The Doctor Satan

by The Complete Series from Weird Tales

  Doctor Satan’s red-gloved hand pulled a drawer open in the top of the bench. The supple fingers reached into the drawer, took from it two objects, and placed them on the bench.

  And now there were six dolls on the bench, the last two being a man and a woman.

  The male doll was clad in a tiny blue serge suit. Its face was long-jawed, with gray chips for eyes, over which were heavy black brows. An image of Ascott Keane.

  The female doll was a likeness of a beautiful girl with coppery brown hair and deep blue eyes. Beatrice Dale.

  “Girse,” Doctor Satan’s harsh, arrogant voice rasped out.

  The monkey-like small man with the hairy face hopped forward.

  “The plate,” said Doctor Satan.

  Girse brought him a thick iron plate, which Doctor Satan set upon the bench.

  On the plate were two small, dark patches; discolorations obviously made by the heat of something being burned there. The two little discolorations were all that was left of two little dolls that had been molded in the image of Martial Varley, and the comedian, Croy.

  Doctor Satan placed the two dolls on the plate that he had taken from the drawer: the likenesses of Beatrice Dale and Ascott Keane.

  “Kessler went to Keane,” Doctor Satan rasped, the red mask over his face stirring angrily. “We shall tend to Kessler—after he has paid tonight. We shall not wait that long to care of Keane and the girl.”

  Two wires trailed over the bench from a wall socket. His red-gloved fingers twisted the wires to terminals set into the iron plate. The plate began to heat up.

  “Keane has proved himself an unexpectedly competent adversary,” Satan’s voice droned out, “with knowledge I thought no man on earth save myself possessed. We’ll see if he can escape this fate—and avoid becoming, with his precious secretary, as Varley and Croy became.”

  Small waves of heat began to shimmer up from the iron plate. It stirred the garments clothing the two little dolls. Doctor Satan’s glittering eyes burned down on the manikins. Girse and the legless giant, Bostiff, watched as he did.…

  * * * *

  Fifty-nine stories above the pseudo-developing shop, Keane smiled soberly at Beatrice Dale.

  “I ought to fire you,” he said.

  “Why on earth—” she gasped.

  “Because you’re such a valuable right-hand man, and because you’re such a fine person.”

  “Oh,” Beatrice murmured. “I see. More fears for my safety?”

  “More fears for your safety,” nodded Keane. “Doctor Satan is out for your life as well as mine, my dear. And—”

  “We’ve had this out many times before,” Beatrice interrupted. “And the answer is still: No. I refuse to be fired, Ascott. Sorry.”

  There was a glint in Keane’s steel-gray eyes that had nothing to do with business. But he didn’t express his emotions. Beatrice watched his lips part with a breathless stirring in her heart. She had been waiting for some such expression for a long time.

  But Keane only said: “So be it. You’re a brave person. I oughtn’t to allow you to risk your life in this private, deadly war that no one knows about but us. But I can’t seem to make you desert, so—”

  “So that’s that,” said Beatrice crisply. “Have you decided how you’ll move against Doctor Satan tonight?”

  Keane nodded. “I made my plans when I first located him.”

  “You know where he is?” said Beatrice in amazement.

  “I do.”

  “How did you find it out?”

  “I didn’t. I thought it out. Doctor Satan seems to have ways of knowing where I am. He must know I’ve located here in the National State Building. The obvious thing for him to do would be to conceal himself on the other side of town. So, that being the expected thing, what would a person as clever as he is, do?”

  Beatrice nodded. “I see. Of course! He’d be—”

  “Right here in this building.”

  “But you told Kessler he was probably miles away!” said Beatrice.

  “I did. Because I knew Kessler’s character. If he knew the man who threatened him was in the building, he’d try to do something like organizing a raid. Fancy a police raid against Doctor Satan! So I lied and said he was probably a long distance off.” Keane sighed. “I’m afraid the lie was valueless. I can foretell pretty precisely what Kessler will do. He will have an army of men scattered through the building tonight, in spite of what I said. He will attempt to trace Doctor Satan through collection of the checks—and he will die.”

  Beatrice shuddered. “By burning? What a horrible way to—”

  She stopped.

  “What is it?” said Keane urgently, at the strained expression that suddenly molded her face.

  “Nothing, I guess,” replied Beatrice slowly. “Power of suggestion, I suppose. When I said ‘burning’ I seemed to feel hot all over, myself.”

  Keane sprang from his chair.

  “My God—why didn’t you tell me at once! I—”

  He stopped too, and his eyes narrowed to steely slits in his rugged face. Perspiration was studding his own forehead now.

  “It’s come!” he said. “The attack on us by Satan. But it wasn’t wholly unexpected. The suitcase in the corner—get it and open it! Quickly!”

  Beatrice started toward the suitcase, but stopped and pressed her hands to her cheeks. “Ascott—I’m… burning up… I—”

  “Get that suitcase!”

  Keane sprang to the desk and opened the wide lower drawer. He took a paper-wrapped parcel from it, ripped it open. An odd array was disclosed: two pairs of things like cloth slippers, two pairs of badly proportioned gloves, two small rounded sacks.

  Beatrice was struggling with the snaps on the suitcase. Both were breathing heavily now, dragging their arms as if they weighed tons.

  “Ascott—I can’t stand it—I’m burning—” panted the girl.

  “You’ve got to stand it! Is the case open? Put on the smaller of the two garments there. Toss me the other.”

  The garments in question were two suits of unguessable material that were designed to fit tightly over a human body—an unclothed human body.

  Beatrice tossed the larger of the two to Keane, who was divesting himself of his outer garments with rapid fingers.

  “Ascott—I can’t change into this—here, before—”

  “Damn modesty!” grated Keane. “Get into those things! You hear! Quickly!”

  Both were no longer perspiring. Their faces were dry, feverish. Heat was radiating from their bodies in a stifling stream.

  Beatrice stood before Keane in the tight single garment that covered body and arms and legs.

  “These gloves on your hands!” snapped Keane. “The sack over your head. The shoes on your feet!”

  “Oh, God!” panted Beatrice.

  Then she had done as Keane commanded. From soles to hair she was covered by the curious fabric Keane had devised. And the awful burning sensation was allayed.

  There were eye-slits in the sacks each wore. They stared at each other with eyes that were wide with a close view of death. Then Beatrice sighed shudderingly.

  “The same thing Varley and Croy went through?” she said.

  “The same,” said Keane. “Poor fellows! And Doctor Satan thought he could deal us the same doom. And he almost did! If we’d been a little farther away from these fabric shields of ours—”

  “How do they stop Doctor Satan’s weapon?” said Beatrice. “And how can he strike—as he does—from a distance?”

  “His weapon, and this fabric I made,” said Keane, “go back a long way beyond history, to the priesthood serving the ancestors of the Cretans. They forged the weapon in wizardry, and at the same time devised the fabric to wear as protection against their enemies who must inevitably learn the secret of the weapon too. It is th
e father of the modern voodoo practice of making a crude image of an enemy and sticking pins into it.”

  He drew a long breath.

  “A small image is made in the likeness of the person to be destroyed. The image is made of substance pervious to fire. In the cases of Croy and Varley, I should say after descriptions of how they perished, of wax. The image is then burned, and the person in whose likeness it is cast burns to nothingness as the image does—if the manipulator knows the secret incantations of the Cretans, as Doctor Satan does. But I’ll give you more than an explanation; I’ll give you a demonstration! For we are going to strike back at Doctor Satan in a manner I think he will be utterly unprepared for!”

  He went to the opened suitcase, looking like a being from another planet in the ill-fitting garments he had thrown together after analyzing Varley’s death. He took from the suitcase a thing that looked like a little doll. It was an image of a monkey-like man with a hairy face and long, simian arms.

  “How hideous!” exclaimed Beatrice.

  “Not as hideous externally as internally,” said Keane. “This is a likeness of a creature named Girse, one of Satan’s followers, who is only prevented from being as fiendish as Satan by lack of genius for it. I wish it were the image of Satan himself. But that would be useless. Satan, using the ancient death, would be prepared for it himself.”

  “It’s made of wax?” said Beatrice, understanding and awe beginning to glint in her eyes.

  “Made of wax,” Keane nodded.

  He looked around the office, saw no metal tray to put the little doll on, and flipped back a corner of the rug. The floor of the office was of smooth cement. He set the image on the cement. With her hand to her breast, Beatrice watched. The proceeding, seeming inconsequential in itself, had an air of deadliness about it that stopped the breath in her throat.

  Keane looked around the office again, then strode to the clothes he and Beatrice had flung to the floor in their haste a moment ago.

  “Sorry,” he said, taking her garments with his own and piling them on the cement. “We’ll have to send down to Fifth Avenue for more clothes to be brought here. I need these now.”

  On the pile of cloth he placed the image of Girse. Then he touched a match to the fabric.…

  * * * *

  In the developing-room, Doctor Satan fairly spat his rage as he stared at the two wax dolls on the red-hot iron plate. The dolls were not burning! Defying all the laws of physics and, as far as Satan knew, of wizardry, the waxen images were standing unharmed on the metal that should have consumed them utterly.

  “Damn him!” Doctor Satan rasped, gloved hands clenching. “Damn him! He has escaped again! Though how—”

  He heard breathing begin to sound stertorously beside him. His eyes suddenly widened with incredulity behind the eye-holes in his mask. He whirled.

  Girse was staring at him with frenzy and horror in his cruel little eyes. The breath was tearing from his corded throat as though each would be his last.

  “Master!” he gasped imploringly. “Doctor Satan! Stop—”

  The skin on his face and hands, dry and feverish-looking, suddenly began to crack.

  “Stop the burning!” he pleaded in a shrill scream.

  But Doctor Satan could only clench his hands and curse, raspingly, impotently. He had never dreamed of such a possibility, was utterly unprepared for it.

  Girse shrieked again, and fell to the floor. Then his screams stopped. He was dead. But his body moved on, jerking and twisting as a tight-rolled bit of paper twists and jerks in consuming fire.…

  “Keane!” whispered Doctor Satan, staring at the floor where a discolored spot was all that remained of his follower. His eyes were frightful. “By the devil, my master, he’ll pay for that a thousand times over!”

  CHAPTER IV

  The Screaming Three

  At half-past twelve that night a solitary figure walked along the north side of the National State Building. The north side was the one the Lucian Photographic Supplies shop faced on; the side street. It was deserted save for the lone man.

  The man slowed his pace as he saw a shining object hanging from the building wall about waist-high, a few yards ahead of him. He clenched his hands, then took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

  The man was Walter P. Kessler. And the flourish of the white handkerchief in the dimness of the street was a signal.

  Across the street, four floors up in a warehouse, a man with a private detective’s badge in his pocket put a pair of binoculars to his eyes. He watched Kessler, saw the shining object he was approaching, and nodded.

  Kessler drew from his pocket an unaddressed envelope. In it were ten checks made out to the Lucifex Insurance Company. He grasped the receptacle for the checks in his left hand.

  The receptacle was a cleverly molded skull, of silver, about two-thirds life size. There was a hole in the top of it. Kessler thrust the envelope securely into the hole.

  The skull began to rise up the building wall, toward some unguessable spot in the tremendous cliff formed by seventy-nine stories of cut stone. Across the street the man with the binoculars managed at last to spot the thin wire from which the silver skull was suspended. He followed it up with his gaze.

  It came from a window almost at the top of the building. The man grasped a phone at his elbow.

  He did not dial operator. The phone had a direct line to the building across the way. He simply picked up the receiver and said softly: “Seventy-second floor, eighteenth window from the east wall. Hop it!”

  In the National State Building a man at an improvised switchboard on the ground floor turned to another. “Seventy-second floor, eighteenth window from the east. Get everybody.”

  The second man ran toward the night elevator. He went from floor to floor. At each floor he opened the door and signaled. And on each floor two men, who had been watching the corridors along the north side, ran silently toward the other local elevators, which had shaft doors on every floor all the way up to the top. At the same time a third man, at the stairs, drew his gun as he prepared to guard more carefully yet the staircase, rarely used, threading up beside the shafts.

  And on the ground floor within fifty yards of the man at the switchboard, a chuckle came from the masked lips of a red-robed figure who stood straight and tall in a red-lit room.

  Across the street the man with the binoculars suddenly picked up the phone again.

  “Damn it—they tricked us. Somebody took the money in on the sixty-third floor!”

  Changed orders vibrated through the great building. And the red-robed figure in the room at the heart of the maze chuckled again—and moved toward the bench.

  Doctor Satan picked up one of the dolls remaining there. It was the image of Kessler. He placed it on the iron plate, which was already heated by the wires trailing from the socket. He watched the little doll broodingly.

  It writhed and twisted as the heat melted its wax feet. It fell to the plate. And from the street, far away, sounded a horrible scream.

  Doctor Satan’s head jerked back as if the shriek were music to his ears. Then, once more, his hissing chuckle sounded out.

  “For disobeying commands, my friend,” he muttered. “But I knew you’d be obstinate enough to try it—”

  He stopped. For a second he stood as rigid as a statue swathed in red. Then, slowly, he turned; and in his coal-black, blazing eyes was fury—and fear.

  There was an inner door to the developing room. But the door was locked, and it still stood locked. It had not been touched. Neither had the outer door. Yet in that room with the red-robed figure was another figure now. That of Ascott Keane.

  He stood as rigid as Doctor Satan himself, and stared at his adversary out of steel-gray, level eyes.

  “It seems we are alone,” Keane said slowly. “Bostiff, I suppose, is retrieving the money from Kes
sler. And Girse? Where is he?”

  Doctor Satan’s snarl was the only answer. He moved toward Keane, red-swathed hands clenching as he came. Keane stood his ground. Satan stopped.

  “How—” he grated.

  “Surely you do not need to ask that,” said Keane. “You must have penetrated the secret of transferring substance, including your own, from one place to another by sheer power of thought.”

  “I have not!” rasped Doctor Satan. “Nor have you!”

  Keane shrugged. “I am here.”

  “You discovered my hiding-place and hid here while I was out, a short time ago!”

  Keane’s smile was a deadly thing. “Perhaps I did. Perhaps not. You can provide your own answer. The only thing of importance is that I am here—”

  “And shall stay here!” Doctor Satan’s harsh voice rang out. The fear was fading from his eyes and leaving only fury there. “You have interfered in my plans once too often, Keane!”

  As he spoke he raised his right hand with the thumb and forefinger forming an odd, eerie angle.

  “‘Out of the everywhere into the here,’” he quoted softly. “I have servants more powerful than Girse, whom you destroyed, Ascott Keane. One comes now—to your own destruction!”

  As he spoke, a strange tenseness seized the air of the dim room. Keane paled a little at the blaze in the coal-black eyes. Then he stared suddenly at a spot in thin air to Doctor Satan’s right.

  Something was happening there. The air was shimmering as though it danced over an open fire. It wavered, grew misty, swayed in a sinuous column.

  “‘Out of the everywhere into the here!’” Doctor Satan’s voice was harsh with final triumph. “The old legends had a basis, Keane. The tales of dragons… there was such a thing, is such a thing. Only the creations the ancients called dragons do not ordinarily roam the earth in visible form.”

  The sinuous misty column at the right of the red-robed form was materializing into a thing to stagger a man’s reason.

  Keane found himself gazing at a shimmering figure that looked like a great lizard, save that it was larger than any lizard, and had smaller legs. It was almost like a snake with legs, but it was a snake two feet through at its thickest part, and only about fourteen feet long, which is not typical serpentine proportion. There were vestigial stubs of wings spreading from its trunk about a yard back of its great, triangular head; and it had eyes such as no true lizard ever had—eight inches across and glittering like evil gems.