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

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