The Doctor Satan

by The Complete Series from Weird Tales

  He looked at the pinch of purplish crystals.

  “The gateway to death. Bring me a glass of water, will you? Even if nothing is accomplished beyond that gateway, even if I never come back from beyond it, it will be interesting to pass through it.”

  * * * *

  Midway between New York and Red Bank, in New Jersey, on a flat-topped knoll near the sea, there stands a rather hideous replica of a Rhenish castle built by an eccentric rich man long dead. The people living near there call it Furlowe’s folly, and know that it has been untenanted and in bad repair for many years.

  What they did not know was that it had been purchased recently by a man who never made a personal appearance during the transaction.

  What they also did not know was that in a steel-lined room in the basement of the house, the purchaser, and his ugly assistant, often engaged at night in occupations that could have blanched their faces would they have looked on.

  The two were there tonight.

  One, the secret purchaser of Furlowe’s Folly, was Doctor Satan, dressed in the masquerade it amused him to wear; red cloak covering his lean, powerful body from heels to throat; red mask over his face; red gloves on his hands; and on his head, the skullcap of red with the little projections, like horns, that completed his costume of Lucifer.

  The other was Bostiff, who was a figure out of an illustration of Dante’s Inferno. He had no legs. He hitched his gigantic, formidably muscled torso about by using his arms as legs and resting his weight on the calloused backs of his hands. His eyes, dull, dog-like, stupidly brutal, followed the red-clad figure of his master constantly.

  Doctor Satan was bending over a long, plain table which was littered with laboratory instruments. He was manipulating a small glass beaker in which a purplish, heavy liquid was rapidly drying into fine purplish crystals. From time to time, he consulted a wrinkled small bit of onion skin paper that had formerly been rolled up in a capsule.

  He shook the dried crystals from the beaker onto the table.

  “Ready, Bostiff,” his harsh voice droned out.

  Bostiff went to a corner of the steel-lined room. Then there was a low divan there. He wheeled it toward Doctor Satan, who lay down on it.

  “For twelve hours, Bostiff,” Doctor Satan Said, “My body is helpless, a dead thing. Remember that. And don’t let anyone force a way in here!”

  “Yes, Master,” Bostiff rumbled, gazing at the purplish crystals with dull fear in his eyes.

  “On my first trip to the land of the dead,” Satan said harshly, “I got from Hallowell the secret of the death ray. Now I can kill from a distance, and loot the possessions of the victim at leisure. This trip I expect to get from the recently assassinated dictator of Texas, Kelly Strong, full details of his plan to become dictator of the United States, and names of men he placed in key positions to carry out the scheme. He was ready to start up his plan in motion when he was killed. I shall carry on for him, and become dictator in his place. How would you like to be Secretary of State of the United States, Bostiff, with countless men—and women—dancing to your whims to avoid being killed or thrown into jail?”

  Bostiff licked his thick lips, and his dull eyes gleamed. Doctor Satan laughed arrogantly, and poured the purplish crystals into a glass of wine.

  “Then guard my helpless body with your life, oh good and faithful servant,” he said mockingly. “And—don’t be so misguided as to attempt to remove my mask and see my face. No man may do that and live!”

  Doctor Satan raised the glass of wine, in which was the little death of Marxman’s antidote, and drank.

  CHAPTER IV

  Two people had taken Marxman’s drug and died the little death. The dock laborer on whom Marxman had experimented, and Doctor Satan. Now, with Ascott Keane’s taking of the purplish crystals, there were three.

  His first sensation after swallowing the stuff was—pain.

  His body ached as though every bone in it had been broken. He felt as though each nerve were being slowly rasped with red-hot files.

  It hurts to die, was his last conscious thought. And after that, he seemed to fall into a deep and dreamless sleep that might have lasted a moment or two, or a thousand years, so that his next thought was, the gateway of death is no black river, or cavern mouth guarded by the many-headed watch-dog. It is sleep.

  But that was a dim thought, quickly lost in a fog of blind horror as his senses slowly struggled back to him. What was it that horrified him? For a long time, he did not know, could not define it.

  He had been sitting at his ebony desk when he drank the antidote. When he regained conscious thought, he did not know whether he was sitting or standing; for he seemed to have no body, no weight. And that was odd, for when he opened his eyes he could see a body. He seemed as solid and weighty as when he had swallowed the drug; and was clothed as he had been then—in most prosaic blue serge.

  Yet, the inability to tell whether he was standing or lying persisted. He simply was; he existed in—in what?

  It was the answer to that which finally brought his blind feeling of horror to a head. For he seemed to exist, now, in nothingness.

  Beneath him he could see nothing. No ground, as we know it, or surface of any kind. Around him was nothing. Over him was nothing. It was as though he had been transported, with the drinking of the purplish liquid, into the immensities of space—and then had been seeing the stars wink out till none remained.

  Yet, this vast nothingness in which he found himself was not a thing of darkness. Vague gray light was diffused everywhere; like dim moonlight, which is not strong enough to outline things tangibly, yet gives an impression of so doing.

  A nothingness of gray space, with Ascott Keane existing in it, but not knowing whether he lay or stood because around him was no single thing by which to orient himself! Where was he? In the land of the dead! And the land of the dead, it seemed, was Nowhere!

  Yet, he existed, saw himself as he had been last in life. He had, at least to his own perceptions, body and individuality.

  But that may be simply the materialization of my thoughts of myself, he thought. If that is so, then I have the answer to the question; does living intelligence die? It does not. The body does, but not the intelligence directing it.

  Now, as he existed in the spaceless, dimensionless, objectless gray nothingness, Keane became aware of sensation of other thoughts and feelings all around near him. Countless forces had their source near him. He felt as one feels when surrounded by a great host of people. Yet he could see nothing, though the feel of being hemmed in by countless others grew stronger with each passing minute. (Minute? That was a figurative term. For along with a loss of dimension and space and outline as the living know them, Keane had lost all time-sense).

  Maybe, thought Keane, I am invisible to them too. Perhaps only the thinking of myself makes me perceptible, and that only to me.

  The corollary notion came at once:

  But if that is so, then I should be able to see others if I think of them! Then it is directed thought which makes outline here in this gray place; which makes tangible outline.

  Well, there was a way to test that. If he thought of someone he had known, now dead, that person might appear…

  The most obvious person was his father, who had died when Keane was twelve, and whom he had admired as much as he loved.

  He thought of his father—heavyset, with keen gray eyes under bristling gray brows, and with stubby, powerful hands thrust always in his pockets.

  And his father appeared before him!

  Keane thought he cried aloud. But there was no sound in this land of the dead. He felt his throat swell with the impulse for sound, and that was all.

  “Dad!”

  “Ascott.”

  But there was no sound. Vibration, thought-waves—the means of communication were as intangible and cloaked in luminous gra
y mystery as everything else here. Keane only knew that he looked at his father, dead for twenty years, and felt him name him.

  “So you have died, my son,” emanated from the figure seemingly of solidified mist, that had appeared with Keane’s though of it. “Your mother will be anxious to see you—”

  “My mother! Then everyone we knew—all people—have a life after death! They exist as they did on earth?”

  Keane thought his father smiled. But he could not be sure, because he could not be sure if the face and form of his father were appearing before him, in actual sight—or behind his eyelids, formed by imagination.

  “Not quite as on earth,” his father said—or, rather radiated. “Here nothing has actual form. You and I, as well as all other living things, are bits of the great central plant of Life Force, which actuates everything that breathes. When we ‘die,’ we are re-absorbed by the great life stream, though we know no more about it than a drop of water knows the meaning of the river that recollects it after it has been drawn to the sky by the sun and released again in rain.”

  “But I see you! I see myself—”

  “You see your thought of me, of yourself, not substance. There is no substance here. You will find out, now that you have died.”

  Keane thought: queer he doesn’t know that I haven’t really died; that I will return from this gray land. Then he realized that secret thoughts were as evident to his father as specially directed ones were.

  For again he seemed to smile, and he said: “I know nothing of what goes on on earth. None of us do, which is contrary to the idea that I, at least, used to have: that the dead know all. Sometimes I would like to know, but I can’t find out. The veil of death keeps us from communicating with the living as well as preventing them from communicating with us.”

  “But now there is communication between dead and living,” Keane replied. “And that is why I’m here. On earth a man invented a war weapon which is useless without an antidote that makes it harmless to the men who use the weapon. The antidote, falling in its intended purpose, gives death for half a day to whoever swallows it. Another man, a person without conscience as well as without fear, stole his secret. He has used it to die and while dead to speak to those actually dead and get from them important information; though how he can do that when they must know his purpose is evil, and must try not to give it to him—”

  “Here where all thought either takes physical expression or can be interpreted as clearly as audible speech in life, no thought can remain hidden,” his father informed him. “The man you describe has but to think his question, and whoever the thought is directed at will necessarily think the answer. For thought is involuntary. It cannot be controlled, and there is nothing physical here.”

  Thought, involuntary? Keane repeated to himself. He did not believe that. It had always been his contention that thought could be controlled by a strong-willed man. But now he was to have immediate proof of his father’s correctness.

  It was miraculous to converse with him! It was miraculous, and appealing, to think of conversing with his dead mother too. But there was a thought more insistent than either of these; that was the thought (recalled strongly to him by speaking of Doctor Satan to his father) of the diabolical being he had come here to thwart.

  And so, converse with his mother, and further converse with his father, were not to be. For with his thought of Doctor Satan—the vague outlines of his father faded, and other outlines began taking their place.

  “Satan!” he thought. “Now—I will see his face!”

  But he had forgotten his own prosaic blue serge, the fabric that seemed to clothe him now as it had when he “died.”

  More and more plainly, the outlines of the figure driving his father from his mind appeared to him. And they were still as secretive as they had been on earth.

  He saw a lean, red-cloaked shape, tall, with a red mask, and red-gloved hands. He saw no revealed feature save arrogant, glittering black eyes through the red mask’s eye-holes.

  Doctor Satan—still masked against disclosure of identity! But with the detestably familiar red form another was appearing. And, with the ability here to guess at all thought, even when that thought tries to conceal itself, he realized why.

  He was seeing the man Doctor Satan had taken the little death to find! His thought of Satan had brought him into materialization and, as one object roped to a second will lift the second when it itself is lifted, with Satan had come the person he had been conversing with when Keane visioned him.

  Keane saw a face that was a little hazy and yet very familiar, topped by wavy, iron-gray hair; a face in which a large mouth was mobile over a long, cleft chin; a face often pictured, in life, in the papers. It was the face of Kelly Strong, in life political dictator of the state of Texas, presumed to have been designing the presidency—and not quite the same presidency as that in the minds of the nation’s founders!—before he died.

  At the same time, Keane perceived with horror the significance of the meeting of these two. The strange but inevitable phenomenon of thought-transference, which was the rule here, instantly spelled it out for him.

  Doctor Satan meant to get the whole of Strong’s plans of dictatorship, almost completed before he died, and become dictator himself! And the idea of Satan as dictator was one to stagger the mind!

  “My God!” thought Keane. And: “I wonder if I’ve come in time to stop it…”

  With his first materialization, Doctor Satan, as aware of Keane as Keane was of him, had turned snarling soundlessly from Strong.

  His black eyes bored into Keane’s gray ones, insane with thwarted purpose. And as both he and Keane concentrated only on each other, the materialization of Kelly Strong slowly disappeared.

  And in that instant Keane had his answer, given him as helplessly by Satan’s involuntary thoughts as Satan’s dead informants gave up their secrets to him.

  Doctor Satan had not yet sucked the information he wanted from Strong! Keane had got to him in time!

  “Keane!” was Satan’s enraged thought. And, though the following words were born in Keane’s brain, rather than actually heard, he yet thought to hear the man’s harsh, arrogant voice. “In the devil’s name—how do you manage to cross me here?”

  But in Keane’s mind, he read the answer, as the question called up in Keane’s brain the memory of his talk with Marxman’s secretary-assistant, and the obtaining of a dose of the antidote.

  “So Marxman’s man made it possible!” Satan raged. “And you guessed what I was doing by the results of the death ray on Linton Yates! Yes, I read it all! I tried to find you with the death ray first. But your damned ability, in life if not here, of shielding your thoughts from me, made you an unlocatable target where ordinary men were not! And so you’re here—”

  “And so I’m here,” was Keane’s response, “And of the two of us, one is going to stay. And I intend that that one shall be you!”

  * * * *

  Alone in the great nothingness of gray, misty light, these two were. Alone in the place of the dead. For here nothing existed that was not thought of. And the two had no slightest thought of anything but each other.

  Doctor Satan’s red-clad outline shimmered toward Keane, only a projected shadow of the red-clad body that lay in the steel-lined basement room the Furlowe’s Folly, but a shadow as sinister and real-appearing as the body itself.

  “There is a hell in this place, my friend,” he stated. “I have been here once before, and I have found that out. It is, like its denizens, only to be perceived when it is thought of. In that hell you shall remain—while I go back to life, a dictator, and freed from your bungling interference forever.”

  His black eyes gleamed more brightly.

  “A hell, Ascott Keane! It’s singularly fitting that I, Doctor Satan, should be the one to cast you into it!”

  Keane made no reply. He could
n’t have if he had wanted to. For now his eyes began to see strange things in the gray mist. Things conjured up by Satan’s thought of them.

  Slowly, the empty space around him was being defined in the shape of a hollow globe, of which he and Satan were the center. And slowly the walls of the globe were narrowing down on them and were becoming more definite.

  And Keane tried to cry aloud again as he saw of what the globe was composed, but he could not, since there was no such thing as sound there.

  The walls of the globe were a solid, or seemingly solid, mass of bodies. But they were bodies such as had never before been seen outside a nightmare.

  Some had no heads. Some seemed all face and mouth, with tiny puny limbs attached. Some were legless or armless or both. And all were blind.

  Pallid gray shapes in the pallid grayness, they writhed and reached toward Keane and Satan; yet Keane knew intuitively that it was not Doctor Satan who engaged their attention, but solely himself. And he shuddered as he thought of being engulfed by the crippled, maimed, writhing things.

  “This is just what shall happen,” he perceived Satan speaking to him. “They shall take your soul here, Keane. These things were men and women on earth. They were “crippled morally” as society chose to express it—just as you believe I am morally crippled when, really…but we won’t go into that.”

  The black eyes glittered satanically. “Here, after death, they are warped and deformed as they were in life. Creatures of hell, Keane. And as destructive and murderous here as when they had actuality. But it is seldom they have the chance to try their talent for destructiveness now. They shall try it on you.”

  The hollow globe was very small now; Keane had the impression that he could almost reach out a touch the hideous shapes composing the wall—had there been anything there really to touch.

  “They’ll get Doctor Satan, too,” he thought frantically. There’s no reason why they should pursue me and not him.”

  But he knew as he thought that there was a reason.