Chapter I: Front Matter

LORD of the SILENT DEATH

by ROBERT MOORE WILLIAMS

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Comet December 40.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Death came out of a box and stalked through the streets of Chicago.

Samuel Morton found the box in Asia Minor, in a niche in the tomb of a forgotten Sumerian king, and not being able to open it, brought it back to this country with him. Morton was an archeologist, on the staff of the Asia Museum, located in South Chicago.

After months of effort, he succeeded, one hot August afternoon, in opening the box. But the death that lurked in it did not strike then. It waited.

Morton was alone that night, in the basement of the museum, trying to decipher the hieroglyphics engraved on the lid of the box--hieroglyphics written in no known language--when the silence came. The first sound to disappear was the rattle of the street cars on the surface line a block distant.

Morton was too engrossed in his work to notice that he could no longer hear the cars.

Then the soft rustle of the blower fan pushing cool air into the hot basement went into silence.

He still didn't notice the cessation of sound, did not realize that incredible death was creeping closer to him every second.

Even when the energetic tick of the alarm clock sitting on a mummy case was no longer audible, Morton did not sense that death was near. He was lost in his work.

But when he could no longer hear the scratch of his pen on the paper, he realized that something was happening. He looked up.

Morton was a solidly built, craggy giant. His face burned a deep brown by the sun of the Arabian desert, a shock of white hair that for days was undisturbed by brush or comb, he sat in his chair, every sense suddenly alert. His eyes raced over the room, seeking the cause of the uncanny silence.

He saw nothing.

But he recognized the presence of danger and reached for the telephone. It was the last move he ever made. As his fingers closed around the instrument, the silence hit him.

It had the effect of a physical blow. The smack of a prizefighter's fist would not have rocked him more. As he gasped one word into the telephone, his body seemed to be lifted clear out of the chair. His muscles, tensing involuntarily, hurled him upward, like a grotesque jack-in-the-box that has been suddenly released. He hit the chair as he fell, crashing it to the floor with him.

His body writhed, a slow, tortuous twisting. Muscles swelled in his throat as he screamed in pain. But no sound came.

The threshing of his heavy body on the concrete floor produced no sound. The scream was blotted into utter silence.

Before the muscular writhing had ceased, his flesh began to change color. The tan of his face, stamped with lines of torture, became a reddish pink. Thousands of microscopic pinpoints of color spread in a creeping tide over his body.

The silence held. Viciously, as though making certain no more life was left in his body, the silence held.

When it lifted, went into nothingness, vanished, not more than a minute had passed.

But in that minute Samuel Morton had died.

The Lord of the Silent Death had emerged from the cell which had held him imprisoned for ages.

* * * * *

"Rocks" Malone--the name "Rocks" came from his calling--lived two blocks from the Asian Museum. But that wasn't his fault. He would have lived nearer if he could have found a room. In fact, for one deliriously happy month, he had slept on a cot in the basement of the museum. Then Sharp, the thin-faced business manager who had charge of the property and the finances, had caught him and given him the bounce.

"Malone, get the hell out of here," Sharp said. "Of all the damned fools we have around here, you are probably the worst. I should think you would get enough archeology just by spending fourteen hours a day here."

"Aw, hell, I'm not hurting anything. Why can't I sleep here if I want to?" Rocks had answered.

"Because it is against the regulations, and you know it. Go on, now, before I report you to the Board."

Grumbling, Rocks had taken his cot and left. And Sharp had reported him to the board anyhow, but that august body, in view of his youth and the pathetic interest he had in archeology, had not reprimanded him. They were archeologists themselves and they knew how the science gets into the blood and bones of a man. Secretly, they had rather approved of Rocks trying to sleep in the basement, so he could be near his beloved relics of dead and gone civilizations. They were grooming him for a place with the next expedition. "As likely a lad as I have ever seen," old Andreas McCumber had said about him. In his day McCumber had dug into half the buried cities in Asia Minor and it was his boast that he knew a man who had the makings of an archeologist when he saw one. "Of course he's young yet. But a little seasoning will cure that." Rocks was twenty-three, but to McCumber, who was past seventy, twenty-three was only late boyhood. "Besides," McCumber had rumbled in his beard at the board meeting. "Penny will--ah--comb my whiskers--if she--ah--discovers that I have permitted him to sleep in the basement."

Penny was McCumber's grand-daughter.

But Rocks had already located a room about two blocks from the museum and had moved in.

That was why the police found him so quickly.

It was an August night, as hot as hades, and Rocks was sleeping with both feet practically out the window, to take advantage of the late breeze. He awakened to the sound of his landlady's protesting voice.

"But I tell you, Officer, you can't want Mr. Malone. He's a fine boy and I will vouch for him personally. I'm sure he hasn't done anything wrong."

"I'm not saying he's done anything wrong, madam," a bass rumble answered. "But the officer on the beat said he lived here."

A rap sounded on the door. Rocks took his feet out of the window and said, "Come in."

A blue-coated figure thrust his head in. "You Malone?" he inquired.

"Yes. What's wrong?"

"We want you over at the Museum."

Rocks was already grabbing for his clothes, jerking them on over his pajamas. "What's wrong? What's happened?"

The cop shook his head. He was still a little white around the gills. "We don't know what's happened. The sawbones wasn't there when I left. But we want you to identify a man."

"Why can't he identify himself?"

The officer wiped perspiration from his face. "Because he's dead."

"Dead!" The word leaped from Rocks' lips. The first shiver of fear knifed through him. He was not yet wide awake and he hadn't fully comprehended what the officer wanted. But that single word shocked him to instant wakefulness.

In the basement of the museum they found three men talking earnestly in a corner. They weren't in uniform but their bearing fairly shouted "Detective!" They looked scared. Rocks didn't know it then, but these three men belonged to the homicide squad. They were accustomed to looking at violent death in all its forms. Stiffs didn't scare them.

But they _were_ scared.

They had the uneasy alertness of the man-hunter who senses danger.

His escort turned Rocks over to them.

"I'm Kennedy; homicide bureau," said one of them. He had a heavy, impassive face and eyes that were drills of jet. "Sorry to bother you, Malone. You work here?"

"I'm on the staff."

"Good. The doc is already here. We want you to identify a body, if you can. Come this way."

Kennedy led Rocks to the large basement room, the other two plain-clothesmen following behind.

This was the room where the specimens brought back from the four corners of Asia were uncrated and cleaned and prepared for display on the floors above. Loot from the tomb of forgotten kings, bits of pottery from Ephesus, a winged bull carved out of the stone of Nineveh, mummy cases from Egypt--for Egypt was included by the museum--beads from the valley of the Tigris-Euphrates, big and little, the relics of lost and dead centuries were piled here. Even in the daylight the place was ghostly.

Photographers were popping flashlight bulbs and taking pictures of the exact position of the body. As Rocks entered they took their last picture and stood aside and the doctor from the coroner's office bent over the body and began his examination.

Then Rocks saw the body on the floor. He recoiled. "My God! That's Samuel Morton."

His respect for Morton amounted almost to reverence. Morton was a world-wide figure in the field of archeology, and to Rocks Malone, he was little short of a god. Rocks had looked up to this man, had longed to be like him. On the next expedition, Rocks was to go along as Morton's assistant.

Now Morton was dead.

"What--what happened?" Rocks whispered.

The doctor stood up. His face was ashen.

"That's what I would like to know--what happened. This man has been dead less than an hour."

"At eleven-thirty Central phoned in there was a receiver off the hook here and said the operator thought somebody had tried to call the police," Kennedy interrupted.

"Heh?" the doctor queried. His professional aplomb had deserted him completely. "The important point is: what was the cause of death? To my knowledge there is no record in medical history of a death like this. Look."

"I've already looked," Kennedy said, turning away. "Once is enough."

Rocks looked again at the solid, craggy face he had known so well. The skin had always been tanned, but now it was red. Puffed and discolored. And _red_--like a chunk of raw beefsteak, like the carcass of a skinned animal. The first impression he got was that the skin had been removed. But he bent over, fighting against the sickness in his stomach, and saw that the skin had not been removed. It had been punctured, in literally thousands of places. Morton's face looked like thousands of pins had been stuck in it. When the pins had been removed, the blood oozed through.

A later report by the medical examiner disclosed that there was not a spot on Morton's body that was not full of microscopic holes--millions of them. Even the soles of his feet, protected by his shoes, showed the same horrible markings.

But it was the coat that held Rocks' eyes. Where the doctor had taken hold of it, the cloth had crumbled. Rocks tested it. The cloth fell away in his fingers, fell into a dark ash. The cloth looked all right, until it was touched. Then it crumbled into a dust as fine as powder.

The hottest fire would not leave so fine an ash.

"What do you think killed him, Doc?" Kennedy asked.

The doctor brushed perspiration from his face. "Really, I could not hazard an opinion. There is nothing like this in medical records. It's appalling. I trust--ah--that it is not some new kind of plague. No, it couldn't be that. No disease would destroy his clothing. I can't even begin to guess what happened, but the body must be removed for a complete examination."

Rocks was so sunk in grief that he scarcely noticed the men who lifted all that was mortal of the old archeologist on to a stretcher.

Kennedy came to him and said sympathetically. "Don't take it so hard, Malone. Morton, I guess, was a friend of yours."

Rocks told the detective what the archeologist had meant to him. Kennedy's eyes softened. "I'm sorry, Malone. We'll do everything we can to discover what happened, but frankly I don't know which way to turn. I've been talking on the phone to some of the men who are in charge of the museum. McCumber was one, Sharp was another. They're on their way over here."

The detective hesitated. "Malone, maybe you can help us."

"I'll do anything I can."

"Good. When I talked to Mr. Sharp, he said, 'I knew something like this was going to happen. I knew it!' When I asked him what he meant he said something about a box that Morton had brought back with him from Asia."

"Box?" The touch of an eerie chill raced down Rocks' spine. "Yes. There it is, sitting on the scale we use to weigh specimens."

The lid was open.

"He--he must have opened it this afternoon," Rocks said.

He wondered what Morton had found in that box. Treasure--or something else? It was empty now, the lid back, the cunning combination lock visible.

But what had been in the box they did not know, until Sharp got there and told his story.