you when my friend and I are through in here.”

The men went out. Benson closed the door. Then he walked, with Caine trailing uncertainly behind him, to the cabinet containing the mummy and mummy-case of Taros’ son.

This was at quite a distance from the collapsed bit of stone floor. It hadn’t been disturbed in any way.

The Avenger stood before the cabinet which was the focal point, it seemed, of all the deadly, mysterious activity that had recently gone on in here. His eyes, like stainless steel chips in his death-mask countenance, were on the thing, staring through the glass lid at the withered shape, which had been human, in its gilded, form-fitting case.

Josh had said that the mummy walked, and Josh was too fearless to imagine such a thing, and had excellent eyesight. But the mummy had bands, innumerable yards of them, swathed around both legs, making them into a solid pillar. The thing couldn’t have walked that way.

Benson took out a screwdriver. He began unscrewing the lid of the cabinet, noting once more that the slight dust in the screw-slots proved conclusively that they had not been tampered with in recent hours.

“You can’t do that!” bleated Gunther Caine. “Even you, Mr. Benson—”

For an instant the pale and glacial eyes held his, then the work went on. The Avenger got the last screw out, and lifted the lid away from the cabinet with a ripple of effortless power flowing over his shoulders.

He looked long at the mummy again, without even glass intervening this time. A strange, dusty smell stole up from the withered thing. And the smell of incredibly old fabric.