He stepped fast and scuttled between the four big pillars like a scared rabbit, fairly broadjumping onto floor with good old American ceiling above it. Then he started at a half-run toward the call box under the elbow of one of the statues.
“Gee, the things are alive!” he panted, staring at the big stone images.
He felt like a gnat in the presence of eagles. But next moment he had something else on his mind — something a lot more pressing than the statues. The mummy of the guy he’d been told was the son of some old priest named Taros! He had to pass that case, and he started to do it at a dog-trot. Then he stopped, as if jerked short with a rope tied around his waist.
Words were coming from the mummy case.
“My father’s charms must be returned without violence.”
The watchman screamed aloud. Words again! Words, from a thing so long dead that it was hardly more than dust!
“He must give all that he hath, to retrieve the charms. All that he hath to receive forgiveness for his blunder.”
The guard ran in earnest, then, getting out of the Egyptian wing so fast that he looked like a streak.
He went to the phone.
“Mr. Benson? I must talk to Mr. Benson at once!”
The drawling voice of a Negro answered his frantic summons of the Sixteenth Street mansion.
“Mistuh Benson is out jus’ now. Any message?”
“Tell him the mummy talked again,” said the watchman wildly. “Tell him—”
He had never heard anything change so rapidly as the voice of the Negro. At one moment it had been sleepy, deep South. At the next it was crisp, and the words were uttered as a college professor might have spoken them.
“I will get in touch with Mr. Benson the instant I can,” said Josh Newton. “Meanwhile, I would suggest that you return to that mummy case, and watch and listen. There may be more words.”
The watchman backed away from the phone as if it had been a living thing.
“Oh, no!” he said. “Not me! I wouldn’t go near that thing for—”
There was a slight sting in Josh’s voice.
“Words can’t hurt you. And you must, of course, have a gun. Stand near the case with your gun drawn. It is important that we know all the mummy may say.”
The man hung up. He was shivering a little. But he remembered the cold, awful eyes of the man with the white hair and the dead face. This command, figuratively at least, was coming from The Avenger. The watchman decided that he was more afraid of those eyes, if he disobeyed the order, than he would be of the mummy case.
He went back to the Egyptian wing.
With his gun in his hand, he went to the case, to stand beside it. He’d listen and see if Taros’ long-dead son spoke again. Meanwhile, if any man or thing came close to him—
He waggled the gun determinedly, and stood next to the case. And then the gun dropped from his nerveless hand.
The case was there, but the mummy was not!
Once more the mummy of Egypt’s priest, Taros’ son, was gone, and the glass lid opened to his gaze only black emptiness.
There was the sound of a step from the blank end of the wing. Then more steps, in measured tread. The watchman whirled.
He was far past screaming, now. He could only sway there, mouth slack, eyes crazed.
The steps were as regular as the ticks of a clock. They were made by a thing that was swathed from head to foot with ancient linen bands of the type Egypt’s embalmers used.
The mummy was walking steadily toward the watchman. As it moved, it slowly raised its swathed right arm, and an extended finger pointed at him.
There were more steps.
From behind a tremendous statue of Typhon, god of evil and of death, came three figures in flowing white. And after them came the figure of a girl, a priestess, in gauzy, transparent robes.
All the figures bore down slowly, inexorably on the watchman.
He saw the face of the mummy now. The linen bands were off the face. He saw shallow, blue eyes, and unintelligent features, set and rigid like those of a sleepwalker, but with something fiendish deep in them. It was the face of the curator’s son, though the watchman did not know that.
The others raised right arms and pointed, too, like the mummy. And the watchman fell unconscious to the floor.
CHAPTER X
“Chief—”
For some time there had been no reports to police headquarters of seeing people dressed in nighties or old Egyptian garb, slinking around Washington’s streets. So when the officer on the Connecticut Avenue beat saw a misty shape flit half a block away toward a big old house with a most important occupant, he rubbed his eyes and decided at first that he was seeing things.
The house was leased to a veteran senator from Idaho. The senator, James Blessing, was a determined, independent man who had made a lot of enemies. It was the officer’s standing orders to keep in the neighborhood of that house quite a bit, in case some crackpot decided he’d like to eliminate Blessing from the American scene.
The patrolman decided at first, when he opened his amazed eyes and saw that the misty shape was still there, that he was seeing some mysterious assailant. But then he began to get the details, and he knew differently. This was either a madman — or a ghost.
The flitting shape was tall and very thin. It wore no head covering, and its skull was as hairless as a vulture’s. There was a bird beak of a nose that furthered the smile. The thing raised its left arm, and the cop saw a ring for an instant that glistened with a funny, pale pink light.
“Hey, you! Stop!” he yelled.
The shape kept on, toward Senator Blessng’s door.
“Stop, I said!”
The cop started running, with gun drawn.
The figure vanished.
It had been moving just out of range of light from a street lamp. It passed into shadows. But the shadows were not enough to account for its disappearance. You could see beyond the clear rim of light, even if not very distinctly.
Yet the cop couldn’t see the emaciated shape. It had completely vanished.
He stopped still, gun hanging in his hand.
“Now, look,” he reasoned with himself. “If there’s somebody there, I oughtta be able to see him. If there ain’t, then I didn’t see him in the first place. But I did see him,” he added, less certainly, “and now he ain’t there.”
The figure appeared again.
This time it was much nearer the patrolman. So near, indeed, that the cop gave a smothered squawk and leaped back. But the leap didn’t save him.
Slowly the emaciated, hairless specter raised its gaunt arms. It was as if it were bringing down a curse on the patrolman’s head, though no word was spoken.
Arms extended straight toward him, the shape approached. It seemed to float rather than walk. That was all the cop noticed. Next instant he felt as if he’d fallen into a vat of acid that was burning and prickling him all over.
After that he didn’t feel anything at all.
The Avenger was sitting in the study of his temporary residence when the message came from headquarters. Nellie and Mac, Smitty and Josh and Rosabel were being very careful not to interrupt. When the chief sat, silent and still, like that, he was coordinating in the icy aloofness of his brain the things he had picked up to date on a case. He might speak, or he might not. But they knew that many facts — either unknown or without significance to anyone else — were falling into place behind the colorless eyes.