The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page A

them.
    He might not have had so much faith had he known they were to be stacked up against beings that had apparently stepped straight into 1940 from the year 4000-and-odd, B.C.

    As the plane was leaving New York’s sharp skyline, The Avenger stepped into the Braintree Museum. An anthropologist on the staff had just discovered the dead body of Bill Casey and phoned the police, who hastily got in touch with the man with the flaming eyes in the death-mask face.
    Benson bent over the corpse.
    There were two wounds on the body, and these two, either one of them instantly fatal, told him all he wanted to know about the murder.
    One was a small slit in the back where a knife had gone straight to the ex-cop’s heart. There was practically no blood at all around this. The slim gash had closed when the knife was withdrawn, and the bleeding had been nearly all internal.
    The other was as bloody as a slaughterhouse. That was the straight slash across the throat that had half-decapitated the corpse. A clotting lake of crimson was on the floor from this.
    A police captain worried over the two deadly wounds.
    “What’s the meaning of ’em?” he fretted. “The stab in the heart killed him deader’n a salt mackerel. And that, I think, came first. Why did the killer slash his throat, too? And why kill Casey anyhow? There’s nothing gone from the museum, as far as a fast check shows. It’s goofy.”
    Smitty’s eyes sought the colorless, flaring orbs of his chief. And Benson nodded.
    He knew the reason; and Smitty had guessed it too.
    The Ring of Power! Needing renewal every forty-eight hours in life blood! Casey’s heart stab hadn’t been bloody. So the hand that wielded the knife slashed the throat to remedy that lack, then dipped the ring.
    “The guy that wore that ring last was Taros—or his double,” the giant Smitty whispered. “And Farnum Shaw is a dead ringer. Do we pick him up, chief?”
    Benson shook his head. “Not yet. It sounds simple, Smitty. But there is something behind all this so sinister and complicated that I still can hardly guess at it. Enough to say that the removal of Shaw would do no good at all.”
    The captain of police was worried about another point, too.
    “I don’t see how anybody could get in here. The joint is built like a bank. There are thick bars over all windows, and none of the bars show signs of having been tampered with. The doors are bronze, solid, thick. They’ve got locks on ’em like a time vault. And the locks look all right, too. You’d think the killer was a ghost that could go through the doors or walls.”

    Benson left the sprawling stone barracks of the museum, with its long-dead occupants and their accessories.
    At the home he was temporarily using, he told the giant Smitty to go on to the airport and pick up Mac and Josh and Rosabel and Nellie.
    He went into the mansion alone.
    His manufacturer friend had left a skeleton staff of servants to take care of the empty house, among them the butler. The butler was good. Usually he was at hand to open the door before Benson could even get his key into the lock.
    He was not at hand, now. Benson let himself in, his cold, pale eyes as expressionless as ice. There was no one in the front hall.
    That is, there was no one until he got almost to the curving marble staircase. Then there were suddenly three figures in the hall beside his own.
    Three figures as bizarre in the morning light as things out of a madman’s nightmare. Three things garbed in the robes of priests of old Egypt, and with naked blades in their upraised hands. Three things whose eyes were dully mad, and whose lips writhed with a lust to kill.
    Without sound or word they rushed on The Avenger.
    Benson had two of the world’s strangest weapons sheathed in slim holsters at the calves of his legs. One, below the left knee, was a needle-like throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle which he called Ike. The other, below the right knee, where a search for weapons