Manning nodded. Farrell was a good man.
“So I tipped Bishop off. You only notice this when the car’s passing you. They saw me looking at it but they didn’t know why. I only really saw the chauffeur. He had a sour puss, looked like it was cut out of a turnip. The one in the back might have been the Griffin. The blinds were drawn and I could just see there was someone. I told ’em I didn’t expect to see such a fine car out here and he said it was because of the short cut.”
“Been by here since?” asked Manning.
“No. They must come in over Grimm’s hill. But they swing in to the road where Bishop sees ’em. They can turn off that to get to the bridge, though it’s not the best way. Still, folks often get mixed up on the short cut. If you don’t turn off the road it leads to the place they call Manor House, the spooky dump you know about. Used to go on through to the river, I guess, but now the road peters out beyond the graveyard. Nobody uses it.”
“Where shall I find Bishop?” asked Manning.
“You can turn in at Three Elm Farm. Nobody living there now. Only two elms left. You can see ’em plain from this road. They’re by the farmhouse. No gate, and rough going, but you can make it. Cut right across the farm behind the house, down an old cow lane to where the mailbox used to be. Just the post there now. There’s some trees and scrub where you can park out of sight if you want to. The fence is down along the Manor House road. Bishop’ll be loafing round there to tell you if the car has passed or not.
“And he’ll show you yesterday’s tire tracks. It rained yesterday morning. If they ain’t changed ’em. I doubt it. They’re the regular tires for that car, and the rubber’s new. Unless they figured you had spotted the car, otherwise they’d likely keep ’em on.”
“Good man,” said Manning. He looked at his watch again. “I’ll be going.” He handed Farrell a twenty-dollar bill. “Bonus,” he said.
It was two minutes before three. With luck, he would get in touch with Bishop before the car passed. But luck, he knew, was too often with the Griffin.
For some reason the Griffin had been making regular trips. And that meant deviltry.
It began to look as if the Manor House might be the lair. Three Elm Farm was not the place. The shutters hung crazily, the chimneys were tumbling down; there was not the track of tire or hoof, or even the pads of a roaming, hungry dog upon the place.
Manning drove down the cow lane, came to some street choked with wild grapevine. He was above the Manor House road, but hidden from it.
He braked, hesitant. To his left, a man shambled dejectedly along, using a stick, a basket like a fisherman’s creel upon his back. A tramp, a mushroom picker—Bishop.
To the right, he saw a car advancing, a long, black car. It came on at a good fifty miles an hour, its weight—and the skill of the driver—seeming to ignore the inequalities of the dirt road. Now and then it swerved, or swayed a little, but it held a fair course.
It neared the shambling figure, which moved towards the ditch, humble and insignificant.
Suddenly Manning threw off his brakes, snatched a heavy automatic from a side pocket, and went rocketing down the slope. He made a beeline for where the fence was broken, distant from where a path had once led to the mailbox.
He dodged sumach, thornapples, plunged through a thicket, surged through second growth and saplings that made his passage a minor miracle. The gun was tucked under his thigh. He risked a blowout every second, but he trod hard on the gas. Now he could not see the road and every pulse-beat seemed to tick off the fatal message—that he would arrive too late.
The Griffin had been ahead of schedule, if there was a schedule. Bishop had been faithfully ahead of time. He was to pay for that faithfulness with a hideous death.
Perhaps the Griffin had suspected or merely disliked his presence on that road. It would take little for that monster to get rid of anything he deemed the slightest nuisance.
Manning had seen a thing that would have seemed unbelievable to any one not acquainted with the Griffin.
As the long car sped, it suddenly accumulated pace. A weird, incredible figure, like some nightmare fantasy, like a shattered gargoyle plucked from an age-old cathedral, swung to the running board. It clung there, legless, one apelike arm through the open window.
The lonely landscape held no other living things. The rushing car—Bishop—Manning, thundering, bounding down the slope, avoiding disaster by split-seconds.
Only a flock of somber crows cawed through the air, witnesses of Death, striking fiendishly.
It was Al, the legless freak bought by the Griffin from a traveling circus, a deaf mute with an atrophied soul and brain, corrupted by his new master.
In its free hand the freak held something that looked like a lance, or a sharpened pole. The big car raced, charging, hemming in Bishop against the fallen fence and the hedge that backed it.
The young trees blotted that out for Manning. He had all he could do to avoid them. He could not. His running board and fenders struck them, dented and crumpled. A buried snag tore a tire and he barely escaped collision with a stump. He held on, lurching on a rim, his arms and wrists wrenched.
He crashed through the tangled fence, smashed rotten rider poles, plunged into the ditch, skidding to the road, twisting and turning on the surface, still slimy with yesterday’s rain.
He wound up with his back bumper bent against a fallen stone wall on the far side, leaped out, gun in hand.
The black car was out of sight.
Something lay twisted in the opposite ditch. A body thrust through and through with a lance, writhing in the last, convulsive agonies of death, bloody and distorted.
Manning stood over Bishop—what had been Bishop. He had seen death in many shapes but none worse than this. For a moment his blood ran cold.
Bishop was impaled upon a stake six feet long. It had been armed with a point of wrought iron, now clotted with crimson.
Al had held that lance, or had flung it. The latter was more probable. The car, with its tremendous speed, perhaps seventy miles or more at the moment, had provided the frightful impetus that had taken Bishop off his feet, as the spear sheared through belly and backbone until half of it stuck out behind; left him like an impaled beetle, squirming and gasping as he died.
The tire tracks were plain in the road. But here was the dead man, and Manning’s car was stranded with a jammed brake, a bent axle, a blown tire and twisted steering gear.
The body that had been Bishop gasped its last breath.
The cawing crows came wheeling back, as if they saw or scented carrion. And Manning stood gun in hand, powerless.
III
The Living Death
Al, the deaf mute, legless freak, squatted on a square hassock in a corner of the Griffin’s private chamber. There was no morality in him. Killing was a delight, the instinct implanted in him as it is in some epileptics who commit homicide instead of having convulsions.
And now this abnormity, whose clothing was sprinkled with the blood that spurted from poor Bishop as the car rushed past, was enjoying his reward with complacency. He squatted on his legless trunk, with an all-day-sucker thrust into his mouth, blissfully absorbing it.
When Al had been in the museum of the circus, he had put on an exhibition of shooting arrows, hurling lances and flinging knives. It was this performance that had helped decide the Griffin to buy off the freak.
This afternoon he had made use of Al’s accomplishments, staging it to suit his own love of the bizarre, adding the force and fury of the speeding car.
The Griffin had not been definitely suspicious of Bishop, nor of Farrell, but it had struck him that the lonely neighborhood had rather suddenly acquired an increase of population. He had noticed Bishop several times. He might be tramp or mushroom picker or he might be a spy. The fact he was an interloper on territory the Griffin reserved for himself, the merest thought that he might be scouting for Manning or the police, sufficed for his warranty of death.
; The Griffin, seated in comfort in his car, had watched the killing with the sadistic delight of a Nero. Human lives meant no more to him than those of the guinea pigs, rats and mice used by scientists in their researches. But the Griffin experimented for no cause but his own. He was indeed like Nero, who encouraged Locusta, the poisoner, by providing her with slaves on which to experiment.
Now the Griffin sat gloating behind his carven desk as Al guzzled his sweet. The Griffin’s features were screened by the mask of thin material that looked like goldbeater’s skin, like the skin of a snake just before shedding. He looked like some ancient conception of Mephisto. The mask twitched to his grimace as he recalled the dying contortions of Bishop—who might or might not have been a spy.
He sucked at the amber mouthpiece of a hookah pipe, and the bubbles danced in the rose-scented water that cooled the smoke. The bowl burned to ashes and the Griffin rose, and began to pace up and down his chamber. He was clad in a long black robe of heavy silk brocaded with cabalistic designs. A sable skullcap was on his head.
There had been amber as well as hasheesh in the pipe, and now the fumes of the former gained ascendancy. From some unseen source music sounded in a barbaric strain of drums and cymbals, of pipes and stringed instruments.
The Griffin seemed to talk to the freak, with whom he could actually communicate only by signs; but the mad monster was really talking loud. Boasting to himself, loving the sound of his voice, the proclamation of his intentions.
“It was well done, Al,” he said. “It was nobly done. He leaped and fell, like one smitten by the shaft of a centaur. Though you are far from that. But it was a good play.
“It has been in my mind that there are too many new and strange faces that follow me about. Gordon Manning on the trail. The fool! Does he think to trap me again and send me to that madhouse. Ha! Forewarned is forearmed, Al. He who strikes first strikes shrewdest. So—we shall strike. Manning shall be the victim. Long ago I promised him an unusual death. And he shall have one. This very day it is perfected. And, by Ahriman and Abaddon, not all the hosts of heaven, not all the fiends of hell shall save him!”
A bronze disk supported between pillars suddenly boomed sonorously. It was the signal that Griffin had been expecting. In the wall a space was suddenly revealed, the entrance to a lift that the Griffin entered, forbidding Al to follow by a gesture. The hidden door closed, the lift descended, going to the cellars of the old manor, now enlarged and converted into laboratories where the Griffin’s evil genii worked his perverted will.
Left alone, Al sulked, then sucked at his candy. He set it aside and swung himself on his palms to the desk. He looked around, like a mischievous ape, at once curious and fearful. The booming of the gong made certain impressions upon his atrophied sense. He knew that it summoned the Griffin, that it announced events.
He balanced his torso with one arm, reached up the other hand and touched timidly the disk. Out of it there came a spurt and crackle of blue sparks and tiny lightnings. The shock of the discharge stung through the freak, bowled him over, his arms numb, his ugly face convulsed as he gave vent to a hideous, bestial cry that he sought to stifle by stuffing one sluggish hand into his mouth.
He rolled to his hassock and lay there while his flesh seemed stabbed with pins and needles. His God, the omnipotent, all seeing, ever present Griffin, had punished him for his sin. Al was cured of meddling. The more so as he had seen his Master touch and tap the plaque without harm; not knowing the Griffin had thrown a switch before he left the chamber.
Al moaned, with uncouth noises, drooling and gabbling. At last, finding himself recovered, he retrieved his sweet, and squatted once more on the hassock, educated and subdued.
Below, the Griffin stalked through cemented corridors just high enough for him to pass without bowing, and came to a central crypt. This was his theater—like the theater of a hospital. Here things were dissected, inanimate objects assembled, demonstrations made. A man awaited him, more like a robot than a human being. He wore an overall of yellow on which was painted, back and front, the numerals 67. His face was the hue of beeswax, bloodless, expressionless. His lips were without hue; the only color showed in his eyes, intensely blue, blazing behind lenses that enlarged them, made them goggle, glow with something akin to insanity.
Innumerable wrinkles radiated about his eyes and mouth. He was entirely bald. His shaggy eyebrows were white. But there was still a restrained vigor about him. Number Sixty-Seven had been a famous chemist, a toxicologist who had mixed up his subtle poisons with his own cosmos.
The Griffin had snatched him from the chaos that resulted. Here was a slave after his own evil heart. He had made a pawn of the other, rescued him from the death penalty to transfer him to a hideous servitude only mitigated by the fact that Sixty-Seven was given apparatus and allowed to use his alembics in experiments. The Griffin consulted him, and Sixty-Seven knew well enough why.
There had been a time when despair came to him, followed by a measure of resignation; of late he had been restless. This last task had pleased him, strengthened the perversion of spirit that he had gradually accumulated, as if partaking of the Griffin’s unholy nature through association.
It was the Griffin himself who had suggested the source of the present experiment. Sixty-Seven had perfected it.
There were two draped figures on narrow tables. One sheeted form was quite still, yet not entirely rigid. There was something about it that suggested life was not extinct. The other covering moved slightly as if the unmistakable body beneath it breathed. Now and then there were twitchings.
The Griffin frowned at this and Sixty-Seven spoke swiftly. “This is the example in which the toxin was first used upon a human subject. It proved not to be sufficiently concentrated. You told me you did not mind how many subjects I used from the numbers you supplied me.”
“True, so long as you succeeded. Those men have passed their utility to me. But why show me a failure?”
“I shall show you also a perfect success. I thought that you might like to see both phases. The first man will ultimately die. He has suffered frightful torments. He is now anaesthetized by pain. He can bear no more.”
Sixty-seven stripped off the coarse shroud. The body of the “subject” was emaciated—the Griffin did not feed his slaves too munificently—but it was also horribly swollen. It looked like something badly stuffed. The limbs were shapeless and blotched, the veins like black cord, twisted and coiled. The lips were drawn back, and the teeth showed between the bloodless gums like those of a skull. Only the blood-specked white of his eyes showed. They seemed to be staring inwards.
“This is after twenty hours,” said Sixty-Seven. “I doubt if I could save him, even if I had prepared an anti-toxin. No one else could. They could never determine the toxin. There are no known tests for it.”
“He looks as if he had been bitten by a snake,” said the Griffin. “Let us see the other one.”
Sixty-Seven covered the blotched man, whose body still twitched to the pain engendered by the toxin, though the worn-out consciousness no longer registered.
There were no such terrible stigmata on the second body that lay exposed and nude. The eyes were open but fixed.
They did not respond to touch or movement, but there was a horror manifest in the distended pupils, the narrowed irises.
Like the first, this body was ill nourished, but it showed no sign of violence, or of agony, beyond the haunting horror in the immobile orbs. The breath misted the mirror Sixty-Seven placed to the slightly parted lips and the chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly. The limbs were plastic, the flesh seemed normal but it was cold as that of a cadaver.
Sixty-Seven thrust a lancet into the nearer arm. No blood followed the withdrawal.
“The heart has ceased to beat, the arterial system is idle. This is after twelve hours. It is a perfect state of suspended animation. He will be dead, to all intents and purposes, within another hour. But there will be no decay. Not for many weeks. He is em
balmed alive. While alive.”
The Griffin frowned again.
“It is good,” he said, “but not all I had hoped. He will die too soon.”
“I can modify the toxin so that the subject will not lose consciousness, as this one nearly has, for days, for a week, perhaps more.”
“Good. And the brain?”
“The subconscious cerebration will cease, but he will know he is alive. Until life—as we term it—finally passes, he will be able to think, he will remember, he will imagine the future.”
The Griffin chuckled. He tapped Sixty-Seven on his shoulder, leaned on him and began to shake with ghoulish laughter.
“It is excellent,” he cried at last. “I was not sure when you showed me the two which I might choose, after all. The torment or the peace, with perfect understanding. I select the latter. The living death. The torture in the brain. I shall bring you your subject soon. And then, Sixty-Seven, name your reward.”
The magnified blue eyes flamed behind the lenses. “You mean—whatever I wish?”
“I have said so,” replied the Griffin magnificently.
“Freedom, that is what I want. I want the sun, I want to mingle again with men—and women.”
“Strange talk for a scientist. Yet you wizards are often very human. It was a question of women that brought you here, I remember. Would have taken you to the chair, if I had not intervened. If I gave you freedom you are apt to land there yet.”
“Who would know me?” Sixty-Seven burst out bitterly. “Look at me, forty in years, seventy in appearance. Old enough, in seeming, to be my own father. But young enough to want to use my life. I could leave the country. I could….”
In the Grip of the Griffin: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 3 Page 19