The Doctor Satan

by The Complete Series from Weird Tales

“I’ll not underestimate you a second time, Ascott Keane! The death shrub—the blue flame—you are armed against those. But I have other weapons.”

  “You’ll never use them,” Keane growled deep in this throat.

  And then his hand shot up.

  Around Doctor Satan’s red-robed body a softly glowing aura suddenly formed. It was like a ball of pale yellow light which enclosed him, a lambent shell against the red rays of the room’s illumination.

  A snarl came from Doctor Satan’s lips, sounding muffled, as though the lambent shell had actual substance and could stifle sound. He straightened, with the aura moving as his body moved.

  His hands moved, weaving strange designs in the yellowed air. And slowly the aura faded a little from around him.

  Tendons ridged up on the back of Keane’s outstretched hand. Perspiration studded his forehead with the intensity of his effort to overwhelm the figure in red.

  That aura which he had flung around the red-robed body was one of the most powerful weapons known to occultism: a concentration of the pure form of electricity known as the Life Force. Mantling a living thing as it mantled Doctor Satan, it should drain out life, leaving behind nothing but inanimate clay. Yet it was not harming this man!

  Slowly, relentlessly, the aura continued to fade. And then Doctor Satan’s hands rose and leveled toward Keane.

  Strange duel between two titans—two men who probably knew more of Nature’s dark secrets than any others on Earth. Odd battle, with Keane, the force of good, gradually being beaten down by the force of evil.

  For now Keane’s rigid arm was sinking as the yellow aura almost disappeared from around Doctor Satan. Slowly he sank to his knees, as if a great weight oppressed him. And, as though this great weight was that of some intangible sea which could suffocate as well as weigh down, he began to gasp for breath. Louder and louder his agonized breathing sounded in the room. Doctor Satan’s black eyes glowed with triumph.

  Keane could see nothing—could feel nothing. Yet it was as if some colorless, invisible, tremendously heavy jelly were gradually hardening around him.

  The red lights grew dimmer, though Doctor Satan had not touched the switch; Keane felt that he was almost lost.

  With enormous effort he brought his arms up, spreading them wide at his sides. “Mother of God!” he whispered.

  Like a living cross he was, in that position; with trunk and head the upright, and arms the horizontal bars.

  “Mother of God!”

  Doctor Satan’s snarl was that of a beast. His eyes took on their feral green light, with a fiendish disappointment embittering their depths.

  And the great, invisible sea that was beating Keane down gradually receded from around him. But as it receded, so dimmed the red lights, till the two men were in blackness.

  “This time you preserve your life,” Doctor Satan said, in the darkness. “Next time you leave your life behind!”

  There was a thud of sound, like a soft explosion.

  “Next time,” began Keane, struggling to his feet and forcing his body forward through the last traces of the deadly, unseen sea.

  He stopped. He was alone in the black-walled room. Slowly the lights came up again, as though shining ever more clearly through a psychic, thinning fog. Keane began wrenching the black drapes from the walls.

  He found a door and opened it. Ahead of him he saw a low passage with steps at the end. He ran down the passage, up the steps. In a moment he was in the street, clutching the iron railing he had felt when he came here blinded.

  Cursing softly, he looked up and down the sidewalk. There was, of course, no sign of the red-clad figure. Doctor Satan had made good his escape. And with him had gone one million dollars, fruit of his first fantastic crime.

  Keane’s wide shoulders sagged, but only for a moment. Then they straightened.

  The first round was Doctor Satan’s. But there would be another time. And then, knowing a little more of the manner of being he was pitted against, he could fight more effectively—and win.

  THE MAN WHO CHAINED THE LIGHTNING, by Paul Ernst

  Originally published in Weird Tales, September 1935.

  CHAPTER I

  Death on the Wall

  The wind played an eerie chorus among the dank leaves of the trees lining the wealthy residential street. Far off, the flickering of lightning split the black September night.

  From behind the high wall bordering the Weldman estate came a hoarse cry. It was not a shout so much as an exclamation; but in it was packed a horror that could not have been more vividly expressed had the person yelled at the top of his voice.

  With the low cry, the wind seemed to die down as if to listen. In the lull the slam of a small gate in the high wall rang out.

  A man sped through that gate. His face was white in the light of the street lamp fifty yards away. His eyes were wide and staring. His mouth was half open and twisted as if for another cry.

  He began to run down the street toward the town section. He pounded through puddles and mud, with his head straining forward and his breath tearing in sobs from his throat. He was slight, bald, middle-aged, and fear lent such speed to his feet that he ran as a youth might run. But only for an instant did he speed through the night.

  The end of the Weldman wall was still a hundred feet in front of him, when suddenly he stopped. This time a piercing scream came from his lips instead of a suppressed exclamation. The scream echoed down the midnight quiet of the street like a banshee wail.

  The man began to dance, as if grotesque, horrible music sounded from somewhere near. And as his feet beat clumsily on the muddy sidewalk, he struck himself with his clenched fists. Against his chest his fists beat, and then against his throat, as though he had gone mad and was attempting to punish himself for some recent transgression.

  His screams ripped out in an almost unbroken flow of sound while he struck at his throat and chest. But only for a few moments did he dance there, and swing his arms. Abruptly his screaming stopped, as though cut across the middle with a knife-blade. His arms ceased to move.

  He stood in the center of the sidewalk, staring up beyond the end of the Weldman wall. A patrolman was running toward him, drawn by the frightful screams. But the man did not seem to see him. He simply stood there, silent now and motionless, as if turned to rock. And then, with the policeman still a dozen yards away, he fell.

  Full length to the sidewalk his body crashed, stiffly, like a thing of wood rather than of yielding flesh. And like a rigid thing of wood he lay in the water and mud of the walk.

  The patrolman reached his side and bent over him.

  Glaring, sightless eyes turned up into his face. The man’s lips moved stiffly.

  “…master… millions…”

  “What?” said the policeman, raising the man’s head. “What’s that you said?”

  The middle-aged man’s voice sounded again, muffled and thick: “…master… shaving…”

  The patrolman almost shook him in his anxiety to hear what was wrong.

  “What is it?” he snapped. “Are you sick? Have you been hurt? What’s happened?”

  But the man said no more. His face was blackening and swelling. His lips were parting over bared teeth, while between them his breath rattled with ever more difficulty and agony.

  Then the agonized breathing stopped. The man’s eyeballs rolled up so that only the whites were visible. And the patrolman lowered him to the sidewalk and blew his whistle.

  The man was dead.

  Instinctively the policeman crossed himself as he stood looking down at the body. There was something hellish here, something diabolical beyond all his experience in a world of violence.

  A squad car screamed to a stop beside the dead man and the cop. A detective jumped out from beside the driver and ran forward. One look he took at the dead, blackened face; then he
shook his head and whistled.

  “Weldman’s valet! He was on his way to the station house to tell us something. I was standing near when the desk sergeant took the call. Something terrible, and too important to be told over the phone, the guy said. Something about his employer, John Weldman. Some danger hanging over him, I gathered.”

  He stared at the agonized dead face.

  “Well, whatever it was he was going to tell us will never be known now. But it must have been something big—for him to have been knocked off like this to keep him from spilling it!”

  “Hey, he wasn’t knocked off,” said the policeman. “I saw him keel over. There wasn’t anybody else in sight.”

  The detective stared somberly at him. “It doesn’t matter whether anyone was in sight or not. This guy was murdered!” He touched the curiously rigid body with the toe of his shoe. “If only he’d said something before he died—”

  “He did,” said the policeman.

  “What?” The plain-clothes man’s hand shot out and clutched the cop’s shoulder. “What did he say?”

  “Just three words. And they don’t seem to make sense at all. He said ‘master… millions… shaving…’”

  The detective relaxed his tense grip. “‘Master. Millions. Shaving.’ That doesn’t mean anything to me. I guess the valet’s secret died with him.”

  But the detective spoke too soon.

  As far as the police force went, the dead man’s secret might have died when he did. And the three words muttered by the dying lips might never be made clear to them.

  But the night was alive with an intelligence far beyond theirs; an intelligence which was aware of things reaching back beyond this death of a servant, and which was already moving ahead of the death toward the apprehension of the cause.

  Across the street from the two men who bent over a blackened corpse was an unusually large tree. In the branches of the tree a shapeless shadow clung.

  The black figure slowly and silently descended while the plain-clothes man and the patrolman waited for the coroner and the ambulance. Under his arm was what appeared to be a small square box.

  The figure got to the sidewalk, faced the men unseen for a moment, then moved silently off into the night.

  * * * *

  From a square black box in a pitch-dark room came a beam of light, spreading from a half-inch opening to cover a six-foot-square silver screen. On the screen showed a high white wall—the wall of the Weldman estate.

  In the blank white wall could be seen a dim oblong which was a small gate. The gate opened suddenly and a man leaped forth. Even in miniature, on the screen, his face could be read: an expression of stark terror was on it, twisting the partly opened mouth and glinting from the wide eyes.

  Faithfully the movements of Weldman’s valet were reproduced on the screen. Slight, bald, middle-aged, he ran through the night along the white wall. Then the picture showed him stopping and beginning his clumsy, inexplicable dance, and beating insanely at his own neck and chest.

  But the picture revealed something more—something which made the halt and the self-punishment only too logical!

  Just before the man stopped, something moved at the top of the high wall ahead of him. The something was a hand. The hand curved out over the wall with fingers contracted as if to pluck something. But the hand did not gather anything in. Instead, it released an object—a tiny object which did not show in the rather dim moving-picture until it had hit the unfortunate valet. Then it showed on the whiteness of the valet’s throat.

  It was a tiny blur, too small to be described by the camera lens. But it moved.

  In the picture it showed for just an instant on the running man’s throat, and then disappeared under his collar. It was just after that that the man stopped and began beating himself.

  “An insect,” a deep, brooding voice split the blackness of the room. “A poison insect! Carried into the Weldman home, no doubt, for the death of the valet there. But the man had left the house on his way to the police station. He nearly escaped…”

  The picture went on, showing the valet’s sudden immobility, showing him fall and lie like a log in the mud.

  Then—it showed something else, at the top of the wall where the hand had appeared.

  The hand was withdrawn now, and a face looked over. It was turned toward the dying man and it was a face to haunt the soul in nightmares.

  There were no features to it. Only a blank expanse showed from forehead to chin, with black holes for eyes. A face masked as though for a masquerade; but there was in the masquerade no suggestion of humor.

  Over the masked, terrible face was a low-brimmed black hat, and the top of the shoulders showing over the wall also showed black; some sort of cloak.

  Evil emanated from the masked face as, like the covered face of a ghoul, it bent over the top of the wall toward where the valet lay dying. Calmly, terribly, it watched the man twitch, and lie still. Then, leisurely, indifferently, it disappeared.

  “Doctor Satan—” a girl’s half-stifled cry sounded in the darkened room.

  There was no reply to the exclamation. The picture continued, revealing the movement of the man’s numbing lips.

  A hand slowed the projector. The picture, running at a slower tempo, showed the formed words on the man’s lips: “…master… millions… shaving.…”

  Then the lips stopped moving and the figure of the patrolman edged into the film. The projector stopped. There was a click, and light flooded the room.

  CHAPTER II

  Beneath the Metropolis

  It was a huge room, a library, with books running from floor to ceiling of all four walls, crowding windows and the one door of the chamber. The books were all volumes of learning—a library such as few universities have, and containing some yellowed tomes dealing with the occult which no universities would have permitted on their shelves even had they the wealth with which to purchase them.

  In the center of the library was a great ebony desk. Standing beside this was a girl, lovely, tall, lithe, with dark blue eyes and hair more red than brown. The sudden light revealed in her dark eyes, as they rested on a man next to her, a look of perplexity, vague horror, and something soft and glowing and shy, which faded the instant the man’s gaze answered hers.

  The man was one who had brought a glow to many a woman’s eyes. For this was Ascott Keane, interesting to the mercenary for his large fortune, and to the unmercenary for his looks. His face, under coal-black hair, with steely gray eyes shaded by black eyebrows, had been reproduced in many a rotogravure section. To readers of those society sections he was a wealthy young man who idled when he was not playing games, a fellow without a serious thought in his head. But the girl beside him, Beatrice Dale, his more-than-secretary, knew better.

  She knew that Ascott Keane’s playboy character was a cloak under which was a grim seriousness of purpose. She knew that he was one of the world’s most learned men in all the sciences—and in those deep arts known, for want of a better name, as Black Magic. She knew that he had devoted his life to the running-down of such super-criminals as could laugh at the police and rise to the rather lofty altitude of his own attention.

  And she knew that the masked, terrible face that had peered over the top of Weldman’s wall for an instant belonged to a criminal who was perhaps more than worthy of his attention. A man known only as Doctor Satan, from the Luciferian costume he chose to wear when engaged in his fiend’s work. A man of great wealth, who had turned to crime to stir his jaded pulses. A man whose name and identity were unknown, but whose erudition, particularly in forbidden fields of learning, matched Keane’s own.

  That was the veiled personality which occupied Keane day and night now, to his own great danger. That was the devil who had killed the valet with a poison insect—and who had done other things in the last few weeks at which Keane, till now, had been able o
nly to guess.

  The telephone on the ebony desk buzzed, softly. Keane picked it up.

  A harsh voice sounded, speaking in a flat monotone.

  “Ascott Keane, you are meddling again!”

  Beatrice Dale heard the voice as well as Keane. Her soft scream rang out: “Doctor Satan!”

  Keane’s eyes glittered. He dropped the instrument as if it had turned into a serpent in his fingers.

  “I’ve told you death would strike if you interfered with my plans again,” the harsh voice continued, sounding from the floor where the phone lay. “And I always keep my promises—”

  The words ended, swiftly and dramatically. With their ending, the telephone on the floor jumped like a live thing, while from transmitter to receiver, in a thick blue arc, crackled a stream of electricity that would have killed a dozen men.

  The crackling arc streamed just as far lightning flickered in the skies south of New York, and died as the lightning died.

  Keane stared at Beatrice, who had gone white as death.

  “He can harness the lightning!” he breathed. “That I cannot do myself! If I can’t stop him soon, God knows what will happen to this city—to the whole country—”

  He stared at the instrument. The metal was half melted. The hard rubber had been utterly consumed. Then he shrugged and turned toward the screen again, where, dimmed now by the lights in the room but still showing, was the picture of the dying valet, showing motionless with the stoppage of the projector.

  “But I will stop him!” Keane’s voice came bleakly. “Doctor Satan, hear that, wherever you are now.”

  He stepped across the melted telephone with a gesture that brushed into a past of forgotten dangers the fate he had just narrowly escaped, and stared at the lips of the pictured man.

  “Shaving,” he repeated, while Beatrice gazed at him with the fear in her dark blue eyes almost buried by that soft glow which she never, never allowed him to see. “Shaving. I think in that word lies the key to the problem we’ve been working on for the last few weeks. The problem ending with the death of Weldman’s valet.”