The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (16 page)

In Shaw’s museum, Nellie had taken the precaution of seeking a hiding place before using the radio. She had chosen a rather grisly one.

The great stone sarcophagus in Shaw’s collection.

The huge stone box was near the door. Its lid was tilted above it at a slight angle to display the carving on it.

Nellie had crawled into it as into a stone coffin, so that the hushed sound of her voice on the tiny radio would be further muted.

She was reporting the discovery that had excited her.

“Some of the cases—”

She hadn’t heard one sound. But past her startled eyes, as she was intent on the radio, she saw a hand and arm flash. The hand was gaunt, emaciated, and so was the arm. And the arm was bare, protruding from a curious, ancient robe.

The radio was ripped from her grasp. She looked up—into the ghastly face of Taros.

She had only an instant’s glimpse. Then there was a crash that seemed to shake her very soul as well as the edifice around her.

The stone lid of the sarcophagus had crashed down.

She was shut in there; held in the ponderous stone coffin, with the great lid over it. She had crawled into the thing in the first place to hide the sound of her voice. Well, that would be accomplished, all right!

She could yell her head off in here, and no one outside the room would hear a whisper.

This time the door of Shaw’s home was locked. But there was no effort on the part of The Avenger and his aides to pick the lock.

Nellie was in danger!

The giant Smitty walked quickly toward the door, and then just kept on walking, over its splintered length on the floor inside. He was a human tank when it came to doors.

Smitty and Mac, Josh and Benson, went to the back addition from which Nellie had spoken her last words. The giant pushed this locked door in, too, as if it had been cardboard.

They ranged around the place. A glance from the splintered doorway had showed that Nellie wasn’t in there, but they had to have a hint of where she had been taken.

The first thing that drew Smitty’s anguished eyes was the sarcophagus. He strode to it, and lifted the stone lid as if it had weighed a couple if pounds instead of about four hundred.

The stone coffin was empty.

“Go through the rest of the house,” said The Avenger to the three of them.

Then Benson began going over everything with his pale, microscopic eyes.

Nellie had started to say something about the cases. He soon discovered what she had learned: the glass cases containing Egyptian weapons were only a third filled, though there were little catalogue numbers under depressions in the velvet that indicated that the cases had recently been full.

Benson suddenly opened one of the empty cases, near the smashed door. In this, besides a few weapons, was a curious little metal thing.

It was of gold. It looked like a tiny golden egg, save that both ends tapered to an identical point instead of one end being a little larger than the other, as is the case with a true egg form. There were four depressed lines in the little gold object, running its length, from one tapered end to the other. On the side of it was a tiny gold loop with a single little gold link on it.

The Avenger slid it into his vest pocket. His three aides came back.

“Nowhere in the house,” said Smitty gloomily. “That killer, Shaw, has murdered her and disposed of the body.”

Benson stared again toward the cases so curiously emptied of weapons.

“Stay here for one hour,” he said. “If anyone comes to the house, hold him. I don’t expect anyone, but there might be. At the end of an hour, go to the Braintree Museum.”

For once, Smitty ventured to protest an order.

“But, chief, if Nellie’s in danger, and we stay here sitting around for a whole hour—”

The Avenger’s eyes were enough to stop him.

Benson had a point in mind worse than anything the giant could think up.

The Ring of Power.

It had been forty-six hours since it was renewed in the life blood of an innocent victim—the gardener of Senator Blessing. According to the ancient legend it must be renewed again, and swiftly.

Inside the next two hours the ring must be dipped in blood. Nellie had been held by the band from the past, and would be most conveniently at hand for the renewal.

“Braintree, in one hour,” he said to the chafing three, eyes expressionless as ice in his death-mask face. “Steal in—the door will be unlocked—and remain unseen no matter what you see.”

The gray steel bar of a man left, and drove back to the Sixteenth Street house.

The merchant, Snead, was still in an upstairs room, still in a coma. Benson went to that room bearing a small case like an overnight bag. This case, in addition to the case containing the portable laboratory, Nellie had brought down from Bleek Street.

The Avenger opened it.

In the top tray were dozens of pairs of tissue-thin glass eye-shells with various colored pupils painted on them. There were also all the other aids to makeup ever invented.

The inside of the lid was a mirror. Benson propped that beside the face of the unconscious Snead. Looking first at Snead’s face, and then at his own white, dead countenance in the mirror, Benson’s steely fingers began to work.

They prodded the dead flesh of his paralyzed face. And where that flesh was pressed, it stayed, as if it had been living plastic. The nerve shock that had paralyzed his facial muscles had also done something to the flesh consistency so that it had no life or volition at all, and it stayed where it was put.

Benson’s forehead seemed subtly to broaden and become a bit lower. His nose straightened a trifle till it made a line with his altered forehead. His nostrils took on sightly more flare.

In a moment, The Avenger was not The Avenger. He was another man; and when he pressed over his colorless eyeballs two thin glass cups with pupils like Snead’s painted on them, he could not have been recognized at all.

Nellie Gray had been here before. She knew that with the first glimpse of returning consciousness, even though “here” was the most exotic place imaginable.

She had gone back six thousand years, it seemed, and was in an Egyptian temple. There were the great pillars, and the stone slabs of a lintel. There was the ark of the Evil One, Typhon.

And there were the many priests who tended the temple.

Then her clearing brain figured it out. The museum, of course. Those pillars were the ones Smitty had spread apart, now set up again. The priests and the ark she had seen before, when they intended to kill her.

It looked as if, now, those intentions were to be made good. Death, it appeared, had only been delayed a little when Smitty rescued her before.

Before, Nellie had aided herself a bit by twisting from a descending knife blade. This time she wouldn’t be able to twist from anything. She was tightly bound.

She had found that out a minute ago when she tried to move. She was bound hand and foot, and lying on her side on the cold stone floor.

Something moved near her. She looked up, and saw the girl, who accompanied these mad shapes, in her gauzy priestess raiment. Tall and slenderly rounded, face calmly, coldly beautiful, the girl stood next to Nellie, and stared down at her.

“Help me!” whispered Nellie, appealing as one of the fair sex to another. “These men want to kill me. Help—”

Nellie stopped her appeal. There was no glint of comprehension—or of humanity—in the priestess’ brown eyes at all. Nellie was talking to a stone statue as far as response went.

Nellie stared at the lovely, bizarre face. She got the same crazy impression Smitty had: This girl was not just made up as an Egyptian priestess, she
was
an Egyptian priestess.

The dread word breathed itself in Nellie’s mind:

Reincarnation.

Nellie was no longer in any doubt about it. The man, Shaw, might be a well-known lawyer in his waking moments. But in reality he was Taros, reverting to ancient type in subconscious periods. Similarly with Blessing and Marlowe and this girl, and the other priestly forms swarming in the Egyptian wing.

These were actually forms from the dim past, living their ghostly lives in the night, when their modern, physical counterparts were unconscious in slumber.

And the mummy that walked?

Nellie shuddered at all the implications of this. The walking, talking mummy went beyond the theory of reincarnation. It went clear into the realm of the supernatural.

The priestly figures weren’t doing anything. They weren’t even looking at Nellie; had paid no attention to her since dumping her here on the stone floor. Gradually this very lack of attention began to seem to the girl to be worse than attempts on her life.

That was because of the message it gradually began to spell out to her. This whole thing was a trap.

She had been allowed to see Shaw—or Taros—in modern tweeds, walking along the Washington street. She had been allowed to enter the conveniently unlocked door, and allowed to give one call for help.

This was to trap not only Nellie—but all the rest.

They were using her as bait, and she had been thoughtless enough to fall into the thing. It was the only meaning possible to be read in the present scene—herself ignored, priests swelled in numbers, all gazing now and then at the door to the Egyptian wing.

The nature of the trap? Well, she thought she could even guess at that.

Every one, save the girl in priestess’ raiment, was staying a long way from Nellie. So the danger spot must be right in her vicinity. Another collapse, perhaps? Or an explosive bomb planted right under her?

Nellie closed her eyes and uttered up some soundless prayers that Smitty and Josh and Mac and the chief would guess this was a trap—and stay away.

Nellie was like that. Rather than risk the lives of the others, she preferred to pass out herself, the hard way.

Even as Nellie was hoping fervently that the others would not show up here where they would be outnumbered six or seven to one, they were stealing through the shaded grounds outside the building.

That is, Mac and Josh and Smitty were. The Avenger, himself, was not with them.

“Wonder when the chief’ll join us?” whispered Josh—a black spot in the late night darkness.

“He didn’t say,” Smitty whispered back. “Just told us to head for here an hour after getting into Shaw’s place.”

The giant’s fingernails were gnawed about to the quick. The inactive wait in the lawyer’s house had been the hardest thing Smitty had ever done. Nellie in danger! And they sat there like lumps on a pickle!

But it had been The Avenger’s orders; and they knew he always had a sound reason behind even the most perplexing of his commands.

Now they were near Braintree, and Smitty was aching for action.

“Whoosh!” whispered Mac suddenly, clutching the giant’s arm.

“Tis company we’re havin’.”

The three sank into the shadow of a great tree. And past them filed the figures Mac had seen a moment ago coming toward them.

Five dim figures in the flowing garb of Egyptian priests.

They went, in a sort of soundless, funereal procession past where the three hid, and approached the great bronze door of the museum. The door opened as they got to it. They passed through, and the door shut again.