The Blood Ring

CHAPTER VIII Temple Rites

In through the great door, left open by the watchman in his frenzied search, drifted a figure robed in gauzy white.

The figure was that of a girl — tall, slender but well-rounded. The robe was that of a priestess of Egypt, and it appeared that priestesses of old Egypt didn’t wear much.

The girl’s face was dreamy, with wide eyes seeming like those of a sleepwalker. The line from the peak of her forehead to the tip of her pretty nose was straight. Her face was startlingly like the faces depicted by ancient Egyptian sculptors.

She moved through the main rotunda, seeming to float rather than walk.

From the direction of the Egyptian room came strange music. It was chanting, or singing. The song was one long forgotten by mankind. With the sound came the regular shuffling of feet.

The girl got to the room just off the Egyptian wing. There she saw three figures. They were men, in priests’ garments. They marched slowly, in a funereal rhythm, toward the double doorway into the Egyptian wing. They were carrying something on their shoulders, a sort of box with a V-shaped roof on it, heavily carved in bas-relief. Handles from the box allowed each of the three to help carry it, which was necessary, because the box was obviously heavy.

That box, a scholar could have told, was the ark of the Egyptian desert or death god — Typhon. Carrying it into the temple was a preliminary to strange, mad rites in its honor.

The priestess fell into step behind the three priests, and marched as they did. Also, she chanted as they did, a low, strange song which was only a succession of vowel sounds.

The procession passed through the doorway of the Egyptian wing. There was a pause as the second doorway — that of an Egyptian temple brought to Braintree stone by stone and set up again — was reached. The head priest stood under the massive lintel saying something in a weird tongue.

The figure leading the little procession was tall and emaciated. Its skull was hairless. The face, the color of putty, was lank and lantern-jawed and there was an eagle beak of a nose.

From the far corner of the wing came a sound. The sound was followed by movement, and from behind the tallest of the temple statues stepped a figure that made the strangeness of the others seem tame.

This newcomer was swathed from head to foot in the yellowed linen bands of an embalmed body. The outer bands binding the legs together were gone, so that it could walk. But each leg was swathed heavily. The head and body were also wrapped, save for a space in the front of the skull where most of a face could be seen.

The walking mummy came to meet the procession. Its slightly exposed face was visible for an instant in the dim light.

It was the face of Harold Caine, line for line.

From far in front, where the great main doors swung, there was a clang as those doors thudded shut with the re-entrance of the watchman. With the clang, the Egyptian temple surroundings, so faithfully reproduced in another land after thousands of years, lost its fantastic life.

The lights overhead seemed to dim. When they burned brighter, again, there was nothing moving in the great room.

Walking mummy, priestess, three priests, ark of Typhon, the Evil One, were gone.

The watchman had his jaw set as he came back into the wing, innocent of all knowledge of what had just been visible. He was resigning himself to losing his job. For there had been no trace of the stolen mummy outside — as he had really known there wouldn’t be before he started to look. He’d have to report it to the police.

But first, he was going to look into the mummy case, once more, to be sure he hadn’t been blind or nuts when he looked before and found it empty.

So he looked into the empty case — and found it was tenanted!

There was the mummy, calmly in place. Its wrappings were in no way disarranged. The lid of the cabinet was securely screwed down, and seemed never to have been disturbed.

The man swallowed hard. He’d have sworn the thing was gone a while ago. Now it was undeniably not gone!

Next instant he had something even worse to worry about.

From that dried and shriveled thing, wrapped in centuries-old fabric and leaning in an airtight glass case, came words.

“Our brother priest is held by the man with the white hair.”

The watchman went as white as milk. He knew the words were coming from the case, that the mummy was talking. Yet he knew that it was incredible.

“Our brother priest must be released.”

The man stood there, wanting to run, unable to move. And more words came, cracked and tinny but understandable.

“My father’s charms against evil must be retrieved, but not by violence. They must be exchanged for all that which he hath.”

The watchman fled then, finally getting his feet to work. He didn’t punch his clock there, or in any other room. He was leaving this place in the morning, and not coming back. He’d stay by the door to guard it, but that was all his conscience dictated.

There had been reference to a man with white hair. The watchman had seen such a man talking to Mr. Caine, the curator. A man with white hair over a body you knew was quite young and powerful, and with a face as dead as last year’s leaves, and with eyes like little pieces of ice.

That must be the man.

At seven o’clock in the morning the watchman pressed the doorbell of the Sixteenth Street home where The Avenger was staying.

Benson, eyes pale, intent holes in his immoble face, was with the fellow who had reeled into the house last night under Mac’s guidance. The one whose cards proclaimed him as being manager of the Washington branch of a rug and carpet company, and whose name was Snead.

The man was still in a coma, breathing shallowly. Benson, one of the world’s finest doctors, knew that his life was hanging by a thread. He might snap out of this, or he might die with never another word from him, save the cabalistic ones already uttered.

“Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief.” It sounded like part of a child’s poem. The next line being, of course: “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.” But the man had not mentioned that sequel. Only the first part.

Mac showed the agitated watchman in. And the dour Scot, as well as Smitty and the others, looked pretty skeptical while he told his tale.

A mummy walking out of its case and then returning! A mummy talking!

But Benson’s countenance framed eyes more icily glittering than usual. And in those pale and awesome orbs was no skepticism. The Avenger seemed to take the trembling man’s mad yarn very seriously.

He went back to the museum with him.

“This is the case?” he said, standing in front of the cabinet housing the son of Taros.

“Y-yes, Mr. Benson,” stammered the watchman. He didn’t like to be near the case even in broad daylight.

“Tell me again the words that seemed to come from the mummy.”

“They did come from the thing. There was no seeming about it. Something about ‘our brother priest is held by the white-haired man.’ ”

That, it seemed to The Avenger, would be Snead, the carpet salesman with the queerly Egyptian cast of countenance.

“And,” the watchman went on, “something about, ‘my father’s charms against evil are gone. They’ll have to be returned without violence, in exchange for everything that he has.’ I don’t know what the gibberish means, or anything about it. But those words I heard!”

Benson inspected the cabinet.

It was made of oak, sound and strong, enameled black. The big box was clamped by iron angles on the inside, so it could not have been opened from the outside without a wrecking bar. And there were no marks of violence to indicate that.

The lid was of heavy glass in a steel frame. The frame was tightly screwed to the edges of the box. There was a faint film of rust already in the screw slots. This had not been marred in the slightest, proving conclusively that none of the screws had been recently removed.

Benson experimentally tugged at the lid anyhow. Sometimes lids seem to be tightly nailed or screwed down and the nailheads are dummies that lift with the lid.

That was not true in this case. The lid was screwed down.

Benson examined the glass in the metal frame. It was heavy plate. It was sealed all around the frame by a dark waxy stuff, firm as rock. His microscopic sight told him that there were hair-fine cracks in the stout sealer. But none of the cracks went all the way through the stuff. They couldn’t mean anything where actually getting into the case was concerned.

No one had opened that cabinet for days. There was no doubt about it. Anything outside getting in or anything inside getting out would have had to pass through oak or glass without leaving a trace.

“It t-talked, I tell you,” insisted the watchman, who had plenty of common sense and was following Benson in his conclusions.

The Avenger tipped the case back a little, easily, though it weighed several hundred pounds.

There were no wires under the thing, or around it. So no tricks could have been done that way.

“The words came from that cabinet, Mr. Benson!”

The Avenger nodded, eyes glacial.

“I believe you,” he said.

No wires, no trick screwheads to allow the secret opening of the lid, clear glass revealing that there was nothing inside the cabinet but the mummy and mummy case — yet Benson’s flaming genius acknowledged truth in the man’s fantastic statement.

Acknowledged, apparently, that the mummy had talked.

That night at a little after nine o’clock, Anna Lees left the big apartment building and her tiny one-room apartment, and walked toward a quiet residential section nearby.

Anna was dressed in a modish, trim suit. She wore a last-minute hat and looked as modern as day after tomorrow. Save for the attractively exotic cast of her pretty face, she looked no more like a servant in an ancient Egyptian temple than one of the typewriters in the government office where she worked.

She climbed the steps to a door set in an old but well-kept brick house, and rang a bell under the small letters:

The door was opened, and she stepped into a small anteroom. There were two women there. Anna waited till they had gone into the doctor’s office and then left the house. Finally, alone, she went in herself. The doctor smiled at her from his desk.

Marlowe was a slender man of thirty-five or so, with hair prematurely grizzled at the temples. He had a low, broad forehead and cheekbones a bit higher than most. His eyes, wide-set, were greenish

“Hello!” he said pleasantly. “Haven’t seen you for some time, Anna. Don’t tell me you’re ill. You look too healthy.”

Anna shook hands with the man she knew personally as well as professionally.

“I’m healthy enough, I guess,” she said. “Except for headaches I’ve been having at night, lately.”

Not a muscle of Doctor Marlowe’s face moved. It still had the pleasant smile on it. Yet suddenly the man seemed very tense.

“I’ve never had headaches much before. Certainly none like these. They worry me.”

“Describe them,” said Marlowe, smile still frozen on his face.

“Why, I feel as if my brain had been set on fire inside my head. Then I feel myself falling into a deep sleep. And as I fall, I feel as if I were being emptied; as if I were no longer me; as if something else were creeping into my head and body. Am I going insane, do you suppose?”

“Hardly,” said Marlowe. His voice was hearty, but the smile on his lips did not reflect in his eyes. “Here — take these powders every night for a while. They ought to take care of the headaches.”

But long after Anna Lees had left his office, Doctor Marlowe sat at his desk.

He had prescribed for the queer headaches Anna had described. And that was pretty ironical, for Doctor Marlowe had recently had precisely such headaches, himself. And he hadn’t been able to do a thing about it.

The sensation of fire in your skull. The deep sleep enveloping you. And then the ghastly impression that you were no longer yourself, that some other thing was taking over control of mind and body!

Perspiration was slowly forming on Doctor Marlowe’s face. There was more to it than that, in his case. For now and then, as the deep sleep stole over him, he had seemed to see a shadowy face. Just a glimpse. The face of a girl. And a queer impression of exotic, gauzy robes.

The face was that of the girl who had just called on him.

Anna Lees.

“Physician, heal thyself,” he muttered. The powders had done nothing to help him. Maybe they would for the girl.

Anna Lees went slowly back to her apartment. She did not see a trim, small figure following her at quite a little distance.

The small trailer was Nellie Gray, lovely little blond bombshell who worked for The Avenger.

Nellie had noted the name of the doctor seen by Anna. She had jotted down time of arrival and then of leaving. And she had done even more. She had written down the conversation between the two.

All The Avenger’s aides were skilled at lip reading. Nellie had gotten the whole thing through the window of the doctor’s office.

Now she took up the trail again. And she had no notion that she, in turn, was being followed and observed!

Behind Nellie slunk a figure like something out of a bad dream. A tall, emaciated shape with hairless skull and a great beak of a nose. Now, the shape could be seen — now, it couldn’t. When others came along the walk, it abruptly vanished from sight. When only Nellie was in view, it appeared, again, to take up the trail.

In the folds of the priestly robe it wore, was a heavy copper dagger.