The Blood Ring

CHAPTER XIII Death From Above

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.

“Really—” panted Caine.

The Avenger paid no more attention to the curator than if he hadn’t been there.

His hands, slim and of average size but with such steely power in their long fingers, lightly touched the yellowed linen bands around the mummy’s legs.

Some of the fabric crumbled at the mere touch. More of it broke, like dry-rotten paper.

Josh had said, and The Avenger believed it, that the swaths around the mummy’s legs had not kept it from walking. Well, these bands would. To permit the thing to walk, the bands must have been taken off the separately bound legs.

But that fragile, age-old fabric could never have been unwound and wound back again, and stayed whole.

Benson stared closely at the mummy’s swatched skull.

The ancient bands had been said to be off the “face” too, exposing it. But here the yellowed linen was even more fragile than at the legs. A little cloud of dust, that had been linen, rose and settled at the tick of Benson’s fingernail. There was a lot of dust behind the mummy’s skull.

The mummy’s head could not have been partially exposed. Yet Josh had sworn it had been.

With his eyes like pale points of flame in his paralyzed face, Benson turned from the cabinet and went toward the statue under whose elbow was the watchman’s call box.

A gurgling scream from Caine drew him swiftly back.

Caine pointed at the mummy with a shivering hand. His lips worked for several seconds before he could make words come out.

“It talked!” he babbled. “I heard it! The mummy talked!”

Benson stared at him as if seeing clear through his fuzzy brown eyes to the back of his skull.

“You’re sure of that?”

“Good heavens! Of course I’m sure!” Caine wiped sweat from his forehead. “I heard it as plainly as I hear you now.”

“What did it say?”

“I couldn’t quite make out—”

“Did it say: ‘The charms must be retrieved without violence, by all the loser’s worldly goods’?” asked Benson evenly.

Caine’s jaw dropped.

“How did you hear that, from twenty feet away? It was barely a whisper. Yet you heard—”

“Were those the words?”

Caine sighed raggedly.

“Yes! Those were the words.”

The Avenger nodded. He had not repeated the message because of the fact that his hearing was far keener than other men’s. He knew what the words were because it had been his voice that delivered them — not the mummy’s.

But now came more words, louder.

“Death shall visit those who interfere.”

Caine stared at the mummy with the look of a crazy man. The Avenger’s diamond-drill eyes fastened on it with equal intensity.

This time the words were not his.

“Death! Death! Death!”

There was a slight premonitory quiver, a small sound — and a ten-foot square of the ceiling crashed to the floor within a yard of the mummy case.

The ceiling of Braintree, like the floor, was made of thick stone slabs. Throughout, the building was constructed of materials designed to last for hundreds of years. The section that fell weighed probably half a ton.

It splintered the floor where The Avenger had been standing. It almost crashed through, as the Egyptian pillars had caved in the night before. Anything caught under that mass would have been pulverized.

But Benson wasn’t under it.

He had spent his life, since his teens, in jungle and wilderness, as has been said. Times without number his existence had been spared by his swift realization of something a little wrong, and his breath-taking quickness of physical reaction.

This was one of those times. With that first faint quiver, he had leaped like lightning as far from the spot as possible. From five yards away, he stared at the jagged heap that had been cut stone in a ceiling, and at the shivering, moaning Caine.

The Avenger’s face was as dead as a glacier in moonlight. But his eyes were alive; pale terrors in his death-mask countenance.