There was a jeering twist to that name, Silbi. Spelled backwards, it was Iblis, the angel flung from heaven to become a devil because he would not give tribute to God’s creation, Adam. Equally the Griffin hated mankind, in general and particular, and deemed himself appointed The Destroyer. The man was insane with grandiose dementia, but that inflamed brain of his was potent for evil. The sinful phantasmagoria it conjured up were colossal in their conception and execution.
He went swiftly up the stairs beneath dim electric lights, and let himself into the studio. The main fixtures had been removed, but, as he set a switch, some lights shaded in violet and amber went on and gave mysterious light to the roomy place. A globe of crystal began to revolve, and within it showed whorls of colored smoke. Exotic music sounded and a censer automatically heated incense that gave off fumes like burning amber, intoxicating, sensuous.
Al came swinging forward on his arms, active as an ape, fawning like a dog, then hastening to set fire to the wood and cannel coal in a big firepot in the open hearth. The weather was warm, but the Griffin’s blood was as cold as that of the squatting toads. He threw off his cloak and warmed his hands. Lines of suffering were graven in his vulturine features, the face with the beaked nose and the cruel eyes.
He poured a purple liquor from a decanter of Venetian glass into a small silver goblet and sipped it slowly, chuckling.
He was expecting a visitor. He had planned another coup, consulted the stars and found the time propitious, the house of his victim threatened, his own horoscope favorable.
The music gave out its strange phrases and barbaric rhythms. Al squatted in a dark corner, his eyes intent upon his Master, his fingers playing with the hilt of a straight dagger in a scabbard slung to chest and shoulder.
Presently the Griffin rose and pulled aside a curtain revealing a painting on Hindu muslin. The subject was not a pleasant one, but the Griffin gave it a sort of ironical obeisance.
It was the gigantic figure of a woman, a heathen goddess. Her skin was ebon, she was four-armed. Her palms and eyes were red, her tongue and breasts and face stained with blood, her hair was matted and her teeth like fangs. She wore a necklace of skulls, her earrings were corpses and she was girdled with snakes.
“O Kali-Mai, Dark Mother, wife of Siva the Destroyer! O Chamunda, Chhinnamastaka!” intoned the Griffin. “I bring to thee a devotee, a worshiper of thy cult. We are of one mind, thou and I, and the deed I propose shall be fitting in thine eyes. Lo, I have consecrated to you the pickax and made the sacrifice of sugar. I will kill a goat for thee in the dark of the moon and acquire thy favor. I shall divine its liver and know your sanction.”
There was a knocking on the door of the studio and Al, following his Master’s nod, swung to open it, one hand reaching to the latch, the other balancing his torso. Then, as the man entered, the freak, at another gesture, returned to his corner, hidden by a screen.
The visitor was of medium height and supple frame. His moves were feline, his whole manner furtive. He was of Hindu type, though he might have passed for an Arab, a Cuban, or a Sicilian.
His bow was formal, his voice toneless. Its placidity suggested a certain lack of soul well fitting to one employed by the Griffin.
“You are welcome, Phansigar,” said the Griffin, using a jargon known as Ramasi, a cultural dialect, rather than a lingual one. “All is prepared. Here is the tale that you must study carefully in case there is delay. Here is the gold that is only a retainer for a fuller fee upon success. Meet me here three days from now at this hour and see you fail me not.”
“I do not fail,” was the answer, as the man prostrated himself before the painting of the goddess, thrice. He put away the gold and the papers and went, silent as a tiger, to the door. The Griffin watched him, chuckling silently.
He took a seat in front of the fire and picked up a gilt-bronze statuette designed for a radiator ornament, a well modeled figure of a griffin, half lion, half eagle, poised to leap or soar, to tear and claw, fit symbol of the monster who now caressed it.
Then he stood up and moved to a carven prie-dieu that held writing materials on its sloping shelf, heavy, gray, handmade paper and envelopes, purple ink, pen and sealing materials, scarlet wax and an intaglio on onyx of a demi-griffin.
He wrote in a bold hand, made, instead of signature, a crisp and clever drawing of his seal, set the missive in an envelope and sealed that with wax and signet before he inscribed it:
GORDON MANNING, ESQ.
KHORASSIN LODGE
PELHAM MANOR
N.Y.
He had his own means of delivery. To his beckoning, Al brought an oriental waterpipe, its bowl charged with tobacco blent with hashish, the water through which the cooling smoke must pass scented and flavored with attar of roses.
The Griffin ignited the weed and sat back, inhaling, contemplating the firelight that played fitfully upon his features. In that crimson glow he looked indeed like Iblis, plotting in Hades.
II
…the stars tell me that the seventeenth of this month, falling on Wednesday, is most favorable for my design. Some swift moment between midnight and midnight, Manning, Erle Crossleigh will be eliminated. May you be there to see. I shall not be far away.
This arrogant fool who presumes to establish my descent, and yours, my dear Manning, from the mouldering relics of arboreal apes, has lived too long.
The board is set. Prepare your defense. It may be I shall lose a pawn, but I have studied well my gambit. I shall win the game.
Gordon Manning was in his library, his pipe clenched between his teeth, his face grim. The tension of weeks was, in a measure, relieved. The Griffin, in his usual arrogance, had announced his purpose, the name of his victim, the date of death.
Erle Crossleigh, eminent anthropologist, the man who had gone farthest to establish the Descent of Man, was doomed, but the doom was not yet definite. The Griffin was positive of final triumph, Manning resolute to prevent it.
Most of all, he itched to come to handgrips with the monster, as he had once before. This time Manning would make no endeavor to capture the fiend alive, to deliver him to justice. The law, in its practice of medieval jurisprudence, had not condemned the Griffin to the chair, but had sent him to an institution for the criminal insane. He should be destroyed, utterly, and Manning meant to be the agent.
But, first, Crossleigh must be protected. It would not be an easy task, despite the aid of the police, of protective agencies.
The Griffin, of course, had prepared for weeks with infinite cunning, an exhaustive study of Crossleigh’s mode of living. He had boasted more than once that a man’s habits, properly comprehended, left him open to well planned attack. The Griffin was an evil genius. Rightly directed, his powers could have lifted him to a supreme height of advancement. Instead he reveled in diabolical intrigue, in plots that might have been hatched in hell.
Manning, in the brief time left him, must acquaint himself with Crossleigh’s customs and environment, must pit his brains and fearlessness against that of the monster, anticipate the deadly stroke, not knowing from what source it might be delivered; handicapped by the Griffin’s strategy of infinite pains and devilish inspiration.
He rested an elbow on the arm of his chair and cupped his left-hand fingers about the bowl of his briar, reflecting. A high window looked out into the sidewalk to his garden. The panes were leaded and the glass was bulletproof. Well locked gates barred intruders.
A gun, these days, was always close to his hand. The next instant he clutched it, almost squeezed trigger before he realized the two way purpose of that protective glazing. No ordinary missile might pass it, and his own would only star the diamonds through which leered a fiendish countenance with glittering eyes that looked like live coals, a beaked nose, mustachios, and twin peaks of beard under a high-crowned, black sombrero.
It was the Griffin! Manning’s Airedale had not barked. His servants had heard nothing.
There was no trace of an invader when he
searched the premises. Only the dog, lying dead, a little foam on its jaws, its limbs stiffening from convulsion.
Manning made the autopsy in his own laboratory. He found a titbit of undigested liver still impregnated with what his reactions showed to be an isolation of epinephrine, an alkaloid akin to the frog venom used by the Choco Indians of South America on their arrow tips, to the Senso drug of China and Japan, used for heart trouble and hemorrhages—also for poisons. Bufagin! Toads’ venom, possessing the essential toxic features of digitalis.
Crossleigh owned two houses on Central Park West. Hotels and big apartment houses hemmed him in, but the neighborhood suited him and he would not sell. Above all things, he disliked to be bothered with even the thought of removal. The houses were spacious and he had made them into one with well planned alterations. The two gardens had been used as space for his workshop, as he styled it, though it was more likely a museum dedicated to evolution.
The workshop was lit by skylights. High walls of surrounding buildings towered about it. It was professedly fire and burglar-proof. The skylights were reinforced by steel grids. The only entrance was from the duplex residence.
Crossleigh received Manning in his spacious library, where the higher halves of the lofty walls were practically covered above the shelves of books with paintings reconstructing primitive forms of life.
In the museum were their fossils, their bones, and perfect reproductions of existing animals with their skins fitted over plaster, arranged in backgrounds showing their native habitat.
There were reconstructions of man’s more immediate ancestors, and also actual parts of their skeletons.
The library opened into the museum and Manning, asked to wait, examined the exhibits with absorbing interest. Here was the process of evolution made exceedingly plain. A child could understand it. One case showed the stages of the horse. There were primitive implements, of wood, of shell, flint, agate and quartz. There were hammerstones and lever-sticks used by baboons for breaking nuts and prying up rocks, even for striking blows.
Despite the ominous and imperative nature of his mission, Manning was fascinated. A man like Crossleigh, supreme anthropologist, student and revealer of the natural history of Man, was threatened by the mad Griffin because the latter considered his own swollen ego insulted by the suggestion that his ancestors had lived in trees.
Manning felt that Crossleigh would laugh at the Griffin’s communication on one score. An exhibit, with its legend, proclaimed boldly that Man was not descended from the great arboreal apes, but that his immediate ancestors were extinct running-apes of the early Cainozoic period.
He heard a step behind him and turned to greet a man taller than himself, athletic, tanned, vigorous, a fellow-explorer. Manning recognized in him a kindred spirit. Crossleigh’s eyes were shining with the enthusiasm of a man who lives for but a single purpose.
He gripped Manning with a powerful hand. Here was a man who would give a good account of himself in any fair encounter, would win against odds. But not, perhaps, against the Griffin’s guile.
The meeting had been arranged through a mutual friend, and the fact that they were both active members of the Explorers’ Club. Crossleigh was cordial, apologizing for the delay in coming down.
“I knew you would understand,” he said. “I was dictating something and I wanted to get it down while it was fresh in my mind. Slosson tells me you want to see me about something vitally important. I have seen you occasionally at the club and, of course, I know of some of your accomplishments, including your capture of the Griffin, though I have only just come back from Europe, from Aurignac, in France. They have made some more important finds there, you know. Most important. You are interested in these matters?” he added.
“Yes,” answered Manning. “Right now, I am more interested in you.”
Crossleigh looked at him sharply.
“You mean the Griffin?” he asked.
Manning nodded, handed him the letter he had received.
III
Crossleigh read it through without a tremor. His eyes were clear and courageous, and he gave the communication back without especial comment, not even about the arboreal apes.
“He does not furnish much warning,” he said. “Not enough. I have a strong objection to dying at present. I am on the brink of an important thing, Manning. I doubt if I shall have the evidence I am expecting much before the seventeenth, and after the receipt of it there is much to be done. You have foiled the Griffin before this. I place myself in your hands, only asking to be allowed opportunity for work without interruption. I think you will do much for Science if you keep me alive for thirty days.”
“If you are alive on the morning of the eighteenth,” said Manning, “you will not have to worry any more about the Griffin. He studies the stars and makes divinations before he announces his proposed victim’s name and the date of elimination. If he fails he wipes the thing out of his own mind. Contemplation of failure drove him beyond the safety line once before, and I think he recognizes that. His ego cannot bear to dwell on a mistake. Above all, he strives to save his face.”
“Good!” said Crossleigh. “I will show you all over the premises, so you can make a fortress of them. You can go ahead and fill them with plain-clothes men, so long as I am not disturbed in my work. I get absorbed in it and probably would not notice you unless you forced me to it, but the knowledge of being overlooked would irritate me. I will go armed, if you prefer it and, of course, you will be my guest for as long as you please.”
“I am afraid I shall have to be your shadow,” said Manning. “At least for the twenty-four hours mentioned. But I shall try to be both silent and invisible.”
“Fine! You see, Manning,” the anthropologist said, “I have just had great news from Java. I have just heard from a man named Kumar Asit Gupta, once assistant curator in the Museum at Delhi, who has been investigating the ruins of the ancient Hindu temples at Boro-Boedoer. In excavating, he came across an upheaved stratum of the Pleistocene period, with two skulls, both complete, and other fossil bones that show development from the first Java men. He is now on the way with these relics that are enormously unique, quite invaluable. I cannot tell you all that it means, save that it ties up with my own pet theory of the origin of modern Man.
“I am sorry to have bored you,” he ended with a change of tone. “I am an enthusiast, practically a fanatic. But these things are not mine, they belong to Science so, let us foil the Griffin, somehow.”
“When do you expect this Gupta, Hindu, from his name?” asked Manning.
“I had a telegram from him saying he had landed and was leaving San Francisco. Here it is.”
Manning read the message.
“This should bring him here on the sixteenth. We must try and have him met, see where he stays. If he sees you on the sixteenth I shall be better content than if he puts it off until the next day.”
Crossleigh laughed.
“You would hardly associate a studious babu named Kumar Asit Gupta, come all the way from Magelang, with the Griffin’s desire to murder me. Perhaps you don’t know the type.”
“I know the Griffin,” said Manning grimly. “If you see Gupta on the seventeenth, I want to be present, if unseen.”
For the moment Crossleigh seemed annoyed, then the frown left his face.
“Agreed,” he said, “if it makes you feel any better. I speak Hindu and Malay. I should detect an impostor before he showed me anything.”
“I am merely taking precautions. They are necessary. I shall want personally to supervise your food that day and to be continually with you. If Gupta comes, well and good, but he will be the only stranger to be admitted during those twenty-four hours. We can check him up pretty well.”
“Do what you please, Manning, but don’t delay the arrival of those fossil bones. Now, shall we look over the house?”
There seemed no doubt about the authenticity of Kumar Asit Gupta. He was discovered registered at the Plaza in the sui
te he had reserved by telegram from the Coast, sent the same time as his wire to Crossleigh.
A quiet and unobtrusive man, who spoke good English and, but for his signature, might have been one of a dozen nationalities with skins inclined to swarthiness.
He had not announced by which railroad he was traveling and the squadmen had failed to pick him up at depots or ferries, mainly because they had been imagining someone with a turban and an air of strangeness. According to the hotel management, Gupta was completely cosmopolitan. He had asked that a certain leather trunk, small enough to be carried, and which he had himself transported from his cab, should be placed in a vault. And he had ordered a modest but well chosen meal in his room without revealing any caste prejudices.
Later, he had telephoned Crossleigh and made an appointment for ten o’clock on the morning of the seventeenth.
All this Manning knew before he took charge of the Crossleigh premises, fortified by forty picked men, distributed strategically. In only one thing Crossleigh had proved difficult. He wanted to go to work immediately upon receipt of the relics, and insisted upon two of his assistants remaining. After all, this bid fair to crown the achievements of his lifetime, he considered it as vital as life itself, and he had placed the full responsibility of guarding that life upon Manning.
Manning found out that it was customary for Crossleigh to shut himself up for days at a time in his workshop with one or more assistants, or by himself, and that nobody dared disturb him. On these occasions he prepared his own meals, which he confessed to Manning were generally either inadequate or rather horrible messes, concocted on the gas burners he used in his experimental work.
Manning announced himself as the cook on this occasion. The two assistants seemed beyond suspicion, but their demeanor and their records did not eliminate them from Manning’s scrutiny. The Griffin had practically bought himself out of Dannemora, combining bribery of a supposedly honest guard with a most ingenious method of departure. Even assiduous scientific assistants had sick wives, mortgages, and private troubles that a golden wand might make vanish. They were not too lavishly paid.
Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 Page 24