The Doctor Satan
Page 23
There was a shuffling sound at the entrance through which Bostiff and Harold Ivor had gone. Bostiff had reappeared. He swayed in the doorway, eyes glinting with brute surprise as he saw two red-robed figures where only one had been before, and with fear as he saw without understanding the blue fog that was rolling toward the one he recognized instinctively as his master.
“To me!” Doctor Satan screamed. “Bostiff—”
The legless giant turned, snarling, toward Keane. Then he turned back obediently toward Satan and began hitching his body toward the blue fog on his hands.
“No!” breathed Keane in something like horror as the legless man hitched forward. But he did not utter the word aloud. Bostiff was as evil as his master, limited only by his own thick-wittedness. He deserved death as well as Satan.
Bostiff reached the edge of the blue fog, paused, then groped a little into it.
A scream suddenly came from his distorted lips. And the fog, touching him, underwent an instant change.
From being a sort of mist, it became a clinging, viscous shroud. Bostiff began wrenching and tearing at it as it poured itself swiftly over and around him. The viscous shroud grew more opaque, palpably harder. It was as though the legless man were suddenly encased in frosted blue glass.
His hoarse shouts died in volume. Through the blue opacity his staring eyes, like the eyes of a man caught under ice and swimming desperately under water to find the hole he fell through, peered out.
“Master! Save me!”
The shout could barely be heard. And in any event Doctor Satan wasn’t listening. Nor could he have done anything if he had.
The blue mist had reached him now. It circled him closer as he crouched against the rock wall as though trying to force his body into it. It touched his face…
Doctor Satan’s hands were up, fingers extended in a cabalistic sign. His lips were moving the red mask over his face as they chanted a ritual not heard by human ears for fifty generations.
And as he watched, perspiration studded Keane’s face under his mask. The blue fog was slowing a little. Was it possible that Satan could evade this death?
But the fog, halting for a moment with the cabalistic signs and the incantation, surged forward again. Incredibly, the mist-like stuff grew what seemed to be horrible tentacles. The shreds of them wrapped around Satan’s red-sheathed arms and dragged them down.
A few yards away, Bostiff was now only a cocoon of a thing lying moveless on the floor. Even his ghastly, staring eyes could not now be seen. The fog portion that had wrapped around him had hardened like the vitrum of which the shell of the egg-like object containing it had been made. Keane repressed a little shudder. Such a fearful death!…
Doctor Satan was down now. Over him, as it had over the legless man, the blue mist was becoming a viscous, sticky sheath. But Satan had stopped screaming. Keane saw his black eyes glisten through the mask with fearful intensity of thought.
Next moment Keane found out what the thought had been directed at.
A man stepped through the narrow portal into the first cave off the flame. Another man followed, and another. Six men lined before the opening and began to advance on Keane. Slaves of Satan’s hypnotic will, they had been called silently, from this distance.
Keane exclaimed aloud, though not in fear of his own safety; the summoning of these comparatively stupid mortals was a futile last gesture, as Satan must have known in his extremity. The thought that wrenched the cry from Keane’s lips was the fear that by sheer numbers the men might defeat the death he had brought here for the red-robed fiend he had struggled against so long.
The Blue Death could surround and kill only a limited number of bodies! True enough, the ancient records hinted that the Blue Death had killed all the inhabitants of the old town of Sarlfolk. But if that were so, a great deal more of it must have been released than had been carried here in Keane’s egg!
The deadly blue mist would attack every moving thing within range save the being that directed it! But it took a definite amount of it to kill. It now surrounded two forms. If it divided to surround six more—would there be enough to kill them all?
For once in his life, Keane wished he had a gun. In his deadly resolve to overcome Doctor Satan at all costs, he would have shot these men, because their dead bodies would not have drawn aside any of the fatal mist. But he had no gun, and he could not attack six men bare-handed. Biting his lips, he could only watch what took place.
Meanwhile the six men, hypnotized by Doctor Satan and acting blindly according to his will, sprang at Keane. With an athlete’s quickness, he dodged their concerted rush. Two of them plunged into the Blue Death, already rolling toward them. One, laying hands for an instant on Keane, he flung into the ominous fog.
The other three started to attack a second time, and stopped like ice-sheathed statues as the Blue Death reached them.
Keane’s breath came between his clenched teeth in a ragged hiss. Eight bodies were cased in the viscous blue stuff which the mist became when it touched flesh! They lay like cocoons on the rock floor, some motionless, some feebly writhing, but all things of horror and despair.
Keane went to the form who still showed a little reddish through the blue crust over it—the form of Doctor Satan.
Terror-filled, dulling black eyes stared at him through the fearful sheath. Red-gloved hands raised a little, crackling the blue stuff that cased them, in a final gesture of malediction.
Then they fell and the black eyes closed.
“Thank God!” breathed Keane, voice harsh and cracked.
The fight was over. He was sure. To make doubly sure, he would have liked to strangle that stark form; to have clubbed its head in. But he dared not touch the blue shell. That would have meant death for him, though he himself had released it.
He went to the opening through which he had seen Harold Ivor taken. The boy was beyond, in a small cave like a prison room. He was cowering against the wall, and he shrieked and threw up his hands as Keane entered in his red masquerade.
Keane dragged off his mask, and threw back his red hood.
The boy stared as Jane Ivor had stared.
“You’re—you’re a man?” he sobbed. “You’re not—”
Keane smiled, and in that smile was a gentleness that erased the fear from the boy’s face.
“I am not Satan,” he said. “There is no Satan—at least, none to frighten you any more.
As Jane Ivor had done, her brother, Harold, swayed in the beginning of a fainting fit from shock. But he had not been as far driven in madness, yet, as his sister had been. He reeled from the shock, but he did not lapse into unconsciousness. And after a moment he came to Keane, trembling hand outstretched.
Keane grasped it.
“Come,” he said. “We’ll leave here. We’ll leave this Hell, and the demons in it, and its master—all dead—”
But then, as he got to the door, a hoarse shout was wrung from his lips. He leaped to the spot where Doctor Satan had been lying, eyes wide with a shock of astonishment that almost unnerved him.
The spot where Doctor Satan had lain was empty. His blue-sheathed form was no longer there. And over the bodies of the seven who had served him, the blue casing was a little thicker.
“Damn him,” raged Keane, trembling fists raised. “Damn him!”
Satan had gathered the remnants of that icy, terrific will of his while Keane was away with the boy, and had, out of his own fragmentary knowledge of Saint Sartius’ Blue Death, contrived somehow to divert its hardening shell from his own body and onto the others that lay near by.
That was obviously what had happened. But, sick with defeat when victory had been tasted, Keane refused entirely to believe it till he got to the anteroom cavern with Harold Ivor.
The flaming pillar was down. Someone had just passed this way and had hurdled the well-mouth opening from
which the fire hissed.
Had that someone hurdled it feebly, barely dragging his body up the opposite edge? Keane thought so. For on the far edge of the small abyss was a single, torn, red glove.
But, feebly or not, Doctor Satan had escaped from the caves. Again he had cheated with death to which Keane had driven him closer than he had ever been before in his satanic existence.
The flame pillar was already rising again.
“You must jump that hole,” Keane said to the boy.
He set the example. The youth followed. Clinging to Keane’s hand, Harold Ivor went with him down the outer tunnel.
The concealed trap-door above was open, as Satan had left it, too hard-pressed and weak to bother to shut it after him.
Under the door the man Keane had hypnotized after his use as guide had been no longer needed, lay stretched on the floor. Eyes open and blank, he slept the sleep from which there is no awakening save by the action of the one who induces that sleep.
Keane started toward the man, then stopped. He was a human rat. The emanations from his hazed mind caught by Keane’s superhuman psychic perception whispered that he was at least once a murderer, perhaps twice or thrice.
Face bleak, Keane went on past him with the shuddering boy. He left the man sleeping there…
Outside, in the driveway of the abandoned farm, the blue sedan was gone. Keane bit his lips as he visioned the swaying, raging figure in red at its wheel, speeding off somewhere into the night—to strike at humanity again when he had recovered.
Somberly, with his shoulders drooping, Keane started toward town with the boy. He had stopped the reign of terror in Louisville—but his real work was not yet done.
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