The Doctor Satan

by The Complete Series from Weird Tales

  “A dragon, Keane,” Doctor Satan purred. “You have seen old pictures of some such thing, painted by artists who had caught a glimpse of these things that can only visit earth when some necromancer conjures them to. A ‘mythical’ creature, Keane. But you shall feel how ‘mythical’ it is when it attacks you.”

  A hiss sounded in the dim room. The serpentine form was so solidly materialized now that it could scarcely be seen through. And in a few more seconds it was opaque. And weighty! The floor quivered a little as it moved—toward Keane.

  Its great, gem-like eyes glinted like colored glass as it advanced, foot by foot, on the man who had pitted himself against Doctor Satan till the death of one of them should end the bitter war. But Keane did not move. He stood with shoulders squared and arms at his sides, facing the red-robed form.

  “‘Out of the everywhere into the here,’” he murmured. His lips were pale but his voice was calm. “There is another saying, Doctor Satan. It is a little different…‘Out of the hereafter into the here!’”

  The unbelievable thing Doctor Satan had called into being in the midst of a city that would have scoffed at the idea of its existence, suddenly halted its slow, deadly approach toward Keane. Its hiss sounded again, and it raised a taloned foot and clawed the thin air in a direction to Keane’s left.

  It retreated a step, slinking low to the floor, its talons and scales rattling on the smooth cement. It seemed to see something beyond the reach of mortal eyes. But in a moment the things it saw were perceptible to the eyes of the two men, too. And as Doctor Satan saw them an imprecation came from his masked lips.

  Three figures, distorted, horrible, yet familiar! Three things like statues of mist that became less misty and more solid-seeming by the second!

  Three men who writhed as though in mortal torment, and whose lips jerked with soundless shrieks—which gradually became not entirely soundless but came to the ears of Satan and Keane like far-off cries dimly heard.

  And the three were Varley and Croy and Kessler.

  A gasp came from Doctor Satan’s concealed lips. He shrank back, even as the monstrosity he had called into earthly being shrank back.

  “‘Out of the hereafter into the here!” Keane said softly. “These three you killed, Doctor Satan. They will now kill you!”

  Varley and Croy and Kessler advanced on the red-robed form. As they came they screamed with the pain of burning, and their blackened hands advanced, with fingers flexed, toward Satan. Such hatred was in their dead, glazed eyes, that waves of it seemed to surge about the room like a river in flood.

  “They’re shades,” panted Doctor Satan. “They’re not real, they can’t actually do harm—”

  “You will see how real they are when they attack you,” Keane paraphrased Satan’s words.

  The three screaming figures converged on Doctor Satan. From death they had come, and before them was the man who had sent them to death. Their eyes were wells of fury and despair.

  “My God!” whispered Doctor Satan, cowering. And the words, though far from lightly uttered, seemed doubly blasphemous coming from the lips under the diabolical red mask.

  The hissing of the dragon-thing he had called into existence was inaudible. Its form was hardly to be seen. It was fleeing back into whatever realm it had come from. But the screaming three were advancing ever farther into our earthly plane as they crept toward the cowering body of Doctor Satan.

  “My God!” Satan cried. “Not that! Not deliverance into the hands of those—”

  The three leaped. And Keane, with his face white as death at the horror he was witnessing, knew that the fight between him and the incarnate evil known as Doctor Satan was to end in this room.

  The three leaped, and the red-robed figure went down.…

  There was a thunderous battering at the door, and the bellow of men outside: “Open up, in the name of the law!”

  Keane cried out, as though knife-blades had been thrust under his nails. Doctor Satan screamed, and thrust away from the three furies, while the three themselves mouthed and swayed like birds of prey in indecision over a field in which hunters bristle suddenly.

  “Open this door!” the voice thundered again. “We know there’s somebody in here—”

  The shock of the change from the occult and unreal back to prosaic living was like the shock of being rudely waked from sound sleep when one has walked to the brink of a cliff and opens dazed eyes to stare at destruction. The introduction of such a thing as police, detectives, into a scene where two men were evoking powers beyond the ability of the average mortal even to comprehend, was like the insertion of an iron club into the intricate and fragile mechanism of a radio transmitting-station.

  Keane literally staggered. Then he shouted: “For God’s sake—get away from that door—”

  “Open up, or we’ll break in,” the bellowing voice overrode his own.

  Keane cursed, and turned. The three revengeful forces he had evoked for the destruction of Doctor Satan were gone, shattered into non-existence again with the advance of the prosaic. And Doctor Satan—Keane got one glimpse of a torn red robe, with clots of deeper crimson on its arm, as the man slid through the inner door of the room and out to—God knew where. Some retreat he had prepared in advance, no doubt.

  And then the door crashed down and the men Kessler had stubbornly and ruinously retained in his fight with Doctor Satan burst in.

  They charged toward Keane.

  “You’re under arrest for extortion,” the leader, a bull-necked man with a gun in his hand, roared out. “We traced the guy that took the dough from the skull here before we lost him.”

  Keane only looked at him. And at something in his stare, though the detective did not know him from Adam, he wilted a little.

  “Stick out your hands while I handcuff you,” he tried to bluster.

  Then the manager of the building ran in. “Did you get him?” he called to the detective. “Was he in here?” He saw the man the detective proposed to handcuff. “Keane! What has happened?”

  “Doctor Satan has escaped,” said Keane. “That’s what has happened. I had him”—he held his hand out and slowly closed it—“like that! Then these well-intentioned blunderers broke in, and—”

  His voice broke. His shoulders sagged. He stared at the door through which the red-robed figure had gone. Then his body straightened and his eyes grew calm again—though they were bleak with a weariness going far beyond physical fatigue.

  “Gone,” he said, more to himself than to anyone in the red-lit room. “But I’ll find him again. And next time I’ll fight him in some place where no outside interference can save him.”

  BEYOND DEATH’S GATEWAY, by Paul Ernst

  Originally published in Weird Tales, March 1936.

  CHAPTER I

  The sea was as calm as a pond. Over it the great ship floated like a ghost vessel, dipping a little to long, slow swells but otherwise as motionless as a thing on a backdrop. The white moon poured down its peaceful flood, but somehow the peace was an eerie thing and not reassuring.

  In a large cabin on Deck A, two men sat behind a locked door and talked in whispers too low to be recorded if there were a dictograph receiver concealed anywhere. One of the two had the often-photographed face of Assistant Secretary of War Harley. The other was Jules Marxman, inventor and manufacturer.

  Harley, a slim, precise, elderly man who looked more like a high school principal than an important Government official, shook his head a little.

  “Then, as the invention now stands, it is useless,” he summed up.

  Marxman, the inventor, nodded his bushy gray head. His heavy grizzled brows drew into a straight line.

  “Useless,” he conceded. “I have the formula for the poison gas completed. It is perfect—a gas so volatile that it spreads at a rate of a hundred feet a second in all directions, and wipes out all living th
ings, including vegetable matter. But its very speed makes it impossible to use it as other war gases are used. It would wipe out the men releasing it as well as the enemy.”

  “Special masks to protect our own men?” suggested the Assistant Secretary of War.

  Marxman shook his head. “I thought of that, of course. I worked along that angle for a long time. But no mask can be devised to protect a man from the gas. So the answer lies in another direction. That is, an antidote of some sort for it that will permit the men releasing it to feel no ill effects from it.”

  “That sounds difficult. Look here, couldn’t the stuff be shot from guns to explode and radiate at a distance?”

  “No. It is so highly explosive itself that no shell can be designed to keep it from exploding when the gun charge bursts, when its high volatility spreads it all around the gun. Again, our own men would die from it. No, the only answer is the antidote that will make the corps releasing it immune to its deadly effects.”

  Harley stroked his long, spare chin. “You’ve worked along that line, Marxman?”

  “Yes, I have been working on an antidote for eighteen months. The final solution is not yet worked out. But I’m getting close.” Marxman looked at the locked cabin door, and lowered his voice still more. “I have an antidote at present that will counteract the effects of the gas. But its own effects are almost as serious: The man who takes it literally dies for a short space of time. His heart and breathing stop. Blood circulation ceases. He’s a dead man—for about twelve hours. Most curious.”

  “And most unfortunate,” Harley said dryly. “In twelve hours the enemy from beyond the radius of the spreading gas could gun and bomb the helpless crew out of existence. But tell me, how can men ‘die’ for twelve hours, with the blood stream stilled and liable to coagulate, and then come to life again? Or—do they?”

  “Yes, they do, I don’t yet know how. The blood should coagulate, but it doesn’t. Perhaps some life force beyond power of detection still functions enough to keep the body in shape to be reanimated when the effect of the antidote wears off. Anyhow, that’s what happens to a man who takes it in its present state. He literally dies for half a day, then comes slowly back to life again.”

  “Have you tried it on anyone?”

  Marxman nodded. His face was a little paler than normal.

  “What happens to the subject of experiment?”

  Marxman looked at Harley for a moment before replying. “I tried it on a dock laborer, several times. He wasn’t a clever or educated man. He didn’t manage to express very well the things that happened to him. But as far as I could gather, he was in the land of the dead during the coma induced by the drug.”

  “Land of the dead!” Harley exclaimed. Then he smiled. “And where is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “I don’t know that, either, My man hadn’t the vocabulary to describe such things in the first place. In the second, he didn’t want to talk! And, though he was fearless in a blunt, animal way, he refused to take the stuff more than twice.”

  “Probably it has some sort of hashish effect,” said Harley shrugging. “Land of the dead! That’s a little thick! But regardless of that angle of it—the poison gas invention is not yet ready to turn over to the war department. Is that it?”

  “That’s it,” said Marxman. “The gas is perfected, but the antidote is not. And until it is, the whole thing remains only a novelty, a dream of empire that can’t be crystallized till I have finished work.”

  Harley fingered his lean chin. “Don’t overlook the fact that, even as matters stand, you have a very valuable secret,” he warned. “Any power on earth would pay millions for the uncompleted formulae, on the chance that they could work out the conclusion in their laboratory. You have the formulae written out?”

  Marxman nodded. “They’re too complicated to carry in my head.”

  “You keep the papers in a safe place?”

  Marxman smiled a little. He drew from his vest pocket a small capsule, like a quinine capsule. It looked like some sort of dyspepsia medicine he carried for use after meals. “The formulae are on onion-skin paper, in this capsule. If ever I am threatened for them, I swallow them. The capsule dissolves in my stomach—and so do the formulae! I hope the necessity for swallowing them doesn’t arise, for it would take me six wasted months to rediscover a few of the obscure chemical combinations in the formulae. But it can be done if necessary.”

  Harley nodded. “As safe a way as any, I think. Well, goodnight, Marxman. Take care of yourself, and for God’s sake give the United States first chance at your gas and antidote when it’s worked out.”

  “I am American,” was Marxman’s simple answer. “I have worked in France because a colleague there has just the laboratory equipment I needed. That’s all. My own country gets the invention when it is completed, as a matter of course.”

  The two men shook hands. Harley left Marksman’s cabin.

  Marxman stared at the little capsule in his hand, which contained the nucleus of the mightiest war weapon ever devised. Then he slipped it into his vest pocket again.

  The night was warm, almost stuffy. He lit a cigar, put on a plaid cap, and went up on deck.

  * * * *

  At that moment, in the salon at the opposite end of the ship, from which he had not stirred all evening, a man who looked like a high school principal but was really Assistant Secretary of War Harley, was talking in low tones with his secretary, a good-looking young fellow of twenty-eight.

  “I hear Marxman is on board with an interesting invention,” the secretary was saying. “Are you going to see him?”

  “By all means,” said Harley. “I think a little later in the evening.”

  Marxman passed the windows of the sailors without looking in.

  Assistant Secretary of War Harley had already seen him, he thought. It never occurred to him that a man could make up like Harley so exactly as to fool him—he was well acquainted with the man and then proceed to pump him dry of details concerning his latest invention.

  He walked to the rail, fingers touching the capsule in his vest pocket.

  Sea calm as a pond. Great ship like a ghost vessel floating over it. Moon pouring down a peaceful but somehow eerie white flood.

  From the stern came strains of music as the ship’s orchestra played for those in evening dress who cared to dance. From the salon nearest to where Marxman stood by the rail came a burst of laughter as members of a salesmen’s convention to laughed over a joke.

  Right behind Marxman there was an iron staircase leading up to the boat deck. From that deserted upper deck a figure appeared.

  It blotted out the faint light at the head of the stairs. It began to descend, slowly, without a sound, like a great snake slithering down on its prey.

  Once Marxman turned for a moment. The black figure became a motionless blot on the staircase. Marxman looked out over the sea again. Then the figure recommenced its crawling descent. A faint streak of light from the drawn shutters of a nearby cabin flicked over it.

  It revealed a form in a black cloak with a black hat pulled low. That was all. The face could not be seen. Yet evil radiated from the form as heat radiates from black-hot iron.

  The black figure reached the deck and took two rapid strides toward the inventor.…

  Gay laughter from the salon—casual music from the dance floor—and on the deck, death!

  Marxman tried to cry out. A steely arm hooked around his throat prevented a whisper from coming from his lips. His hand darted for his vest pocket and he raised the capsule to his lips and took it into his mouth.

  The arm around his throat was replaced by steely hands. He couldn’t swallow. His face grew blue, purple, with eyes starting from their sockets as he fought for breath. Then his writhing body became still. It hung from the iron grip of
the hands around his throat.

  One of the hands shifted. Fingers, gloved, pried open Marxman’s jaws. They took the melting capsule from his mouth. Then the dark figure heaved upright.

  A thing like a badly tied bundle of rugs went over the ship’s rail. There was a faint splash, almost inaudible in the plashing of the ship’s progress.

  The dark figure watched Marxman’s body float astern like a drift log in the white wake of the moonlight. Then it turned, and melted into the darkness of the nearest companionway. And with it went the formulae of the new gas—and its partly perfected antidote.

  CHAPTER II

  On a hill fronting the shore of the bay among great estates forming the cream of the big houses in the wealthy resort town on Red Bank, New Jersey, was the home of Linton R. Yates. A thirty-room mansion, it crowned the hill like a coronet of gray, cut stone.

  At the moment it was dark. No lights showed from any window, even the windows in the servants’ quarters. It looked empty. But it wasn’t. In the darkness of the side driveway a roadster stood. The roadster had been driven there, alone, by Linton Yates himself. And Linton Yates was at present in the basement of the house.

  Down there, with none of the electric light showing from any barred and steel-shuttered basement window, he stood beside the square furnace at the end wall. His withered old hand went out.

  He touched a small, discolored patch in the wall next to the back of the furnace. A section of the wall hinged out.

  Gray bearded, wizened, crafty-looking, the rich man stared furtively around him before he stepped into the hidden basement room revealed by the swinging back of the concealed door. As he entered the room he touched another discolored patch in the stone wall, and the door closed after him.