by Harold Ward
Holm chuckled as he read. He understood vaguely that it was himself who was referred to—that it was his picture that smiled back at him from the printed page. Yet he did not understand. Detective—he a detective? Had he not always been linked in some unfathomable way with Doctor Death?
He frowned and tossed the paper aside. What he did not understand was not to be questioned. Somewhere, deep within his subconscious brain, Doctor Death had so willed. And the will of Doctor Death was his law... It amused him to think that the papers believed that Doctor Death feared him. Why should Death be afraid of him? Was he not Death’s assistant?
“Good morning!”
Holm turned quickly. Doctor Death had entered and was standing before him. There was a cold smile on the aged scientist’s cadaverous face; his sunken eyes glittered like those of a snake as he pointed to the newspaper that Holm had tossed aside.
“You read?” he asked.
Holm nodded.
“Without understanding,” he answered. “There is something vaguely familiar about it all—something that I cannot comprehend. It is as if I had lived another life and that now I am dreaming about it.”
Death chuckled low, mockingly.
“Time is but a fleeting thing at best,” he answered. “Eternity is everything.”
He leaned forward, his voice vibrating with energy.
“I needed you. What I need, I take. You are a scientist. I, too, am a scientist. Science, as you know, recognizes no law except the law of truth. You pleased me because you, of all the world, had brains enough to recognize the truth. And that is why I seek to destroy the so-called scientific world. Let me read you something.”
HE selected a book from the pile on the table and, turning the pages rapidly, found that which he sought.
“I quote from a statement made back in 1933 by L. A. Hawkins, executive engineer of the research laboratory of the General Electric Company. Listen:
“Labor has been taken away from human beings and given to machines to do. That change is an important new factor in the depression of the last four years, but we are not going back to muscles instead of machines. The human race never has known happier times than in Athens of old, when slaves did all the work. Now we of today must learn how to get used to our slaves—the machines...
“Wrong—all wrong,” he said, laying the volume down. “The same erroneous impression that the entire world is laboring under. A generation ago Jack London, one of the greatest of the Socialistic fraternity, shocked people by his romance, The Iron Heel, in which he pictured a tyranny of organized industrial plutocracy which lasted for centuries. London was wrong and yet, to a certain extent, he was correct in his surmises. An industrial plutocracy is being swiftly erected, but it is a plutocracy of machinery. A plutocracy brought about by science. The world is already staggering beneath its yoke. It is the iron heel of this plutocracy that we must battle.
“Science—and I am a scientist, remember—has reached a stage where it is as malevolent as a harpy, eating into civilization like worms into a dead body, drooling with poisonous hunger for more civilization to destroy. We are nearing the end. The world must either be set right or die. I am the chosen vehicle to bring this change about.”
He leaned forward, his eyes gleaming.
“You see, the Almighty’s plan has gone wrong,” he said. “The devil and I have a better one. My mind possesses the power to raise the dead. You have seen it demonstrated. There, my young friend, is your answer. I have no hatred in my heart for these men whom I must destroy, I am merely fulfilling a mission. Have I made myself clear?”
Holm nodded.
“You have made yourself clear,” he answered, parrot-like.
Doctor Death leaned forward again and touched him on the knee with his bony forefinger.
“Together we can work wonders—the three of us—you and Nina and myself. Is it not so?”
Holm’s eyes glistened excitedly.
“We can change the world,” he said. “You will be in supreme command. Miss Fererra and I will execute your orders.”
Doctor Death nodded benevolently.
“With two assistants such as you, I can win on every front,” he said solemnly.
Holm leaped to his feet, his face tense with excitement.
“Let us get to work” he exclaimed. “There is no time to be lost.”
Chapter VIII
The Cave of Death
DEATH rose slowly to his feet, a look of triumph in his cavernous eyes.
“Come,” he said. “There is much that I must show you, since you are to be my assistant. Miss Fererra cannot handle everything herself and these dead people—these Zombi—have no intelligence. They follow a beaten path. You majored, I understand, in chemistry. It was one of your favorite studies.”
“Was it?” Holm answered dully. “I seem to have a knowledge of it, yet I cannot remember where I acquired it.”
Doctor Death chuckled again. For an instant he gazed at Holm, a look of interest in his deep-set eyes. Then he asked him a number of questions, each meant to test the memory of the younger man. Satisfied, at last, that the detective’s amnesia was complete, he made his way through the narrow door with Holm in his wake.
Entering a narrow passage, he stepped into a room which seemed strangely familiar to the detective, yet he had no recollection of it.
“You recognize this place?” Death asked.
Holm shook his head.
“I seem to know it, yet I cannot remember of ever having seen it before,” he answered. “It is like gazing upon something of which, some time in the past, you have dreamed.”
Death smiled grimly.
“It is the room where you awakened last night,” he said. “See? There is the little room beside it. It is where I pass my leisure time. It is a well-equipped laboratory. However, compared to that which I am going to show you, it is nothing. And now for a sight that you, as a chemist, should be able to appreciate.”
He threw open a narrow door and pressed a switch. A thousand lights sprang into life. Stepping inside, he made way for Holm to enter.
The detective gasped.
It was a huge cave in which he found himself—a cave as vast as the interior of a great cathedral. And, like a cathedral, it was arched, for scattered here and there were gigantic pillars of clear, translucent stone—stalactites. They were colossal like the place itself, some of them ten or fifteen feet in diameter at the base and wrought with a delicate tracery baffling description. In every direction the great aisles stretched almost as far as the eye could reach, while the reflection of the thousands of lights, dancing and scintillating, gave the huge cavern the appearance of a gigantic fairy grotto.
Out of the vast main aisle, there opened, here and there, smaller caves or grottos. Death led the way to one of the larger of these and waved his arm at its contents with an air of ill-concealed pride.
Even this side room was big—larger than the average hall used for assembly purposes in great municipalities. Scattered about it were innumerable tables and benches, carved for the most part out of the solid rock. They were covered with flasks and bottles and beakers of every description and size. Around the great columns which supported the roof, shelves had been cut; these shelves were filled with bottles.
Holm drew closer and examined them. Here were chemicals of which he had no knowledge. There were test tubes, too, microscopes of the finest quality, Bunsen burners, pipettes—everything needed for research work down to the finest detail.
His face betrayed the excitement under which he labored. Death smiled broadly.
“You like it?” be asked.
“It is wonderful!” the young man exclaimed. “It must have cost thousands to assemble all this apparatus.”
“Say millions, and you will come closer to the mark,” the old man answered. “And it will be yours in which to work. Here, in company with Miss Fererra—as clever a chemist as ever manipulated a test tube—you will spend your days carrying on my experi
ments. I have many things in view. Chemistry is my hobby—my one relaxation.”
Death’s saturnine face lighted up with a happy smile. For a moment he was like a little child who has been praised by its elder.
“Ah, but you have not seen half,” he said. “Let us hurry.”
He led the way down the big aisle to another cave. His long, bony finger touched a button and another battery of lights sprang into life.
“Look!” he exclaimed.
ON every side were fungi—mushrooms, toadstools, foul-looking, fetid-smelling growths. The huge cave was filled with them; some of them were of enormous size, bloated, puffy monstrosities of the vegetable world, unclean looking, venomous. They filled every nook and corner of the gloomy cavern. Their odor was overpowering, nauseating.
“Some of them are deadly poison, even to the touch,” Death said with pride. “I gathered them from the four corners of the earth. It has taken me years to propagate some of them, crossing them, nourishing them as one nourishes a baby. From them I have made many weird potions. From them I expect to make many more. Some day I will explain them to you more fully, for I expect you to use them in your work. They fill a different place in the scheme of things, however. They seem to know me. Note how they lean toward me, waiting, child-like, for me to caress them. They realize that I love them.”
For an instant he fluttered here and there amidst the loathsome growths, petting, fondling, caressing. Finally, straightening up, he gazed at Holm benevolently.
“Now for something different,” he said. “Watch and, watching, fear not.”
He turned out the lights. Holm drew a long, tremulous breath.
Where, but an instant before, there had been only empty space, now something was moving in the darkness around them!
He felt it, sensed it. Yet he could not see it. He knew that it was monstrous, devilish, sinister, unclean. It seemed to be reaching out for him—stretching its mighty arms toward him. It was of the blackness—a part of it—and yet apart; something that was striving with all the force at its command to break through the veil, yet fearing to do so.
Doctor Death chuckled.
“It is where I incubate my elementals,” he said. “They require the darkness—foul, unclean places. They come from nowhere—from beyond the veil—fearful, loathsome things, viewing all humanity with an unquenchable hatred. Yet I am their master and so you need have no fear of them. They come only when I call and the aura of my protection surrounds you like a mantle. The very air inside here is filled with them. At a word from me they would cover the earth. Within a year life would be extinct, living as they do upon vitality. But there are other wonders. Let us go.”
AGAIN he led the way down the wide aisle to another great cavern. A bat fluttered past them, almost brushing Holm with its great wings. The place was dreadful, uncanny. Yet so strong was Death’s hold over Holm that he had no fear.
Then, as Death touched a hidden switch in the wall, the semi-darkness was dispelled and he gazed up on the weirdest, most ungodly sight that human eyes ever rested upon.
“Skeletons!” he exclaimed. “Human bones! Dead bodies! A charnel house!”
Death shrieked with laughter.
“Bones! Bones!” he chortled. “Millions of bones! All that remains of strong men and fair women. In their day many of them achieved prominence. Others were but common clay. Yet here they lie—preacher and harlot, honest man and thief, society women and creatures of the streets—upon a common level.”
He pointed to a great pile of bones. It extended almost to the ceiling. Even as he spoke a bat brushed against it. A dozen skulls came tumbling down, leaping and bounding. One of them brought up with a crash against Holm’s feet. Death kicked it contemptuously aside.
“The ancient and the modern,” he gurgled. “Once this great cave was the burial place at a great nation—a race that must have existed before the Mound Builders. When I found this place, I put my Zombi to work bringing other bodies here—the bones of modern men and women. I needed them. And of what avail are marble tombs and costly sepulchers to one whose life is extinct? Now here they lie in a common heap.”
He gazed at the pile of skulls speculatively.
“I discovered this cave by accident,” he went on. “Where do you think it is located? The entrance is through my residence. My house is a scant quarter mile from Lake View cemetery. But why, I hear you ask, do I mention this? Come, I will show you.”
He led the way into another cavern. Then, as Holm stared wide-eyed, he understood the answer to the question.
All along the walls were piled other dead bodies—newly dead: some of them seemed barely to have parted with this life with no signs of dissolution having set in. Men and women, clad in the cerements of the grave, were stacked, like cordwood, as high as the arm could reach. Zombi, straight-faced, glassy-eyed, were constantly bringing more in, placing them in fresh piles.
Doctor Death was speaking.
“It is thus that I recruit my Zombi,” he said. “A Zombi, as you are perhaps aware, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life. It is a dead body that is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to bring this about—and there are few, I assure you—must obtain a body from a fresh grave before it has had time to rot, and galvanize it into movement by the power of thought.
“I am anticipating the future. When the time comes that all mechanical activity ceases, there will be need—for a time at least—for additional labor. It will be hard for man to adjust himself to changing conditions. Nor is it the Creator’s desire that humanity should become a race of slaves. These Zombi, then, must do the drudgery.”
He took his battered pipe from his pocket and filled it thoughtfully.
“But not every dead person can be made Zombi,” he explained, striking a match and applying it to the tobacco. “In fact, there is not one out of fifty thousand that can be so changed. I must, therefore, experiment on many before I succeed. And where is there a better place to obtain the dead bodies than in a cemetery?”
He chuckled reminiscently.
“So my Zombi search the graveyards nightly,” he went on. “They bring all of the newly dead here. At my leisure, I work with these bodies, constantly augmenting my army of Zombi. I already have several hundred at my command.
“And there is still another use for these carcasses.” His brow clouded as he spoke. “My elementals. Ah, my friend, there is my problem. Elementals, as you are probably aware, must draw their sustenance from humans. Obviously, it would be unfair for me to turn loose upon the human race this horde of creatures from behind the veil. Yet I cannot allow them to starve—and starve they will unless I can secure for them a certain amount of human vitality. And when they are hungry, they are unruly.
“Death,” he went on, “is a slow process. We say a man is dead when the last breath leaves his body and when his heart has ceased to beat. Not so. For hours, days—sometimes even weeks and months—the soul still lingers about the form of clay it has quitted as if reluctant to leave its earthly home. And surrounding the body, then, is an aura of vitality. It is upon this vitality that I let my elementals feast.
“You saw John Stark,” he went on. “My elementals were half starved. They fell upon him, sucking him dry. For Stark, my friend, was not Zombi when he walked and talked to Inspector Ricks. He is not the stuff of which Zombi are made. He was simply obeying an impulse that I had implanted in his brain just as he passed away. He responded to my commands. Then, this done, my will ceased to rule his body and he became, once more a dead thing.
“But come,” he ended abruptly. “I have shown you enough wonders for one time. And we have much work to do.”
Chapter IX
Attack of the Zombi
“TONIGHT,” said Doctor Death at the dinner table, “I will unleash the forces of hell against the world. Doctor Karl Munson must die. I had thought that, perhaps, there
had been enough deaths—that those who are in high places would take warning. Instead, the wheels of industry continue to spin as they have spun in the past. There is no let up. The police, according to the papers, have merely doubled the guards about the men who have made this possible and have increased their activity in searching for me. I must strike again.”
They were dining in a huge room just across the passage from the library. It too, Holm guessed, was built inside the cave. The walls, apparently of concrete, were paneled, while the ceiling was beamed. They had completed their repast, the plates had been whisked away by the solemn-faced Zombi. Now Death, toying with his wine, leaned back in his chair and surveyed his two assistants quizzically through the haze of cigar smoke that surrounded him.
Nina Fererra shuddered. She raised her glass to her crimson lips and sipped deeply. Holm noticed that the jeweled fingers with which she held the thin stem trembled.
“Is it necessary?” she asked. “Can’t it be postponed?”
Death shrugged his shoulders.
“I have warned them enough,” he said gruffly.
Holm turned to Nina.
“You have been with the doctor long?” he questioned.
It seemed to him that it was ages before she answered. Yet the same enigmatical smile that he had noticed before hovered around her mouth as she made reply.
“For years,” she said finally. “I was formerly his secretary. Later—when he decided upon his present course—I became his assistant.”
“She helped me plan it, in fact,” Death said musingly. “Her assistance has been invaluable.”
Holm imagined that the girl shuddered again. She gazed at him queerly as the aged scientist leaned forward and looked him squarely in the eyes.