The Plague, Pestilence & Apocalypse MEGAPACK™
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threatened in the river . And once more police, now that the Black
Death was finished, would be able to turn their attentions to catching
him .Wentworth dared not go to his home, lest they be waiting for him
there . Nevertheless when Nita and he drove back to the city in her
speedy little Renault, the Spider, having sent Ram Singh on ahead
with the small black valise and some private instructions in Hindu-
stani, turned downtown and headed directly for police headquarters .
“Dick!” cried Nita, grabbing his arm, “Are you crazy? Have you
forgotten…”
Wentworth smiled at her, stopped the car before police headquar-
ters and kissed Nita for all the world to see .
“No, darling,” he said, “It is you who have forgotten .”
And he led the puzzled and still reluctant girl to the office of
the police commissioner. An officer sprang up smartly and swung
open the door, ushering into the presence of Stanley Kirkpatrick, the
Spider and Nita van Sloan .
Nita stared in bewilderment at the three persons she saw there .
Virginia Doeg, a young man she didn’t know, but whom Wentworth
bowed to and addressed as Handley, and Commissioner Kirkpatrick .
Kirkpatrick’s face was grave, but years seemed to have dropped
from him . His clothing was immaculate again, his black mustache
WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, by Norvell Page | 219
was waxed to needle points, and he bowed with a gallant gesture to
Nita .
“I have already communicated with the newspapermen,” he said
gravely . “They will be here in a few minutes .”
“But I don’t understand,” Nita whispered to Wentworth . “What
is this all about?”
Wentworth smiled down at her .
“Let Kirkpatrick have his fun,” he said . The door opened again
and the newsmen filtered in, a keen-faced dilapidated lot.
Kirkpatrick greeted them somberly . One of the newspapermen
nudged another .
“The Spider,” he whispered, and all eyes riveted on Wentworth .
He pretended not to hear, but Nita’s hands gripped his arm until
her fingers ached.
“I called you gentlemen in,” Kirkpatrick said, “to hear a dicta-
graph record which was delivered to me today by the Spider —”
Kirkpatrick looked up at the newsmen with a slight smile — “though
not in person . But he called me up in advance and told me it was
coming, and a taxi driver brought it .”
He stooped and lifted to the table a rusty valise . He opened it, and
gleaming metal showed inside .
“If you press the side of this bag,” Kirkpatrick said, “it starts the
machinery going, and a magnifying device which is the cleverest bit
of work I’ve ever heard of, picks up any sound within a radius of ten
or fifteen feet perfectly… I want you to hear the record.”
He pressed the side of the bag at the point he had indicated, and
suddenly a harshly vehement voice spoke from the bag with a tone
so life-like that Nita started:
“Why do you continue to hide behind that mask? Do you think I
am a complete fool? Can you imagine that the Spider doesn’t know
that the name of his enemy is —” a short laugh barked from the
instrument — “is MacDonald Pugh.”
And another voice snarled out, the voice of a man they all knew
to be dead, the voice of MacDonald Pugh .
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“That knowledge will do you no good, Mr . Spider . I do not intend
to leave any witness to accuse me of the Black Death .”
And Nita, her heart singing, recalled that long talk she had not
been able to understand in the cavern and remembered that it cleared
her Dick in every particular, of every crime that the police laid at his
door . She smiled gaily .
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered into Dick’s ear .
“When?” He merely framed the word with his lips, and Nita,
remembering, laughed . When would he have had a moment to tell
her before they had landed again at his estate and started back over
the road to town? And really this was much nicer than being told .
She heard, as in a dream, Wentworth’s voice grating as it never
naturally did and realized that he had been disguising his tones there
in the cavern . Then Kirkpatrick stopped the machine and turned to-
ward Wentworth .
“It’s very obvious, Dick,” he said, “that the Spider’s voice is not
yours . But that eccentric gentleman left nothing to chance . He told
me over the phone — ” He smiled and drew toward him a slip of
paper . “I think I have the exact words . ‘I do not appreciate your
confusing me with that numbskull, Wentworth . He’s all right, but he
hasn’t the brain for this type of work!’”
Wentworth was angry .
“That’s all very well for the Spider to brag,” he said vehemently .
“I was on the right trail, though . He just beat me to it .”
“That’s right, Wentworth,” jeered a reporter . “He just beat you
to it .”
And the newspaper men made a concerted dash for the door to
phone in the biggest story since five hours ago when the Master of
the Plague had died .
Virginia Doeg and Jimmy Handley were the next to go . Hand-
ley stopping to shake Wentworth’s hand, and say again the “Thank
you,” he had shouted when Wentworth had saved him . Then only
Kirkpatrick and Nita and the Spider were left .
Wentworth crossed to the desk and held out his hand . Kirkpatrick
gripped it fiercely, and the men’s eyes locked affectionately. Nita,
WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, by Norvell Page | 221
who could understand, slipped from the office, a soft smile on her
lips . Finally the two men dropped their hands, a little embarrassed
by their show of emotion .
The Spider cleared his throat . “That was generous of you, Stan-
ley,” he said, “making it as public as all that .”
“Forget it,” said Kirkpatrick shortly . “You have much more to
forgive than I .”
And he proffered his cigarette case . Wentworth accepted one, and
with a quick gleam in his eyes, dug from his pocket the clumsy
lighter that Pugh had made, the lighter which even now bore the
seals of the Spider — seals that would not dissolve in an unknowing
hand .
“I wonder,” said Wentworth slowly, his tip-tilted brows mocking,
“if you’d let me have that dictating machine as a souvenir of a case
on which the Spider beat me to the kill?”
He flicked flame to the clumsy lighter with its Spider’s seals and
touched it to Kirkpatrick’s cigarette .
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THE MAN WHO LIVED, by
Raymond F. O’Kelley
Originally published in Weird Tales, Sept. 1941.
Hunger and the sight of plenty drove Edward Penderby from the
streets at 9 o’clock the night of that September 10 . London’s heat,
pulsing at wall and roof all afternoon and evening, had made the
Lupus Street attic oven-hot . He opened the window,
and the effort
left him panting .
Penderby was tired in body and mind, tired as only the workless
on his futile quest can be . His underwear clung . The soles of his
feet seared burning . The hunger-pain had given way to an ache that
throbbed between his eyes and the top of his head .
Picture this Penderby . Picture him as he lay, while the room dark-
ened, on the soiled coverlet of the truckle-bed . Lanky, ill-shaven,
black hair in need of cutting, eyes quick even in defeat, suit now so
ragged that any employer would have been repelled; and in dubious
control—a clever, savage brain scheming ever to no purpose .
And ask why he was chosen .
Whatever the quality of Penderby’s faculties, worry and fatigue
had numbed his mind beyond the power of directed thought that
night, and he stared as unthinkingly as a human being can at the
lamp-thrown window-pattern taking shape on the slanted ceiling .
When that pattern was sharpest, he had fallen asleep, one leg still
hanging over the side of the bed, and it was three hours after the
automatic extinguishing of the street-lights wiped the design away
that he awoke .
“If it weren’t so infernally hot” he said, “I’d stay in bed”
THE MAN WHO LIVED, by Raymond F. O’Kelley | 223
Then he saw that he had slept in his clothes, and cursed . They
would stick to his sweating skin more than ever . As he swung onto
the edge of the bed, he felt the clamminess of them already .
But he washed, tiptoed down through the fetid lodging-house air,
and stepped into the freshness of the street . He turned toward Lon-
don’s heart and walked slowly .
What impelled him, what had caused him to leave his room so
early and make a miserable day longer than it normally would have
been, he did not know .
The first body was outside a store at the corner. It was an old
newspaper-seller’s, in a greasy blue suit that shone . Copies of the
Evening Standard and the Star had fallen from his arms to the side-
walk . Penderby, determined not to be an inquest witness, hurried
past .
But beyond the corner was another body, a girl who had been
standing in a doorway . Her body had folded into the attitude of a
sleeper on the step, and her cigarette had burned away in the palm of
one hand . There was no blood so far as Penderby could see . But she
might have been murdered; so might the old man, only a few feet
away; and Penderby turned and ran .
He stopped short to avoid a bundle of rags and what had been a
slum harridan .
He was frightened, now . He retreated to the middle of the street,
and looked swiftly up and down. Two more bodies were about fifty
yards away . And one was that of a policeman .
“What in thunder is this?” Penderby asked aloud . “Am I awake,
anyway?”
He undeniably was, and the bodies still were there .
“They can’t be asleep, all together,” he said . “Nor drunk—look
at that cop .”
But he went back to the sidewalk and touched the two bodies on
it gingerly . He said, “Hey, wake up!”—and felt a little sacrilegious,
as he tried to shake what had been the girl . They were corpses, with-
out a doubt . So, he found, were the bodies of the policeman and the
well-dressed youth nearby .
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Five bodies! And not noticed, apparently, till now .
“I don’t give a damn,” Penderby muttered . “Let someone else be
a witness . I’d get no thanks for it, I’ll bet .”
On he went . A pair of cats had died on the steps of a house . What
he assumed to be the body of a man lay on the other side of the
street . “Let him lie there!”
He found himself counting the dead on Warwick Way . They
seemed natural after a time; most, at a distance, were dark bundles
that matched the drab street . His astonishment gradually receded; it
did not grow: it became a curtain in his awareness, new background
that gave a new proportion . But he stopped now and then to ponder
the astounding fact once more, and his thinking did not lessen the
fact that these streets in the center of London were filled with dead.
To one he did give heed . A girl, seventeen or eighteen, had been
leaning out of a first-story window, face cupped in hand. Her elbows
had spread on the sill, and her fingers had slid into her yellow hair.
Chin and part of one cheek rested on the stone slab .
He ran to the door of the house . He pressed the bell, wielded the
knocker till the street echoed . No one was aroused .
“It’s a plague!” Penderby shouted . His voice was shrill . A sickly,
light sweat stood on his forehead . “It’s a plague! It’s got all the town,
and it’ll get me!”
But he began to reason, with the surprising coolness that marked
most of what he did that day . He walked from one to another of six
or seven bodies on the street . The expressions of the faces were
those of persons who had tried to prevent themselves from slipping,
from tripping, from being struck . There was no sign of panic . And
there was no sign that anyone had run to aid anyone else .
“No,” he concluded . “If it was a plague, it killed everyone at
once . But a plague couldn’t do that; and anyway how comes it that
I’m here, after sleeping beside an open window all night?” Then,
“But am I awake?”
He pinched the soft skin on the backs of his hands, in turn, sev-
eral times, stamped, shook himself as if to fling a burden away.
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He was awake . These others had died, Edward Penderby was
alive .
He went on, his bearing less hesitant than before .
Sixteen or seventeen busses, passengers in all of them, drivers
and conductors in a few, stood in the Victoria railroad-depot yard .
Penderby did not enter any of them . He noted a blue-uniformed
group in a corner, and remembered that drivers, conductors, and
inspectors had gathered at the spot .
There was no sound of trains . One, bearing travelers from the
Continent who had landed the evening before, had drawn in . Some
doors were open, but the cars still were full .
Outside were taxi-men dead, newsboys dead, policemen dead .
Two bodies in German-cut clothes had fallen into a gutter; they were
refugees, probably .
Horror and alarm gained brief mastery, and Penderby fled the
place. As he fled, Big Ben and Cathedral bells began to peal the
useless hour and made a clangor in his ears .
He stopped only when his lungs seemed about to burst and his
aching legs could not carry him farther .
An automobile stood six feet from him. It was the first he had
noticed . He stepped onto the running-board . But he had to respect
property, and he paused .
“Is there anyone alive here?” he shouted . Then he bawled the
question .
There was no reply, and he slipped in .
But the ignition had been locked and the key
removed . He cursed
in impatience already different from the vexations of his months of
struggle, and jumped out . A bigger automobile was ahead, and the
driver had slumped onto the wheel . He opened the nearest door,
turned the body off balance and guided it to the ground, seated him-
self at the wheel, and started the engine . The key had been lying on
the floor.
Bicycles, cars, and bodies blocked the way every few yards; so
Penderby traveled slowly . He passed the houses of Parliament and
Government buildings in Whitehall .
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Trafalgar Square contained more dead than even the space out-
side the depot . He spared them only a glance . The air was chill, and
the hunger that sleep had held off had returned . He drove to a big
restaurant three hundred yards away, and, somewhat timidly despite
all he had seen, walked in .
The restaurant had been full . He halted at a table at which a
middle-aged man had sat . On it were beef, ham, cakes, bread and
butter, a pot of tea . Standing, he snatched food in both hands, and as
he ate wolfishly from one, the other was stretched for still more. But
he could not eat as much as he had expected; his stomach had been
used to little .
He was thirsty . The long-cold tea cut the saliva from his tongue;
still, it was bitter, and he set the pot, from which he had gulped, back
with a crash . He remembered that he was in the less-expensive sec-
tion . He returned to the entrance-hall, stepped over bodies of waiters
and others, and went up the broad stairs .
Bottles and glasses stood on a table near the cashier’s desk in
the second dining-room . He poured a glass of wine . He swallowed
it in a second, poured and drank another; and, a little less quickly,
another . His body began to tingle; he lost awareness of blistered feet
and sticky clothes .
“This is something like it!” said Penderby .
Bottle and glass on knees, he sat on a chair he had drawn a little
apart, and mused in a mingling of contentment and glee .
His mind suddenly seized on the fact that the dead he faced had
been more than well-to-do . He leaped onto the chair, waved bottle
and glass aloft, and cried:
“Silence!”
His voice mounted to a singsong screech:
“Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen! You simply