THE MASK OF MEDUSA

Keep your eyes tight closed

For if the Gorgon come, and you behold her,

Never again will you return …

IT WAS a far from prepossessing place. In fact so gray and drear its aspect that it tended to repel rather than attract the passerby. Which was, of course, a most enticing fault—so far as Shaner was concerned. To him it was a matter of no moment that the shop-front’s mullioned windows were milky with neglect, that from sprung hinges sagged a door wan with recollection of old paint, that lock and bars were green with verdigris. The place was uninviting and obscure. Moreover, it was open. This last was reason enough for using it.

Shaner was an opportunist. He was, as well, a firm believer in the adage that one should make for any old port in a storm. Since this was a haven—of sorts—and since a storm was brewing at his heels, his choice was clear.

Above the entrance, restless in the sluggish breath of twilight, creaked a sign limned in tarnished gilt:

GLYPTOTHEK

Gallery of Classic Marvels 24

Lifelike Models of

Infamous Persons

24

Visitors Welcome

ADMISSION FREE

T. Cavendish Cerologist

Beneath this sign, scarce noting its strange title, and through the door beyond stepped Milo Shaner. He stumbled over a worn doorstep and passed from a world of apprehensive light into a somber, welcome sanctuary …

The hall was lighted, but so futile the striving of its cobwebbed globes that, freshly come from staring into the blood-red eye of the setting sun, it took Shaner some seconds to accustom himself to the gloom.

When at length he did so, it was with a start. For what had seemed to him an empty hall now proved to be peopled with a host of crowding figures more menacing than those from which he fled.

A moment of cold panic gripped him briefly, and in that instant desperation thoughts of flight, battle, cringing submission, coursed wildly through his brain. A bitter anger laced with gall the terror in his mind. To be caught thus … with escape so nearly won. And by mischance, at that. Small consolation to know he had planned well and cunningly. There bulged in his pockets the ransom bills that proved his guilt. And all too well Shaner knew the penalty awaiting a convicted kidnaper and murderer.

Pleading denial blurted from his lips. “Listen—” he began. “It’s all a mistake. I can explain every—”

And then, belatedly, his tortured brain grasped the fact that these new foes were still. They neither moved nor spoke nor changed expression. With hope-sharpened eyes Milo Shaner looked at them again … then suddenly he laughed aloud, his nervous mirth discordant in the silence.

Waxworks! His search for refuge had brought him to a museum of waxwork models. A gallery of lifeless . .

“My pets amuse you, sir?” asked a quiet voice.

Once again a dart of panic pricked at Shaner’s ragged nerves, for the gentle query seemed to float from nowhere to his sleeve. But this time his instinctive recoil came and was gone in the halting of a breath. Composedly he turned to meet the eager gaze of the little man beside him.

“My pets,” repeated the proprietor. “You find them amusing, sir?”

“Hardly that,” answered Shaner. “Interesting, yes. But I shouldn’t say amusing.”

“Yet you laughed. I heard you laugh, sir.”

“Relief,” chuckled Shaner frankly, “not amusement. To tell you the truth, they somewhat startled me at first. I thought they were alive. They are very lifelike, you know.”

“Oh, but of course,” said the little man. His eyes were large and pale and abnormally intent behind thick-lensed glasses; they seemed to peer not simply at Shaner, but beyond and through him. They were strange eyes, at once servile and forceful, querulous and possessed of a dark, lost knowledge. A dancing light flickered briefly in their depths … or possibly it was a reflection glancing from the thick-lensed glasses as the man nodded. “Very lifelike very! But, of course, that is to be expected. Isn’t it?”

He put the query almost as a statement, yet with an air of eagerness and hope. His lips half-parted, eyes intent on Shaner’s face, he waited for an answer, head cocked to one side in an attitude of curiously birdlike expectancy.

“Well—” conceded Shaner, “I suppose so. Not all—uh sculptors do as well. You are an artist, really.”

It was, he thought, rather handsomely said. But he was not averse to paying a compliment, especially when by so doing he might win a needed ally. Shaner was an opportunist. There was a chance—an off-chance, but nonetheless one to be considered—that the police might blunder into this unlikely place. If so, even a cheap wax sculptor, warmed by flattery, might prove a valuable friend. Particularly—thought Shaner—the sort of tallow-dabbler who called himself “cerologist” and his chamber of monstrosities (Shaner laughed inwardly) by the classic title of “Glyptothek.”

The little man—Cavendish was his name, remembered Shaner suddenly—flushed with pleasure.

“It’s good of you to say so—” (“Not at all,” murmured Shaner politely) —“but, really, you’re too kind. I don’t deserve … You see, it’s not as if I . o . Well, what I mean is—” He floundered into confused silence, blinking rapidly and almost apologetically at Shaner, while his tiny, moth-like hands fluttered aimlessly at his lapels. Then he cleared his throat and tried again. “Would you like me to show you the gallery?”

“It wouldn’t be too much trouble?”

“Trouble? Oh, no, sir! I’d like to!”

“I’m sure,” said Shaner, “it would be a pleasure to see it through your eyes. But I don’t want to keep you. And it must be almost closing time?”

“Oh, that!” said Cavendish, and frowned. He took a mincing step to the door, closed it and shot its bolt, pulled a cord that unfurled heavy curtains over the door and window-panes alike. “Now we won’t be bothered. So, if you’re ready—?”

Shaner smiled. Things were working out even better than he had hoped. What had been fair security was become, with the drawing of the curtains, isolation. Vanished now was any likelihood of the police searching this place. There remained to him but one problem: that of spiriting himself with the ransom money out of this neighborhood. That chance would come later, after the hue-and-cry had died down. When it came he would be ready for it. Shaner was an opportunist.

“I’m ready,” he said, and followed Cavendish.

One cheapening hypocrisy, at least, was Milo Shaner spared. He did not have to simulate false interest in what a proud and eloquent guide showed him during the following half hour. Preoccupied as he was with his own uneasy problems, he found himself becoming more and more interested in that which he saw and that which he was told as Cavendish, pathetically intent to please, led him from one to another of the macabre images with which the hall was thronged.

“This,” chattered the diminutive artist cheerfully, “is Roger Saunders, the poisoner. You may remember he killed his brother, his brother’s wife, and their five-year-old son? Cyanide of potassium. He hoped to inherit his brother’s coal-and-coke business, but—”

He prattled on glibly, supplying an incredible fund of dates and data, as Shaner studied the model before him. A ghoulish thing it was under the baleful lights of this musty hall. But a work of art. An undeniable work of art … in its fashion. Oh, it had its faults. Cavendish had shown a deplorable lack of imagination in his modeling of the figure, for example. Surely the poisoner might more effectively have been posed in the crouching act of administering his lethal draft to, say, another figure lying in a bed, reaching gratefully for that which would destroy him? But, no. This Roger Saunders stood upright and alone, with no prop or artifice to indicate the fashion of his perfidy.

“And this,” continued Cavendish, his explanation a background theme to the fugue of Shaner’s musings, “is Nicholas Rodriguez—‘Nick the Spick,’ they called him. The knife was his weapon. Heaven only knows how many victims—”

But works of art—there was no denying that. What if the infamous Nick Rodriguez were not depicted with blade in hand? There was murder in his heart and in his eyes. There were taut, strained lines between his brows; matching creases scored his swarthy cheeks from flared nostrils to tensed jawline. The expression was that of the ruthless killer brought to bay, angered, incredulous at his capture, but staring into the face of doom with furious defiance.

And all, all were like that. Unimaginative Cavendish might be, but at the art of delineating character he was a craftsman. Almost, thought Shaner with something akin to a shudder, he was too competent a craftsman. There was a grim warning implied in these rigid figures … and Shaner did not like the implication. It struck too close to home.

“Now, here,” beamed Cavendish, “is one you’ll like. His murder method was quite unique. Air embolism. Ever hear of such a thing? He injected an air bubble into the veins of his victims with a hypodermic needle. The fact that he was a practicing physician made it easy for him, of course—”

“Another murderer?” demanded Shaper, a bit sharply. “Are they all murderers? All of them?”

The little man’s thick-lensed glasses nodded frosty answer. “But of course. Didn’t you know? That’s my mission in life.”

“Mission?” repeated Shaner, uncomprehending.

There was a strange and sultry ardor in the artist-proprietor’s voice, a ferocity of which Milo Shaner had not dreamed the little man was capable.

“Murder,” he cried. “Murder, that most horrible of crimes. I hate it, sir—loathe and despise its perpetrators with every fiber of my being. It is my mission, then, to show the world these fiends in human form, display them in all their brutal bestiality, that men may view them, tremble, and take heed!”

“But—” began Shaner.

“My sacred mission,” continued Cavendish febrilely, his strange eyes pools of pallid flame. “One that will never end till justice has been meted to earth’s last murderer.”

“Still,” said Shaner, “there are other crimes. And in a museum of this sort, I should think—”

“It is murder,” said the little man sternly, “which must be thwarted and exposed. The destruction of a life: is there any more wicked inhumanity which can be practiced … any single act more criminal than that?”

It was obvious, realized Milo Shaner, that argument was useless. Upon this subject the diminutive cerologist was clearly monomaniac. Better to shift the conversation to some less intimately hazardous field. He said soothingly, “You’re right, of course. Quite right—”

“My sacred mission,” Cavendish repeated. “There is one alive now whose … whose semblance—” He hesitated over the word—“belongs in this gallery. I was listening to a history of his villainy just before you entered. My radio, you know. And never was a blacker page written in the ledger of mankind than the record of his crime. A kidnaper, sir, who brutally murdered his innocent victim—”

“The radio?” interjected Shaner hoarsely.

Cavendish nodded. “Then callously proceeded, as if the child still lived, to collect the ransom money pledged by the anxious parents. A cruel deed, sir. A foul deed—”

The musty hall was curiously hot. There were beads of perspiration on Shaner’s forehead; his tongue was parched and brassy. He said, “They … they caught this criminal?”

“Not yet. But they will,” said the little man with somber satisfaction. “They will. He has the ransom money on him. Fifty thousand dollars in fresh new bills, still bound in the bank’s wrappers.”

“I … see,” said Shaner slowly. “Then the bills are marked? When he tries to spend one—”

Cavendish smiled tightly. “They’ll catch him. And if they don’t—” His smile deepened, but mirthlessly—“and if they don’t, I will.”

“You?” exclaimed Shaner. “You?”

But now it was Cavendish who seemed stricken with a sudden unease. The lambent fury dwindled from his eyes as he veered abruptly from the subject.

“Forgive me, sir,” he said mildly. “Don’t mind me, please. I fear I feel too strongly on that subject. It’s my weakness. I get carried away. We were looking at this model, were we not?”

Shaner nodded, content to drop the subject. “Yes.” “A most interesting case,” said Cavendish. “An air embolism. Of course, for a man of Dr. Hartwell’s position in the community, it was a simple matter to—”

“Hartwell!” cried Shaner. “Did you say Dr. Hartwell?”

“Why, yes. That’s right.”

“But Dr. Hartwell was never captured,” said Shaner. “I remember reading about the case. He was never even found. Because—” Complete recollection struck him abruptly, stunningly—“because he could not be identified! He had been an erratic recluse for years. No one knew him well. There were no pictures available to the police.”

Cavendish shifted miserably from foot to foot. His moth-like hands betrayed the agitation his words tried to conceal. “I believe that is so, sir. But—”

“But you—” There was a vague and dawning comprehension in Shaner’s voice—“you have an image of him, accurate and complete in every last detail. Cavendish! Where did you get the description from which you modeled this figure?”

The little man cried, “I … I don’t remember. Somewhere. It must have been printed somewhere?”

“It wasn’t, Cavendish.”

“Well, I … I’m an artist. I have my methods—”

“Yes,” said Shaner thinly. “You are an artist … in wax. You have your methods: the dipping vat, the paste, the brushes. Cavendish, tell me the truth! That lifelike figure … is it a model of Dr. Hartwell? Or is it Hartwell himself?”

The little man’s hands ceased their motion with one final, despairing gesture. Then, bleakly, “Yes,” said Cavendish. “That figure is—or was—Dr. Hartwell.”

Milo Shaner laughed. It was not a clean and wholesome laugh. There was a note of hysteria in it. This little saint, this eager little cherub who “loathed and despised” an art in which he was not only adept, but a ghoulish master. A slayer with a “mission” … to kill and stuff like pigeons fir the public’s gape his fellow-murderers . .

“But you mustn’t laugh, sir,” wailed Cavendish. “I beg of you! You don’t understand!”

“I understand plenty!” rasped Shaner, returning abruptly to the world of reality. Milo Shaner was an opportunist, and it occurred to him suddenly that here was an end to all his problems. Cavendish would be his ally now, not by virtue of flattery or friendship, but because he must be. They were twin swords this duo held, each over the other’s head, and Shaner’s was the keener.

“I understand plenty, you mealy-mouthed scoundrel,” he repeated. “You hate murder, eh? With twenty-four victims to your credit, you pretend to be the benefactor of mankind!”

The small cerologist’s voice was a thin, dry pleading. “And I am, sir. I am exactly that. I—”

“How did you kill them?” demanded Shaner. “Pistol? Knife? Or into the tallow vat alive, perhaps?”

“You’re wrong,” sighed the little man. “I’ve tried to tell you, sir, but you won’t listen. I did not kill them.”

“I suppose,” jeered Shaner, “they killed themselves, then?”

“That’s it, sir,” nodded Cavendish. “That’s exactly what happened. They killed themselves … by looking.”

“Looking? Looking at what, for God’s sake?”

“At—” began the little man, then hesitated. Pale eyes sought Shaner’s beseechingly. “Did you ever hear of the Gorgon’s head?” he asked.

“The what?”

“The Gorgon’s head. The head of Medusa.”

Shaner stared at him, a dim recollection struggling with his impatience. “Medusa? I seem to remember something. A monster of legend? A myth? A fable?”

As though the telling of his secret had loosed some curb upon his tongue, a new eagerness suffused Cavendish. He bent forward, his thick-lensed glasses glinting. “No legend, sir,” he breathed. “Medusa was no myth, no fable. She lived … how many years ago, man cannot guess. So long ago that we have only a confused tale of her exploits and her horror. Of the hero, Perseus, who slew her—”

“Looking into his polished shield,” recalled Shaner, “because it was death to look upon her face. Now I remember. So terrible was her face that merely to gaze upon it turned men to—” His voice faltered, and his eyes turned suddenly to the rigid figures in the gallery, then back to Cavendish. “Turned men to stone,” he whispered.

Even as he spoke the words voicing the wild surmise that had struck him, he did not believe them. It was fantastic, incredible, impossible.

But Cavendish nodded.

“Exactly, sir. Even as these.”

“But that’s insane!” cried Shaner. “Medusa and her sister Gorgons … they were just myths. Symbols of something, perhaps, the ancients could not explain. Strange monsters so horrible to look upon that the sight of them chilled the blood. But not to stone. That’s impossible!”

“You would not,” asked the little man quietly, “care to look upon the mask?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s here. I found it,” said Cavendish, “long ago in the wild, lost grottoes of Greece. Where or how does not matter now. But I have it. And it has been my means of fulfilling my sacred mission in life. The destruction, the cleansing of the world, of those who slay their fellow men.”

It was then that sanity, the cool balm of logic and reason, came to Shaner’s rescue. He stared at the little man for a long moment, shocked at the burning madness in his strange, pale eyes. Then suddenly he laughed, aware that for a time he had half believed Cavendish, had half shared his madness.

He said curtly, “Okay, Cavendish … let’s stop clowning now, shall we? It’s a good joke, but I’m in no mood for laughs. Let’s you and me talk turkey.”

“I’m not sure,” said the little man, “I understand you, sir.”

“Then I’ll put the cards on the table,” said Shaner bluntly. “Skipping all this ‘Medusa’ nonsense, you’re a killer. You know it and I know it. You’re cracked on the subject of ridding the world of murderers … and somehow you’ve succeeded in mounting a collection of your trophies in this hall of horrors.”

“I didn’t kill them,” protested Cavendish. “I told you, they killed themselves.”

“Yes, I know. By looking, eh? Okay. Stick to that story if it pleases you. But I don’t imagine you’d want the police to snoop around here and dissect one of your stone models, would you?”

“I—” faltered Cavendish, and licked his lips. “I don’t understand,” he said, “What are you driving at? What do you want of me?”

“Your help,” said Shaner, “in getting out of this town. Oh, don’t look so scared, Cavendish. Play ball with me and nothing will happen to you. I don’t like die police any more than you do. That’s why I’m here tonight; that’s why I want to get out of this burg.

“And you can help me. You’re a business man, free of suspicion. You can crate one of your ‘lifelike models,’ and send it away in a van. If I were the ‘model’ you crated … you see what I mean?”

The little man seemed to be listening, but when he answered it was strangely, thoughtfully.

“You,” he said, “fear the police? You too are a … murderer?”

“I didn’t say that,” snapped Milo Shaner. “I just said I was in trouble. I want your help. Well?”

Cavendish said, “It will take money. I would have to rent a van. I am not a wealthy man.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Shaner told him. From his pocket he took a heavy bundle of fresh new bills, removed a brown paper band and riffled the money invitingly. “Double whatever the cost will be … that fair enough? How much?”

Cavendish stared at the torn band on the floor. A hank wrapper neatly labeled: 100—$10.00—100. His eyes lifted with understanding to those of Shaner, and his voice was a shred of sound in the silence.

“Then it was you,” he said. “You are the one who kidnaped and killed that child?”

He backed away, arms bent before his face as if to shield himself from the very sight of Shaner.

Shaner frowned.

“Don’t you realize you’re being a damned fool?” he demanded. “What I did or did not do is none of your business. You’ve got yourself to worry about. Do you want me to tell what I know about your gallery? I don’t have to go to the police, you know. A telephone call will bring them here.”

Shaner was an opportunist. He knew when he held the whip hand. But this idiot was making things very difficult. Perhaps a movement toward the door …

“If that’s the way you want it,” said Shaner, “I’ll go. I imagine the coast is clear, with or without your help. But I’ll make that call before I leave town—”

“No … wait!”

The little man’s cry stopped him at the doorway. A thin smiled touched Shaner’s lips. He turned questioningly. “Yes?”

Cavendish said, “I did not want to do this. I never want to do it. But in this case, it must be done—”

“You will help me, then? That’s sensible,” approved Shaner. “Believe me, Cavendish, it will be better this way. Much better. For both of us.”

“Yes,” nodded the other man. “I think it will. Much better … for both of us. You didn’t believe my story of the Gorgon’s head, then, sir? It rang untrue?”

Shaner grinned. “A bogey-man tale for kids, Cavendish. But I’m a practical man. I didn’t believe it.”

“I had hoped to convince you,” sighed Cavendish. “But since I failed—” He ducked suddenly behind a counter at the far end of the gallery. When he reappeared, he clutched something in his right hand. Something Shaner could not see in the gray shadows.

“Look, then!” cried Cavendish, his voice like biting flame. “Look, murderer, upon the crimson mask of Medusa!”

Shaner scowled. Madman, he thought. Was there no reasoning with this stupid fool, this monomaniac now pressing something—something—forward into the fusty glare of the bulbs? Something hideously dead, yet monstrously alive. Something a man could not believe in; something which simply could not be. Disdainfully he glared at the grisly object, and:

“Ridiculous!” rasped Shaner. “Utterly ridic—”

GLYPTOTHEK

Gallery of Classic Marvels

25

Lifelike Models of

Infamous Persons

25

Visitors Welcome

ADMISSION FREE

T. Cavendish Cerologist

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