The Doctor Satan

by The Complete Series from Weird Tales

  Keane’s long, strong hand went out. “Let me see the note.”

  Walstead fumbled in his pocket and drew out a folded sheet of paper. Handling it as though if were a deadly serpent, he handed it to Keane, who spread it out on the desk.

  “Ballard Walstead,” Keane read aloud, “You are hereby given a chance to purchase a continuation of your rather useless life. The price of this continuation is the round sum of one million dollars. You may pay this in any way you please—even in checks, if you like, for if ever you attempt to trace the checks you will die. And if you refuse payment you will die even more quickly.

  “You will disregard this as a note from a crank, of course. But by noon tomorrow you will know better. You see, I have given two other men, Arthur B. Ryan and Samuel Billingsley, a choice similar to yours and I believe they are going to defy me. Read in the afternoon papers what happens to them, Walstead. And believe me when I say that the same thing will happen to you if you do not meet my price. Directions will be given to you tomorrow noon as to where and how you are to pay the money. Your obedient servant, Doctor Satan.”

  Keane looked up from the paper.

  “Doctor Satan,” he repeated. Into his steel-gray eyes came a hard, relentless glint. “Doctor Satan!”

  “You know him?” asked Walstead eagerly.

  “I know of him. A little. You read in the papers this afternoon of what happened to Ryan and Billingsley?”

  “Yes,” whimpered Walstead. “My God, yes! And that’s what will happen to me Keane, if you won’t help me.” He shuddered as though drenched with icy water. “A tree growing out of a man’s head! Killing him! How can such things be done?”

  “That is something only Doctor Satan can answer. Did you get instructions about where to pay the money this noon, as is promised in this letter?”

  In answer, Walstead drew out another bit of notepaper.

  “Walstead:” Keane read. “Leave the money either in thousand-dollar bills or in checks up to twenty thousand dollars apiece, in the trash can at the corner of Broadway and Seventy-Sixth Street, tonight at nine o’clock. If checks, make them payable to Elias P. Hudge. Signed, Dr. Satan.”

  Keane’s eyes search Walstead’s again. “Are you going to do it?”

  “I can’t!” exclaimed Walstead hysterically. “I’m a wealthy man, but my affairs are in such a state that to take a million dollars in cash from my business would bankrupt me! I can’t!”

  Keane’s long, powerful fingers formed a reflective tent-roof under his long, powerful chin. “You’re going to defy Doctor Satan, then.”

  “I must!” cried Walstead. “I have no choice.”

  Keane’s fingers moved restlessly. “This Doctor Satan must have known your affairs were such that you couldn’t meet his order. And he must have foreseen that you would have to refuse his demand. Were you in your office when the second note was delivered?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who delivered it?”

  Walstead shivered again. “That is one of the deepest mysteries of all. No one delivered it.”

  Keane stared.

  “Nobody delivered that note,” Walstead repeated. “I was alone in my office, reading over some papers. I turned away from my desk a moment. When I turned back, the note was there, on top of the other things. No one had come in. The window was closed and locked. Yet the note was there. It…it was like witchcraft, Keane!”

  Keane’s fingers, stilled for a moment, moved restlessly again. “You may be speaking more truly than you know, Walstead. After you received the note, what did you do?”

  “I stayed in my office till four-thirty. Then I went down to the building lobby, and saw the afternoon papers. Screaming headings about the deaths of Ryan and Billingsley. After that I came here as fast as my chauffeur could drive me.”

  “Did anything unusual happen to you on the way?”

  Walstead shook his head. “Nothing. I got into my car at the office building, was driven straight here, and got out in front of your building.”

  “No one said anything to you? Or, perhaps, jostled you?”

  “No one,” said Walstead. Then his lips tightened. “Wait a minute. Yes! A man bumped into me just as I was coming into this building entrance.”

  Keane’s eyes narrowed till all that was apparent of them was two gray glints. “Can you describe him?”

  “No. I didn’t pay any attention to him at all, after I saw he had no weapon in his hand and meant me no harm. His shoulder brushed against my neck and cheek, and then he was gone, after apologizing.”

  Keane got up from his desk. He eyes were more inscrutable than ever. “I’ll do all I can to help you,” he said. “Suppose you run along now, Walstead.”

  Walstead jerked to his feet with frenzy and perplexity in his face. He was almost as tall as Keane, but didn’t give the appearance of being nearly so big.

  “I don’t understand, Keane. Are you throwing me over? Aren’t you going to act with me against this Doctor Satan?”

  “Yes, I’m going to act against Doctor Satan.” Muscle ridged out in Keane’s lean cheeks. “You go along home.”

  “I’d hoped you would let me stay here, with you, till the danger was past…”

  “You will be in no more danger at home than you would be here,” replied Keane, with odd gentleness in his tone. “My man will show you to the door.”

  With the words, Keane’s man appeared; a silent, impassive-looking fellow who handed Walstead his hat and stick. Walstead, with many protests, went out…

  “Beatrice,” Keane called softly, when he was alone in the big library again.

  A section of the shelving, lined with books, swung smoothly away from the wall, forming a doorway. Through it came a girl with a shorthand notebook and a pencil in her tapering hands.

  She was tall and beautifully formed, with dark blue eyes and hair that was more red than brown.

  “You sent him away!” she said, eyes at once accusing and bitterly disappointed. “You wouldn’t help him. You sent him away.”

  “He is past help,” replied Keane. “The stranger that jostled him in front of the building—that stranger was death. Perhaps Doctor Satan himself, perhaps a helper.”

  “How can you know that?”

  Keane breathed deeply. “Doctor Satan must have known in advance that Walstead could not pay his demands. Hence he must have planned to use him from the start as a sacrifice—a third horrible example of what happens to wealthy men who defy him. The man who jostled him planted death’s seeds in him. He will die within the hour, with one of those unearthly shrubs forcing its way up through his skull.”

  “Still—you sent him away.”

  “I did, Beatrice. Suppose he died here. The police! Many questions! Detention! And I don’t way to be delayed; I have work to do now that makes any of my former tasks seem like unimportant games. Doctor Satan! With three rich men dead, no others will defy him. He’ll loot the city—if I can’t stop him.”

  The girl, Beatrice Dale, Keane’s companion as well as secretary, fingered the notebook in which was recorded the talk between him and Walstead.

  “Who is Doctor Satan, Ascott?” she said. “I don’t seem to remember that he has figured in any of your former work.”

  “He hasn’t; Doctor Satan is a new phenomenon. I’ve been expecting to hear from him ever since I heard the first whisper of his existence a month ago. Now, with these three fantastic murders, he makes his bow. Who is he? Where does he hide? What does he look like? I don’t know—yet.”

  He began pacing up and down before his big ebony desk.

  He chanced to be looking at the chair when it happened. The chair, also ebony, was pushed a few feet back from the desk. It was tilted back a bit, with the felt pad slightly away from the movement of his body as he had left it.

  It squatted there, a dark inanimate thing a
t one instant. At the next there was a soft pouf of sound and the chair leaped into blue incandescence. Lambent flame played over it, so hot that it blasted the faces of Keane and Beatrice five feet away. For perhaps four seconds the blue flame persisted.

  Then it died out as suddenly as it had appeared.

  And the chair was no longer there. In its place was a little heap of fine ash, smoldering on the carpet.

  Keane gazed slowly into Beatrice’s horrified eyes. “I don’t know about Doctor Satan yet,” he repeated coolly, “but apparently he knows a great deal about me! Well, what is it, Rice?”

  Keane’s man stood in the library doorway, staring first at his master and then at the tiny heap of ash that was all that was left of the ebony chair.

  “Mr. Walstead just died, sir,” he said. “It was in the lobby of the building, just as he was about to step into the street. He’s lying down there now.” Rice’s eyes flashed bleakly. “There’s something pushing up through his head, sir. Little sharp spikes of something, like branches of a little tree, or bush.”

  CHAPTER III

  Three miles away, in a windowless, black-draped room, a figure bent over a metal table in the attitude of a high priest bending over an altar.

  The figure looked like one robed for a costume ball, save that in every line of it was a deadliness that robbed it of all suggestions of anything humorous or social.

  Tall and spare, it was covered by a blood-red robe. Red rubber gloves swathed the hands. The face was concealed behind a red mask that curtained it from forehead to chin with only two black eyes, like live coals, showing through eyeholes.

  Lucifer! And to complete the mediaeval portrait of the Archfiend, two horned red projections showed above the red skullcap that hid the man’s hair.

  Before him, on the metal table, a thin blue flame died slowly down into a sprinkling of yellowish powder from which it had originally been born. The blue flame was the only light in the room. By its flicker could be seen three other men, crouching around the walls and watching the flame with breathless intensity.

  One of these three was a young man with an aristocratic but weak face. The other two were creatures like gargoyles.

  The first was legless, with his great, gorilla-like head, set on tremendous shoulders, coming up only to a normal man’s waist. The second was a wizened small monkey of a man with bright, cruel eyes peering out from a mat of hair that covered all his features. The blue flame on the metal table died out. The red-clad figure straightened up. A gloved hand touched a switch and the room was illuminated with red light.

  “Ascott Keane,” said the man in Satan’s costume, “has escaped the blue flame.”

  The three men around the walls breathed deeply. Then the younger, with the weak face, scowled. “How do you know that, Doctor Satan?”

  “If the flame had consumed him,” Doctor Satan said, “the blue flame fire would have burned red while his body was devoured. It did not burn red.”

  The younger man walked toward the table. He moved with a curious air of ringing defiance. “How do you control the flame, Doctor Satan?”

  The coal black eyes burned into his through the eyeholes in the red mask.

  “It is all in here,” Doctor Satan said at last, pointing to an ancient roll of papyrus spread flat on a stand near the metal table. “The ingredients of the flame were compounded first in Egypt, five thousand years ago. To these ingredients are added powdered bits of the person of the one to be consumed by the flame. Fingernail parings, hair, bits of discarded clothing, for instance. Then when the powder is burned, the person burns, though a thousand miles of distance separate him from the blue fire.”

  “Yet Keane escaped,” said the young man, watching Doctor Satan narrowly.

  “I had no bits of Keane’s person to place with the chemicals. He is too shrewd to have allowed hair or nail clippings to be smuggled from his home. I had only a sliver of the chair in which he customarily sits. Obviously he wasn’t in the chair when I touched off the fire, and so escaped death.”

  The young man lit a cigarette. The frightened defiance of his every gesture was heightened by the manner in which he lit it. “The death tree, Doctor Satan. How do you work that?”

  “It is a species of Australian thorn bush,” Doctor Satan said without hesitation. “Rather, it was, ’til with a certain botanical skill I altered it into a thing that flowers in two hours or less, rooting in a man’s brain. The only drawback is that the seed, a tiny thing that floats in air, must be inhaled by the victim, to lodge in the nasal passage and later work its way up to the brain.”

  “You have more seeds of this tree?”

  “Yes,” said Doctor Satan. His manner was strange, his voice almost gentle, but there was a deadliness in the very gentleness. The monkey-like little man with the hairy face, and the legless giant with the huge shoulders, stirred restlessly in their positions by the wall.

  “Why didn’t you use the flame on Ryan and Walstead and Billingsley?” questioned the young man. “That would have been easier than killing them with your thorn bush.”

  “Easier,” conceded the grim figure in red, “but not quite so spectacular. I wanted those three to die as fantastically as possible, so the requests I make on other rich men will be more quickly granted.”

  Doctor Satan walked to the stand on which the papyrus rested. He pulled out a drawer and took from it ten bundles of currency. In each bundle were thousand dollar bills. And the band around each bundle proclaimed that each contained a hundred such bills.

  “The first contribution,” Doctor Satan said. “From William H. Sterling, the philanthropic manufacturer of automobiles. One million dollars.”

  The young man stared at the heap of currency with glistening eyes. A fortune, in such small compass that it could be concealed under a man’s clothes!

  But now, at the same time, he seemed suddenly to sense the mockery of Doctor Satan’s geniality, and of his apparent frankness in disclosing his affairs. Color drained from his face, and more drained from it at Doctor Satan’s next words. “You know a great deal about me, don’t you, Monroe?”

  Monroe swallowed painfully, then straightened his shoulders. “Yes, I know a lot. I know your real name—a family name familiar to everyone in the United States. I know your philosophy of life; how you, an enormously wealthy man, tired of all the thrills that money can buy, have turned to crime. I know you intend to make your crimes pay as part of your game. I know you have studied the occult and the scientific, in preparation for this debut. And now I know how you control two of your murder tools—the blue flame and the tree of death.”

  Doctor Satan’s eyes bored into Monroe’s till the younger man gripped the edge of the metal table for support.

  “Yes, you know a lot, Monroe,” he crooned. “More than anyone else living. You wouldn’t think of betraying me, would you?”

  “Not if you treat me fairly, Doctor Satan. But if you try to double-cross me, you are lost. In a safe deposit box which is to be opened by my lawyer in case an accident happens to me there is a full account of yourself…”

  His voice trailed off into a frightened squeak at the look in Doctor Satan’s coal-black eyes. The red-clad figure appeared to loom taller and taller, until it almost filled the room. And now all the defiance was gone from Monroe’s posture, leaving only the fright.

  “What are you going to do?” he panted. “What…”

  Again his voice trailed off, but this time it ended in a thickness like that of beginning sleep.

  Doctor Satan’s eyes, glittering, ruthless, held Monroe’s eyes. Doctor Satan’s hand passed slowly before Monroe’s face.

  The monkey-like man and the legless giant watched from the wall.

  “You are asleep.” Doctor Satan’s voice sounded somnolently in the silent, windowless room.

  “I am asleep,” breathed Monroe, wide, glassy eyes fixed on
the red mask.

  “You will tell me all you know and all you hope to do.”

  “I will tell you all I know and all I hope to do.”

  “What are your plans concerning me?”

  For a second, Monroe’s still features twisted, as though even in hypnosis his will fought to avoid answering that question. Then his lips moved mechanically.

  “I am going to inform the police how to find you when you collect your next looted million. Then I am going to take the money, and the seeds of the death tree and the chemicals for the blue flame, and collect more money myself.”

  “It is enough,” said Doctor Satan, still in that almost gentle voice.

  The monkey-like man and the legless giant looked at each other. Doctor Satan had pronounced a death sentence.

  Doctor Satan spoke to them, eyes never leaving Monroe’s face. “Girse. Bostiff.” The two moved toward Monroe. The monkeylike man known as Girse hopped like a deformed ape. Bostiff hitched his giant torso over the floor with his thick arms, using his calloused knuckles as feet.

  “The iron box, Bostiff.”

  Bostiff hitched his way to one wall, pushed back the stable drapes and drew from a three-foot niche a coffin-like box that gleamed dully in the red light.

  Doctor Satan’s hand went out. He plucked three hairs from Monroe’s blond head. He laid the hairs on a small pile of the yellowish powder on the metal table.

  “You will lie down in the box, Monroe,” he droned.

  The blond young man walked with jerky steps to the metal coffin and lay down in it.

  “The lid, Bostiff.”

  Picking up the massive iron cover of the coffin as easily as though it were a pot lid, the legless giant put it on the box. Then, without further orders, he dragged the metal coffin back to its niche in the wall and slid it home in the surrounding stonework.

  Doctor Satan picked up a pinch of the yellowish powder and crumbled it sharply in his fingers. The tiny heap on the table burst into blue flame. The three blond hairs writhed and were consumed.

  The end of the metal coffin, showing from the niche, was suddenly red-hot, then glowing with white incandescence. Slowly it faded to deep, hot red in color, and back to black.