He stood there, half fainting in the grasp of the sinister two, staring at the death in the coal-black eyes.
“So you would have read the secret of my ray,” the arrogant, calm voice went on, “and perhaps have exploited it for your own profit when you got out of here! Fool, you will never leave here. I could not have let you live, in any case, to bear witness as to what happened here. Now I am doubly forced to remove you.”
The red-clad form seemed to grow, to tower taller in the low, cement-covered pit.
“Girse! Bostiff! Stand aside!”
The two released the man and moved away from him. The electrician sank to his knees, unable to support his weight on his trembling legs.
“I saw nothing!” he chattered. “I learned nothing! I swear—”
He stopped. His lips continued to move for a moment, but no more words came. His eyes were like those of a bird paralyzed by a serpent as he kneeled there.
“You wanted the secret of the box?” purred Doctor Satan. “Well, you shall have it. But it will be a different secret from the one you already have an inkling of. That transformer of mine has two functions. The primary ray it can produce realigns molecules to make them invisible. The secondary ray causes atoms to collapse.”
The coal-black eyes beneath the mask burned more fiercely yet.
“Have you ever speculated on what would happen if atoms collapsed? Matter is nothing but a few atoms moving within certain confines. The rest is space. Your body, for example, is not a solid at all, really. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the atoms of your body were compacted to their limits.”
Gasping, the man stared at him. Doctor Satan moved to the box, with his eyes constantly impaling his victim. He reached within. A tiny light glowed in the side of the box. Doctor Satan trained its rays on the electrician.
The man began to scream. The agony of hell was in those screams. But he did not move. His body twitched and jerked, but seemed incapable of muscular action.
On and on the screams continued, but gradually they changed tone. They grew higher, shriller in pitch, keeping time in their change of pitch with a phenomenal change in the man’s body.
It was growing steadily smaller!
With poorly concealed terror in their eyes, Girse and Bostiff watched the fate of Doctor Satan’s latest victim. They watched him shrivel from a man to a figure the size of a child. It was like peering down a telescope through the wrong end; a telescope so adjusted as to reduce an adult form to a statuette the size of a doll.
On and on the unfortunate man screamed. But now the screams were like the shrilling of an insect, piercing the eardrums in the upper reaches of sound, but still scarcely audible.
“My God!” whispered Bostiff at last.
The man was a thing two inches high, that peered up and up at the towering giants in the mile-high room. Girse and Bostiff bent far down to see, keeping carefully out of the ray’s beam. And they saw that the feebly shrilling, tiny thing that had been a human being was sinking into the packed earth that made the floor of the pit.
“Small as he is,” the calm, harsh voice of Doctor Satan droned out, “he weighs as much as ever. And a thing two inches tall and weighing a hundred and sixty or seventy pounds will sink through pretty solid substance.”
Now the ear could no longer hear the tiny shrilling of the man’s screams. And the eye could no longer see him save as a blot, a pinpoint. The pinpoint remained the same in size.…
Doctor Satan turned off the deadly little light. Girse and Bostiff bent till their eyes were within six inches of the pinpoint.…
It was a hole in the hard-packed earth. A hole that might have been made by a fine needle. Down that hole the man had sunk. To where? God knew! Such concentrated weight might stop with the first rock layer of the earth’s crust—or it might sink and sink till earth’s center was reached! Either way, a slight threat to Doctor Satan’s peace of mind had been removed.
The pit was very quiet as, sweating, Bostiff looked up at Doctor Satan again. The red-robed figure was moving convulsively. And with horror in even his savage heart, Bostiff read the meaning of the movement.
Doctor Satan was laughing! The doom he had meted out to the man was amusing to him!
“At least he will see things, if he lives, that no human eyes have ever seen before—” Doctor Satan began.
But the sentence was never finished. Another voice rang out in the pit, the voice of neither Girse nor Bostiff nor their hellish master.
“Perhaps he will sink far enough to pay his respects to the demon you emulate, if there is a devil and a deep-buried hell.”
A monkey-like cry came from Girse’s lips, and a rasping exclamation from the thick lips of Bostiff. Doctor Satan whirled toward the door with his hands clenched so hard over the rim of the black box that it seemed as if the red gloves must split.
“Ascott Keane! By heaven—”
Keane walked slowly forward from the door to which he had trailed the wire. He was empty-handed. He needed no weapons for defense from such as Bostiff and Girse; and he knew that no ordinary weapons could injure Doctor Satan. But it was eerie to see him walk, without apparent defense, into the lair of the coldblooded monster in red.
“You trailed the wire,” breathed Doctor Satan. “You found me—and you came alone. It is more than I could have hoped for.”
Suddenly his body moved convulsively again. And Bostiff and Girse saw that again he was laughing, but with a laughter now more terrible than that with which he had watched the disappearance of the electrician.
“More than I could have hoped for, Ascott Keane. You came—but you shall not leave as you entered!”
“That’s what you said when I found you beneath the graveyard in New York,” said Keane. “But I left—and you very nearly stayed behind, dead!”
Doctor Satan’s laughter stopped. His eyes glowed with cold triumph.
“That time I did not have the black box. This time I have. And you shall receive its emanations as the other did!”
With the words his red-gloved hand flashed down. The tiny light glowed again—with its rays leveled straight at Keane.
Keane shouted once, a yell of agony, then was silent. But he was not silent because the agony had ceased. The torture of that beam of light was a thing that tripled by the second, a thing that knocked the breath from his body and seemed to sear him in flame.
With legs wide apart, he stood there like a figure of stone, unable to move a muscle. And as he stood there, he became smaller.
From Doctor Satan’s masked lips came a grating cry more eloquent of triumph than the waving pennants of a victorious army.
“I’ve got you!”
Ascott Keane’s once tall frame had dwindled till his head was almost on a level with the head of the legless Bostiff. And still he stood there, braced on widespread legs, glaring at the figure in red.
“Success, and your doom, Ascott Keane!”
Doctor Satan moved closer to his victim, along the side of the clear-cut path of the beam. He thrust his red-covered face down close to Keane’s face, which was a mask of agony.
“Watch out!” screamed Girse.
But the words came too late. Already, Keane had moved.
His right hand shot out and clutched Doctor Satan’s red-robed shoulder. His left gripped the fabric of the robe at his throat.
Indescribable amazement and almost superstitious fear glinted in the black eyes of the man who had roused such awe and such superstitious fear in others.
“My God!” he gasped. “My God! You moved! But you can’t move! No one can move with the paralysis of the beam on him! It’s… impossible… but you did.…”
The hoarse, astounded words ended in a scream that was a faint echo of the shriek of the electrician. For Keane had pulled the red-cloaked figure before him so that the light from the
black box caught it directly.
“See—how—you—like—it,” whispered Keane, between gasps of agony.
Bostiff and Girse leaped forward.
They clutched at Doctor Satan’s robe and tried to tear him from Keane’s grasp. But though his hands were so small that they looked like the hands of a child, they held their grip. His body was shrunken, but all its weight and all its muscle texture was left. He held the man with an unbreakable clutch.
“The light!” screamed Doctor Satan thinly. “Turn it—off!”
Both Girse and Bostiff leaped toward the black box, Girse bounded monkeylike over the earth floor, Bostiff swinging in great loops on his thick arms.
“Quick!”
Girse fumbled in the box and apparently found no switch, for the deadly light continued to shine, and the red-robed form continued to shrink in size. He looked at Bostiff.
The legless giant growled something impotently, and caught up a hammer. He raised it over the box.
“No, no!” Doctor Satan shrieked. “The ray must be reversed! Don’t wreck the transformer!”
Bostiff dropped the hammer. Girse continued to fumble. The red-clad body was now less than four feet tall, scarcely an inch taller than Keane’s grim, compacted frame.
“Behind the light!” choked Doctor Satan. “Girse—”
His racked cry stopped, as the light did. Girse had found the switch. Agony rolled from Keane. He could breathe again. But he kept his clutch on Doctor Satan.
Keane spoke. His voice was piping because of his shortened vocal cords. But there was no lack of relentlessness in it.
“Make me as I was before, or you die!”
“You can’t kill me!” raved Doctor Satan, trying fruitlessly to break Keane’s grip. “No man can kill me!”
“You thought it was impossible for any mortal to move while in the path of the atom-compacting beam,” said Keane. “But I moved. You have occult as well as scientific methods of fighting—but so have I. I’ve come to close grips with you at last. You’ll go to the devil, your maker, at once, if you don’t do as I say.”
“Bostiff! Girse!” panted Doctor Satan.
The two swung in on Keane. But, with their arms reaching for him, they stopped. His steely eyes were drilling into theirs, now Bostiff’s, now Girse’s. Under that hypnotic gaze they seemed to congeal.
“The switch, Girse,” snapped Keane, moving Doctor Satan as he spoke, till he was in the path of light instead of the red-robed body. “Move it backward—and we’ll see what happens.”
“Girse—don’t move!” panted Doctor Satan. “You hear me—”
Girse moved like a sleepwalker toward the box.
“Girse—” It was a cry of maniacal rage from the red-masked lips.
But the monkey-like man went on, with Keane’s power in the ascendency even over Satan’s. His hand found the switch. The light in the box snapped on.
In no particular did the light seem to differ from that which had flashed like a baleful eye to collapse the atoms in a man’s body and shrink him in stature. Yet, now, under what seemed the same beam, Keane’s stature increased.
To five feet he grew, to six. His face was a stony mask of triumph—tempered by the fact that Doctor Satan grew as he did. The rays filtered through his body, apparently, to affect the red-robed body he had tried to block from the light.
“Enough,” he snapped.
Moving mechanically, Girse turned the switch. Once more the light went out. And now Keane saw a curious thing. His half-transparent right hand, affected in the conference room, had become opaque again! In the beam, that had been altered back to normal along with his stature.
At every point in this encounter with Doctor Satan, he had won! Now he had only to destroy that black box by the wall, and then destroy its master.…
With all the tiger strength in his big body, he thrust the red-robed figure suddenly from him and leaped toward the box. Doctor Satan staggered back against the wall. But his jet-black eyes suddenly flamed savage hope instead of impotent rage.
Keane did not see the change in expression. He was too intent on catching up the hammer Bostiff had dropped, too sure he had won completely.
He raised the hammer over the box, with Girse and Bostiff making no move to stop him. Doctor Satan’s eyes flared like live coals…
“And now, damn you, you’re next!” grated Keane, bringing down the hammer on all the intricate and delicate apparatus in the box as if it were the red-covered skull he struck.
There was a soft explosion. Rays of blue flame leaped from the black box, bathing Keane in malevolent fire.
He choked, cried out, and staggered back. Still a third secret the box had yielded: almost certain destruction to him who wrecked it!
A snarl like that of a victorious animal came from Satan’s lips. He stared at his two men, and, stirring as though waking from sleep, they moved toward him with Keane’s occult chains broken. The blue flame licked at Keane’s body.
“And so you die,” rasped Doctor Satan, staring at him. “You have stopped me again. But this is the last time you’ll interfere in my plans.”
With Girse and Bostiff following him, Satan left the pit. And behind them, as the door closed, Ascott Keane lay with death playing through his body from the wrecked black box…
The hum of the motor beside him grew to a wail, a scream, and then with a grinding roar subsided into silence. With no constantly tending hand to keep it running, the motor had at last burned out. Blind fate had rescued Keane.
But Doctor Satan did not know that. He was not, after all, infallible. Grimly confident, he left for dead a man who was already stirring feebly, to recover almost within the hour and play the part of Satan’s nemesis once more.
THE CONSUMING FLAME, by Paul Ernst
Originally published in Weird Tales, November 1935.
CHAPTER I
The Night Explodes
The service telephone rang. The chauffeur, in whipcord pants and shirt sleeves, picked it up. The crisp voice of Besson, president and majority stockholder of Besson Motors, sounded out. “Carlisle, is the sedan in running order?”
The chauffeur stared at the phone with bulging eyes. His gasp sounded out. Then he collected his wits, and said: “Of course, sir.”
“Bring it around to the side entrance, then,” Besson ordered. “Full tank, check everything. I’m going to drive down to Cleveland. I’ll drive it myself.”
Carlisle kept staring at the phone in that unbelieving way. He opened his lips several times as if to express the amazement showing on his face. But no words came.
“Well? Did you hear me?” snapped Besson.
“Yes, sir,” responded the chauffeur. “Certainly sir. The sedan will be at the side entrance at once, sir.”
He hung up, swore in profound perplexity, then shrugged into his whipcord coat and went downstairs to the garage.
He got into the sedan, an immense, gleaming thing built specially in the shops of the Besson Motors Company, and sent it out of the wide doors of the garage and down the graveled lane to the portico of the Besson mansion.
He got out of the car and waited respectfully for the master to appear. But while he waited, with a bemused scowl, he felt the radiator.
It was quite warm. The car had been used recently.
Besson came out of the door, followed by a footman who carried a small bag and a briefcase. Besson was a short man, heavy set, inclined to rather loud checked suits which would have looked humorous on his squat frame had it not been for the quiet, tremendous power lying obviously in eye and jaw. No one laughed after looking into the motor magnate’s face!
“Everything ready?” said Besson.
“Yes, sir,” nodded the chauffeur.
Once more he seemed to be on the verge of saying something further, but once more he repressed himself.
Besson got into the car. The footman put the bag and case in the rear.
Besson nodded brusquely to the two servants, and sent the great machine out of the drive and swirling onto the street with the practiced rapidity that was still his after his early years as a race-track driver before he made his money. The sedan hummed out of sight in an incredibly short time.
Carlisle turned to the footman. In the chauffeur’s eyes was something like fear, and small beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he said.
“What’s up?” asked the footman.
“The boss!”
“Either he’s going crazy or I am.”
“Why?”
“An hour ago,” explained Carlisle, “the chief came out to the garage. I was washing down the town car. He called to me to ask if the sedan was checked, and I said it was. He got into it and drove out of the garage with it. He had a bag, and I thought he was starting his Cleveland trip then. It seemed kind of funny that he came out to the garage himself for the car instead of having me bring it around, but I didn’t pay too much attention to it.”
“He started out an hour ago, with a bag?” said the footman, staring. “That’s funny.”
“It isn’t funny as what happened next,” Carlisle said. “In twenty five minutes I heard a car roll into the garage—I was upstairs in my rooms. I came down, there was the sedan. So I figured the boss had changed his mind and wasn’t going to Cleveland after all.
“I went back upstairs, and three minutes ago, I’ll be damned if he didn’t phone out, ask if the sedan was checked, and tell me to bring it around to the side door here just as if he hadn’t been out in the thing, himself, a little while ago and knew it was checked and ready for the trip.”
“First the boss came out and drove away himself?” repeated the footman. “Then, just now, he called for the car to be sent around, just as though he hadn’t been in it the first time? That is funny! In fact it’s impossible.”
Carlisle stared at him, forehead wrinkled.
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