“You’re sure you feel all right?” persisted the director, staring at her violet eyes.
“Yes. I’m all right.”
The director bit his lips, then shrugged. After all, this was only a rehearsal. The star’s slightly strained look, for which he could think of no reason whatever, would not matter.
“More light on Miss Harwell’s right cheek,” he called.
The burly electrician moved a baby spot. The planes of the star’s face leaped into higher relief.
“On the back of her head,” said the director.
The man with the sensitive face and the wide, apprehensive eyes moved another small spot so that Miss Harwell’s lustrous hair became a web of silky light.
And Joan Harwell shivered suddenly as that light touched her.
All noticed it, though none noticed that the last small spot to be moved was the one that had the fine bare wire subtly fastened to its power cable.
“Is the lens of that light clean?” snapped the director. “It seems just a shade off-color.… No, I guess my eyes are playing me tricks. All right, Miss Harwell.”
Absolute silence reigned in the great sound stage. In it, workmen and actors, property man and director, stared at the nation’s most beautiful woman who sat on the divan in the lacy negligee that molded limbs and body a sculptor could not have equaled.
The star swung into her part.
“He’s coming,” she whispered, just audibly for the microphone to catch it. “He’ll be here soon… after nearly a year…”
The director frowned. Her voice was strained, almost harsh. But her facial expression was all right. It registered happiness—mixed with fear. No, not fear. Horror! What ailed the girl?
The spotlights rayed on her face and body. The little spot that illuminated her hair seemed to burn with a faintly orange tint…
The director, seated in his camp chair, gripped the rough wooden arms and stared with eyes that protruded from their sockets.
Joan Harwell’s hair! What in heaven’s name?…
It seemed to be fading from her head like a cobweb mist, revealing the lines of her skull!
The director blinked rapidly, and stared again. Was he going mad? The slight rasp of his panting shivered in the air. He was going insane—or blind!
“He’ll be here soon,” Miss Harwell whispered, “unless Tim reaches him first.…”
A sort of croak came from the director’s throat, a rasping small sound of utter horror.
The beautiful lips that had murmured the words had become like the lustrous hair—misty, like substance of fog rather than of flesh. He could see her teeth through the lips!
The shivering sob of the small electrician near him in a way reassured the director, though the reassurance was a dreadful thing. For it told him that someone else was seeing what he saw.
“If Tim tells him that lie, and kills his love for me!” breathed the star. “But he won’t! Fate couldn’t be so unkind.”
And now in the sound stage there was a paralysis of silence more terrible than wild shouts. Every eye was riveted on the star with chains of horror. Riveted on her face and head.
Something was happening to the beautiful face—something terrible and impossible beyond description—something of which Joan Harwell still seemed unaware, though the tone of her voice had grown more strained and odd with each word she uttered.
Her face was disappearing!
Shuddering, whimpering silently in his throat, gripping the arms of his chair, the director glared at the girl on the divan. And now the metamorphosis, progressing ever more swiftly, was complete. And Joan Harwell no longer had a countenance that could move men to rapture and women to envy.
Gone were the violet eyes and the straight small nose. Gone the silky hair and the creamy skin of cheeks and brow.
On the star’s lovely throat a skull rested!
With a scream the director leaped from his chair. And his wild shriek broke the awful silence that chained the others in the sound stage. As one, they ran for the great outer doors, hiding their eyes from the thing of horror that now sat on the divan; all but the burly electrician, who stood near the cameras and stared, with eyes that started from his head, at the thing that had been a woman.
A gorgeous body, seductively revealed by a cream satin negligee—but a body on which was nothing but a grinning skull!
“My God!” whimpered the one man who had stayed behind. “Oh, my God!”
“Harry!” shrilled Joan Harwell, getting up from the divan and turning toward the doors from which the men were hastening. “Harry—what is it? What has happened to me?”
The director did not answer. He did not turn back to look at her. Not for empires would he have gazed again at what had been sheer beauty. He ran from the doors and out into the afternoon sun. The star was alone with the shaking big man in coveralls who stared at her with twitching terror in his stupid face.
The thing that had been Joan Harwell walked toward the man. The negligee, trailing from the perfect body, rustled in the stillness. The blanched white skull on the slender, lovely throat turned toward him.
“You,” Joan Harwell’s voice came from between teeth that chattered in their bony sockets, “for the love of heaven—tell me! What has happened?”
The man’s nerve broke utterly at last. With a hoarse yell he turned from the glaring, hollow eye-sockets of the skull, and raced for the door to join the others.
The beautiful form in the clinging negligee stood beside the cameras. The ghastly skull turned this way and that.
“Gone! All of them! They ran from me. But what has happened to me?”
The lovely figure swayed. Then it walked unsteadily to a make-up box near the set, with the skull atop the creamy bare shoulders shining almost phosphorescently in the dimness. Death on lovely life! A pallid skull on a beautiful woman’s body!
The thing that had been Joan Harwell stretched out a trembling arm and hand toward the make-up. Pink, tapering fingers opened it. In the lifted lid a mirror showed.
For perhaps ten seconds of frozen silence the glaring eye-sockets of the skull stared into the reflection of themselves. Then through the clenched and naked teeth scream on scream ripped forth.
People gathering outside the sound stage, drawn by the almost crazed director and workmen, heard those screams and shuddered. But none moved to enter the place. None dared!
And suddenly the frightful screams ceased. The pink fingers holding the lid of the make-up box slammed it down, shattering the mirror into a thousand pieces. In its place, the fingers caught up a pair of shears, keen, thin, long.
Straight and tall the figure stood—lovely as few women’s bodies are lovely. Then a bare white arm went up. The shears glittered in the dimness of the sound stage; glittered more as they swept down and in; ceased glittering as they were bedded in flesh.
Joan Harwell fell, the negligee half covering a breast from which crimson poured, but with nothing covering the thing of horror that had been a flawless countenance crowned by bronze hair.
And now in a far corner of the great stage a shadow moved. It had seemed nothing but a mound of debris covered with tarpaulin. But now it took on human shape.
A tall, emaciated-looking figure stood erect. A black cloak covered it from heels to head. A dark felt hat with a down-drooping brim hid the head and part of the face. The rest of the face was covered by a red fabric mask.
The figure walked to the body of the dead star, and stared down. From eyeholes in the red mask, black eyes gazed callously at the skull set on the creamy throat. Then the felt hat moved as the man nodded.
Silently the figure moved from the body to the small spot that had been trained on Joan Harwell’s head. Fingers sheathed in red rubber gloves ripped the bare fine wire loose from the power cable. Then the figure moved toward a smaller door in the sound stage leading into the p
roperty warehouse—where a secret exit could be made with the fine wire which was all the clue that might have explained the method by which a flawless face had been turned to fleshless ruin.
CHAPTER II
Satan’s Decree
In the conference room flanking the private office of the president of the R-G-R Motion Picture Company, eight men sat. They were the wealthiest men of the industry, titans of the picture business. But they looked like anything but titans as they sat there.
The eight were frightened to the verge of collapse, and they showed it. Their faces, whether lean or chubby, were paper-white. Their hands trembled. Several smoked, sucked in great drafts from cigar or cigarette and expelling them again without really knowing what they were doing. And the eyes of all were turned toward the door marked: A. R. Stang, President.
In the big private office behind the closed door, there was a sight to evoke the same dread as that inspired the day before in the sound stage when Joan Harwell gazed into a mirror and saw why men ran from her.
Stang, the president, shivered in a huge leather chair next to the big desk across which normally flowed the business of R-G-R. But no business was flowing now. The desk was bare. And beside it, a fantastic creature, cowered Stang. Or the thing Stang had become!
The president’s corpulent body remained untouched. But his left forearm and hand were the hand and forearm of a skeleton! Like bony twigs his fingers writhed and clenched while he sat there gazing at them; gazing out of sockets as eyeless as Joan Harwell’s had been yesterday! For on the thick neck of the man was no longer placed a head. A skull was there, blanched, pallid, naked bone.
No sound came from the fleshless mouth. Sounds had been worn out. For eighteen hours Stang had cowered in the office, unable to drag himself out of it to face the horrified stares of the rest of the world. For eighteen hours he had screamed and cursed, raving for those who knocked at the office door to go away.
Now the first person to come into the big room was pacing up and down before him and shaking his head while he said with stiff lips: “I don’t know what to do. I’ve been a practicing physician for twenty-eight years, and I’ve never seen anything like it. You haven’t any idea what caused the change?”
The skull on Stang’s shoulders spoke.
“I have no idea at all. I was sitting at my desk, bent over. I was writing. Just a check, so I didn’t bother to light my desk lamp—I sat with only the light from the overhead fixture shining down on my head and hand. Maybe that light… but how could a light do—this—to me?”
He raised his skeletal left hand and forearm. The doctor’s nails bit into his palms as he repressed a shudder.
“I didn’t feel anything much. I recall feeling cold, as if a dank wind had touched me. That was all. The first thing that told me of the change was my secretary’s behavior. She came into the office, stared at me as though she’d suddenly been turned to stone, and fainted. And I’ve been in here ever since.… Doctor, for God’s sake, do something!”
The doctor walked toward the door. “I’ll do everything humanly possible. But first I’ve got to try to find out what is wrong. I’ll take this sample of your flesh down to the laboratory and report back as soon as I can.”
He opened the office door, with a reflection in his eyes of the panic that had filled the eyes of those who had fled from Joan Harwell, and went into the conference room.
The eight executives in there surrounded him.
“Doctor—what causes it?”
“Is it some new disease? Is it contagious?”
“Is it controllable?” rasped one who held crumpled in his fist a sheet of note-paper.
The doctor brushed them aside with a weary wave of his hand.
“Gentlemen, I know nothing yet. I can only tell you what I told Mr. Stang. As soon as I find out something I’ll report.”
“But what could strip the flesh off a human being’s bones like that?” demanded a short fat man whose high voice was like a squeal. “And how can a person live in such a condition?”
“The flesh is not stripped off,” said the doctor, moistening his lips. “That at least I have found out. I found it out by feeling of the affected parts. The flesh is still there, gentlemen. Mr. Stang’s head is not a naked skull. Hair and flesh and eyes and features are still there. But in some unguessable way they have been made invisible, or transparent. The flesh is as it always was—but it is as translucent as so much spring water, so that all you can see is the bony structure underneath. Similarly with his left hand. So it is not as bad as we feared.”
“Not as bad!” squealed the fat man. “Does it make it any the less frightful that the skull is not really a naked skull? To the eyes of all beholders, it is only dead bone!”
“An illusion,” the doctor began shakily.
“Hell, man! In a case like this illusion is as ghastly as reality. Stang can never mingle in the world again, like that. At a stroke he has been made into a thing that is dead even though still alive. You’ve got to do something!”
The doctor shrugged, opened his lips as though to retort, and then went on out of the conference room. Behind him, the eight reseated themselves at the big oval table.
“Gentlemen, we’re beaten,” said the man who held the sheet of notepaper in his hand. “We will have to follow the demands of this outrageous letter.”
He straightened the crumpled paper and read again that message which any of the eight could have repeated word for word from having read it so many times already:
Bertrand C. Phillips, President of Acme Pictures, Incorporated: You will arrange to pay me five hundred thousand dollars by tomorrow at midnight. You will also instruct your star, Dorothy Dean, to pay to me the three hundred and eighty thousand dollars she has invested in Government bonds. If the payments are not made, she will suffer the fate of Joan Harwell, and you shall become as A. R. Stang—whom I advise you to visit immediately in company with other motion picture heads. His appearance may be an object lesson.
Signed,
Doctor Satan.
The man with the letter looked around the circle of faces.
“Bertrand Phillips,” he said. “That’s me. And if I don’t pay, I’ll have a skull for a head and enter into a life in death such as lies before Stang. If I do pay, and persuade Miss Dean to pay, it will be only a beginning of the schemes of this man who calls himself Doctor Satan. Every one of you will have to give in to the same threat in turn. And then all of us will have to keep on, paying millions to the fellow.”
The little fat man shook his head like a scared, bewildered child.
“But nobody can do a thing like that! Making flesh transparent over bone so that only the bone is seen, like a living skeleton! It can’t be done.”
“The only answer is that it has been done,” the other man ground out. “I’m going to pay, personally. I’ll pay Miss Dean’s share too, if she should refuse to do as Doctor Satan demands. Her head is worth more than three hundred and eighty thousand dollars to me. Not to mention my own!”
“Is there no way out, then?”
“None, gentlemen, as far as I can see. A man who could perform such miracles of horror as were performed on Stang and Joan Harwell is a man far beyond the reach of law or the police.” He sagged lower in his chair. “I repeat, we’re beaten—”
The outer door of the conference room opened. A man stood on the threshold an instant, then calmly came into the room. He was tall, dressed in dark gray that masked the width of his shoulders and the muscularity of his athletic frame. Steely gray eyes peered out from under black eyebrows. The eyes, combined with a large but aristocratic-looking nose, gave him a hawk-like appearance.
“Who are you?” squalled the little fat man in feeble wrath. His fear and uncertainty in the last hours came out in a burst of rage against the intrusion. “What are you doing in this room? We left orders that no
one was to come in here!”
The man’s large, firm mouth moved in a grim smile. “Your orders were observed by your office help,” he said. “Or, they would have been observed—but I walked past them out there and came in anyway.”
“Who are you, anyhow?”
“My name,” said the man, “is Ascott Keane—”
“Keane? Keane! That means nothing to me. I never heard of you—”
“Just a minute,” the voice of the man with the letter cut across the little fat man’s voice. “That name means something to me! Ascott Keane… Aren’t you a criminologist? From New York?”
Keane nodded.
“You’re a sort of undercover man, working for no one but yourself? You tackle the big crime cases, sometimes when the regular police don’t even know the cases exist?”
Again Keane nodded.
“For God’s sake,” quavered Phillips, “sit down and talk this over with us. I don’t know if you realize it, but a man like you couldn’t have come here at a better time!”
Ascott Keane looked at the letter Phillips handed him. He didn’t even bother to read it. The signature, Doctor Satan, was all he needed to see.
His steel-gray eyes turned toward Phillips.
“I didn’t come here by any accident,” he said quietly. “I came knowing I would find some such thing as this in Hollywood. I saw the news flashes yesterday about the hideous thing that had happened to Miss Harwell. Within a half-hour I was on a plane, with my secretary, Beatrice Dale, headed this way. At the airport when I landed I overheard a man talking of what had happened to Stang here. The man was on his way out of California, afraid it might happen to him too. So I came here at once, to place my services at your disposal.”
“If you will,” babbled the little fat man, “if you only will—well, you can name your own fee.”
Keane’s grim smile appeared again.
“I happen to be fairly wealthy, gentlemen. I am not working against Doctor Satan for fees. I’m working”—his eyes flamed—“to rid the world of a monster that will be emperor of all crime if he can’t be destroyed!”
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