Free Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 by J. Allan Dunn Page B

those optical delusions they show you on Montmartre, where the body of a beautiful girl changes before your eyes into a decomposing corpse. Imagine then! Before my eyes Evelyn was swelling hideously, changing color. She was mottled like the Thing. Her face lost all features. And I—I lost my sanity. I don’t know if I’ve got it back,” Power ended wearily. “I only know that she was killed horribly, perhaps before my eyes.
    “That terrace garden of ours is private and inclosed. When I reached it, with my gun, there was no trace of the Thing. Not a leaf seemed disturbed. There are no fire escapes. The walls are sheer, up and down. And they were vacant. The Thing had vanished utterly. And my wife lay inside—a revolting sight, even to me, who loved her. I called our doctor with what reason I had left. You know the rest.”
    “Not all of it,” said Manning. “But I hope to. Power, I found this underneath one of your wife’s pillows. Do you know anything about it?”
    Power stared blankly at the object, an image of brass, female, which had been engraved by hand on the original casting. He shook his head.
    “I never saw it before. What is it? Some sort of mascot? It’s ugly enough.”
    “It is an image of Parvati, the wife of Siva the Destroyer, one of the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva. Hindu workmanship, unquestionably.”
    “Hindu? She might have got it from this chap Zerah, who has the penthouse on the roof. He is a swami or a yogi, some sort of mystic or fakir, I suppose. Evelyn and some of her pals used to go to see him, formed some sort of mysterious cult or other. I don’t know much about it. Crystal gazing or fortune telling. It was a kind of fad.”
    Manning said no more, but put the little image in his pocket. There was no use in telling Power that the Thugs of India robbed and ravished in the name of Parvati, that the Tantrists indulged in wild orgies in her foul honor.
    “How big did this Thing seem?” he asked.
    “How can I tell? There was a mass, like some crouching body, mottled and furry but not too distinct. It was not less than the size of my head. Then, as I told you, it rose, it swelled, it stunk. There were the eyes! The eyes!”
    Manning left Power, with Doherty in charge.
    “Don’t harry him,” he said to the sergeant. “I don’t want him to feel he’s a prisoner. He’s been through hell.”
    “Yeah,” said Doherty stolidly. “I wouldn’t wonder. You’re a big shot in our game, Mr. Manning, but I can’t swallow all that hooey about what he calls the Thing. It ain’t human, leastwise I mean it ain’t natural, or reasonable.”
    “Ah!” said Manning. “ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.’ I’ll be back presently. I want to find out a few things about Pelota, and then I’m going to pay a visit to Zerah, the Hindu gentleman who lives in the penthouse. Just one thing, Doherty. I want you to come into that bedroom for a minute. Hanlon can keep tabs on Power and the maid, also the cook when she shows up.”
    V
    They stood in the death chamber. Manning closed the windows where the Thing had disappeared.
    “Got a good nose, Doherty?” he asked.
    “Not bad. Why?”
    “Smell anything unusual? A little like ammonia? It’s faint, but I can still detect it.”
    Doherty enlarged his naturally wide nostrils.
    “I noticed that before,” he said. “Thought it was disinfectant the doc used.”
    “So did I,” agreed Manning. “Try again, with me.”
    Doherty sniffed deeply.
    “Smells to me like ants,” he said. “We had a plague of ’em once, me and the missis, in our little shack on Long Island. They used to swarm in the house and the old lady found a nest. Poured boiling water on it. Killed ’em. But they gave off a smell like this one.”
    “Ants! Formic acid! Doherty, you’ve given me a lead. It needs disentangling, but it looks promising. And I won’t forget you if it works out.”
    “You don’t mean ants had anything to do with