The Doctor Satan

by The Complete Series from Weird Tales

  Phillips clutched his trembling hands together.

  “A man who can do what he has done,” he said, “could be emperor of the world, I’d think. Who is he, Mr. Keane? You seem to know of him already.”

  “I know very little. I don’t know his identity, nor does anyone else on earth. But I do know that his is a name that is internationally famous for family wealth and power. I know that he is a man in the prime of life, who has become jaded with the pleasures of wealth and has turned to crime of a sort so advanced and bizarre that nothing like it has ever been known before—crime, incidentally, that must pay, in the end. That is one of the rules of his game. Though he is perhaps richer than any of you here, he must get money from his crimes or they would not be successful and he would not get his thrill from his grim play.”

  The little fat man clutched his arm. “You can stop him, can’t you?” he squealed. “You can force him to leave Hollywood? Money! Successful crime! He’ll get all the wealth of all of us if he can’t be stopped.”

  “I can do my best,” murmured Keane. “Can any of you men give me a hint or clue of how the change was wrought in Stang or Joan Harwell?”

  The eight looked at each other. Finally Phillips said: “I don’t think any of us can give you a bit of help. I doubt if Stang himself can.” His voice sank to a fearful whisper. “I wonder where Doctor Satan is, here in Hollywood. And I wonder if he has prepared my fate, and that of Dorothy Dean, already.”

  CHAPTER III

  The Heart of the Web

  The motion picture industry is still a new one; and R-G-R is not a pioneer company. None of its buildings is very old. But one of them, the property warehouse, was old enough so that all but a few veteran workmen had forgotten one feature of its construction.

  Under the north end of the warehouse was a deep circular pit. At one time the mechanism for a large, buried, movable stage had been in that pit; a stage set beside the original, smaller warehouse. Then the stage had been discarded, the warehouse had needed enlarging, and workmen had floored the unused pit and built the warehouse out over it.

  Dark, secret, forgotten, it had yawned beneath the cement floor untouched for years. But it was untouched and forgotten no longer.

  Less than four hundred yards from the conference room in which eight executives sat in pallid fear, the pit teemed now with activity.

  In the center was a big electric motor, once the power source of the movable stage mechanism; then left to rust, outmoded; now cleaned and repaired again. It was running, sending out a low hum that filled the round pit with a murmuring noise.

  Beside it were three men—one normal and average, the other two like gargoyles out of a nightmare.

  The one was a workman in coveralls with rubber-insulated pliers in his hand. He shrank from the other two as he stood there. And no wonder.

  One of these two was a giant of a man with no legs, who moved about between his swinging arms with an astonishing speed and agility. The other was a small fellow with matted hair over his face through which pale, cruel eyes peered like those of a sadistic monkey. The legless giant was Bostiff, servant of Doctor Satan. The smaller man was Girse, another henchman.

  “I tell you this old motor won’t hold together much longer,” chattered the man in coveralls. “I didn’t think I’d ever get it in working order in the first place.”

  “You got it in working order,” rumbled Bostiff, “because you’d have been killed if you hadn’t. You’ll keep it in working order for the same reason.”

  “What are you using it for, anyhow?” babbled the workman. “And how long are you going to hold me here?”

  A sinister smile appeared on Bostiff’s stupid, savage face.

  “We’ll hold you here as long as we need an electrician,” he growled. “As for what the motor is used for—it’s to make things happen to women like Joan Harwell and men like that damn rich man, Stang!”

  “But how in the name of—”

  “Shut up,” snapped Bostiff, cracking the flat of his huge hand against the electrician’s mouth.

  The electrician staggered back, with blood flowing from his lips. And as he did so, a red light near the roughly cut entrance of the circular pit snapped on and off.

  “It’s him!” said Girse, hopping monkey-like toward the entrance.

  Bostiff drew his gigantic body up on the backs of his hands as though standing to attention. Girse opened the door.

  A figure came through that was as bizarre and extraordinary as something cut from a book of ancient illustrations; a figure that looked as though made up for the part of Lucifer in some ghastly masquerade.

  A red robe sheathed its gauntness as a red scabbard might sheathe a lean blade. Red rubber gloves covered the hands; a red mask concealed the face save for burning black eyes; over the hair was a red skull-cap with two small knobs like sardonic devil’s horns.

  “Doctor Satan,” murmured Bostiff hoarsely.

  The electrician whimpered and drew back from the sinister form in red. Doctor Satan’s jet-black eyes flicked over the unfortunate man, noting the blood oozing from his cut lips.

  “He has been trying to get away?” he asked Bostiff.

  The legless giant shook his head. “Not that. He feared he could not keep this old equipment running.”

  The red mask over Doctor Satan’s face moved a bit, as though to a smile.

  “He will keep it running,” came the arrogant, flat voice. “He loves life.”

  Doctor Satan turned toward Girse. The little man’s pale eyes wavered under the impact of the coal-black ones glaring from the eye-holes in the mask.

  “Girse, there is more for you to do. Take the fine wire and run it from this pit to the R-G-R conference room. Attach it there to the light socket over the third chair on the left-hand side of the big table. The third chair, Girse! Make no mistake! It is in that chair that Bertrand Phillips sits.”

  An evil chuckle came from the masked lips.

  “Because that light gives diffused illumination instead of a beam of it like a spotlight, we shall be unable to control the rays quite so thoroughly. It will be amusing to see the result—if Phillips defies me. He might become a partial skeleton from the waist up, instead of merely exchanging a normal head for a skull.”

  “The wire is to be laid from this pit to the third light on the left side of the conference table,” muttered Girse, parrot-like. “It shall be done, Master. And it is to be attached at this end?”

  “To the transformer,” nodded Doctor Satan. He paused an instant, then said harshly: “This man has not been allowed to examine that transformer?”

  Bostiff stared with dull ferocity at the electrician.

  “He has not,” he said.

  Doctor Satan walked to one wall of the pit, near the humming old motor. A cable led from the motor to a black box leaning against this wall. Doctor Satan raised the lid of the box. Over his red-robed shoulder could have been observed a maze of cobweb wires in the box, with vacuum tubes studding the maze and glass terminals at the wire’s ends. From the opposite end of the box came a small length of the fine wire that had led to the baby spot in the sound stage. To this would be spliced the wire leading to the conference room.

  Doctor Satan’s Luciferian head moved in a gesture of satisfaction.

  “All is ready. Prepare the wiring, Girse. And—if by the luck of the devil, my master, you should see Ascott Keane, you know what to do. If you can!”

  Bostiff started. His dull eyes swung toward the red mask.

  “Keane?” he croaked.

  “Yes.” The word hissed from the masked lips. “He is here. In Hollywood. He is to be killed at sight.”

  * * * *

  The eight men who headed the motion picture industry of the nation were in the R-G-R conference room at eleven-fifty next night. They faced Ascott Keane, who sat at the head of the
board.

  Bertrand Phillips’ face was dewed with sweat. He kept staring at the clock, and running his tongue over his dry lips.

  “In ten minutes,” he said huskily, “if the payment is not made I am to become as Stang became! Keane, I must make that payment!”

  Keane shook his head. His face was pale, tense.

  “Payment would only put off your fate. You would pay—and pay again. There would come a time when you could pay no longer, and then Doctor Satan would strike. For he must keep terror alive in the hearts of others, and to do that he must give a horrible object lesson at regular intervals.”

  “But what can we do? You have found out nothing. You admit it.”

  “No, I have not admitted it. I have found out a little. I have found out how Doctor Satan creates his ghastly illusion, for one thing. The man has devised a ray that changes the molecular arrangement of flesh. The ray, playing on flesh, so lines up the atoms of which that flesh is composed, that they fade from the range of vision of the average eye. It is as if a cloud of dust particles were so shaken as to line the particles up one behind the other. The cloud would become a thing of straight lines, seen end on, and hence not seen at all.”

  “But how is the ray controlled? From what place can it come?”

  “I don’t know,” said Keane.

  “And where does this Doctor Satan hide? Such a ray would mean equipment of some sort. Perhaps bulky equipment. Where is it concealed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Phillips sprang from the chair he habitually used and paced up and down the room, with the eyes of the others following him.

  “I can’t stand the strain any longer! I want to pay!” He mopped at his forehead. “Fancy going through the rest of my life as Stang is doomed to do! Unless he kills himself.…”

  He stopped abruptly, and a look of terror froze his face.

  “Do you hear it?” he whispered, after a moment.

  Ascott Keane stared at him. “Hear what?”

  “A voice.” His whisper shivered in the conference room. “A voice! I heard it distinctly. It said: “Remember—at midnight! Pay, or doom overtakes you at midnight!”

  Frozen silence chained the room for an instant. Then the eyes of all swung back to Keane.

  “Telepathy,” said Keane quietly. “There was no voice. The words grew in your brain, Phillips. But I think it means that Doctor Satan is very near us.”

  “I’m afraid!” panted Phillips. “Keane—what are you going to do?”

  “I’ve told you. We will wait here till midnight. Satan will strike then, or attempt to. And the nature of the attack—and its source—will determine my next move.”

  “But he strikes at me!” sobbed Phillips. “At me! If you can’t act quickly enough—”

  He stopped and stared at the clock. Two minutes of twelve. With a groan he sank into his chair again and buried his face in his hands.

  Keane stared at him with pity in his steely eyes, though inexorable purpose shaped his countenance. Then his eyes, too, sought the clock. A minute and a half to twelve. A minute.…

  How did Doctor Satan project his diabolical ray? How could he control the invisible current that made flesh transparent so that the bony structure beneath, whose mineral content no doubt made it impervious to the ray, could be made so hideously plain?

  Forty seconds to twelve o’clock.

  Phillips’ breathing rasped through the silence. The little fat man choked out a curse. The rest of the picture executives held their breaths.

  Thirty seconds. There was a slight flicker of the lights…

  “Out of that chair!” yelled Ascott Keane, springing up so swiftly that his own chair was overturned. “That’s how he does it! The lights! Out of that chair!”

  Phillips stared at him in dazed lack of comprehension, with a kind of bleating noise coming from his lips. Keane bounded toward him.

  “Move, man! Damn it—then—”

  Keane’s arm shot out. His hand clutched Phillips’ coat collar and he pulled backward with all his strength. Phillips shot back against the wall, crying aloud, and Keane, with a leap and a smash of his hand, broke the light bulb in the ceiling over the spot where the man had been sitting.

  Then, in the pandemonium of men unused to action and made into terrified animals by the nearness of peril, Keane looked grimly at his hand.

  The fingers of that hand looked as if they had suddenly been turned to frosted glass. They were not quite opaque. In them could faintly be seen the outline of finger and knuckle bones. Doctor Satan’s ray had accomplished a fraction of its deadly purpose before the bulb had been smashed.

  “Touché,” he whispered. “A slight, partial victory for you, Doctor Satan. But also, I think, the beginning of the end.” He stared at the light socket.

  “Of course! It came from the lights! I should have thought of it instantly. Joan Harwell’s flesh became invisible when the spotlights were played on her. Stang’s head changed under the ceiling light above his desk. The lights! With Satan’s ray traveling along their beams!” He placed a chair beneath the shattered fixture, and examined it closely.

  A fine bare wire came into view, soldered deftly to the socket, and threading up through the plaster of the ceiling with the main light wire. Disregarding the men who babbled and clutched at his arm, and who stared with horrified eyes at the milky fingers of his right hand, he walked to the window and leaned out.

  The rays of a small flashlight showed him more of the fine wire stretched unobtrusively down the outside wall of the building. Down the wall, to the ground. And at the other end of that wire.…

  “Gentlemen,” Keane’s vibrant voice cut across the din, “I shall see you soon. And I think I will have conclusive news!”

  He went down and out of the building, and around beneath the window. Off into the night the fine wire ran, so inconspicuously that it would never have been seen by eyes not searching specially for it.

  Off into the night—toward the great dark building which was R-G-R’s property warehouse!

  Drawing a deep breath, Keane started tracing the wire—to the source of the ray and, he prayed, the man who had devised it.

  CHAPTER IV

  Black Box of Death

  In the pit beneath the property warehouse, Doctor Satan stood with his head bowed a little as though listening. He stood near the secret door, with Girse and Bostiff near him.

  Behind the big electric motor, the electrician lay with eyes closed as though asleep. But under the fringe of his lashes he was watching the three near the door. And now and then, at long intervals, he moved a little. His movement was always in one direction—toward the mysterious black box to which a cable ran from the motor and from which a fine bare wire trailed on the opposite end from the cable. Girse and Bostiff hardly breathed as they watched their master. The red-masked face lowered a bit more. They stared in silent respect, careful not to distract him.

  They knew what Doctor Satan was doing. They had seen him do it often before.

  Somewhere in the night outside, there was a person in whom Doctor Satan was vitally interested. He was reading that person’s mind, through his marvelously advanced telepathic powers.

  Suddenly the red-robed form stiffened. The red mask moved with words.

  “Phillips will pay,” the harsh, arrogant voice rang out. “He has escaped the doom of the ray. Someone suspected the source, and broke the light bulb. Ascott Keane, probably.” The red-gloved hands clenched. “But Phillips will pay. He has just telephoned his home to deliver to whatever messenger calls for it the package of currency he made up before Keane persuaded him to hold off. Girse, you will call for that package. First, as you go out, remove the wire from this pit to the conference room before it is traced. Then go to Phillips’ home.”

  A malevolent chuckle sounded from the covered lips.

 
“Half a million dollars! And it is only a beginning—”

  The words stopped with awful suddenness, and the coal-black eyes glaring from the mask’s eye-holes began to gleam like fire opals.

  Doctor Satan turned suddenly, and stared at the black box from which the fine wire ran. He stared also at the figure beside it.

  The electrician had edged his way from the motor to the box. Leaning on one elbow, with his terrified gaze going constantly to the ominous red form by the door, he had raised the lid, and was peering in at the maze of wires and tubes the box housed.

  The man cried out, a low, choked exclamation. There was no chance for him to pretend sleep as he had done before. Satan had whirled and caught him as though he’d had eyes in the back of his head and had watched all along.

  No chance to conceal his fatal curiosity! The man could only stare, panting, into the awful black eyes, with his hand still holding open the lid of the box.

  Doctor Satan walked slowly toward him. On either side, Girse and Bostiff moved with him. The terrible three advanced soundlessly, save for the slight rasp of Bostiff’s calloused knuckles on the floor as he propelled his great body forward.

  The man screamed, and cowered away from the box. He got to his feet, wildly, and tried to run. But there was no place to run to.

  Girse got him on one side, and Bostiff on the other. They dragged him to confront Doctor Satan. The eyes behind the eye-holes in the mask were like small black windows into hell.

  “So,” murmured Doctor Satan, “you were curious to see what was in the box.”

  His red-sheathed arms folded themselves across his chest. His voice was as soft as satin—and as deadly as a snake’s hiss.

  “Scientific curiosity,” he purred. “The inquisitiveness of the trained man. It is an odd thing. You are a prisoner here, afraid for your life—and rightly. But in the same room with you there is a bit of electrical equipment such as you have never seen before. Mysterious equipment. A new invention. And you must look. With death staring you in the face, you can still be moved by that professional inquisitiveness! The human animal is an odd object.”

  The man held by Girse and Bostiff said nothing. It was doubtful if he heard the words, or, hearing, understood them.