The Doctor Satan

by The Complete Series from Weird Tales

  Keane looked at his watch. In thirty seconds, if Doctor Satan were right, the two cubes would explode with double the violence planned on.

  There was a violet flare that seemed to fill the world. Keane was knocked backward out of a doorway that an instant later became nonexistent.

  A glimpse he had of a man who sprawled over and over with the force of the shock and then relaxed to lie at last in the actual death hitherto denied him. The dead watchman! Then he was staring into coal-black eyes that glinted with a fear that never before had touched their arrogant depths.

  “Keane!” whispered Doctor Satan, as the criminologist faced him. “You weren’t… then it was Girse.…”

  “It was Girse who died,” said Keane and sprang.

  With a pleasure that sent a savage thrill to his fingertips, he got his hands around the red-swathed throat.

  “The drug that made that girl as she is,” he grated. “I want it.”

  Doctor Satan’s voice gurgled behind the red mask. His hand went under his robe. The fear of death—that exaggerated fear felt by all killers when they themselves feel death approach gleamed in his eyes. He drew out the big hypodermic.

  “How much is the reviving amount?” said Keane.

  “Two… calibrated marks… on the… plunger,” gasped Doctor Satan. Keane relaxed his fingers. “The same as the lethal dose.”

  “Death, or renewed life, the same,” whispered Keane.

  Then a bleak smile shaped his firm lips. He took the hypodermic. With the swiftness of a leaping serpent his hand moved. And death poured into Doctor Satan’s veins!

  Keane shot the stated amount into Beatrice’s white arm. There was barely enough. With his heart in his throat he watched her reactions.

  “Thank God!” he whispered.

  Color was slowly seeping into her cheeks. Her eyes blinked, then began to lose that deathly dullness. The pulse increased toward normal in the throat vein.

  Keane turned toward Doctor Satan and his face wore the same grim look it had worn when he left Girse to his merited destruction.

  “Get up,” he said.

  Slowly, stiffly, Doctor Satan rose. His dead eyes peered straight ahead.

  The factory building was a solid blaze. Shouts and sounds of running feet announced the beginning gathering of a crowd in the street.

  “Walk straight ahead and keep walking,” Keane snapped.

  The red-clad figure, like a dread automaton, walked straight ahead toward the roaring flames. Keane waited, with bleak victory in his tired eyes, till the figure was on the brink of the flames. Then he turned to Beatrice.

  “What?” she faltered.

  He helped her up. “Don’t talk. Just come with me,” soothed Keane. And, in answer to the look in her eyes: “Doctor Satan? He’s dead at last. In the flames. It’s triumph for us.”

  He helped her to the curb and through the milling crowd to his coupe.

  It was the one of the few major mistakes of Keane’s life.

  “Two calibrated marks on the plunger,” Doctor Satan had said was the reviving dose of the drug. “The same as the lethal dose.”

  The revival amount had been correct: Beatrice was alive again to prove it. It did not occur to Keane that Satan might had lied about the other.

  So he did not see the red-clad figure draw back from the flames as soon as he had returned and started leading the girl from the cinder yard. He did not see Doctor Satan crawl behind a rusted pile of metal tanks, nor see, a moment later, a figure clad in conventional dark clothes emerge, leaving behind a red, Luciferian costume that would have been too conspicuous to wear where many could observe.

  “Victory,” Keane said again, with shining eyes, as he drove toward the hotel.

  But nor far from the blazing factory behind him and Beatrice, a tall figure had drawn itself up with clenched fists, and the soft voice quivered with fury as Dr Satan whispered:

  “Ascott Keane thinks he has killed two of us: you, my faithful servant, Girse, and myself. He shall learn his mistake. I shall bring you back, Girse, and together, we shall have proper and fitting revenge for the humiliation we have suffered at his hands. This I swear by the Devil, my master!”

  HORROR INSURED, by Paul Ernst

  Originally published in Weird Tales, January 1936.

  CHAPTER I

  In Satan’s Crucible

  It was noon.

  The enormous National State Building hummed like a beehive with the activity of its tenants. Every office spewed forth men and women on their way to lunch. The express elevators dropped like plummets from the seventy-ninth floor, while the locals handled the crowds from the fortieth floor down.

  At the top floor an express elevator tarried beyond its usual schedule. The operator paid no attention to the red flash from the starter downstairs signaling the Up cages to start down as soon as possible. He acted as though he was beyond schedules, as indeed he was.

  This elevator, though not entirely private, was at the disposal of Martial Varley, owner of the building, whose offices took up the top floor. Others could ride in it, but they did so with the understanding that at morning, noon and evening the elevator waited to carry Varley, whose appearances at his office occurred with time clock regularity. Hence, if the cage waited inactively those in it knew why and did not exhibit signs of impatience.

  There were half a dozen people in the elevator that paused for Varley to ride down. There was an elderly woman, Varley’s office manager and two secretaries; and there were two big business men who had been conferring with Varley and were now waiting to go to lunch with him.

  The six chatted in pairs to one another. The cage waited, with the operator humming a tune. Around them, in the big building, the prosaic business of prosaic people was being done. Nothing farther from the abnormal or horrible could be imagined. Yet terror and death were there, in that cage, with the others.

  The glass-paneled doors to Varley’s office opened. The operator snapped to attention and those in the cage stopped talking and stared respectfully at the man who came to the cage doors.

  Varley was a man of sixty, gray-haired, with a coarse but kindly face dominated by a large nose which his enemies called bulbous. He wore the hat that had made him famous—a blue-gray fedora which he ordered in quantity lots and wore exclusive of all other colors, fabrics or fashions.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Ed,” Varley boomed to one of the two business men in the cage. “Phone call. Held me up for a few minutes.”

  He stepped into the elevator, nodding to the others.

  “Let’s go,” he said to the operator.

  The cage started down.

  The express elevators were supposed to fall like a plummet. They made the long drop to the ground in a matter of seconds, normally. And this one started like a plummet.

  “Damn funny, that phone call I got just before I came out of my office,” Varley boomed to the two men he was lunching with. “Some joker calling himself Doctor Satan—”

  He stopped, and frowned.

  “What’s wrong with the elevator?” he snapped to the operator.

  “I don’t know, sir,” the boy said.

  He was jerking at the lever. Ordinarily, so automatic was the cage, he did not touch the controls from the time the top floor doors mechanically closed themselves till the time the lobby was reached. Now he was twitching the control switch back and forth, from Off to On.

  And the elevator was slowing down.

  The swift start had slowed to a smooth crawl downward. And the crawl was becoming a creep. The floor numbers, that had flashed on the little frosted glass panel inside the cage as fast as you could count, were now forming themselves with exasperating slowness. Sixty-one, sixty, fifty-nine…

  “Can’t you make it go faster?” said Varley. “I never saw these cages go so slow. Is the power low?”


  “I don’t think so, sir,” said the operator. He jammed the control against the fast-speed peg. And the cage slowed down still more.

  “Something’s wrong,” whispered one of the girl secretaries to the other. “This slow speed… And it’s getting warm in here!”

  Evidently Varley thought so too. He unbuttoned his vest and took his fedora off and fanned himself.

  “I don’t know what the hell’s the matter,” he growled to the two men with him. “Certainly have to have the engineer look into this. There’s supposed to be decent ventilation in these shafts. And if they call this express service… Gad, I’m hot!”

  Perspiration was bursting out on his forehead now. He began to look ghastly pale.

  Fifty-two, fifty-one, fifty… the little red numbers appeared on the frosted glass indicator ever more slowly. The elevator would take five minutes to descend, at this pace.

  “Something’s the matter with me,” gasped Varley. “I’ve never felt like this before.”

  One of the girl secretaries was standing near him. She looked at him suddenly, with wide eyes in which fear of something beyond normal comprehension was beginning to show. She shrank back from him.

  “Get this cage down,” Varley panted. “I’m—sick.”

  The rest looked at each other. All were beginning to feel what the girl, who had been nearest him, had felt.

  Heat was beginning to radiate from Varley’s corpulent body as if he were a stove!

  “Good heavens, man!” said one of the two business men. He laid his hand on Varley’s arm, took it away quickly. “Why—you’re burning up with fever. What’s wrong?”

  Varley tried to answer, but couldn’t. He staggered back against the wall of the cage, leaned there with arms hanging down and lips hanging slack. There was no longer perspiration on his face. It was dry, feverishly dry; and the skin was cracking on his taut, puffed cheeks.

  “Burning!” he gasped. “Burning up!”

  The girl secretary screamed, then. And the man who had put his hand on Varley’s arm jerked at the operator’s shoulder.

  “For heaven’s sake get this cage down! Mr. Varley’s ill!”

  “I—I can’t,” gasped the boy. “Something’s the matter—it never acted like this before—”

  He jerked at the controls, and the elevator did not respond. Slowly, monotonously, it continued its deliberate descent.

  And abruptly a scream tore from Varley’s cracking lips.

  “Burning! Help me, somebody—”

  The slowly dropping cage became a thing of horror, a six-foot square of hell from which there was no escape because there were no doors opening onto the shaft at the upper levels, and which could not be speeded up because it did not respond to the controls.

  Screaming with every breath he drew, Varley sank to the floor. And those who might otherwise have tried to help him cowered away from him as far as they could get. For from his body now was radiating heat that made a tiny inferno of the elevator.

  “God!” whispered one of the men. “Look at him—he really is burning up!”

  The heat from Varley’s body had become so intense that the others in the cage could hardly stand it. But far worse than their bodily torment was the mental agony of watching the thing that for a week had New York City in a chaos.

  Varley had stopped screaming now. He lay staring up at the gilded roof of the elevator with frightful, glazing eyes. His chest heaved with efforts to draw breath. Heaved, then was still.

  “He’s dead!” shrieked one of the secretaries. “Dead—”

  Her body fell to the floor of the cage near Varley’s. The elderly woman quietly sagged to her knees, then in a huddled heap in the corner as her senses fled under the impact of a shock too great to be endured.

  But the horror that had gripped Varley went on.

  “Look! Look! Look!” panted the office manager.

  But he had no need to pant out the word. The rest were looking all right. They’d have turned their eyes away if they could, but there is a fascination to extremes of horror that makes the will powerless. In every detail they were forced to see the thing that happened.

  Varley’s dead body was beginning to disappear.

  The corpulent form of the man who a moment ago had been one of the biggest figures in the nation seemed to have been turned to wax, which was melting and vaporizing.

  His face was a shapeless mass now; and the flesh of his body seemed to be melting and running together. As it did so, his limbs writhed and twitched as if still imbued with life. Writhed, and shriveled.

  “Burning up!” whispered the office manager, his eyes bulging with horror behind their thick lenses. “Melting away… burning up…”

  It was so incredible, so unreal that it was dream-like.

  The cage descended slowly, slowly, like the march of time itself which no man could hasten. The operator stood like a wooden image at the controls, staring with starting eyes at the heap on the floor which had been Varley. The two business men shrank together, hands to their mouths, gnawing the backs of their hands. The office manager was panting, “Look… look… look…” with every breath, like a sobbing groan.

  And Varley was a diminishing, shapeless mass on the floor.

  “Oh, God, let me out of here!” screamed one of the business men.

  But there was no way out. No doors opened onto the shaft here. All in the cage were doomed to stay and watch the spectacle that would haunt them till they died.

  On the cage floor there was a blue-gray fedora hat, and a mound of blackened substance that was almost small enough to have been contained in it.

  Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven… The cage descended with its horrible, unchangeable slowness.

  Twenty-five, twenty-four…

  On the floor was Varley’s hat. That was all.

  The operator was last to go. Eleven, ten, the red numerals on the frosted glass panel read. Then his inert body joined the senseless forms of the others on the floor.

  The cage hit the lobby level. Smoothly, marvelous mechanisms devised by man’s ingenuity, the doors opened by themselves; opened, and revealed seven fainting figures—around a gray-blue fedora hat.

  * * * *

  Three o’clock.

  On the stage of the city’s leading theater, the show, Burn Me Down, was in the middle of the first act of its matinee performance.

  The show was a musical comedy, built around a famous comedian. His songs and dances and patter carried it. To see him, and him alone, the crowds came. Worth millions, shrewd, and at the same time as common as the least who saw him from the galleries, he was the idol of the stage.

  He sat on a stool in the wings now, chin on fist, moodily watching the revue dance of twenty bare-legged girls billed as the world’s most beautiful. His heavy black eyebrows were down in a straight line over eyes like ink-spots behind comedy horn-rimmed glasses. His slight, lithe body was tense.

  “Your cue in a minute, Mr. Croy,” warned the manager.

  “Hell, don’t you suppose I know it?” snapped the comedian. Then his scowl disappeared for a moment. “Sorry.”

  The manager stared. Croy’s good humor and even temper were proverbial in the theater. No one had ever seen him act like this before.

  “Anything wrong?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I don’t feel so hot,” said Croy, scowling again. “Rather, I feel too hot! Like I was burning up with a fever or something.”

  He passed a handkerchief over his forehead.

  “And I feel like trouble’s coming,” he added. He took a rabbit’s foot from his vest pocket and squeezed it. “Heavy trouble.”

  The manager bit his lip. Croy was the hit of the show—was the show.

  “Knock off for the afternoon if you feel bad,” he advised. “We’ll have Charley do your stuff. We can
get away with it at a matinee—”

  “And have the mob on your neck,” interrupted Croy, without false modesty. “It’s me they come to see. I’ll go on with it, and have a rest afterward…”

  The twenty girls swept forward in a last pirouette and danced toward the wings. Croy stood up.

  “It must be a fever,” he muttered, mopping at his face again. “Never felt like this before, though.”

  The stage door attendant burst into the wings and ran toward the manager. The manager started to reprimand him for leaving his post, then saw the afternoon newspaper he was waving.

  He took it from the man’s hand, glanced at the headlines.

  “What!” he gasped. “A man burn up? They’re crazy! How could a… Varley—biggest man in the city!…”

  He started toward the comedian.

  “My God, could it be the same thing happening here?… Croy! Croy—wait—”

  But the famous comedian was already on the stage, catapulting to the center of it in the ludicrous stumble, barely escaping a fall, that was his specialty.

  The manager, clutching the newspaper, stood in the wings with death-white face, and watched.

  Croy went into a dance to the rhythm of the theme song of the show. He was terribly pale, and the manager saw him stagger over a difficult step. Then his voice rose with the words of the song:

  “Burn me down, baby.

  Don’t say maybe.

  Put your lips against my lips—

  and burn me down!”

  The audience half rose. Croy had fallen to his knees on a dance turn. The manager saw that the perspiration that had dewed his forehead no longer showed. His skin looked dry, cracked.

  Croy got up. The audience settled back again, wondering if the fall had been part of his act. Croy resumed his steps and his singing. But his voice was barely audible beyond the fifth row:

  “Burn me down, Sadie.

  Oh-h-h, lady!