“For the last hour,” said the footman, “Mr. Besson has been in his rooms. I overheard him dictating a few letters to his private secretary, and I helped his man pack his bag. So he couldn’t have driven out of the garage and then back again!”
The chauffeur bit his lip. He was silent for a long time as the meaning of the statement came home to him.
“He didn’t drive out of the garage an hour ago and come back again twenty-five minutes later? Then who did? And why?”
The footman shook his head.
“Did you see the boss’s face?”
“No,” admitted the chauffeur. “As I said, I was washing down the town car. I heard his voice, and saw his body as he climbed in behind the wheel. But it was his voice! I’ll swear to that.”
“Well,” said the footman slowly, “somebody besides Besson took that car out of the garage for half an hour. I wonder if they did something to it?”
The chauffeur wiped sweat from his forehead. “It—it felt all right as I drove it out of the garage. But if a steering-rod was sawed half in two or something.…”
He stopped. Besson was a notoriously fast driver. He burned the roads at ninety miles an hour in his frequent trips to cities near Detroit.
“Maybe nothing was done to the car,” said the footman through lips inclined to be a little pale. “Better not say anything, anyhow, about this. It might get you into trouble.”
Carlisle nodded. He went back to the garage. But on his face a look of foreboding grew.
With all his heart he hoped the sedan hadn’t been tampered with. But common sense told him it must have been. A man wouldn’t take risk and trouble to get it off the Besson property for half an hour without some reason behind the act.
“Who took that car out?” he whispered to himself as he went up to his quarters again. “And what did they do to it?”
* * * *
Out along the road to Cleveland, Besson sent the great sedan leaping like a live thing, unaware of the short trip it had made before he stepped into it. It was only eight in the evening. The road was fairly crowded with traffic, so Besson did not hit his highest road speed. The speedometer needle quivered at seventy.
Besson frowned a little in a puzzled way. And he was puzzled. He squirmed uneasily behind the wheel of the car.
His nerves felt as though each tiny end were being filed. And his hair was acting queerly. It had a tendency to rise on his scalp, prickling and itching as if it had turned to fine wires.
He took his hands off the wheel for an instant to see if there were a short circuit somewhere in the ignition system that was sending a little current up the steering-column and into the wheel. His sensation was vaguely of the kind induced by a slight electric shock. But lifting his hands from the wheel did not lessen the sensation. And glancing down at the seat beside him he saw that a bit of paper torn from a cigarette package clung to the velour as tissue paper clings to a comb that has just been drawn through hair.
Traffic cleared. Frowning, Besson pressed harder on the accelerator. The car leaped up to ninety-four miles an hour, roaring down the road with a sonorous, low-pitched scream.
No man saw what happened after that. A dozen pairs of eyes were drawn to the spot a second later; but none observed the entire proceeding.
At one moment the special-built car was racing along the concrete. At the next, there was an enormous flare of violet-colored light and there was no car there. Furthermore, there was no trace anywhere on the road or alongside the road that such a car had existed.
Besson, the sedan, and everything else, had utterly disappeared.
A woman behind the counter of a roadside stand was the first of the dozen witnesses to break the awful silence following the blinding violet flare which a man and a car had vanished in, utterly from the earth.
“Oh, my God!” she screamed.
It snapped the spell. Truck drivers, pleasure car owners, proprietors and patrons of the roadside stands near by, raced to the spot.
“My God!” the woman screamed again, shrill and high.
The men did not cry out, nor did they say anything. They simply looked at each other and then at the road.
A long black streak of charred concrete was all the evidence left of the speeding sedan.
CHAPTER II
The Death Engine
In the experimental room of the Dryer Automobile Corporation, three men stood looking at a roadster.
Outside, in the great shop, all was thunder and clangor. The big machines that turned out the production stream of Detroit’s third largest motor factory were so expensive that they had to be run day and night so that now, at ten in the evening, the uproar was as great as at ten in the morning.
But here in the corner laboratory the roar penetrated only as a murmur, and in critical silence the three men examined the roadster.
It was a tremendous thing. The wheelbase was nearly a hundred and sixty inches. The hood slipped off and away from the windshield as if the power of a locomotive were under it which was almost the truth. It gleamed with the finest and latest of enamels; a toy to delight the heart of a rajah.
“Everything is all right?” said the chief engineer to a mechanic in dungarees near by.
“Listen for yourself,” said the mechanic, switching to the motor. The engineer nodded. A sour look was on his face. “Twenty-eight thousand, and that thing cost to build. Well, it’s some car. It’ll do about a hundred and forty, won’t it?”
“A hundred and forty-eight,” said the mechanic.
The engineer grinned bleakly. “And Dryer’s pampered son will use the speed, too. This is certainly a birthday present! When is it to be delivered?”
“First thing in the morning,” replied the assistant. “I got orders two hours ago. I’m to drive it up in front of the Dryer house and leave it to “surprise” Tom Dryer. Though he knows all about it, of course.”
The head engineer turned to the mechanic. “Stock a canvas over it,” he ordered. “It would be a shame to get a scratch on papa’s darling’s plaything. I’ll lock up.”
The mechanic draped a great canvas, such as painters use, over the enormous roadster. The men went to the door of the experimental room, and stepped out into the clangor of the shop. The engineer locked it.
But behind that closed door was not emptiness.
As the lock clicked on the room and the roadster, a shadow stirred in a far corner near a work-bench. The shadow was that of a man who had been lurking in there for over an hour.
The man, a shapeless outline in the darkness, went toward the roadster. He lifted the canvas from over the hood and raised the hood catch. From his pocket, he took what appeared to be an aluminum box, a third as big as a cigar box.
He attached it to the reverse side of the dashboard.
From the box trailed four fine wires. One went to each wheel of the roadster. Then the man worked with the wheels. To each spoke was attached an almost invisible, flexible fin of colorless material. The fine trailing wires were adjusted so that the ends would almost touch the fins on the spokes as the wheels whirled.
The shadow figure fastened the hood down and replaced the canvas. It glided toward the door. Over the penetrating roar of the busy shop outside sounded a faint laugh. It was an icy, blood-chilling sound, twice repeated. Then the door opened as if it had never been locked closed again, this time on a room containing no human thing, but in which was a roadster that was far indeed from being the same mechanism as that which had been hand-built in the shop.
It was hardly fifteen minutes later when the door was opened once more and the lights switched on.
The chief engineer and another man were in the doorway. The other man was young, barely twenty-four. He was blond, dressed in a tuxedo, with no hat on and with his hair rumpled a little. His blue eyes were too bright, and he swayed a bit on his feet.
“Your father will be very disappointed if you don’t wait until tomorrow and use it then, on your birthday, for the first time,” urged the engineer.
But the man, young Tom Dryer, only shrugged. “I want it tonight. And what I say goes around here. Wheel it out.”
“But…”
“Wheel it out, I tell you!”
The engineer shrugged. He got into the roadster, after taking off the shrouding canvas. A side door of the laboratory opened. He drove it out and onto the cinder driveway leading from the fenced factory grounds.
“Boy, that’s a job!” said Tom Dryer, his too bright eyes taking the lines in and power of the machine. He got in behind the wheel. The motor boomed.
“So long.”
The young man waved his hand to the engineer, and drove off. The watchman at the yard gate barely had time to open the portals for the flying thing. Then young Dryer was out and off.
The engineer shook his head. His face was pale.
“So long,” the boy had said. And it seemed to the older man that the words, and the parting wave of the hand, were prophetic. The farewell given for a long trip. A long, long one, perhaps.
“Drunk, and at the wheel of a thing that will go nearly a hundred and fifty miles an hour,” the engineer whispered to himself. “I certainly hope.…”
He turned back into the experimental laboratory without finishing the sentence.
* * * *
An hour later, at a little after midnight, the great new roadster fled like a silent, tremendous night bird over the open highway. Swaying a little behind the wheel was young Dryer Beside him sat a girl with unnatural-looking red hair, and predatory gray eyes set in a face as flawlessly regular—and as uninspiring-looking—as a beauty on a magazine cover.
“Seventy,” said Tom Dryer. “And you don’t feel it any more than if you were going twenty. Wait till we hit an open stretch! I’ll show you speed, baby!”
“Let’s be satisfied with seventy,” urged the girl. She was a little pale under her rouge as she glanced from the speedometer to his face.
“Don’t be like that,” laughed the boy. “That’s an old maids’ speed. I want to show you what this buggy can do!”
The girl was silent for a moment. She moved restlessly in the seat. “Say,” she exclaimed finally, “do you feel funny?”
“How do you mean?” said Dryer.
“Kind of itchy and nervous,” said the girl.
“Nope.”
“Well, I do, and my hair feels like—like it was being pulled by someone. I don’t like it. And I don’t like going so fast on a road where you’re apt to go round a corner and meet a car piling toward you.”
“Like this?” laughed Dryer, steering around a curve on the wrong side of the road with screaming tires. “Hand on, kid! This is a straight stretch ten miles long. Bet we can make it in five minutes.
“The needle’s going to eighty-five.”
“Tommy,” shrilled the girl. “Don’t please! I—I feel…”
“Hang on!” Dryer repeated, shouting over the rush of wind. “You’ll never have another ride like this!”
The needle went to a hundred.
“Tommy!” shrieked the girl. “I—oh, God—”
The night was split by a violet flare that could be seen for miles. Like concentrated lightning it burst forth, shattering the darkness along the road.
It blazed into being with no warning, persisted for about a half-second, and died as suddenly.
And on the road, where the great roadster had been, with a man and girl in it, was nothing. A charred black streak showed. That was all.
CHAPTER III
Satan Schemes
In a tower of the Book Hotel, next noon, two men sat talking.
One, thin, of average height, with thin gray hair and eyes lidded by colorless flaps that looked like the membranes veiling the eyes of a bird of prey, was president of the Universal Motors Corporation, Detroit’s biggest automobile combine. The other was Ascott Keane, criminologist.
Keane got up from his chair and paced slowly back and forth across the room, his wide-shouldered, athletic body moving with the perfect muscular coordination of a trained athlete. His gray eyes were like chips of ice in his lean face. His black brows were drawn low.
“There is only one person on earth who could possibly be responsible for this,” he said.
Corey, president of Universal, stared up at him. His veiled eyes looked more than ever like the eyes of a bird of prey—but of a very frightened bird, now. But even in his fright, he preserved his business caution. So many men, these days, claimed knowledge to which they had no right and tried to extort money from you on that claim!
“Who is that?” he asked, warily.
“Doctor Satan,” said Keane.
Corey sighed and leaned back in his chair. “You are right, I guess you know the answer behind the—the disappearances, and you claim to. The voice that spoke to me ended the insistence by saying that its owner was somebody with the bizarre name, Doctor Satan.”
Keane stared at him. On Keane’s face was a trace of impatience. He had read the man’s thoughts, and didn’t like them. But Corey, wealthy and powerful as he was, was only a pawn in the game. And one doesn’t become annoyed with pawns. “Tell me about the voice,” he said.
Corey swallowed with difficulty. His face was greenish. “I was in my office. The office is soundproofed, so that no voice could have come from outside. I was alone—even my secretary had been sent out and the door was locked. And while I was sitting there—a voice came to my ears.
“You have heard the news,” the voice said. “You have heard how Charles Besson, and Thomas Dryer, son of Dryer the motor magnate, were consumed in a mysterious violet flame.”
Corey looked at Keane like a terrified child. “It was almost like the voice of a second self speaking! It came so unobtrusively and—and naturally—that for a minute I wasn’t startled at all. But then I was. I realized that there wasn’t a soul but myself in that locked, soundproof room. A voice save mine couldn’t sound in there! But this one did; a soft, almost gentle voice, but it gave me chills. It went on:
“You are thinking of that news now. You are planning how best to take advantage, in a business way, of the fact that Besson has died suddenly, and that Dryer is stunned and helpless from the blow of his son’s death.
“That that was true,” Corey blurted out. “It was as if someone was reading my mind.…
“Well, I was thinking about the business advantages that might accrue to Universal by the tragedies. Any man would.” Corey shivered. “The voice said…”
“You have more important things to think about now. One is your own life. Another is how you can arrange your financial affairs so that you take ten million dollars in cash from your fortune. For that is the price of your life. Ten million dollars. You will deliver it to my servant within the next few days, or you will die as Besson and Dryer died. I swear that, and Doctor Satan has never broken a vow.”
Corey glared at the back of his bony, prehensile hand. “Those aren’t the exact words, but that’s the message given by the voice. And that was the name: Doctor Satan. I’d have said the whole thing was some clever trick, played by a master of hypnotism or ventriloquism to cheat me out of money. I’d have defied the orders of the voice, of course—if it hadn’t been for the awful way in which Besson and Dryer’s son died. My God, can anyone really do that? Consume people in violet flame at will?”
Keane shrugged. “According to the newspaper and many witnesses, someone can. What do you intend to do?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I came here to ask: I had about decided to pay, when you phoned. How did you happen
to get in touch with me, anyway, at such a crucial moment?” A bit of the old wariness and business suspicion came back to Corey’s face.
Keane smiled. “The moment I read, in New York, of the inexplicable tragedies that had happened here, I flew to Detroit. Both victims had been prominent in motor manufacturing circles, so I began with you, intending to run down the list of executives till I found one who had been threatened. I knew who was behind the crimes, and I know something of how he works, so my course of action was outlined for me. You told me you had been threatened; I asked you to see me—and that’s the answer.”
Corey sighed. “Shall I pay this Doctor Satan? Ten million dollars! It’s colossal! But life is more important than money…”
“Even if the price asked was only ten cents,” snapped Keane, “You shouldn’t pay it.”
“But he’ll kill me! The flame…”
Keane’s long jaw squared. His firm mouth became firmer, grimmer. “I’ve found this man more than once,” he said. “I’ve beaten him before. I’ll do it again. Don’t pay. Your life will be saved if you take one precaution.”
“And that?” said Corey eagerly.
“Don’t ride in a car. In fact, don’t ride in anything capable of high speed: bus, train, anything.” He glanced toward the door, indicating that the interview was over. “If you refrain from that, you’ll be all right.”
Corey went out. The door opened after his exit, and Keane’s secretary came into the room. Tall, lithe, beautiful, with dark blue eyes and hair more red than brown, she stared at her employer with a look in her eyes that would have revealed much to him had he been gazing at her at the moment instead of looking unseeingly out the window at the rooftops of the automobile city.
Beatrice sighed and came up to him.
“You have found out how the deaths were caused?” she asked, professionally, with the glow hidden in her eyes.
Keane nodded absently. “I have found out several things. Not exactly, in detail, but closely enough to map out my plans.
“Doctor Satan is up to his old methods of harnessing the forces of nature to do his crimes for him. It was nature that killed Besson and Dryer’s son. Static electricity.
The Doctor Satan Page 11