The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (2 page)

Casey, making the rounds of the Egyptian room, went in such a manner that his path would take him last to the vicinity of this new mummy. The thing gave him the jeebies, though he wouldn’t admit it, even to himself.

A vague half-light illuminated the wing. It left the upper third of the temple statues in near-darkness. Casey stared up at the cold impersonal stone countenances.

“It’s alive ye are, I’m sometimes thinkin’,” he muttered to the inanimate statues.

Which would indicate that he had some little imagination, after all. The sculpture of Egypt is not the kind we’re familiar with. Bodies and faces are distorted and unhuman.

Yet somehow the unknown craftsmen who carved that stone managed to get a weird feel of life into the work.

“Faith, and ye look like ye could walk, some of ye,” mumbled Casey. He often talked aloud to himself in the lonely night, making the rounds of the acres covered by the museum. “Though heaven help us if ye did walk!” he added soberly. The idea of one of those towering stone images suddenly moving—and perhaps toward him—was frightening.

There was a watchman’s clock ticking on his belt, near the big revolver. He walked to a box, neat and modern under the very elbow of one of the thousands-of-years-old statues. He fitted the clock tongue into the box. Now it was registered that he had come to this part of the building at precisely sixteen minutes past midnight, as he was supposed to do.

He went on, nearer and nearer to the most recent mummy, only in place a week. He kept his eyes away from it as he approached.

The reason he had qualms about this mummy was that once, two days ago, he had thought he heard sounds from it.

The sounds were the faintest of whispers. He couldn’t tell if they really did come from near the mummy, or if they’d been made by a rat at that end of the room, or if he was simply hearing things. You get kind of jumpy in an enormous, deserted place like Braintree in the dead of night.

Now he was within ten yards of the new case and had no excuse at all not to keep on going past it.

“I dreamed it, the other night,” he said suddenly, aloud. “I didn’t hear nothin’ from the borne pile.”

He squared his shoulders, like a man walking past a graveyard in the dark of the moon, and marched toward the ancient remains of the son of Taros, high priest of Rameses.

“To the devil with ye,” he said loudly.

He passed it, looking right at the face of the thing—or, rather, at the swathed part of the skull under which a moldering face should be.

“I wish that last expedition had never gone after ye,” said Bill.

And, sounding just a little above his footsteps, there was the faint echo of one of his words.

“—gone—”

Casey stopped, past the mummy case, his back to it. He stood there, hands tight at his sides, eyes wide and staring ahead.

He stood that way for half a minute, then relaxed.

“I
am
gettin’ potty,” he thought. But he just thought it; didn’t say it aloud. So there was no excuse for the echo
that
time. And anyhow, the echo reproduced words that he hadn’t even thought, let alone said.

“They’re gone—”

Casey moistened his lips. They felt, suddenly, as dry as the remains under the old, old, linen bands. He felt as if he couldn’t move at all for the moment. He seemed to have taken root in the stone slabs of the floor, set in a design to simulate the floors of old Egyptian temples.

He swallowed noisily.

Words? From a mummy? From a thing thousands of years dead, and now so unknown that only parentage and not name was on the rolls? Don’t be silly, Casey!

The husky old ex-cop turned squarely. There was a military movement about it, like the formal about-face of a soldier. He looked at that mummy case, and he walked squarely back to that mummy case. This thing was going to be settled once and for all. He couldn’t go along feeling that every once in a while a confounded mummy was going to talk to him. They lock you up in padded rooms for that sort of thing.

He stood in front of the big cabinet with the glass lid, within which was the gilded mummy case and the swathed mummy inside that, like a kernel in the half-shell of a nut.

The glass was tight in the lid. The lid was screwed to the cabinet with a thin gasket edging it to preserve the airtightness within.

“Sure, an’ it’s as impossible as I knew it was,” muttered Casey.

Why, if the thing within
had
spoken, no one could hear it. Sound, unless very loud, couldn’t get out of the tightly sealed and gasketed case.

“So if ye did talk, ye spalpeen, ye couldn’t make yerself heard,” said Casey defiantly.

But in the back of his mind was an uneasy realization.

Mummies, if able to talk, surely would also be able to transcend limitations of glass lids and gaskets. They’d be able to make themselves heard, all right, in some bizarre way—

“They’re gone. My father’s charms against evil.”

Casey tottered where he stood. This was no echo. This was no rat scurrying. This was no freak of the imagination.

That mummy had talked!

Casey reached out blindly for support. Toward the mummy case, since that was the nearest tall thing at hand. He jerked his arm back, as if nearing a red-hot stove, before his flesh could touch the sinister, coffin-like thing.

“My father’s charms are gone. They must be retrieved.”

Casey glared at the thing with enormous eyes. A shape swathed in yards on yards of ancient linen, the color of coffee with cream in it. A shape, that no matter how miraculously embalmed, could be no more than dried sinew and crumbling bones, now. A shape that had no head, just a thing like a football wrapped in bandages.

That thing couldn’t talk.

But—it had! Casey
knew
it had. And the knowledge was too much for even a man like the husky ex-patrolman.

Casey swayed a little, sagged to his knees as if a great weight pressed down on him, then slid on to the floor, out like a light.

In the night outside the Braintree Museum, near the Egyptian wing, a figure suddenly appeared and began to float rather than walk away from the structure.

It was a tall, thin figure in the robe of an ancient Egyptian priest. The face was lank, lantern-jawed, of a ghastly putty hue. The nose was as high-beaked as that of a bird of prey; and like the dome of a carrion bird, its skull was completely bare.

It glided among the trees, appearing, disappearing; till at last it could be seen no more.

But just before its last disappearance, there was a faint flash from something on its shadowy left hand. A ring there. The flash was pinkish-red, like that from a clot of pale blood, set into a ring.

Miles away from the Braintree Museum, in Washington South-East, was the big home of Gunther Caine. in spite of distance, there was a direct connection.

Gunther Caine was curator of the vast building in which were stored the records of man through the ages.

Caine was a multi-millionaire in his own name. His job paid well, but it was a hobby with the rich man rather than a necessity.

He had it because he was rabidly fascinated by the work entailed. He glowed like a small boy with a new red sled when some new acquisition passed through his hands en route to a case in the museum building.

He was glowing now, in the library of his luxurious house. Because an acquisition of tremendous import had just come into the possession of Braintree.

Months ago, an expedition had unearthed the unrifled tomb of the son of Taros, high priest of Rameses. There had been a mummy, complete with case and sarcophagus. There had been a brief history of the young man; brief because his life had been brief. He had succeeded to his father’s position, when Taros died, ruled the temples for eight months, then died, himself.

Also, there had been the priceless amulets of the young man’s father, passed down directly to his hands.

Charms against death. Charms against evil.

The amulets were disks, mostly of gold, a few of cornelian. The gold ones were set with a king’s ransom in rubies and other precious stones. But the worth of the stones was only a fraction of the real worth of the things as relics.

In addition to the amulets, there was a ring.

The ring was of old gold with a slab of pinkish cornelian as a setting. And this was, perhaps, worth all the amulets put together. That was because of its history.

The ring was described in temple hieroglyphics as the Ring of Power. It had been worn always by the current high priest. The belief was that without that ring, the head priest would instantly lose all his authority, and with it, probably, his life.

The mummy and case had been shipped to America without much trouble. But the Egyptian government had held up the shipment of the amulets and ring. They wanted them, themselves, for their museum in Cairo.

Finally the stuff had come through. It had been brought down tonight. The box containing the stuff had been carried by a heavily armed, special messenger. With the messenger had come two private detectives.

Now the precious box was in the room next to Caine’s library.

In the library were half a dozen men, talking over the priestly relics.

There was Gunther Caine, tall, thin, so unconcerned with clothes that his expensive suit looked wrinkled and almost shabby. He had fuzzy brown eyes and gray-brown hair and a short, snub nose.

There was Harold Caine, Gunther’s son. Harold was twenty-two and had never grown up. He was the jitterbug type, without a serious thought in his head, and his rather shallow blue eyes and vacuous face showed it.

There were the three directors of the board of the Braintree Museum—Evans, Spencer, and Moen. Evans was short and fat, with a monkishly bald head; Spencer was tall and fat, with a face like a kewpie doll; Moen was tall and squarely built, an ex-football star now fit though forty.

Then there was an individual who would have stood out in any gathering at any time.

His lithe body, in the dark-gray he habitually wore, gave an impression of colossal, steely power. The man’s face was the most arresting thing about him.

His face was dead! Motionless, white, still, it was like a death mask rather than a human countenance. And in this immobile, dreadful face were set eyes so light-gray as to be almost colorless.

The name of this sixth man was Richard Henry Benson. But it was not as Dick Benson that he was best known. The name that brought awe into the faces of honest men, and terror into the hearts of criminals, was—The Avenger!

The Avenger was the greatest enemy the underworld had, but he was not here tonight as a crime-fighter.

Benson, in addition to being a crime-fighter, possessed a fund of knowledge on almost any given subject so vast as to make him a top-ranking expert. It was as an expert Egyptologist, probably without peer in the world, that he was here tonight.

Caine, and the museum directors, had invited him in to judge the authenticity of the amulets and the ring.

The ancient charms against evil had been out of the hands of the expedition for some weeks. The Egyptian government had had them. Presumably the stuff had been locked in an untouchable vault. But there
might
be a possibility that a clever thief had stolen them and substituted forgeries.