Free The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring by Kenneth Robeson

about it.
    The sensation of fire in your skull. The deep sleep enveloping you. And then the ghastly impression that you were no longer yourself, that some other thing was taking over control of mind and body!
    Perspiration was slowly forming on Doctor Marlowe’s face. There was more to it than that, in his case. For now and then, as the deep sleep stole over him, he had seemed to see a shadowy face. Just a glimpse. The face of a girl. And a queer impression of exotic, gauzy robes.
    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