In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3

by J. Allan Dunn

  It might have been….

  Manning went apart, concentrating, striving for full memory. The Lodge was hushed. No one had left. No one attempted to. And Manning had given orders to that effect. The commissioner himself was on the way, flying by police plane, with him Manhattan’s justly celebrated medical examiner, Dr. Morse. Manning had worked with him before.

  There were one or two things. Thorpe was a vigorous man. He could swim. Why had he made no struggle, even though the fast filling waders would have dragged him down? He had surely been unconscious. But that tiny mark showed no great impact. It was a clean mark, no weed-smear about it.

  One of the plain-clothes men had retrieved Bostick’s rod, reel and line still attached though the gut leader was broken off as if the hook had snagged when he had tossed the rod away at sight of Thorpe, falling.

  The rod, with others, stood on the porch of the Lodge in a rack. The anglers spoke in hushed whispers. Bostick repeated the story of Thorpe’s first fall.

  “He must have been unsteady on his feet,” he said. “He wore nails on his brogues. Over the waders. He must have been subject to vertigo.”

  Manning walked to the outer gate, hardly knowing where he was bent, save that he wanted to be on hand to meet the commissioner and the examiner. The gatekeeper spoke to him with a shake of his head.

  “A terrible thing, sir! A terrible thing! The country needed him. I’ve got a note for you, Mr. Manning. It was left here a little before noon. The gentleman said there was no hurry. I forgot it when I heard the news.”

  “Give it to me,” said Manning. He knew from whom it came.

  He was staring at the few lines in purple ink on the heavy gray paper. This was no forgery.

  You annoyed me, Manning, in our last encounter. Therefore I left you out of this gambit. You were lucky at Pelham Manor but I did not consult the stars for that. Now you are here, you have taken your precautions and you find that I, the Griffin, the Destroyer, am invincible. Read this riddle, Manning, if you can. In any case the answer would come too late.

  Too late for Thorpe. Too late for Tanaka. Too late to catch the Griffin or his messenger, now leagues away. But not too late, perhaps, to discover the actual murderer, to take him.

  Manning thrust the letter with its scarlet affiche on the bottom for signature into his pocket.

  Manning was painstaking but it was not that which made him a genius. A light illumined his brain. He remembered the thin thread of light he had glimpsed, he remembered Thorpe’s and the others’ tales of Bostick’s casting prowess.

  The detectives had not left. Manning rounded up the man who had picked up Bostick’s rod and set him with a dozen others to search every inch of the riffles above the pool, every crevice, telling them what to look for. It might be a fly, it might be something else. He was sure nothing had been flung into the pool, however small. Bostick did not, he thought, have it on him. He had not had time to conceal it. He would have wanted to get rid of it.

  The commissioner arrived, the medical examiner with him. They talked aside with Manning, who stayed on the porch where Bostick sat with the rest, mute and grief-stricken. Then the two officials went in to view the body. The commissioner came out alone.

  “Mr. Bostick, you were with him,” he said. “Dr. Morse would like to talk with you. You suggested vertigo, I believe?”

  Bostick went in and the commissioner nodded at Manning, who stood by the rack from which the rods had not been removed, Bostick’s steel rod among them. A man came running, the one who had retrieved that steel rod. He saluted.

  “Found it!” he said triumphantly. The commissioner indicated Manning, who took what the man offered with the thrill of the successful manhunter.

  There was a length of gut, broken off at a leader knot. At the end of it, a small, pear-shaped pellet of lead, in all holding the equivalent weight of a thirty-two bullet; a light type of sinker for still water. Manning hefted it, looked at the knot.

  “Bostick tied his own leaders,” he said to the commissioner. “Used a silk thread buffer. The gut will match up at the break, under a micro lens. I saw him casting. He could hit a floating leaf at thirty feet with a small, light fly. With that steel rod of his, he could, with his skill and his wrist, turn that pellet into a bullet with a short cast. It would not pierce the skull, but it stunned Thorpe, sent him helpless to drown, unconscious, weighted down by the waders Bostick loaned him. Any wading boots would have anchored him, but Bostick made certain. It was a devilish scheme. That other chap was a decoy. We won’t be able to prove anything on him except that he trespassed. This is the Griffin’s work. Thorpe was murdered.”

  “Correct, Manning,” boomed the deep voice of Dr. Morse. “He was murdered.”

  He stood in the door with his hand on Bostick’s arm in seemingly friendly fashion. The medical examiner was a powerful man, but Bostick’s lunge sent him reeling as the killer lunged towards the rod rack. His reel was still attached, the leader part of the line. The commissioner started forward and Bostick smashed him on the jaw. He was like a tiger, charging. A Norwegian knife, affected by fishermen, which released the blade from a wooden handle by a spring, flashed in the dusk and then Manning’s gun barked sharply and Bostick went down cursing with a smashed knee.

  “He figured it was safer to leave his rod with the rest,” said Manning. “I didn’t want to kill him. He might talk.”

  “He will,” growled the commissioner.

  There was no dissenting voice. Dr. Morse tended the wound and shrugged his broad shoulders. Manning thought of Thorpe—and Tanaka. Other detectives came up and they carried Bostick inside. It did not take long to get what they wanted.

  “He admits he worked for the Griffin, under pressure,” said the Commissioner. “The Griffin had something on him, found out the real Bostick was from California, not known here, snatched him, and this chap took his place. The Griffin picked him because he was a good flycaster. Tried him out with this pellet racket. We had to bear down on him a bit, and he passed out.

  “It looks like a new commissioner, Manning,” he added, aside.

  “No more your fault than mine.”

  “Hell, you got the guy who killed him! I don’t see how you figured it, at that.”

  “I fish myself,” Manning told him. “Besides, there couldn’t have been any other way. Thorpe was out when he started to fall.”

  Dr. Morse once more came out on the porch; stroked his gray goatee.

  “They had him handcuffed,” he said. “After he came out of the faint they gave him a cigarette. Yep, one of his own. One of those Spanish brands. He must have packed it today in case anything went wrong. Every end of them, inside the cardboard tip, had the dark brown tobacco soaked with cyanide. Anyway, he’s gone.”

  The Griffin Returns

  Once Again the Griffin Challenges Gordon Manning—and Through the Night Creep the Killers on a Terrible Mission of Hate

  The man, who styled himself the Griffin, lounged on a balcony at the back of the old Colonial house. Lofty trees shut in the neglected garden, save where sunshine entered through the ragged branches of a blasted maple.

  The golden gleam shone upon the form of the Griffin. His body was clad in a robe of sable brocade. A black skullcap covered his pate. His face was covered by a yellow mask of gleaming fabric, finer than silk, resembling goldbeaters’ skin. It half-revealed the features, and made them hideous, seemingly leprous; clinging closely to the harsh contours; the high cheekbone, the beaked nose, the thin, cruel lines of the mouth. Black eyes gleamed through half-open slits. They were eyes without a soul behind them, the orbs of a murderous maniac.

  The Griffin had slain, with fiendish ingenuity, a score of men who stood for the advancement of philanthropy, of science and art. Men hard to replace, whose death halted fine achievements.

  Once he had been captured, after a failure to kill had inflamed his diseased, but subtle brain.

  Gordon Manning, scientist, explorer and adventurer, ex-Military Intelligen
ce; called in under special commission to uncover and arrest the monster, had succeeded; but the law had proclaimed the Griffin mad. Manning had protested, but the murderer was not executed; and, within a few months, the fury in his brain subsiding, he escaped from the institution for the criminally insane at Dannemora and went ahead on his diabolical career with added fiendishness.

  Manning had unearthed the Griffin’s secret fortress and laboratory. The slaves kept there to carry out his satanic ends—men of high accomplishments, held by the Griffin’s knowledge of their secret crimes—had been scattered. But the Griffin’s stores and sources of wealth had remained hidden. He had regathered some of his workers, reëstablished himself in another, hidden aerie.

  It was here, in the old house, that the Griffin had set up his latest stronghold. The spot had a sinister reputation. The gloomy house, the private cemetery with its moldering vaults, the dark lake in the woods, where suicides had occurred, the impoverished soil, kept it off the market.

  The nearest highway was miles away, and the neglected dirt road that tied up with it led to nowhere but the old mansion. Ostensibly, a dour farmer and his silent, withered wife were the owners. Actually, the Griffin had covertly bought the place, and they were his servitors; faithful because of their love of gold, too fearful of him to pry into his secrets.

  From this place the Griffin emerged and killed; flushed with blood-lust, with his insane desire to eliminate all who dared elevate and enlighten the world he wished to plunge into darkness.

  And then the Griffin had suddenly ceased to function.

  A strange being, an anthropomorphous portion of humanity, came out on the balcony, swinging a legless body between over developed arms. This was Al, named after the gruesome, impure spirits of Persian mythology. The Griffin had found the freak with a wandering circus, bought its freedom.

  Al was a deaf mute, but the Griffin had taught the limited intellect a method of communication. He patted the hydrocephalic head as he might have patted that of a pet baboon. The Griffin made swift signs and Al, balancing his legless trunk, handed him a tall staff of ebony that lay beside the bamboo lounge.

  The Griffin rose, moving slowly but certainly, passed into the room behind the balcony. It was hung with black tapestries that had strange cabalistic designs woven upon them with gold thread. The thick rug was of the same malignant hue. There was a screen of black lacquer in which a disk revolved, emblazoned with the signs of the zodiac.

  The Griffin seated himself at a carved desk of ebony. On it stood a plaque of bronze suspended between pillars, a gong, that now and then gave out a low, vibrant note without being touched. There was a gold-bronze griffin; half lion, half eagle, for a paperweight.

  Al squatted in a corner, immoble as an image. His eyes glowed like a cat’s in the dark angle he had chosen.

  Out of a drawer the Griffin brought a list of names inscribed with purple ink on gray paper. Many of these were scored through with vivid scarlet. Dead men, these, perished in their prime. Opposite each name were brief notations, giving exact hours and days of birth.

  The Griffin ticked off a name.

  With the skill of an expert draftsman, his hands steady, the Griffin took a sheet of parchment. He set down a rectangular space, enclosed by a frame that held the zodiacal signs. Inside the space a diamond was precisely drawn, and inside that, square. From the four points of the square, lines went to the corners of the frame. So twelve triangles were formed, marked from the center of the left side from the prime sign of Aries, the Ram; into twelve houses, or domi. The houses of life, of riches, brothers, parents, children, health, marriage, death, religion, dignities, friends and enemies.

  In the central square the Griffin set down the name he had selected. He began to murmur an invocation, calling upon the gods of the stellar pantheon; beginning with the sun-god Shamash, and the moon-god Sin, asking them for their aid.

  “Oh, Marduk! O, Ishtar! O, Ninib! O, Nebo! O, Nergal!”

  As he droned his mystic ritual, the gong gave out strange murmurs. The Griffin’s slitted orbs glowed like black opals with their inner fires. The horoscope was shaping to his liking. At last he spun the lacquered disk that bore the symbols of the zodiac, checking up.

  Then he stood up at his full height.

  “The stars in their courses have delivered him into my hands,” he gloated. “Now to communicate with my good enemy, Gordon Manning.”

  At the first tinkling of the telephone in his library, Gordon Manning knew who was communicating with him. In his lengthy antagonism against the Griffin, his ego had become attuned to the approach of evil.

  He had been worn, jaded in mind, in nerve and body, in that conflict. The morning after his appointment by the police commissioner, with its confirmation by the governor, the Griffin had called Manning and mockingly congratulated him. Then and there he challenged Manning to what the Griffin likened to a game of chess, with living pieces. Condescendingly, the Griffin averred that it amused him to play with such an opponent.

  It was not a fair game. The Griffin always had the opening moves. He chose his own gambits, had his campaign worked out ahead. He professed to even matters by naming his next victim, and the day that he should die; but it was hard for a sane, well-balanced mind to cope with the deviltries of the Griffin’s diseased but potent brain. There had been victories on both sides. Now Manning was rested, ready with renewed energies to give battle to the monster.

  He picked up the instrument, with the blood tingling in his veins, the zest of adventure upon him; much as he had felt when he saw in the jungle the spoor of some man-eating brute.

  He heard again the weird music of the gong and then the deep tones of the Griffin, sinister and sneering.

  “Ah, my dear Manning. Again we get in touch. No doubt you thought me dead. Doubtless you hoped so. I hear you have had a holiday. I trust it has refreshed you for the fray. I am busy to-night, so I am sending you a message that should arrive at any moment. I need hardly tell you that in it you will read a name, also the date of the departure of its owner to that bourne from which no traveler e’er returns. Also, there will be a slight demonstration of the fact that the Griffin has not lost any of his power.”

  There came a chuckling laugh, dying away, lost in the eerie strains. Then silence—followed by a ringing of the door bell.

  Manning rose from his deep chair without effort, moving as a roused animal moves, in perfect coördination. He slid an automatic from the side table into the pocket of his smoking jacket. Mati, the butler, was opening the door when Manning reached it. A lantern in the porch ceiling showed a sprawled body in the entry clad in the uniform of the local messenger service. A hand gripped a yellow envelope with a crimson, spreading stain in one corner.

  It was addressed to Manning.

  The boy lay face down, motionless and quite dead, and his blood pooled beneath him. The mark of entry from the missile showed as a slight snag in the cloth of his uniform, where a bullet had brought him down.

  Manning picked up the yellow envelope, but he did not touch the body. Mati stood with his brown, Malaysian face the hue of putty, though he had seen sudden death before.

  Manning spoke to him in his own language.

  “I will call the police. The body must not be disturbed.”

  Manning knew there would be no clews. The bullet might bear distinctive marks, but they were useless without the weapon. And that, Manning was certain, would not be found. He opened the outer, bloodstained envelope. It enclosed a sealed letter. There would be a name, an address, of the sender at the office, but nothing would come of that. Some nondescript would have handed it in.

  The letter was on heavy, gray, handmade paper. It was sealed with a splotch of scarlet wax, imprinted with the seal of the Griffin. A demi-griffin rampant.

  At the bottom of the short note, written in purple ink in striking chirography, there was an affiche, a scarlet oval, with the same design.

  The content was short. A name—and a date.

>   Manning’s face became rigid as he read.

  “My God!” he muttered. “Of all men—John Phillimore!”

  Presently the police arrived, deferential to Manning, taking the body to the morgue, going through the routine of informing the boy’s parents, of questioning the messenger service. The medical examiner gave his findings, plain-clothesmen took measurements and photographs, reporters swarmed.

  There were no results but flaring headlines, vague theories, fantastic stories. The Griffin was out to kill. He had struck again, at Manning’s door. But the press did not learn what the note had said. Manning did not mention it. The commissioner was silent.

  The issue was up to Gordon Manning.

  II

  John Phillimore, M.A., M.D., F.R.S., D.S., etc., was scientist as well as practicing physician. His residence was on lower Fifth Avenue, his clientele was exclusive, and their fees served to not only maintain the doctor’s establishment, but enabled him to prosecute his important discoveries.

  Aside from his private, paying patients, Dr. Phillimore gave two mornings a week to public clinics. He never neglected a case that he thought he could help because there was no money to give for his advice, and for medicines.

  He had many friends, and he could have had a fortune, but he did not care for it save as a means to his philanthropic ends. His fame was growing, but he did not care for that, save as a visible sign of his progress in behalf of humanity; to which his life was devoted.

  He was a bachelor, whose household was run by a housekeeper and two maids. He maintained an assistant and a nurse for his consulting room; and two well trained aides for his laboratory.

  The laboratory was back of the paved court behind the house. The court had two flower beds, always bright and gay according to the season, fenced about with low iron hoops thrust into the dirt. There was a small fountain between them, with a basin for thirsty, dusty sparrows. Two ailanthus trees flourished, and there were statues, of marble and bronze, gifts from grateful sculptor patients.