The Blood Ring

CHAPTER I Shades of the Past

Just off Massachusetts Avenue, in Washington, D.C., squatted the great, dark-red bulk of the Braintree Museum. It had plenty of grounds around it, shaded by huge old trees.

It was beautiful in daylight. But at night, with none too many street lamps around there anyway, it looked pitch-dark, grim, filled with whispering shadows.

On this particular night, it was darker than ever around Braintree Museum. The big trees seemed actually to droop their full branches till they touched the ground, making little tents with the trunks of the trees as the center poles. It looked as if an army could hide in the museum grounds.

From all the stationary shadows, at just a few minutes after midnight, suddenly appeared one that moved.

It was very tall, thin, and had a human look. And yet, if anyone had been around to see, he would have had the impression that the moving shadow, somehow, was not human.

However, there was no one around to see.

The museum was like most public buildings. Open only during daytime, at night it and its surroundings were completely deserted. No one had any business around there, late at night; so few people ever came.

The tall figure disappeared suddenly in the shadow of a great maple tree, to reappear again on the other side, nearer the museum. It seemed to glide rather than walk. And now for a brief instant it was in the direct rays of a distant street light. And more could be seen of it.

The figure seemed covered with a flowing white robe that melted into nothingness at the fringes. The garment had a distinctive look. It reminded you of something. At first, exactly what, could not be told. Then visions of old schoolbooks would have been specified — had there been a spectator.

The robe was that of a priest. Going on from there, the person with old history lessons in his mind would have been more specific. It was that of an Egyptian priest.

Six thousand years ago the high priests of Egypt had garbed themselves like that.

And there were more details in the dim light. The head and face atop the flowing white robe could be seen.

The face was so thin that it seemed to be the fleshless countenance of a skull. It was lank, lantern-jawed. There was a great, high beak of a nose, as arrogant as a kingly scepter. The cranium was completely bald. There was no more hair on it than on a vulture’s bare and repulsive dome.

The great-nosed, bald figure in the incredible garb of a priesthood thousands of years dead, floated serenely toward the museum. It got almost to the pitch-black shadow of the east wall. Then it disappeared once more.

It did not reappear.

Inside Braintree Museum, Bill Casey moved at his nightly duties.

Casey was an ex-cop, now over sixty and retired to this job as night watchman and caretaker of the big museum. The job was no cinch. There was stuff in that sprawling building worth millions of dollars. True, it was junk that couldn’t be readily sold, but it could tempt a thief just the same. Collectors exist who are glad to pay big sums for museum pieces along the lines of their collections.

Casey had a .45 swinging solidly at his left hip, and he could use it expertly. Casey feared few things on earth after forty-one years as a harness bull. Casey was nearly six feet in height, weighed close to two hundred, and still had a florid face that was only just beginning to line a bit with years.

He was in the Egyptian wing of the building at the moment. He had none too much imagination; was a good, solid, practical ex-cop. But this room could always give him the willies late at night.

The room was enormous — fifty by ninety, and about thirty feet high. The height was to accommodate the Egyptian statutes brought here from the Upper and Lower Nile temples.

The ceiling had to be high because the statues were high. The tallest almost scraped the stone roof as it was.

They were ringed around the great room like giants cast in stone. They stood there, motionless, with eyes staring straight ahead at nothing. But staring hard, as if the stone orbs could actually see something, a million miles off, straight ahead. If you’ve ever been in an Egyptian room you know the eerie feeling which that straight, dreamy, impersonal gaze gives you.

At the feet of the old statues were dozens of mummy cases, with linen-wrapped bones in them in more or less good repair. Some of them were rotted so that the bones showed through the wrappings; some were almost perfect.

Among the latter was the latest acquisition of the Braintree Museum. That was a mummy, complete with stone coffin — or sarcophagus — of the son of a high priest named Taros. The son’s name was unknown. But Taros was on register, all right. He had been the high priest under Rameses.

The son of Taros stood upright in linen swathing that had darkened with centuries till it was about the color of coffee with a lot of cream in it, but it was sound in every stitch. Over the mummy case had been fitted a cabinet with a glass lid, so that the public could see in. The glass was sealed into the edges of the lid with a sort of plastic wax, which made the interior air-tight.

Through the glass, the mummy of the high priest’s son seemed to stare, through linen bands over the skull, at his own sarcophagus, lying ponderously near his skeletal feet.

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.