But—the body rose slowly, stiffly, at Doctor Satan’s word!
Doctor Satan’s eyes impaled the dead eyes of the moving, standing corpse.
“Smile,” he said.
The dead lips, altered with the protoplasm, moved in a smile. It was the wolfish grin of Corey Magnus, pictured many a time in cartoons.
“Speak. What is your name?”
“My name,” spoke the corpse, “is Corey Magnus.”
“I shall tell you silently what you are to do tomorrow,” said Doctor Satan. “Then you shall repeat my instructions.”
For several minutes, the glittering, coal-black eyes probed the dead eyeballs of the animated body. Then the stiff lips moved.
“I shall go to the United Continental Bank tomorrow. With me I shall have a check written out by the man who lies behind you. I shall take this check to the president’s office—”
But now a new voice spoke in that underground room, a voice not heard before. One that made Bostiff grunt in amazement, as though he had been struck. One that stiffened Doctor Satan’s red-draped body as if an electric shock had coursed through it.
The voice came from behind Doctor Satan. And its message was as electrifying as its presence in that chamber.
“Let me tell you what the corpse was to have done for you tomorrow.”
For the space of a heartbeat the silence that chained the room was more terrible than shrieking chaos. Then Satan whirled and stared at the man who had been lying behind him.
The man was sitting up now; and though body and features were those of Corey Magnus, there was something about the eyes… something…
“Keane!” Doctor Satan whispered. “Ascott Keane! Here!”
The black eyes glared at the head of the man, so different from the lean, hawk face of Keane. Glared amazement—and rage.
“You have altered your face and body with protoplasm! You blundered onto my method of using and creating it.…”
Keane’s voice came again, amazingly, from Magnus’s throat. “That’s only one of the many things I’ve discovered, Doctor Satan. I know all you’ve done and planned to do.
“Tomorrow that revivified corpse would take a check, made out in advance by Corey Magnus, to the office of the president of the United Continental Bank. Why to that one bank? Because only on that one presidential desk is there an object—such as an electric clock—behind which your puppet could write with a dry pen over the words and figures already made out by Magnus, and thus seem to write the check fresh ‘under the very eyes’ of the president.”
The coal-black eyes glaring at him from the red mask were like living jet, burning with hate. But, relentlessly, Keane went on, slowly getting to his feet as he spoke.
“A clever, if somewhat complicated, scheme, Doctor Satan. But like all complicated plans, it provided its own drawbacks as it went along.
“For one thing, your dead men roused an inexplicable feeling of horror and dread in the minds of observers. They seemed all right, and acted all right—but something chilled those they came in contact with, and that fact was remembered.
“For another thing, there was the matter of their queer actions at home and in their offices. Clever as you are, you couldn’t know all the details of their private and business lives, so your masquerading corpses made mistakes sometimes.
“Again, there was the matter of shaving. Hair does not grow on the dead, contrary to superstition. And your mask of living protoplasm, of synthetic flesh, covered the facial hair of the dead who did your bidding. So there was no shaving to be done—to the bewilderment of barbers and valets. It was this that started Weldman’s valet to spying around, as a result of which he started for the police, and his death.
“Finally, you had to pick rich victims who were not living with their families at the moment. No matter how marvelous the disguise, immediate relatives of course could not have been fooled. It was that fact which informed me, when Corey Magnus’s family went abroad, that he would probably be next on your list. So I persuaded him to go away secretly while I took his place. An easy way to find you, wasn’t it, Doctor Satan?”
With the fires of hell glittering in his jet-black eyes, Doctor Satan had heard Keane out. They flamed like fire opals as he finally spoke.
“An easy way to get here, Ascott Keane. Very easy! But you may find it more difficult to leave.”
“I’ll take my chance on that,” said Keane.
Doctor Satan’s red-clad body quivered. “Seize him!”
Girse and Bostiff clutched Keane’s arms and held him in apparent helplessness.
“Bind him!”
Rope was wound around Keane’s arms and body and pulled so taut that it cut deep into the synthetic flesh with which Keane had built out his hard, firm body to resemble Magnus’s pudgier one.
Keane stared at Doctor Satan—and smiled.
Doctor Satan’s hand brought from under his red tunic the deadly, crystalline tube.
“The lightning tube!” muttered Bostiff, mouth open stupidly. “But, Master, there is no storm tonight. The sky is clear.”
“Fool,” said Doctor Satan, “there is always lightning, and storm, somewhere in the world. And distance makes no difference to this.”
He thrust the crystalline tube between Keane’s bound arm and his side, jet-black eyes flaming with triumph.
“When the next lightning bolt splits the sky, somewhere on earth,” he said, almost softly, “you die, Keane. That may be in five seconds—it may be in ten minutes. But whenever it comes, death comes with it.”
And still Keane smiled.
“You’re so sure, Doctor Satan? Under this synthetic flesh on my body there might be something that would astonish you—”
The sentence was never finished.
In some far distant place, lightning flared.
And suddenly the underground chamber was ablaze with blue-white light that dazzled the eyes even through closed lids. It was an inferno of light, a soundless, rending explosion of it.
In a blinding sheet it played over the body of Ascott Keane. Played over it—and as suddenly shot away from it at a crackling right angle!
Girse screamed and Bostiff roared like a lanced bull as a little of the tremendous current rayed into them. But Doctor Satan made no outcry.
The main stream of blue-white death was streaming from Keane’s body—straight into the red-clad figure!
Doctor Satan’s body convulsed at the touch. A smell of burning fabric filled the room, to mingle with the acrid odor of burned ozone.
And then Doctor Satan was down, with sheet after sheet of lightning bathing Keane in harmless radiance and streaming from him to plunge into the writhing red figure on the floor.
Keane’s bonds were burned away by the force he had redirected. Some of the synthetic flesh over his abdomen was charred from him, revealing part of a crystalline plate, like armor over his body.
He dropped Doctor Satan’s tube, which smashed on the floor, and leaped over the moaning figures of Girse and Bostiff toward the cages in which three men screamed pleas for help.
From walls and roof of the low room bits of rock and earth were falling, loosened by the lightning bolts. The very floor seemed to sway under his feet.
He opened the cages.
“Run!” he shouted. “Run!”
The three staggered to the door and into the passage, with Keane behind them. At his touch on a concealed projection, the tombstone from the cemetery above sank down to get them.…
With a soft roar the earth behind them caved in, burying many feet deep the passage between them and the room in which they had left Doctor Satan, Girse and Bostiff, and the five dead men who had served Satan’s turn.
The passage shuddered and quivered. Air from the cave-in screamed about their ears. The four clung to one another for support.
Then, in the racking silence succeeding the pandemonium, they stared at each other in the faint light of the stars coming down the black pit.
“The end of Doctor Satan,” breathed John Weldman at last. “Thank God for that!”
But Ascott Keane said nothing. He was remembering that in the burned patches of Doctor Satan’s red robe he had seen some crystalline stuff. And he knew that was armor such as he himself had devised against the lightning’s bolt. Not as impervious as his own, perhaps—letting some of the current through to convulse the man’s body—but still saving him from death.
The cave-in? That could not have harmed Doctor Satan. He must have constructed the chamber to resist the lightning shocks, because he drew them there himself. Only the passage between the room and the end of the tunnel could have collapsed.
So Keane said nothing to Weldman. But he knew the truth: neither lightning nor cave-in had killed Doctor Satan. He was alive—to continue his grim forays against all the laws of decency and humanity.
HOLLYWOOD HORROR, by Paul Ernst
Originally published in Weird Tales, October 1935.
CHAPTER I
Death in Life
The central sound stage on the lot of the R-G-R Motion Picture Company was almost ready for the shooting of the main scene in the company’s latest production. Outside the square, windowless concrete building the massive doors were being closed. In a moment the red light would burn which would keep anyone from entering and ruining the sound effect. Inside, all was tense activity and bustle.
The inside of the sound stage had an eerie, cavernous look. One huge room, it was dark and shadowy at its outer fringes, and its high ceiling was lost in darkness. Shadows of people and things appeared like soundless prehistoric monsters.
Far above in the semi-darkness were shadowy platforms along which electricians were moving as they shifted scenic lights and equipment. An electric crane purred like a giant cat as it moved a heavy bit of scenery.
In the corner of the sound stage a set was being completed. It was for the picture, Enchanted Castle, in which the great star, Joan Harwell, had the leading role.
Men were hauling huge “sun-spots,” incandescent globe spotlights, to platforms on three sides of the set. “Baby spots” also were being fixed in place to give a beautiful backlight effect on Miss Harwell’s bronze hair.
All was prosaic, business-like, commonplace to the moving-picture industry. And yet—
One of the electricians, who was trundling a baby spot into position, shivered suddenly. He was a small man, partly bald, with a sensitive, thin face. He had wide blue eyes which, at the moment, glistened with something more than apprehension in the dusk of the great stage.
He paused beside another electrician, a burly, phlegmatic man, as he got the spot to the right position to play on Miss Harwell’s head when she sat in the divan around which the forthcoming scene centered. His hand touched the burly man’s shoulder.
“Bill,” he half whispered, looking embarrassedly around to make sure he wouldn’t be overheard, “do you feel it too?”
“Feel what?” grunted the big man.
The smaller man cleared his throat, plainly torn between a desire to speak what was in his mind, and a fear that he might be thought a fool. Desire won over fear.
“There’s a kind of funny feel to this joint today,” he muttered finally. “I’ve never noticed it in here before, but I can sure notice it this afternoon!”
“What are you talking about?” demanded the big man. “What kind of a feel?”
“I… don’t exactly know how to describe it.” The smaller man stared aloft at the spidery forms of workmen on the cat-walk, and then glanced almost fearfully at the set which had been constructed for the afternoon’s shooting. “It gives me the willies, that’s all.”
The big man stared around, with his forehead wrinkling. “It’s kind of quiet, like everybody was holding their breath,” he said. “But it’s always like that when we’re about to shoot.”
“No—it’s more than that,” babbled the smaller man. His hand on the big man’s arm became a frantic clutch. “God, Bill, something’s going to happen in here today. Something awful—some thing not on the director’s program. I can feel it. I know it!”
He moistened dry lips. “I remember once feeling like this when I was a kid. I’ve always been funny about feeling things—a spirit medium called me psychic, once. Anyway, this time I was just going into a picture show. I was about fourteen, I guess, and I went with a couple of other kids. When we got inside the theater I almost turned around and went out. I didn’t know why. I just felt that something was going to—happen. I tried to get the others to leave with me, and they only laughed. I couldn’t explain my feeling, you see. I said I felt that something terrible was going to happen in that theater, and we ought to get out before it did. But—they only laughed. We stayed.”
Even in the half-light the whiteness of the man’s face was perceptible. “Bill, it happened, all right. That theater was the Mohawk Theater in Chicago. Everybody still remembers the name—and the fire that destroyed it and killed half the people in it. That was what happened, and I was the only one of the crowd of us who went in that got out alive.”
He wiped sweat from his face.
“I feel now, today, just the way I felt that night, an hour before the fire! I feel now, this afternoon, that something awful is going to happen in this sound stage. Bill, should I say anything to the boss or the director—maybe get them not to shoot this scene today?”
The big man jerked his arm loose from the other’s detaining hand. His phlegmatic face registered annoyance and contempt. “Are you nuts? Sure, they’ll put off shooting the scene for a day, with a forty-four thousand dollar payroll, just because you got a shivery feeling in your spine. I see ’em doing a thing like that!”
“But, Bill—” quavered the smaller man.
“You better get busy,” said the other, briefly. “Come on, hop to it.”
The two left the baby spot the smaller man had adjusted to illumine Miss Harwell’s bronze, silky hair. The big man was scowling, and a sneer shaped his lips. But the smaller man looked almost ill, and his eyes glinted like the eyes of a frightened horse in the dimness.
Neither of the two noticed something it was, in a way, their business to see:
Taped inconspicuously to the power cable trailing from the spot that was to throw its rays on Miss Harwell’s head was a fine bare wire. It entered the shell of the light along with the big cable. It was soldered, with the other, to the incandescent globe socket. And before this globe there was a lens that differed just a little in color from the glass of the other lenses.
A trifling difference. One any man could be forgiven for not seeing. But—it was a change that was to introduce to Hollywood a horror such as had never descended on the moving-picture industry before!
* * * *
A tall man with stoop shoulders adjusted a microphone at the end of a long boom. He stepped in front of it, called: “One, three, five, six, seven…”
The voice of the monitor in the glass-enclosed booth came hollowly from a loud-speaker, like the voice of a ghost: “Okay on valve test.”
Through the great outer doors came the director and the members of the cast who were to participate in the scene, two men who played minor roles, and Miss Harwell.
It is unnecessary to describe the great Joan Harwell. Before her untimely end, she was familiar to two-thirds of the population of the country. Her silky, red-brown hair had dazzled millions of eyes with its soft sheen. Her large, brilliant eyes were the envy of the women of a nation. Her body, flawless in the delicate maturity of its curves, had stirred the pulses of a nation’s men. A great beauty, she would have been outstanding in any period; one of those women who almost frighten the beholder by their perfection.
She was dressed in a creamy satin neglige
e which was to register white on the film. The negligee clung to her figure, accentuating its loveliness, and revealed perfect bare arms and throat. Above it her exquisite face and flame-brown hair were flower-like.
“Miss Harwell,” said the director, a corpulent man with a bald head, “you know your lines?”
“Yes,” she said, in the soft, well-modulated tone with which all the theater-goers in the world were familiar.
“We’ll rehearse this living-room scene, then.… What is it? Don’t you feel well?”
The director looked anxiously at the star’s rather pale face, spotting the pallor in spite of her exaggerated make-up.
Joan Harwell hesitated a moment, with her red lips quivering. Then she smiled.
“I feel all right.”
“You’re sure? We’ve been working you pretty hard lately.”
“I’m sure.” The beautiful face continued in its smile, although the deep violet eyes were not smiling. “I felt a little cold for a moment, that’s all. Not exactly cold—a little chilled, as though a cold, damp wind had touched me.”
“I don’t think there’s any draft in here,” said the director jovially, glancing at the solid walls. “Well, let’s get on with it. I’ll run over the scene again for you.
“You are to sit on that divan in the center of the set. You are to register happiness mixed with fear. The man you love is on his way to see you—but another man may reach him before he gets here with a malicious tale that may turn him against you. So you are in a fever of impatience, mad to hold him in your arms, ecstatic at one moment and at the next fearful that he may not come at all. Then the malicious tale-bearer comes in and announces that your lover is on his way back to the ship that will carry him out of your life for ever. You have lost. You go through the throes of grief and rage.… But I think you know the rest well enough. Take your place, please.”
Miss Harwell walked to the divan and sat down. Light in floods brought every detail of her face and form into relief as she reclined on the divan. She faced a little away from the bank of cameras.
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