Keane got out of the coupe and walked back a half-block. He saw that an elderly man, patently a watchman, sat in the open side-doorway of the factory.
He hesitated an instant, then walked openly toward the man. He couldn’t have hidden his approach anyhow, and thought he could overpower the watchman if his suspicious thoughts of the place were verified and the man tried to give an alarm to others inside.
His eyes fastened to the watchman with increasing curiosity as he approached. He saw that the man was cheaply dressed, with faded blue eyes and a stubble of grayish beard on his face. And he saw that the eyes stared off and sway in the oddest, most unseeing way imaginable. Also, he noticed how unmoving the old man was. He sat in the doorway like a statue, not shifting his position in any way. Even when Keane had come quite close, he did not move.
Keane stared down at him with growing grimness. He could see the man’s pulse beat in the vein in his throat; but it seemed to him that the pulse-beat was incredibly slow. He could see the hair of his stubble of beard closer, and it appeared that the flesh of the man’s face had receded from hair-roots, more than that the hair itself had grown.
Keane felt a chill touch his spine. Realization, like a spike of ice, began to sink into his brain. But he still could not quite believe.
“Hello,” he said to the man, in a low voice.
“Hello,” the man replied. He said the word with his lips hardly moving, and with his eyes staring boldly straight ahead.
Keeping his voice almost in a whisper, so that it could not be heard through the open doorway, in which the man sat, he said, “Are you alone here?”
“There are four inside,” the watchman replied creakily.
Keane moistened his lips.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“It is…”
The man stopped, like a run-down machine. His faded, unblinking eyes stared straight ahead.
Keane stopped, then he touched the watchman’s wrist, and shuddered.
Perceptibly he could feel a pulse, beating perhaps twenty to the minute. He could see the man’s chest rise and fall with immensely decelerated breathing.
Pulse, and breathing. And the man could speak and, up to a point, answer. But that man was dead!
Keane dropped the wrist, icy as something long immersed in water. His lips were a thin line in his face. A dead man on guard! A watchman whose presence here would be missed, and who, therefore, had been left in his accustomed place to give passersby no suspicion that anything unusual was taking place inside!
He had found Doctor Satan. The presence of a living dead man where a live and vital human being should be, proclaimed the fact like a shout.
Keane drew a long breath. Then he stepped past the dead man, who sat on with faded blue eyes staring into space. He entered the doorway. His eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness and detected the presence of the black drapes swathing the interior and making it a smaller voice(?)—a voice that made the hair on his neck crawl with remembrance and primeval fear. The voice of Doctor Satan.
Edging his way along between the drapes and the wall, careful to touch neither, Keane moved to a spot where the soft but imperious voice sounded farthest sway.
Then he took out a knife, slit the black fabric, and looked through.
The first thing his eyes rested on was Beatrice Dale.
She sat on the floor of the abandoned factory with her slim arms down by her sides, and her silk-sheathed legs out in front of her. Arms and legs were bound, and a gag was around her lips. Over the gag her eyes stared out, wide and frightened—yet, in the last analysis, composed. Keane felt a hard thrill of admiration for her fortitude go through him as he looked into her eyes.
Over her bent the figure he had seen before several times in the flesh and many times in nightmares. A tall, gaunt body sheathed in a red robe, with a red mask covering the face and a red skullcap over the hair.
Keane bit his lips as he noted the knobs, like horns, that protruded from the Luciferian skullcap. Those mocking small projections were the keynote of the character motivating Doctor Satan. A man who took pride in his fiendishness! A man who robbed and killed, and broke the laws of man and God, not for gain, because he already had more than any one person could spend. But, solely for thrills! A being jaded with the standard pleasures of the world, and turning to monstrous, sadistic acts to justify his existence and give him the sense of power he craved!
Next to the red-robed figure, Keane saw Doctor Satan’s two make believe henchmen, Girse and Bostiff.
Girse, small and monkey-like, was gazing at the girl’s form with his pale eyes like cruel beads in the hair covering his face. Bostiff, supporting his giant torso on his calloused hands, swayed back and forth to a sort of full ecstasy.
Again, Doctor Satan’s voice cane to Keane’s ears. “I have not yet decided what I shall do with you,” the soft voice pronounced. “You are beautiful. I am alone in the world—and it is not inappropriate that Lucifer take a consort. But that consort should not be a mere living woman such as lesser beings have. You noticed the watchman as you were borne into this place?”
Keane saw a spasm twitch Beatrice’s face, saw her eyes winch with terror.
“I see you did,” Doctor Satan said. “And I see you sensed his state. A dead man, my dear—yet a man who will breathe and move in a sort of suspended animation as long as I shall will it. A man whose automatic reflexes can still dimly function, so that the dead brain may direct the muscles of throat and lips to answer verbally any questions not too complex and so that the body may move to orders not too difficult.”
Doctor Satan’s grating, inhuman laugh sounded out. “It comes to my mind,” he said, “that Lucifer might here find a fitting mate. The devil’s consort—death. A beautiful woman who must answer as required, and who must move without question to fulfill her master’s least demand. That would be unique—and amusing. Think how Ascott Keane would react to that.”
Keane, motionless behind the drape, with his eye to the slit in the fabric, felt perspiration trickle down his cheeks. The man was diabolical. Yet was he not mad? He was beyond madmen in the aims he pursued and goals he achieved. He was sane icily, brilliantly sane!
And now, Doctor Satan went on with that in his voice which made Keane suddenly tense in every muscle as instinctive small warnings prickled in his brain.
“The reactions of Ascott Keane to that spectacle… very interesting. I must see them. In fact I will see them!”
Like a flash of light, the red-robed body whirled. The coal-black eyes of the man glared through the eyeholes of the red mask, glared straight into the eyes of Keane, pressed to the slit in the black fabric.
Impossible that he should see Keane’s eyes in the dim red light of the black-shaded room! Impossible that he should have heard Keane breath or move! Yet, he knew the criminologist was there!
For a moment that seemed an age, Doctor Satan’s glittering black eyes stared into Keane’s steely gray ones. Then the red mask moved with words. “You will come here, Ascott Keane.”
Keane’s legs moved. Savagely he fought the muscles of his own body, which were like relentless rebels in the way they disobeyed the dictates and his will. But the muscles won.
His legs moved. And they bore him forward. Like an automaton so that the black drapes moved forward with him, slithered over his head, and sank back into place behind him.
He walked up to where Doctor Satan and Girse and Bostiff ringed the bound, helpless girl. There he stood before the man in red, eyes like steel chips as they glinted with savage but impotent fury.
“Will you never learn, Keane, that my will towers over yours, and my power goes beyond yours?” Doctor Satan scoffed.
Keane said nothing. He looked at Beatrice, and saw that into her eyes had crept a horror that went beyond the fright that had entered them at mention of the living dead man
who guarded his red-lit inferno.
He could feel his body responding sluggishly to the commands of his brain, now. But the recovery was really feeble. He could not have moved toward Doctor Satan to save his life, though with every fiber of him he craved to throw himself on the man and rip the red mask from his face and batter that face into a thing as inhuman as its owner’s soul was in reality.
“Girse,” said Doctor Satan.
That was all. The little man hopped in obedience. He came close to Keane with his right hand hidden behind his back.
Keane gasped and tried to throw his arms as he read in the little man’s mind and sensed the command Satan had wordlessly given him. But his arms moved too slowly to prevent the next act.
Girse lashed forward with his own arm. Something glittering in his right hand pressed into Keane’s flesh. He felt a sharp sting, then complete physical numbness.
He sank to the floor. But though his body was a dead thing, his mind continued to function with all its normal perception.
Doctor Satan’s glacial laugh rang out. “The great Ascott Keane,” he said. “We shall see how he meets his own fate. And that of his secretary, toward whom his secret emotions are not quite as platonic as his conscious mind believes.”
He turned to the little man. “Girse,” he said again. That was all. The rest of the command was unspoken. But all too clearly, with the telepathic powers that were his, Keane caught that too. He fought in an agony of helplessness to make his body move, as Girse hopped toward Beatrice. But he was an immobile as though paralyzed.
Again, Girse held a hypodermic needle, but this was a larger one than the one he had plunged into Keane’s body.
With his pale eyes shining, the monkey-like little man pressed the needle into Beatrice Dale’s bound left arm. The girl closed her eyes. A strangled moan came through the gag that bound her lips. Keane croaked out an oath and struggled again with a body as limp and motionless as a dead thing.
“The drug in that hypodermic is quick-acting,” Doctor Satan said. “Observe, Keane.”
With starting eyes, Keane saw how true the words were.
Into the girl’s eyes already had crept the terrible, unseeing look that characterized the faded eyes of the thing outside in the doorway. He could see the pulse in her throat slow down. Slower…slower.…
“She’s dead, Keane,” said Doctor Satan emotionlessly. “Though, dead, she will obey better than alive, Girse.”
Once more, the monkey-like small man approached the girl. In his hand was a knife. He slit the bonds that held her, and removed her gag. “Come to me, Beatrice Dale,” commanded Doctor Satan.
Through a red haze, Keane saw the girl get to her feet, slowly, unsteadily. She walked toward the figure in red, moving like one asleep. “You are mine, Beatrice Dale,” Doctor Satan said softly.
There was a perceptible hesitation. Was the girl’s brain, even in death, struggling against the monstrous statement? Then her lips moved, as the lips of the thing in the doorway had moved, like the lips of a mechanical doll. “I am yours.”
Keane panted on the floor. He could not even cry out. His vocal cords were numbed by the drug, as was the rest of his body.
Doctor Satan stared down at Keane. “And so, my friend, we see the end. Your aide has become as you see. You yourself shall presently die as Besson and Dryer and Corey died. The end.… Bostiff.”
The legless giant hitched his way forward on his long arms.
“The flywheel, Bostiff,” Doctor Satan said. “Girse, attach the cube of death to Keane.”
And now Keane glanced at a thing he had seen only perfunctorily, and noticed not at all, until now. On a length of rusty shafting in the rear of the factory room was a big flywheel, which had performed some power service when the factory was busy. To this, was belted an electric motor.
Bostiff hitched his way to the flywheel. As he went, he trailed behind him a fine wire only too familiar to Keane, the kind of wire that had led to the metal box Keane had detached from his coupe before death could strike him. To the spokes of the flywheel, Keane knew, were fastened the colorless, unobtrusive fins which generated the static death that had struck down the motor millionaires.
Girse fastened to Keane’s chest a metal cube which had been resting on a low bench nearby. Bostiff fastened the other end of the wire leading from it to a point near the flywheel. Then he started the motor.
The big flywheel started moving and turning over. Doctor Satan’s eyes burned down at Keane.
“In five minutes, approximately,” he said, “there will be a violet flare. In that flare, you will be consumed. Just before it occurs, the drug that holds you will begin to disappear, so that you shall be the more keenly aware of your fate. We shall, naturally, wait outside till the bursting into flame of the building announces that you are no longer alive to annoy me.”
He turned toward the dead girl. “Come, my dear.”
Beatrice walked toward the draped door, her body swaying a little from the impairment of her sense of balance, her eyes staring unblinkingly ahead. Doctor Satan followed. Behind came Girse and Bostiff.
Doctor Satan raised the drape. The three passed through ahead of him. He stared toward Keane. “Four minutes, now,” he said. And then he followed the others.
CHAPTER VI
Two Metal Cubes
Keane was lying so that he could see the watch at his wrist. He watched the little second hand fly around its circle three times. He listened to the whirling of the great flywheel, gathering static electricity through its fins. Such a colossal store of it as even the lightning could not rival, to be held in the mysterious metal cube on his chest till it had gathered beyond the cube’s power to contain it any longer. Then the cube would be consumed, and consume everything around it like a tremendous blown fuse.
Keane stared at the watch. He had a hundred seconds of life left. One hundred seconds.
But his counting of the seconds was not actuated solely by the fear of death. His mind had never been keener, colder than it was now. Ascott Keane was waiting for the first sign of returning movement in his muscles. When that occurred, he had a plan to try. It was a plan the success of which hinged on facts unknown to him. But its steps seemed logical.
He felt burning pain in his finger ends, then in his hands. Grimly he moved his fingers, searing with returning life. He flexed his hands. He had forty seconds. Perhaps a little longer, perhaps a little less, for Doctor Satan could not foretell to the second when the static force stored in the metal cube should burst its bonds in the terrific violet flare.
Now he could move his right arm feebly from the elbow. He dragged it up by sheer will till it went to his coat pocket. In that coat pocket was a factor which Doctor Satan had not reckoned with: the metal cube with its broken end of wire, which Keane had taken from his coupe for analysis which he had not had time to make.
He got the cube from his pocket. His watch told him he had twenty seconds, a third of a minute, to live.
With maddening slowness, his hand moved. It found the wire from the box in his pocket. With numbed fingers it pressed the broken bit of wire to the other cube.…
The fifteen seconds that passed then were an age.
Keane’s idea was that with two of the storage cubes hooked together, it would take twice as long for the spinning flywheel to generate the static force that was presently to consume him. As simple as that. And, even though he knew nothing of the substance in the cubes capable of storing the force, he thought its action must be as logical as it was simple.
If it took minutes longer for the building, with Keane in it, to go up in violet flames, Doctor Satan might come back to see what was wrong.
The zero second approached, passed. Keane held his breath. Ten seconds passed, and still death did not strike. The flywheel turned, the gathering static electricity rasped his nerves and stood his hair on end,
but the violet flare did not dart toward the heavens.
Twenty seconds went by, and Keane breathed again and watched the draped door. He could move arms and legs now, and a bath of flaming agony told that all his body would be soon released from the grip of the paralyzing drug.
Two minutes had gone by before he saw the drapes at the door move. And then Girse came in. Girse! Not his master! But Girse, Keane thought, would do.
The monkey-like little man came into the red-lit room, and to his merited end. Keane’s steely eyes were on him. Through them, as through shining little gates, his iron will leaped at the man.
Girse stiffened in the doorway. Then, in obedience to Keane’s unspoken command, he walked to Keane’s side.
“You came to see why the violet flame has not burst out?” Keane said.
“Yes,” said Girse, his wide, helpless eyes riveted on Keane.
“Doctor Satan is outside with Bostiff and the girl?”
“Yes,” said Girse. A spasm passed over his hairy face, as though apprehension, struggled with the deep hypnosis in which he was held.
“Answer this,” snapped Keane, “and answer it truly. The girl, Beatrice Dale, is now dead. Do you know of a way to make her have life again?”
God, the agony that went into Keane’s waiting for that answer! And then Girse’s lips moved. “Yes.”
Keane drew a deep breath. He stood now, tottering a little, but almost entirely recovered. “What is the method?” Tell me quickly and truly.”
“The drug that killed her is its own antidote. More of it will bring back to life any who have been dead for not more than half an hour.”
“Thank God!” said Keane.
And then he acted. And as he did so, before his mind ran the list of crimes this man, with Doctor Satan as his leader and the unspeakable Bostiff as his comrade had committed. The list took all pity from his face.
He fastened the two metal cubes to the man whose body was held in his mental thrall. Then he went to the door, backing toward it with his commanding eyes over Girse.
The flywheel turned with a monotonous whirring. The fins attached to its spokes sent down the fine wire the accumulation of current. Millions, billions, of volts, filling the mysterious storage capacity of the first cable, reaching toward the capacity of the second.
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