The Blood Ring

CHAPTER IV Bloody Cornelian

In the beginning dawn, headquarters in Washington began getting the craziest reports a police headquarters ever received.

The sergeant at the desk, after the fourth phone call, turned a bewildered face toward a lieutenant of detectives who was leaning over his shoulder.

“It’s mad, these folks are!” he complained. “Four loonies, all with the same idea.”

“What idea?” asked the detective lieutenant, playing with ideas of hot dogs and coffee before going home to a daytime sleep.

“Four people — three men and a woman — have phoned that they’ve seen a person runnin’ around in a kind of nightie. Each has given a different description; so it looks as if there are four people in nighties loose in Washington. That is, if these telephoners ain’t as nuts as they sound.”

“Nighties?” said the cop, beginning to forget the dogs and coffee.

“That’s what the descriptions sounded like. Anyhow, it sounded that way from three of ’em. They’re ordinary folks, goin’ off to a dawn job or comin’ home from a night one. But this last guy was different. He’s a high-school teacher who was workin’ all night on some research of his own. A highbrow. He says this nightie was the robe of an Egyptian priest.”

“You mean one of them mullahs or muezzins, or whatever they got in Egypt to keep the Arabs quiet?”

The sergeant looked as disgusted as he dared, to a lieutenant of detectives.

“Naw! Not a priest of Egypt, now. A priest of Egypt in the time when them mummies at Braintree were walkin’ around under their own power.”

“Why would any one want to wear an outfit like that?” said the plainclothes man fretfully.

“How would I know?” snapped the desk sergeant.

“Maybe it’s a masquerade.”

“Mebbe. But if it is, it must be a magician’s ball. Because this last guy, the teacher who knows Egyptian clothes when he sees ’em, says the mug he saw wearin’ ’em disappeared.”

“Huh?”

“Disappear! Vanish! Phht!” said the sergeant.

“He’s dotty.”

“Well, that’s what I said,” shrugged the sergeant. “But I suppose we oughtta radio a squad car to cruise around there — South-East — and see what can be seen.”

This was at dawn, with gold just lightening the pink of five-thirty in the morning.

Dawn, with the night’s work of Bill Casey, watchman at Braintree, almost over.

Casey was in the Early-American Indian room, punching his last station for the night. Wax figures with long, feathered headdresses, in front of replica wigwams, stared at him out of big class cases. Tomahawks and flint knife-blades studded the walls over his head.

Casey was pretty indifferent about this stuff. Indian relics seemed like things out of last week, compared to the ancient remnants from thousands of years ago exhibited here. And there was nothing in Indian art that gave Casey the creepy feeling of life which he got from the statues in the Egyptian room.

The result was that Casey was a little careless about present surroundings as well as past perils. He punched the clock noisily, yawned loudly, and strolled toward the door going back to the main exhibit room.

And behind him crept death!

The museum was, if anything, darker than it was in the middle of the night. That was because there was an automatic switch that turned the night lights off, for economy, as soon as daylight touched photo-electric cells. But the light of dawn, while sufficient to touch off the switches, wasn’t enough to lighten the gloom of the building for the first hour or so.

Casey might have been excused for not seeing the figure behind him, in the gloom, even if warned of its presence. But he was not warned; so he was completely off his guard.

He walked out into the main rotunda, steps echoing emptily in the darkness. And behind him slid a tall, thin shape in the garb of a priest of old Egypt. The lank, lantern-jawed face was intent on the caretaker’s back. The hairless cranium moved a little as the head of a snake might shift before coiling to spring. The eagle-beak nose seemed to flare at the nostrils like that of an animal of prey.

Casey went to the huge bronze main doors and tried them. Locked tight, of course. He turned, to walk back to the workroom and locker room.

The emaciated figure in its bizarre garb slid behind a pedestal on which was a reproduced skeleton of Neanderthal man. Casey drew even with the pedestal, passed it.

The great room seemed suddenly airless and frozen with danger. It was as if walls and ceiling leaned near to witness what was to come.

Oblivious as he was, Casey, striding toward the locker room, paused. Behind him, the creeping white death did not pause. It came on, seeming to float rather than walk.

Casey, with every primitive instinct uneasily alert now, started to turn.

The move was never completed.

The gloom suddenly held a pin prick of light, reflected from a knife blade. But the thin streak of light was not pale, steely in color, as it would have been from ordinary metal. It was a reflection from a metal such as we in the modern world do not know. It was a coppery-gold reflection.

The reflection seemed a long streak, because it came from a knife blade flashing down.

Down toward the man’s broad back!

It hit with a dull, hollow punnk, the blade going deftly between ribs. Casey fell without ever knowing what had happened, as the metal ripped his heart.

He fell, and the tall, grayish form in misty priest’s robes bent over him. The knife with queerly golden glint swept once, in a right-to-left fashion. Casey then had no throatline. His throat had been slashed square across!

The figure with the bald skull and beaked nose lifted its left hand. On the second finger glistened a pale, pinkish stone. The left hand, ring and all, was plunged into the crimson flood coming from Casey’s throat.

For perhaps sixty seconds that hand was held thus. Then, slowly, it was withdrawn. A sigh came from the odd figure, like the satiated sigh of a dope fiend after a shot of the drug he lived for.

And now the ring — the Ring of Power that old Taros once had worn — had changed color.

It had been pale, flesh pink. Now it was deep red. Ruby red. With an inner glow like that of a great ruby with a tiny light in it.

The Ring of Power had been renewed in the life blood of a sacrificed victim. For another forty-eight hours it would give its wearer omnipotent power, and preserve its existence.

The Ring of Power. The ring of blood!

Richard Benson, The Avenger, was known to every police official in America. He was beginning to be known, by sight at least, to almost every patrolman and plainclothes man too.

It was out of that knowledge, that Gunther Caine finally managed to catch up with him.

Benson had friends in high places all over the world. It was only natural that he should have even more than usual in the nation’s capital, where affairs of great moment were constantly being hatched.

A very good friend of Benson’s was a retired manufacturer with a mansion on Sixteenth Street near Embassy Row. The friend was in Europe at the moment, and had cabled Benson to make the place his own, whenever he chose.

Benson had gone there from Caine’s home, with the bewildered Smitty.

“I never knew what hit me,” repeated Smitty. “This tall, skinny shape in the priest’s robe raised both hands, as if he was calling down a curse on me. I felt as if I’d been suddenly bathed in acid or something that prickled and burned. Then I went out like water down a drain.”

“The thing was dressed like a high priest of ancient Egypt?” said The Avenger. His colorless eyes were as glittering as diamond drills and as cold as the Antarctic.

“That’s right,” said Smitty.

“And it had a thin, lantern-jawed face, and was hairless?”

“Yes.”

“The nose?”

“A regular bird-beak of a thing.”

Benson stared not so much at Smitty as through him. As if seeing strange things very far away.

“An exact description of the old priest Taros, as given by Egyptian hieroglyphs,” he said.

Smitty started to grin, and changed his mind.

“It’s impossible of course,” the giant said. “But I will say this: if there really could be anything in this reincarnation business, if the ancient dead can come to life again — this guy was it. He didn’t just act like an old Egyptian priest. He was one! I can’t tell you why I felt that so strongly, but I did. And the girl was just as authentic.”

“Yes, the girl,” Benson said. “That was more fantastic than the other. You say she bowed down to him?”

“Yes! As if old Taros’ double had given her some kind of an order.”

Smitty remembered the gauzy raiment worn and the shapeliness revealed underneath. Then he remembered something else.

“Funny a ghost would wear a ring,” he said, more to himself than to Benson.

“What?”

Smitty found himself staring breathlessly into two colorless wells that suddenly had the flash of naked steel. Well as the giant knew the man with the paralyzed face, he was still unable to repress an icy feeling along the backbone when those terrible eyes turned on him like that.

He moistened his lips.

“I just said, it’s funny a ghost would wear a ring—”

“Describe it!” the cold voice cracked out.

“Well, I couldn’t see it very well in the darkness, and the guy wasn’t close till he raised his arms in that curse thing that knocked me out. But the ring seems to be pinkish, with a funny light to it—”

The Avenger was halfway to the door. Smitty had to jump to keep up with him.

“Where—” began Smitty.

“Police headquarters,” said Benson. “That was the Ring of Power, Smitty. And it’s supposed to be in Caine’s strong-box — was supposed to be there at that moment. So we’ll see if thefts have been reported.”

But that was where The Avenger’s description to the nation’s cops came in. For the first person they saw outside the Sixteenth Street mansion was a patrolman; and the patrolman had just received orders from the desk to try to find Benson and tell him Gunther Caine wanted him.

The glittering big car started at seventy an hour through the deserted streets.

Smitty spoke just once on the way.

“Chief, I called the guy in the funny robe Taros’ double. Do you suppose — this reincarnation stuff — would it be possible that the boy with the bald dome and the eagle beak really is Taros, alive again after all these thousands of years?”

The Avenger only said: “Faster, Smitty.”

Gunther Caine, curator of the Braintree Museum, looked like a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. His unpressed suit was more than ever like a suit of pajamas, after his night’s anxiety. His fuzzy brown eyes were dull with exhaustion and worry. He caught Benson’s arm, which was about like catching hold of a length of steel cable.

“Mr. Benson, you must help me! We must get the relics back! My reputation, my whole life, hang on that!”

He didn’t give the man with the white hair and linen-white face a chance to get in a word.

“It’s my ruin,” he babbled on. “See my position. I personally was entrusted with the Taros amulets and the ring. I personally am responsible for the loss. Now, there are collectors, like the famous lawyer, Farnum Shaw, who would give up to half a million dollars for those things. I will be branded as a thief if we don’t get them back. People will say I sold out to someone like Shaw.”

The Avenger was walking through the man’s library as Caine babbled, through it and to the small den where he had seen Caine place the box at a little before midnight.

The box was there, empty, on the table where it had been when Benson’s pale eyes last rested on it. The Avenger strode to the table.

“Where does that door go?” he said, pointing.

“To the hall,” replied Caine, swallowing noisily.

“And that one?”

“To the drawing room beyond. But that door is always shut. It has a bolt on it that is rusted to the catch. It hasn’t been used in years.”

“And that door I just came through leads to the library,” nodded The Avenger. “So a person could leave the library, step into the hall, walk to the hall door of this room—”

Caine eyed him intently, hopefully. But Benson did not go on. He was looking at the table. Then he bent down and looked at the floor around the table.

There was a deep-piled green rug on the floor. The Avenger’s steely fingers went down, picked up something from the thick nap.

It was a tiny, flattened flake of wax.

“No one left the library while we were talking over the relics,” Caine said, mopping his pale forehead. “So your idea of someone’s leaving, and slipping down to the hall door of the den has no foundation.”

“Yes,” said Benson, “someone did leave.”

“But I remember distinctly. Moen and Evans and Spencer—”

“Your son left the room,” said Benson quietly. “I’d like to talk to him, please.”