by Harold Ward
There had been murders—killings galore. Killings such as this—weird, fantastic, bizarre. Senseless killings—the work of a maniac with the greatest brain of the century. The nation had dripped with crimson—the blood of men high in the ranks of science and invention.
And Doctor Rance Mandarin, known as Doctor Death, had become Public Enemy Number 1. Yet, in his own mind, he was not a criminal. “Millions of men have died fighting for a principle,” he asserted. “Nations have gone to war over a scrap of paper. Why then, should the deaths of a dozen or two—yes, even a few hundred—be counted against one who seeks to bring the world back to what it was intended to be. I, the greatest of all scientists, know that I have been given the brain with which to accomplish these things. I am but the object to this end.”
But Inspector Ricks had seen the Doctor’s astonishing deeds of horror as reign of terror. He had started the fight on this master criminal. Despite his hatred for the scientific in crime, had been sagacious enough to call to his assistance Jimmy Holm, millionaire criminologist, dabbler in the occult, member of the police department in spite of his money and not because of it.
“Holm, the supernatural detective,” the newspapers had dubbed him, making great sport of him in the beginning because of his methods and his application of psychological principles in the solving of Death’s crimes. Yet, in the end Holm had triumphed. The nation had sung his praises, and Ricks had grinned in unholy triumph.
Jimmy thought of all that now, and of how out of it had grown a Damon and Pythias friendship between the grizzled old manhunter and himself; and of the love between himself and Nina Fererra, Doctor Death’s niece and assistant. Forced into a life of crime by her insane uncle, she had swung over to the side of law and order and, side by side with Jimmy Holm, had assisted in tracking Doctor Rance Mandarin to his lair.
The man who called himself Doctor Death had escaped. For months now he had been ominously silent. Ricks had hoped that he was dead. Arrangements were being made for the marriage of Jimmy Holm and Nina Fererra. And now—Jimmy Holm shuddered at the thought—Nina Fererra was again in the madman’s hands and everything must be started at the beginning again.
HOLM was jerked back to the present by the grunt of the medical examiner, who looked up, a peculiar expression creeping over his ruddy face.
“It’s got me beat,” he said.
Holm nodded wearily.
“I know,” he said moodily. “You’re new on the staff, doctor, yet you must have read of our battles with him before.”
Holm jerked his thumb toward the table where he had laid the note he had taken from the breast of Harmachis. The medical man’s jaw dropped as he read the penciled scrawl.
“Doctor Death!” he exclaimed. “Almighty God!”
For a moment there was silence. Then the physician pointed down at the dead man near the door.
“That poor devil?” he questioned. “How did he get in here? He’s been dead for hours. Rigor mortis has set in—”
Ricks, still weak from his manhandling, looked up and nodded understandingly.
“You’re telling me?” he interrupted. “And now tell me something. Could that dead man have choked me almost into insensibility?”
The medical man smiled wryly. “Stop kidding,” he growled.
“Yet,” Ricks said, caressing his throat tenderly, “there are half a dozen men here who are willing to swear that he damn near killed me. Have you ever heard of Zombi?”
The physician grinned.
“A Haitian myth,” he said. “There is no such thing.”
“The hell there isn’t!” Ricks growled. “That guy’s a Zombi.”
The physician held up his hand.
“You are making statements that will hardly bear the light of scientific investigation,” he asserted. “The manhandling you received may have been worse than you imagined, Inspector. Better let me give you a bit of going over.”
Ricks snarled.
“I was a doubter once,” he answered. “Now I know better. I’ve felt the grip of dead men’s fingers around my throat before this. Yet they are not altogether Zombis. This man Death injects something into their veins. They respond to his orders because that something—damned if I know what it is—it’s a metallic solution of some kind—worked by some sort of tiny, radio-like device—
“Horseradish!” the medical examiner interrupted flippantly. “There’s a scientific reason for everything. When you get at the bottom of this affair—”
“Yeah, when we get at the bottom—if we ever do,” Ricks interrupted.
The medical examiner dropped into a nearby chair and lighted a cigarette.
“I was in Europe at the time of the Doctor Death episode,” he said. “What really happened to the old fellow—became sort of a homicidal maniac, as I understand it?”
Ricks shrugged his shoulders moodily.
“We trapped him in an old house where he had his headquarters,” he answered. “There practically all of his scientific apparatus was located—stuff worth millions—priceless. The house caught fire and we barely escaped with our lives. Death got away. Since then he has been lying low. I had hoped that he was dead. Instead comes this.”
Meanwhile Ricks’ men had been searching the rest of the house. Now they returned to where Jimmy Holm stood savagely biting at the end of his pipe. He stared at them moodily, questioningly.
“Nothing—not another soul living or dead,” was the substance of their report.
Ricks drove them out of the room ahead of him and down the stairs into the front hall. Jimmy demurred, but the Inspector insisted.
“You know that I’m not a coward,” be growled. “You know, too, that I’ve had experience aplenty with the man responsible for these deaths. Why these men were killed is beyond my ken; they’re smaller calibre than Death usually strikes at.
“I know his methods—so do you—know that he battles with instruments that no human agency can cope with. I’m ordering everybody out of this house. That includes you, Jimmy. I’m sealing the doors. Not a man will be allowed inside until the break of day. That’s an order, not a request. The fiend with whom we have to cope fights best in the dark.
“Guard the house but keep outside.”
None of them saw the top of a mummy case moved quickly to one side. A lean, cadaverous face peered out, the sunken eyes gleaming like the twin fires of hell.
“Tomorrow the papers will tell of my triumphs anew!” he chortled. “I can almost see the headlines: Doctor Death Scores Again!”
He stepped out into the hallway, and leaning over the rail, listened to Ricks as he exhorted his men.
Then, as the outer door closed behind the Inspector and his crew, he chuckled low—mockingly.
“I am going back to Nina’s,” Holm asserted. “There, perhaps, I can find a clew to put me on the right track.”
Ricks’ chin dropped to his breast. For a moment he gazed out into the darkness. Then his big hand touched the younger man on the shoulder.
“God, Jimmy!” he said. “I’m afraid—for the first time in my life—afraid of this devil we’re pitted against. We’ve got the whole battle with his infernal powers to fight over again. And now, Nina’s under his ghastly influence once more.”
He leaned against the side of the big police car, his keen eyes taking in the disposition of the guards as the sergeant placed them about the quaint old house. Finally he spoke again.
“There’s only one silver lining in the whole affair,” he said. “We know that, regardless of his other faults, Doctor Death loves Nina. No harm will come to her in his hands.”
“No harm?” Holm interrupted bitterly. “Can you say that, knowing as you do that when she is under his spell she is liable to commit violence—to kill and destroy, even as he destroys? My God! I can hardly stand it, Ricks. Tomorrow was to have been our wedding day.”
Ricks nodded his shaggy head kindly.
“I understand, my boy,” he said. “God knows that I’d be willing
to die myself in order to save her—”
He stopped suddenly. One of his men, standing close by the side of the house, shrieked. From where they stood they could vaguely make out his form in the darkness. For an instant he seemed to be dancing—boxing with a shadow. Then he slumped to the ground, his body twisting and writhing.
“Take it off!” he wailed. “For the love of God, take it away! I feel its arms... about me! It’s sucking me... dry... drawing the very... life out of me...”
THEY charged toward him from every side. There was nothing to be seen. Yet his feet played a ceaseless tattoo on the pavement and his eyes seemed about popping from his head as if a tremendous pressure was being slowly applied to his neck. He was dying, that was apparent, dying hideously.
Around them the air was growing foul. They seemed to gaze at each other through a haze of terror; it closed in on them, sinister and diabolic, engulfing them. It had the feel of air that comes from a tomb that has long been closed and is suddenly opened. It was horrible, loathsome.
“Help... me!...” the dying man croaked gutturally.
A comrade stooped to raise his head. An invisible force hurled him backward. His head struck against the fence. He rose to his feet, a dazed look on his face.
They flooded the gasping, gurgling man with their flashlights, watching him struggle against his invisible opponent. Again and again they rushed toward him; each time a cold barrier of terror held them back.
Finally, he gave a feeble, choking gasp. His jaw dropped and his form grew lax. They knew that he was dead.
And all the time that he was dying—with each gasp that he gave—his huge body seemed to be collapsing, losing its shape like a toy balloon that has been punctured. His uniform became loose and flopped about him like a sack. His skin grew wrinkled and parchment-like.
For a moment they stood there, too horrified for utterance.
“God!” Ricks muttered.
“The elementals again,” Jimmy Holm said in a dry, husky whisper.
Then came another surge. It swept over them, leaving them gasping for breath. With it was a strange, overpowering, awful odor—the horrible stench of death and decay.
Officer Braddock, who had first discovered this unspeakable thing that was engulfing them, was the first to give way. With a sudden shriek, he turned and, tearing at his collar like a man who is choking to death, rushed through the gate down the street. A dozen paces away he dropped to his knees.
“It’s getting me!” he cried in a horrified, choking voice.
He flung himself face forward, writhing and kicking like a dying man. They tried to get to him. The strange force hurled them back.
From out of the darkness came great, gleaming eyes, set in the midst of shapeless faces—phosphorescent eyes that seemed to burn into the very hearts of the men under Ricks’ command. They danced like mad things, whirling, coming closer and closer.
Then the blackness was peopled with weird, sinister monsters, legless, armless—gigantic heads set atop funnel-shaped bodies that spun like whirlwinds. Nearer and nearer they swarmed to the little band.
And with them came great surges of hate that swept over the group of policemen like waves. From every side the hell-shapes charged, gyrating, leaping, cavorting.
Weird noises assailed the ears of the little group of officers as they stood there watching their comrade die. From far out of the crawling shadows of the night came whispering, rodent-like sounds. Slowly they increased in volume until the whole world seemed filled with a shrieking, gurgling cachinnation. It rolled over them and around them.
“Fight it, men! Fight It!” Ricks roared. With the unholy racket came another rush of snarling, shapeless wraiths. Their very weight carried the little group of policemen down. They came on like a cyclone, twisting and roaring. One man dropped. Then a second and a third. The little group tried to break and run. Invisible hands held them back, hemming them in on every side.
They were forced to stand, helpless, seeing their comrades die without being able to lend a hand—watching bodies shrivel and shrink as their vitality was lapped up by the sinister gray creatures from the atmosphere.
Holm, quick to think in times of emergency, commanded the men to stand back to back in a hollow circle, their flashlights forming a ring of light around them. Into the outer edge of this light the gyrating, bloated things of evil struck, leaping back again as the light rays perforated their transparent vaporish bodies. Then a flashlight battery burned out. A rush! Another man went down, screaming...
There was a crash of glass.
“Jimmy!” a voice shrieked.
Holm looked up.
Nina Fererra was leaning out of a broken window. The towel with which she had been gagged hung loosely about her neck. Her hands and feet were bound. Imprisoned in one of the mummy cases by Doctor Death, drugged by the power of his mind, she had yet managed to fight off his baleful influence long enough to hobble to the window. Twisting her hands, she had succeeded in seizing a vase and had hurled it through the pane.
“Iron!” she shouted. “Iron!”
The gaunt, cadaverous face of Doctor Death appeared behind her, his cavernous eyes gleaming with rage. She was jerked backward.
“Jimmy!”
Holm leaped forward. Iron! The only known substance antagonistic to elementals. He fought back the horrible, sinister things that sought to seize him. Grasping the oldfashioned, wrought-iron fence, he gave a mighty pull. A post, rusted where it entered the ground, snapped. A long section came loose in Holm’s hands. Tottering under its weight, he charged forward.
The diabolical things screamed their rage. They shrank back before Jimmy Holm’s mad onslaught, disappeared into the night from whence they came.
Whirling, Holm dashed onto the porch and threw his weight against the door. It crashed open. At the head of his men, he tore through the house like a maniac.
Nina Fererra had disappeared.
Through some secret exit known only to himself, Doctor Death had spirited her away.
Chapter IV
Egypt’s Sorcery
SOMEWHERE in the immediate vicinity of New York City lurked the greatest menace to civilization the world had ever known—Doctor Rance Mandarin, alias Doctor Death.
Where was he? That was the question uppermost in the minds of every public official throughout the civilized globe.
DEATH STRIKES AGAIN!
Doctor Rance Mandarin, Alias Doctor Death, Slaughters Egyptians
Where Will The Monster Strike Next?
Such were the headlines the newspapers carried following the discovery of the dead men in the house of Harmachis, the Egyptian. Columns of speculation were carried.
Why had a man who claimed to be fighting for the poor and oppressed, struck down an apparently inoffensive foreigner as his first victim? Did Harmachis know some strange secret?
A meeting of the President’s cabinet was called. A resolution was introduced to reorganize the Secret Twelve, which had previously successfully combated Doctor Death. It was passed with only one dissenting vote—that of Horatio Hellenburg, Secretary of the Treasury. Once more the twelve leaders came together with the President of the United States at the head of the table.
Again Inspector John Ricks called upon Jimmy Holm to head the fight. And Jimmy, the thought of Nina Fererra ever in his mind, accepted the stupendous task.
WITH Ricks by his side, he took up the pursuit of Doctor Death with an energy that surprised even himself. He worked with feverish haste, for none knew better the menace of the sinister being with whom they had to cope. Every facility known to modern criminology was brought to bear upon the case. New methods were originated. Nothing that could be thought of was left undone.
“Get Mandarin, Alias Death, Dead or Alive.”
Such were the orders that thundered across the wires and were repeated at hourly intervals over the radio. “Shoot first and ask questions afterward,” police officials told their men. Every newspaper in the country carri
ed a picture of the sinister doctor at the head of each column in an effort to impress his skull-like face upon the public mind so that he would be recognized at sight.
Under the direction of Jimmy Holm were placed the cream of the world’s manhunters. The Post Office Department brought from the far corners of the world the pick of its inspection department.
From Texas came the Rangers—lean, hard-eyed men who seldom spoke—men whose teeth had been cut on six-guns and to whom danger was the breath of life. Canada, aware of the menace to the world, sent the pick of her Mounted—men as lean and hard-bitten as the Texans. The Army, the Navy, the Marines—all contributed their best.
And working hand in hand with the officers of the law was another group. Shifty-eyed they were, men and women who spoke the language of the underworld. Under the direction of Tony Caminetti, uncrowned king of this empire without the law, the forces of disorder and crime were again brought side by side with the organizations of law and order, to the end that civilization might be saved.
All crime ceased. “Caminetti says it’s curtains f’r d’ man dat hists even a hairpin ‘til dis De’th guy is in d’ gow,” was the emphatic message that flew from mouth to mouth throughout the invisible kingdom. Guns were sheathed, gang feuds forgotten. Tony Caminetti had so decreed. And, in the underworld, Caminetti was the law.
Nina Fererra was a national character. She had been acclaimed only a few weeks earlier as the country’s heroine. Her praises had been sung by press and public. The President had, on behalf of a grateful nation, presented her, for what she had done, with the Congressional Medal.
Now she was in the hands of a maniac.
And, even worse, again the nation was in deadly peril.
Through it all Doctor Death remained ominously silent. Somewhere like a blood-hungry monster, he lurked in his hidden fastness biding the time when he would again leap forth and fasten his tentacles about the throats of mankind. Jimmy Holm knew only too well the meaning of his silence. Doctor Death was busy building up once more the vast machinery with which to tear down society.