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.
CHAPTER IX
The Mummy Walks
In one of Washington’s innumerable parks, a little later that night, two men sat on a secluded bench. One of the two was young, frightened-looking, with shallow blue eyes and a vacuous face — Harold Caine. The other had a face as dead and cold as that of a harvest moon, and eyes like pale agate set in ice.
“I asked you to come here and have a few words with me alone,” said The Avenger, “because your father seems to get upset when I question you in his presence.”
“Why not?” said Harold shakily, angrily. “You as much as say I had something to do with the loss of the Taros relics. Why wouldn’t he get sore?”
“And you had nothing to do with that loss?” asked Benson quietly.
“Good grief! Certainly not!”
It was the most genuine-sounding denial Benson had ever heard, uttered by a youth who wouldn’t seem to possess the experience and brain power to put on an act before the pale, flaring eyes and awesome, still face.
The Avenger stared at the young fellow.
“Have you had any more of those odd headaches?” he inquired.
Harold’s eyes suddenly left Benson’s white face. A moment before he had sounded as sincere as a man could sound. Now, he was suddenly evasive, shifty. Also he seemed a little more frightened, at mention of the malady.
“Headaches?” he said loudly. “I don’t have any headaches. Never had one in my life.”
“You said the other night that you had left the library to get aspirin for a headache,” Benson pointed out. “You said it was a very peculiar headache, that it felt as if your brain were on fire.”
“I said that?” Harold exclaimed, eyes trying to evade Benson’s. “Why, you must be mistaken. I don’t have any—”
His words trailed off at the look in the icy, fearsome eyes. But the set of his lips continued to be obstinate. He had admitted having had an odd headache. Now, for some reason, he was anxious to take back that admission.
Nellie Gray had reported what she had seen and heard just before Benson came to the rendezvous with Harold. That, too, was about headaches. Benson decided to try to couple the coincidence and apply it to Gunther Caine’s son.
“You do have headaches, almost nightly,” he said, voice as cold and clear as his eyes. “Odd headaches. You feel as if your brain were burning up in your skull. Then you feel yourself drifting off into a deep, deep sleep. The sleep may last a long time, or just a little while. It varies. But just before you fall asleep, you have a queer feeling that you are being emptied, that something is taking over control of your body.”
Harold Caine was white with terror. His eyes were wild. He was panting hoarsely.
“How do you know that? Are you a devil, or a man? How could you guess—”
With a tremendous effort he pulled himself together. Shaking all over, he faced the man with the dead face and the eyes of ice.
“I don’t have any such headaches. I never have had. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The Avenger’s colorless eyes were diamond drills.
“Do you know the lawyer and collector, Farnum Shaw?” he asked, with an abrupt shift.
Harold was startled into saying, “Why, yes. I know him slightly.”
“You are usually overdrawn on your allowance — short of money — aren’t you?” said Benson evenly.
Harold moistened his lips and said nothing,
“Farnum Shaw would give a great deal of money for the Taros relics,” Benson went on. “And if you had such a sum, you wouldn’t have to worry about allowances.”
Harold was literally holding his breath.
“Did Shaw ever hint that he’d pay you well for the relics?”
Amazingly, Gunther Caine’s son nodded.
“As a matter of fact, he did. He didn’t make a direct proposition, but he put over the idea that he’d like to buy the relics, that he didn’t care who from, and that I had the run of my father’s house and was trusted by him.”
If The Avenger was surprised by the sudden frankness, his eyes didn’t show it.
“You turned down the proposition?”
“That’s insulting even to ask me,” snapped Harold, drawing himself up with a virtuous look. “I’d have punched him in the nose if he hadn’t been an older man, and I told him so.”
Benson nodded.
“Now about those headaches—” he began.
Harold’s bluster and air of virtue melted like snow in the sun. He was pale, shaking again.
“I tell you I never had any such headaches,” he almost screamed. “Never, never, never!”
He turned and practically ran.
Benson let him go. The youngster walked in mystery — and in peril. But, as yet, there was nothing to be done about it.
At Braintree Museum, the night watchman taking the place of murdered Bill Casey had not resigned as he’d intended on his first night. The museum officials had been lenient about his not punching in at his rounds; daylight had lent him courage again, and he did need the job.
The courage of daylight was draining with the darkness. It had been leaking away since his entrance into the place at ten o’clock. Now, at past midnight, it was practically nonexistent.
But he was making his rounds, forcing his feet to bear him shrinkingly over what seemed miles of stone floor that echoed hollowly under him. The echoes rang into far, dark places filled with shadows.
Even as Casey had done, the new man had taken to talking aloud to himself for company.
“Lousiest place I ever heard of,” he said. “Why don’t they put a few lights in here?”
Even as he spoke, he knew the answer. There’d have had to be thousands of lights really to dispel the shadows from that mammoth place of statues, pillars, cases, and stuffed animals. The place was designed for daylight.
The watchman punched his clock at a box under a rib of a dinosaur’s skeleton.
“Nothin’s going to happen to me,” he mumbled. “I thought I saw a mummy case empty, then filled again. I thought I heard words come from the case. I was nuts, that’s all. So’s the guy with the dead pan,” he added stoutly.
He went at last toward the Egyptian wing. He had punched all the midnight boxes but that one. He’d have preferred a beating to going in there, but he was trying to hide the fact even from himself.
He went over the threshold, and was under the tremendous stone lintel, supported by the gigantic red sandstone pillars brought from the Nile. He had the same odd, suffocating feeling that if he didn’t step very fast, the pillars would spread and allow the stone slabs to fall down on him.