Altogether the yard was a pleasant spot. It could be reached from the ground-floor rear, or by a stair that led from the metal balcony that reached the width of the house, outside the windows of the consulting room and the dining room.
The house was a corner one. The wall on one side of the court was a high one, between the court and the street. The other barrier was lower, separating the yard from the adjoining one.
The laboratory was entirely modern. From it had come miracles of medicinal research, serums to prevent and check leprosy, and the hookworm. Here the germ of infantile paralysis had at last been filtered, and Doctor Phillimore, ever conservative and modest, had let it be known to a group of his fellows that he expected within six months to be able to announce that the scourge of children could be stopped by the use of his anti-toxin. That secret had leaked out, and the general press had seized upon it.
With this publicity, the name of Phillimore was added to the death-list of the Griffin. Where others admired, the Griffin, with his warped nature, hated and sought to destroy. He believed in predestination, in the influence of the stars; including his own; and men like Phillimore were meddlers, to be despised the more because of the esteem in which they were held.
Now Phillimore sat in his upstairs library with Gordon Manning. His face was grave but serene as he offered his guest brandy, and an excellent cigar.
“Mind if I use a pipe?” asked Manning. With the other’s assent, he carefully filled his briar with his special blend, thrust the notched stem between his strong teeth, and lighted up.
Phillimore watched him with interest. Manning was a rather tall, lean man, tanned long ago by tropic suns. His gray eyes were steady and intent, one of them slightly puckered by a scar. He was dressed in rough tweeds, since he had dined in town, and had not had time to change before keeping his appointment with Phillimore. All of Manning’s movements were precise but swift. He had the efficiency of a born athlete who has kept himself in condition. Phillimore approved of him.
“I have heard of you, of course, Manning,” said the doctor. “Also of the Griffin. A purely pathological case.”
“He should have been executed, like a mad dog,” said Manning sternly. “He cannot be cured?”
Phillimore shook his head. “His fibers are rotten. He is a true paranoiac, and so incurable. A dangerous maniac, who should have been more closely conned. He is likely to end up in paralysis and epileptic fits, as deterioration leads towards dementia praecox. As a physician I may not agree with your belief he should be eliminated.”
Manning shrugged his shoulders. He was not going to argue about the Esculapian oath. “Meantime, he does the eliminating,” he said. “Your life is in grave danger, doctor. Two weeks from to-night he will strike. How, it is hard to predict. But he has never failed to attack, too often fatally.”
Phillimore surprised Manning as he turned to a wall desk, and took from a drawer one of the gray envelopes with which Manning was only too familiar. He handed it to Manning, who removed the letter. The envelope was fully addressed but it had not been mailed.
“It was delivered by hand one morning when I was at the clinic, no doubt deliberately timed,” said Phillimore. “He seems in earnest.”
“He is,” replied Manning grimly, as he read the distinctive script:
The stars announce your downfall. You presume to change the courses of Destiny. I am the appointed Scourge of those who would interfere with Nature’s methods. Who are you to ward off appointed death? You may not ward off your own.
Some time between midnight and midnight on the eleventh of November, on the day of your birth, but not necessarily at the hour, you will surely die.
There was no affiche, but a clever drawing of the upper body of a griffin; wings spread, talons extended, fangs apart.
“He is ingenious in his suggestion that disease is part of general evolution, and the survival of the fittest. Ingenious, but false,” Phillimore said, as Manning returned the letter to him after reading it.
“It doesn’t seem to have disturbed you much,” Manning suggested. “But I warn you that letter is not far from a death-warrant unless we can find means to guard you. I believe that if he fails on this date he will not repeat the attempt on you. He will think the stars have deceived him. And each failure will hasten the course of his disease no doubt.”
“No doubt. I am willing to place myself in your hands, Manning; with the proviso that my regular routine is not interfered with. That day I do not go to the clinic. I shall have some visits to make. Certain patients will come here in the late afternoon and the early evening. I shall do some work in my laboratory, perhaps.”
“You must do nothing that takes you outside the house,” Manning said positively. “Not even to your laboratory. You must receive no new patients. That is essential. I shall be here for the whole of that twenty-four hours, and there will be other precautions taken. Even to your food.”
“It is absurd to mistrust my servants. They are devoted to me,” objected Phillimore. “I will consent to your terms, otherwise. Since it is only for one day.”
“I do not mistrust them,” said Manning. “Nevertheless, I shall provide your food, and my own, that day. Bring it myself, and prepare it myself. I am not a bad cook. But I have seen a man poisoned with one half of a melon that was sliced before me. The other half was innocuous. I have known that fiend to kill in a place apparently as secure as a safety-deposit vault. I admire your attitude. But I do not minimize your danger, or my responsibility.”
III
It was “murder weather” on the eleventh of November. When Manning entered Phillimore’s house shortly before midnight, after a personal round of the guards he had set in strategic places, the night was murky with rain and mist. Melancholy hootings came from the river. Street lights were veiled in vapor, and the air was raw and chill.
There had been no further demonstration from the Griffin, nor had Manning expected any. He entered upon his twenty-four hours’ vigil in excellent condition to go without sleep. The plain-clothes men who were watching were picked men who would be relieved every eight hours, and during one meal. But Manning would have no break. He brought two men into the house, gave them their instructions.
Phillimore greeted him cheerfully. After a cigar, a high ball, and some chat upon places Manning had seen, and which the doctor hoped to visit, Phillimore went to his bedroom. He did not lock the door. Half an hour later, Manning looked in and found the other sleeping peacefully. Phillimore was up at seven o’clock, and enjoyed the simple but appetizing breakfast Manning served for them both.
The bad weather continued, the day dragged on. Phillimore spent his morning in his library, working over formulas and writing letters. Some of them were prepared in the event of his death. He was perfectly calm, without a trace of bombast. Manning envied him his nerves as the hours ticked off. His own were steady enough, but he was tensed, while Phillimore remained placid.
In the afternoon he received patients. His assistant was with him, most of the time, in the consulting room. He had been warned. No patients were to be received whose names were not on the appointment list. At dinner, Phillimore was cheery. He made only one allusion to the situation, when he pledged Manning in a glass of Pol Roger the latter had brought.
“I, who may be about to die, salute you,” said the doctor with a laugh. “I know how Damocles felt, at his banquet. Five more hours to go. I suppose the Griffin counts on the stress of suspense as part of his punishment for my presumption.”
“Perhaps,” said Manning. He did not agree. He was sure the Griffin had fixed on his time, and had not changed it—that some minute of the three hundred remaining would see the attack delivered.
“Have you many patients for to-night?” he asked.
“Three only. None very serious. They should not take long. A woman with nerves, a man with arthritis, and another man who drinks too much, and eats too much.”
“Will your assistant be there? And your nurse?”
“Only the nurse,” said Phillimore.
“I would like to see her when she comes,” said Manning.
The nurse was neither young nor old, self-possessed, and evidently very efficient. She had been with Phillimore for years. Manning liked her. She knew about the Griffin. Her eyes were brave, her mouth firm, and she made no comments.
“The doctor will leave the door of his consulting room open this evening,” Manning told her. “I want you to never leave him alone, with any of these three patients, for more than three minutes. You can make some excuse to enter if your actual presence is not necessary.”
She nodded. “They are all simple cases,” she said. “I am really only here to-night in the event of an emergency.”
“There will be no emergency cases to-night,” said Manning. “Persons not belonging to the household will not be admitted. I have arranged for that. You will be in the office between the reception and consulting rooms. I shall be in the reception room myself, as a supposed patient, waiting to see the doctor after his appointments are over. That often happens, I imagine?”
She nodded again, chary of speech. But her eyes pleaded with Manning, and then she spoke.
“You will not let anything happen to him? He is so wonderful! He means so much to the world. If it was somebody like myself, it would not matter, but for him to—to…. I would gladly die for him,” she burst out, after she had got a grip on herself. “So would many others.”
Manning patted her on the shoulder. She did not often show emotion, he fancied.
“I’ll do the best I can,” he said.
Again he was in tweeds, to better play the part of patient. He carried an automatic in a shoulder clip, and he knew how to use it.
It was eight o’clock when he passed through into the empty consulting room and looked out over the court. At the far end, the windows of the laboratory were dark. He stepped on the balcony, returned and locked the French windows.
Two of his men were in the yard, lurking in the rain and fog behind the trees or statues. Another patrolled the street beyond the wall.
Manning switched on a ceiling lamp. The indirect lighting revealed the details of the room, with its examination table, its gleaming apparatus behind glass, all the precise accessories of such a place. Phillimore came in, took case-cards from a steel filing cabinet, and looked them over.
Less than two hundred and forty minutes now, until midnight.
Manning watched the patients as they entered. They seemed harmless enough—the nervous woman, the indulgent man and, last of all, a man whose face was drawn and haggard, who limped a little and seemed in pain with his arthritis. Inflammation of the joints appeared to have made him something of a cripple, as he hobbled through the reception room. Manning heard Phillimore greet him heartily.
The nurse had done her part. “Thank God he’s the last,” she whispered. “Mr. Manning, may I stay until twelve o’clock? I may be able to do something, though I hope there will be….”
Manning glanced at his wrist watch. “Three minutes,” he said.
She picked up a tray, and placed a card upon it that had already done service that night. Manning watched her as she walked through the narrow office; took hold of the handle of the door.
Suddenly she swung about, her eyes bulging.
“It’s locked!” she cried. “It’s locked, and bolted!”
Manning leaped for the door; confirmed her statement. Not only a turned key, but bolts also held the heavy door. He thought he heard a light tinkle inside, barely audible. He was not certain of it.
“Call the man on the stoop!” he cried to the nurse. “There’s another in the library! Break down that door!”
He had a feeling of nausea. He had no doubt that the doctor had been murdered, that the killer had fastened the door, and escaped through the long windows, closing them after him. He might yet catch him. The man with arthritis! Neither a new patient, nor an old one. But one who had been treated long enough to be so considered. The Griffin had planted him before he called Manning, or sent the doctor the message.
The nurse rushed for the front door, and Manning bolted to the dining room. He flung back the long windows and stepped out on the balcony. The lights in the consulting room were out. The killer had escaped.
The court was like a pit, silent as an open grave. His nostrils caught an acrid tang, vanished in a whirl of wind that swept the enclosed yard like a miniature cyclone.
Manning tried the windows of the consulting room. He could not see inside. They closed with a spring latch. He stepped over the railing to the balcony and dropped to the ground, a good twelve feet, calling to his men, whipping out his gun. Phillimore was dead. He must, at least, avenge him.
He strove to adjust his eyes to the gloom, still calling, getting no answer. He gulped another whiff of tainted air, closed his lips against it. He had an electric torch with a powerful lens and batteries. Its beam fought through the downpour, making rainbow gleams of the rain.
Manning saw the body of one of his picked guards stretched out by one of the statues. The man moved slightly, gasping for breath. The other was close by, on his back, legs drawn up. He too, might be alive. They had been gassed, as Phillimore must have been. The shower had given these two a fighting chance for recovery. Phillimore, in the consulting room, door locked, windows closed, must be dead.
Manning swung his torch, and saw an agile shape moving by the wall, flinging up a light rope ladder. He heard the clink of grapnel claws as they failed to hold.
The man turned. Manning knew this must be the murderer, the third patient, the man with the faked arthritis. It was dope, not pain, that had made him look so haggard in the reception room. He was far from a cripple now, spurred by a fresh dose of drug.
Now he seemed, viewed through the film of rain, like some strange beast, half man, half dragon. He was wearing a gas-mask, with goggles, tube and strainer. He seemed unearthly. One hand went to his left shoulder, and as a weapon appeared, Manning fired.
This was, as usual, only an agent of the Griffin. A slave held because of the Griffin’s private knowledge of some crime. A slave who might be made to talk, if captured alive.
Manning knew his bullet struck first, high in the body, to the right. It should have sent the other down with the impact, the shock of lead on bone.
But the other only staggered back, his left hand outspread against the wall for support. There was a bulletproof tunic next to his skin.
He pulled the trigger of his weapon. Manning saw no spurt of flame, heard no report. But something tapped lightly on his breastbone, broke and fell. He heard again the light tinkle of glass as he strove not to inhale nauseating, stupefying vapor that enveloped his head, flooding his nostrils, his mouth, his eyes.
Phillimore might have been shot this way, with gas contained in a fragile globe. It was more likely he had been slugged first, and a gas-pellet tossed back into the room as the killer fled—closing the windows, avoiding the lethal vapor, adjusting his mask before he jumped to the yard, where the guards had probably been eliminated already.
Out here, in the pelting rain, Manning had a show, if he could only—only—only—
Something came leaping, hopping like some enormous toad, a hideous shape that flung two arms, tremendous as a gorilla’s, about Manning’s knees. It was Al, his head made grotesque with another gas-mask, tugging at Manning with prodigious strength to drag him down, to settle him with powerful fingers.
Manning strove to break the hold, to club the misshapen freak with his gun, even to shoot. But the force had gone out of him. His arms lost all their energy as the poison gas slowly impregnated his blood.
He tripped over the border-hoops of the flower beds; buried his face in the chrysanthemums and in the wet dirt.
That saved him. He had not taken in much gas. It was not a heavy vapor. Close to the ground he found sweet air.
The freak had left him, making his getaway.
Three times Manning tried to
get to hands and knees, and three times his limbs betrayed him. There was no pith in them. He groped for gun and torch, which he had dropped. He tried to shout, but his throat was seared. He found his gun, and aimed at a shape climbing the wall by the rope ladder, now fixed. The automatic seemed heavy as an anvil. He tugged at the trigger like an infant. The cartridge exploded, but he could not control his aim.
The freak was swarming up an ailanthus tree like a baboon. It leaped, legless but agile, swung along the coping, disappeared. The other man was gone. And both had cast aside their gas-masks.
Wavering, groggy, his vision bleary and his knees weak, Manning got to his feet, like a fighter too badly punished to know his own corner.
The Griffin had scored. Phillimore lay dead. He, Manning, had failed in this encounter.
His own scorn spurred him, and he stumbled towards the wall. His two shots should have brought aid by now. The rope ladder was in place. The murderers had discarded everything in their flight, masks, ladder, even the pneumatic pistol.
It seemed to him he climbed a thousand feet, wearing the leaded shoes of a diver, before he reached the top of the wall, still dizzy, throat and nostrils raw, eyes smarting.
He saw the ruby tail-light of a black sedan that swung north into the avenue. His patrol was missing. Manning imagined him gassed, or slugged, or both; dragged into a doorway where, on a night like this, he might not be discovered for an hour.
Manning crept down the ladder, to make sure of the thing he was too certain of—that Phillimore was dead.
He would have the car chased, but he knew that was useless. He had pursued the Griffin’s cars before. No dragnet would gill that eel.
IV
He trod on the pneumatic pistol, and picked it up. The fragile globes of glass it had popped out, like a Roman candle, had been filled with some product of the Griffin’s secret, suborned laboratories, the discovery of one of his captive chemists; some gas akin to cyanogen, perhaps; but more efficient in action.
In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 Page 9