“Your hours are over, I know,” she said with a smile. “But I’d like to consult you anyway, if you don’t mind. The door was open. I just walked in—”
“Certainly,” said Marlowe. “What seems to be wrong?”
“I have been having queer headaches lately,” said Nellie, calmly. “I’ve never had anything like them before. There’s a feeling of burning, inside my head.”
Doctor Marlowe was no longer impersonally pleasant and indifferent. His expression did not change a line. But suddenly it seemed to have a frozen quality. The effort made to conceal his agitation was so desperate that it almost — but not quite — succeeded.
Nellie duly made a mental note of that agitation.
“Any other symptoms?” Marlowe said.
“Well, the headaches come usually just before I go to sleep. Then when I do fall asleep, it seems to me the sleep is much heavier than normal.”
Marlowe cleared his throat.
“Do you happen to know a girl named Anna Lees?”
“Why, no, I never met any such person,” said Nellie truthfully. “Why do you ask?”
Marlowe waved his hand evasively.
“No matter,” he said. “Now as these headaches—”
He stopped. A look of strain, almost of terror, appeared in his eyes, strive as he would to conceal it. His hand went up, like a thing with will of its own. It pressed hard against his forehead.
Nellie remembered that he had been rubbing his forehead when she first saw him. She realized now that it was the gesture of a man with a headache. And this — this anguished prodding of the temples — was the move of a man with such a pain in his head that he could hardly bear it.
That was odd, Nellie thought. That was—
Abruptly she straightened up in the visitor’s chair she had taken on coming in here.
She was beginning to have a headache herself!
There was a dim sensation of heat in her head. It increased rapidly till it seemed as if her brain were being seared. Her sight began to fail. She heard herself crying out, then felt as if deep sleep were tugging at her eyelids.
The tendency to sleep didn’t seem to help the terrific headache any. Between the two, she sagged in the chair, and was still, almost unconscious — but not quite.
Dimly she saw Doctor Marlowe’s hand come down from his skull, as if the pain there had ceased. She saw him get up from the swivel chair and walk toward a large, old-fashioned wardrobe in a corner.
The deep sleep was pulling harder at heavy eyelids. She missed some moves, then. But again, dimly, she saw the doctor, after a lapse of time. She could not guess how long it had been.
She was jarred a little out of her strange and painful coma by what she saw.
Marlowe had been transformed. He was now in strange robes, the garb of a priest of old Egypt. It was amazing what the garment did for his own appearance. His face was suddenly something that might have floated off the frieze of an ancient tomb on the Nile. The uncanny conviction was borne home that the man was more than merely dressed in Egyptian priests’ robes; he was an Egyptian priest, straight out of the dim past.
He moved toward Nellie, rather like a sleepwalker, yet with something demoniac and alien in the large, glazed pupils of his eyes.
Even deeper pain wove red strands through the black unconsciousness that was cloaking Nellie Gray. Her whole body felt as if on fire; as if dipped into a vat of acid.
That was her last conscious sensation.
CHAPTER XI
Out of the Tomb
When Benson had phoned orders to his aides in the Bleek Street headquarters, he had told Josh to bring the black suit.
The reason for that was apparent, now.
Josh was in the Braintree Museum, but from ten feet away, in the dim lighting, you would hardly have known it. All you’d have seen would have been a deeper shade in the shadow cast by a certain cabinet.
The suit Josh wore was a standard black one such as people use in mourning. Thus it would excite no particular attention if seen. The fact that it had lapels higher than most would not have been noticed.
With those lapels, Josh could cover whatever collar he happened to be wearing. And when he did that — Josh practically ceased to be, if it were dark around him.
Josh was pretty dark himself. Dark skin and dark fabric made him blend with shadow so that he wasn’t discernible at all, unless he grinned — in which case the ivory of teeth and the white of eyeballs appeared amazingly out of thin air.
But he wasn’t grinning at the moment. He was grim and watchful.
The cabinet in the shadow in which he was lurking was that containing mummy and mummy case of Taros’ son. Josh was in the Egyptian wing.
He had spent half of last night there, after first receiving The Avenger’s orders. Now, the first half of this night was gone — and nothing had happened.
Josh felt cold, although it wasn’t at all cool in the great stone barracks. He felt cold — and lonely.
He was the only soul in the place. The night watchman replacing Casey really had quit after that second hectic night at Braintree. A successor hadn’t been picked up yet. There was just Josh.
Josh had prowled the place on the hour, almost like a conventional night watchman, himself. All windows, all doors, had been covered to make sure no one had tampered with them in the preceding sixty minutes.
The phrase, “all doors,” was misleading, however. There was just one entrance in all the museum. That was the great front entrance with its massive bronze slabs. These had locks a Houdini couldn’t have picked, Josh had decided; and on every round the locks had been untouched.
He had made sure, at about one o’clock in the morning, the last time. Now he was again at the station that seemed to contain most danger.
The Egyptian wing, next to the mummy of Taros’ son.
Josh had thought about the mummy a lot, during the dark hours. There was nothing else to think about.
He had decided that perhaps the thing really had talked; Benson seemed to think so, and the chief was almighty as far as the colored man was concerned. But that the mummy had walked—that was an egg of another breed! That was impossible! Also it was impossible that the mummy ever could have got out of its case. Josh had hung around the cabinet long enough to know that it had not been opened recently — could not have been, or marks would have showed.
The reports of the watchman about the mummy getting out and moving around were simply the figment of an imagination excited by words coming from it.
Josh slid from the shadow at the side of the cabinet and looked into the front of it, through the glass lid. And then Josh bit down hard on a cry.
The mummy case was empty!
It was simply impossible! The mummy had been in there five minutes ago, when he returned from the regular inspection of doors and windows. He had looked hard, to make sure, just five minutes ago.
Now it was gone. There wasn’t even the mummy case in the oak cabinet. That was gone too. There was only black emptiness.
But he had been standing right next to that cabinet during every moment. He had been practically touching it. Nothing had come near it, and — his hair-roots tingled at even the thought — there had been no stirring within it. If there had been, he would have heard.
Yet in that five-minute interval, the mummy had gotten out of its sealed and airtight cabinet!
Josh began to sweat. What next? The watchman had not only told of the mummy’s getting out, but also of its walking. Surely that, at least, had been a delusion.
From the far, blank end of the wing, Josh heard footsteps.