“It’s a lot,” contradicted Keane. He got up, eyes icy with growing knowledge. “A lot! Thanks, Mercer.”
He left the bank. Four men who seemed without worries—but who cashed large checks as though being bled by some criminal ring! Four who seemed normal at first glance—but who made the bank president feel as he had felt when near a graveyard as a boy!
Keane went to the presidents’ offices of the five other big banks in which the four men had large deposits, but from which none had drawn money in the past two weeks. He found what he had thought he would find.
On the desks of none of the five executives was there anything corresponding to the onyx electric clock on that of Mercer. Their desks were bare of all but papers.
* * * *
In his big library, to which none gained admittance save after searching preliminaries, the frosted glass television screen on his ebony desk glowed softly. The face of Beatrice Dale was reflected. He pressed a button and the door swung open. Beatrice came in. He stared inquiringly at her. She was dressed in street clothes and had evidently just come in.
“I’ve just come from Mr. Weldman’s home,” she said. “I talked to a maid there. The servants are all terrified, of course, at the death of the valet.”
Keane nodded impatiently. “They would be, naturally. But Weldman! How about him? How does he act?”
Beatrice caught her red lip between her teeth.
“He acts cheerful, absolutely normal. In fact, he seems almost too cheerful, after the murder of his man. Certainly he seems in no danger, nor does he act like a man who is being blackmailed.”
“Did you see him?”
“Yes, I saw him for a moment from the servants’ wing. I got just a glimpse. But, Ascott”—her voice sank—“I had the most uncanny sensation when I saw him! There’s something about that man—something—”
She stopped with a shudder.
“Go on,” said Keane gently.
“It’s impossible to put into words. He frightens me. I don’t know why. And it isn’t exactly fright—it’s horror.”
“Do the servants feel the same way about him?”
The girl touched her burnished, red-brown hair distractedly. “Yes. They’re a little afraid of him without knowing why. Several are leaving, because of the valet’s death, they say. But I’m sure that vague feeling of horror is part of their going.”
Keane’s large, firm mouth tightened. His strong fingers clenched a little. But his voice was even as he said:
“The rest of the report, please. You saw the barbers I listed, and talked to the other valets?”
“Yes. I talked to the barbers in the four buildings where Dombey, Case, Kragness and Weldman have their suites of offices. And I talked to the valets of Kragness, Case and Dombey. None of them has shaved any of the four in the past two weeks.” Her face colored a little. “It seemed a silly question to ask them, Ascott. But I know you must have had a good reason for telling me to inquire about it.”
“I did,” said Keane. “The best. The answer to that question clears up in my mind almost the last of the mystery of Doctor Satan’s latest crime methods—precisely how he is draining the fortunes of these rich men.”
Beatrice shook her head, bewildered. “Perhaps it’s clear to you. I certainly can’t understand it! And I can’t understand what it is that takes place in Doctor Satan’s mind! He is master of a hundred secrets of nature unknown to all others, save perhaps you. He could get all the money he wanted, if he chose, without these dreadful crime plots.”
Keane looked at her with his gray eyes reflecting a knowledge of the motives of men that was far beyond the knowledge other mortals could glean from human contacts.
“You don’t look at it from the right angle, Beatrice. Money? It isn’t money alone Doctor Satan wants. He has more than enough of that without plotting for it. It’s the game itself he is after. The grisly, stark game of plundering his fellow men of their fortunes and souls and lives—solely for the thrill of conquering them. Of course he must get the money too. One of the dark rules of his game is that his crimes must pay. But the fact that he is not purely a money-grabbing criminal is what makes him so infinitely dangerous. That, and his learning.”
His voice lowered, and into it crept the resolution that had tempered the steel of his nature since first he had heard of the ruthless, cold-blooded individual who chose to dress in the devil’s masquerade and call himself all too appropriately, Doctor Satan.
“But I’m going to stop him, Beatrice! It may cost me my life, but the cost will come after the purchase—which is the destruction of Doctor Satan!” He smiled, and his voice returned to normal. “However, histrionics won’t catch him, will they? It takes work and persistence to do that. Such work as the sifting of news items, for example. And I think I have one here that is to prove very, very important.”
He took from a drawer a half-page cut from the society section. It pictured three people, a woman with a granite chin and gray hair like cast iron in a wave over her forehead; a girl who was a replica of her; and a foppishly handsome young man with a harassed look.
“Mrs. Corey Magnus, wife of the financier, is sailing at midnight tonight for England with her daughter, Princess Rimsky, and her son-in-law, the prince, last of the Borsakoffs. They will be received at court—”
Keane stared long at the pictures and the text.
“Another wealthy man living without his family for a time. Corey Magnus. And all the others were left alone by their families before beginning their cash withdrawals.…”
He put the clipping carefully away. And in his eyes was pity as well as stony resolve. For he knew that another man had been marked by Doctor Satan. Another victim for the strange and as yet unconquerable crime-routine contrived by the red-masked, red-robed demon who juggled with human beings as though they were pawns—to be thrown away when the game was over.
CHAPTER IV
The Fifth Victim
In the home of Corey Magnus at nine next evening, Magnus’s private secretary opened the library door and almost tiptoed in. He walked softly to the fireplace, in front of which was standing a tall, heavy-set, imposing-looking man with gray hair and slate-gray eyes who stared with a frown at the leaping flames.
The secretary’s bearing expressed the deference due the man who was Chairman of the Board of the American Zinc Corporation, president of the New York & Northwestern Railway, president of the New York Consolidated Trust, and many other huge financial and industrial groups.
“Mr. Bowles, of the Gull Oil Corporation, is here to see you, Mr. Magnus,” he said.
Magnus’s slate-colored eyes turned on him.
“Ask Bowles to wait for a moment. I don’t feel very well… a touch of dizziness.… But don’t tell him that!”
The secretary nodded and went out, closing the doors of the library behind him. He was looking worried and perplexed. Asking a man like Bowles to wait! Even Corey Magnus might be sorry he had done that.
Behind him, his employer stared dully at the closed door, and then back at the flames in the fireplace. His eyes contracted as though he were in pain. He swayed a little, and caught at the mantelpiece for support.
The open French doors leading to his garden caught his gaze. He walked toward them, breathing deeply of the chill fall air. Small beads of perspiration studded his forehead, and his heavy face was pale.
He walked out of the doors.
His head was bent forward on his thick neck, and he looked intent, almost rapt, as though something called him from out there and he must find out what it was.
It was ten minutes later when his secretary came back into the library again, not daring to keep Bowles waiting longer. He saw that the room was empty, and went to the open French doors.
The garden was empty too. He rushed back to give an alarm—and saw something he had missed before. A note
on the library table.
“Send Bowles away,” the note read. “Tell him I’m ill and will see him in the morning at his office. You may go home, yourself. C. M.”
The secretary bit his lip. No word in the note as to where his employer had gone so abruptly! No explanations of any sort!
But the brusque letter was indubitably in Magnus’s handwriting. There was nothing for him to do but obey its commands.
* * * *
Under the little cemetery, in the rock-lined chamber, Girse and Bostiff, servants of Doctor Satan, were busy.
More lamps had been lit. Now the room was brightly illuminated with garish red light. In the brighter illumination the cages along the end wall showed plainly: the one empty cage, the occupant of which had been consumed by the trapped lightning in the next chamber, and the three occupied cages.
The figures in these cages, seen in detail under the better light, would have astounded the city in the heart of which this chamber was buried. Naked, disheveled, gaunt with hunger and mottled with cold, they were Edward Dombey, John Weldman and Shepherd Case, men among the two percent who controlled four-fifths of the wealth of the country.
The empty cage had belonged to Harold Kragness.
Girse, with ape-like movements, was clearing out the empty cage. Bostiff, with a look of stupid awe and fear on his bovine face, was stirring something in a large metal bowl.
It was curious stuff he stirred, faintly phosphorescent, like a colorless, opaque jelly. It clung to the pestle and, once, splashed sluggishly high enough to touch Bostiff’s hand. When this happened, he exclaimed aloud and shook the stuff off his flesh, to land in the bowl and mingle with the rest.
Girse sneered at the exclamation.
“What are you afraid of, you ox?”
“This—this stuff in the bowl,” Bostiff rumbled. “It’s kind of alive!”
“Sure it’s alive,” chuckled Girse, keeping his distance from the bowl. “It’s this here proto—protoplasm, Doctor Satan said. The junk you’re made of, and me, and everybody else.”
“I don’t like it,” said Bostiff, leaving off his stirring.
“I do! Anything that brings in the cash that stuff brings, I like a lot. God, Doctor Satan’s smart!”
“‘Smart’?” Even to Bostiff’s limited intelligence the word seemed feeble. But he could supply no other. “Smart enough to know everything we think or say. And to kill us if we don’t think the right thing.”
Girse nodded, his ape-like grin fading. He had seen his red-robed master read treachery in one man’s thoughts, and kill him in a blue flame the only materials for which were mysterious powdered chemicals in a little heap.
The ape-like man started to say something, then stopped. The red lamp near the door was winking on and off, on and off. He opened the door and went down the passage revealed.
“Bostiff!” The voice came from a distance.
The legless giant hitched his way out of the chamber and down the tunnel to join Girse. Beside Girse, at the foot of the shaft down which the broad tombstone slid as an elevator, was a motionless figure. A heavy-set, important-looking man who was breathing stertorously but was obviously unconscious.
“Corey Magnus!” Bostiff rumbled. “I’ve seen him many a time in his private car when I worked on the New York & Northwestern Railroad! That’s where I lost my legs. So he’s the next! God, it’ll be a pleasure to handle him!”
Even Girse paled a little at the dull ferocity in Bostiff’s eyes.
The two of them dragged Magnus to the chamber and shut the door. There, working with the method of those who have performed the work before and know in advance every move, they began a strange series of tasks.
Girse hopped agilely to a box beside the metal mixing-bowl in which Bostiff had stirred the protoplasm, afraid of it, but having no conception of the marvel of it. From the box Girse took moistened, pulped papier-mâché.
He pressed a thin blob of it over Magnus’s unconscious face. It slowly hardened there. As it did so, Bostiff stripped the man, leaving his slightly paunchy body bare and white in the cold underground chamber.
Bostiff moved with the clothes to the row of figures leaning against the wall near the door like life-sized dolls. And now it could be seen that there were five figures leaning there instead of four.
One of the figures was naked; and its nudity revealed a fact about itself and the clad four beside it that was the most startling thing about the underground room.
These were not mechanical things—dolls the size of men and dressed in men’s clothes. These were corpses; bodies; dead men, perfectly preserved but nevertheless as dead as last year’s leaves!
Bostiff, handling the corpse as though it were a thing of wood, clothed it in the garments of Corey Magnus. And Girse, after feeling the papier-mâché sheet over the unconscious man’s face to make sure it had hardened properly, carefully lifted it off.
He held in his hands a perfect mask of the millionaire.
The red light next to the door winked again. But it was a different signal this time. Instead of winking on and off at random, it blinked twice, hesitated, then blinked three times.
“Doctor Satan!” said Girse. “Is everything ready for him?”
“Everything is ready,” said Bostiff, leaning the freshly clad corpse against the wall.
The door opened, slowly, as though no hand had touched it. A step sounded in the passage. Into the room came Doctor Satan, red-robed and gloved, with the crimson light reflecting dully from his red mask and the skull-cap with the mocking, Luciferian horns on it.
An instant Doctor Satan stood within the doorway, black eyes glaring at the two who served him so well. Then he swung the door shut behind him with an impatience of movement that made Bostiff and Girse glance apprehensively at each other.
Doctor Satan was in a rage. The icy brain under the cap and horns was glacially angry at something. They knew the signs.
“Has all gone well, Master?” said Girse, timidly.
The coal-black eyes behind the mask narrowed as if their owner would ignore the question of an underling. Then the mask moved with words.
“You have the man, Magnus, whom I directed here in the little death of hypnotism. Doesn’t that mean that all has gone well? And yet—”
Doctor Satan strode to the unconscious, stripped financier.
“All has not gone well,” he grated at last. “Keane escaped the lightning. And he was not in his home awhile ago when I went there to deal personally the death he has avoided so far. Keane.… A man in my own position—wealthy, learned, making an avocation of crime prevention as I have made a pastime of crime.”
The grating, arrogant voice softened with thought, almost with doubt.
“The ancient Greek theory had it that every force that reared in the world soon found an equal, opposing force rearing against it as an antidote. Can that be true? Has some high Providence observed my rise, and in the observing prepared for me an antagonist like Ascott Keane? But, no! There is no God, no higher Providence. Keane is an accident—an opponent more dangerous than most, but still one to be destroyed by me almost at will!”
The red-clad figure strode to the cages. Doctor Satan stood with folded arms, staring at the three men who cowered within them at his near approach.
“And you are three of the world’s great,” Doctor Satan’s harsh, glacial tone lashed them. “Observe! Three who thought themselves all-powerful! Cringing here like animals in a cage! But I am more powerful than any other, though the world does not yet know that.”
The three men cowered lower. Doctor Satan turned abruptly.
“The mask is prepared? The body matching Magnus’s body in height and weight and build is prepared? But yes—I see it is so clad, and the garments fit it well. Bring me the mask, and the bowl.”
He bent over Corey Magnus. Bostiff and Girse w
ent to the corner and came back with the bowl of protoplasm, and the papier-mâché mask.
Working with deft, gloved fingers, Doctor Satan began a process of scientific sculpture the methods and materials of which transcended anything yet known in science, art, or plastic surgery.
CHAPTER V
Chained Lightning
At a nod from Doctor Satan, Bostiff hitched his great body over to the newly clad corpse, dragged it down, and carried it to him with one huge hand under the dead man’s belt.
He laid it beside the unconscious financier. Doctor Satan carefully placed the mask over the dead face, and thrust a small tube into the bowl of living substance. The other end of the tube was placed between the mask and the dead face.
No process of siphoning was begun as far as Girse or Bostiff could see. Yet the level of the protoplasm lowered steadily in the bowl as the jelly-like stuff flowed sluggishly up the tube and under the mask.
After a while the level ceased to sink in the bowl, and Doctor Satan stood up.
“It is done. Tomorrow another industrial giant shall go to the bank and draw out the first of many blocks of cash.”
He removed the mask, and even Girse and Bostiff, who had seen such things before, gasped aloud.
The face of the dead man was the face of Corey Magnus!
Doctor Satan’s coal-black eyes fixed themselves on the altered face of the corpse. His gaze was electric, compelling, mystic.
“Magnus,” he said, “for from now on you are Magnus—rise!”
The man, lying there nameless in oblivion, was dead. That was beyond questioning. His flesh was cold and stiff. For many hours the heart had not beat.
The Doctor Satan Page 6