by Otto Penzler
“But you can’t!” the girl whispered. “We’re prisoners. The trap-door that leads into the waxworks is guarded, and it’s the only exit. They caught me hiding in there, just as they did you. But they didn’t search me; I had the knife hidden under my sash. I pretended to be unconscious and they left me in this passage. Now I’m going on. I’m going to kill him anyhow!”
“Him? Who do you mean?”
“Dr. Magwood.”
“Then,” Dwight stammered, “it is Magwood—here, alive?”
She nodded.
“And what’s that got to do with you?”
“You remember,” she said, “that man with me there in the rooming-house—the poor creature with the mutilated face? He’s Fred, my brother. He was Fred, I mean. Now he’s a maniac with a broken mind, one of this fiendish doctor’s victims.”
“Tell me about him—Magwood,” Dwight said. “What’s he doing?”
“Bringing dead murderers back to life!” she sobbed. “He’s stolen the formula for some sort of synthetic blood to revive them. But he has to have fresh human blood for his work. He traps his victims in the waxworks, just as Fred was trapped. He drains the blood from these victims, then revives them with his chemicals and they become monsters.
“Those he can’t revive are embalmed and put in this museum. Fred and two others managed to escape. But they couldn’t become men again. The stuff in their veins made them thirst for blood. You saw—there—there in that room. It was dreadful. I had searched for Fred, found him there. But he had killed a man, was trying to drink—God! I can’t say it.
“You see, that’s why I couldn’t go to the police. I managed to get him away, take him home, lock him up. He swore he would get the two other victims and come here, kill them all. But—” she sobbed fiercely, “that’s what I’m going to do!”
“Rot!” Dwight snapped. “With a knife? We’ll go back, fight our way out, then come back with the police—”
Dwight broke off to follow the girl’s tense gaze. She was staring toward a ruffled ribbon of light which showed beneath a curtain at the end of the passage. Sounds came from beyond that curtain—a murmur of voices, a rhythmic creak, creak, like the noise of a rusty pendulum. A medley of strange chemical smells drifted to their nostrils, and a persistent reek like the sickening, bloody smell of a slaughterhouse.
A voice rose above the murmur: “A little more blood, Brutus, a little more blood.”
Dwight seized the girl’s arm. “Come!” he whispered.
She pulled away. “No!” she said. “I’m going in!” And she ran stumbling toward the curtain, the knife in her hand.
With an oath, Dwight raced after her. But he was too late. She flung the curtain aside and went staggering into the room. Dwight followed—and as the thick velvet curtains rippled past his body, talon-like hands clawed at him from either side, gripping his arms and shoulders. He fought, but his body was dragged back, held as in a straitjacket.
Further struggle was useless. The two powerful creatures, with the bloodless, dead faces and cold, empty eyes, pressed their loathsome bodies against him, pinioned his arms securely. Another of the beasts was holding the sobbing girl.
The blood throbbed hotly in Dwight’s temples. His throat seemed dry, scaly. He stared helplessly about the strange long room—something between a laboratory and an abattoir. Long tables held test-tubes and retorts and all the gleaming apparatus of the chemist. There were shelves of chemicals and curious-looking machines.
In one corner a weird contrivance caught Dwight’s wildly gazing eyes. It was something like a child’s seesaw, mounted on a frame of gleaming steel. Strapped to it was the naked body of a man, and at each end one of the grisly, grey man-monsters was keeping the contraption in motion, bending and straightening his gaunt, repulsive body with the stiff and rigid movements of an automaton. This accounted for the creaking sound which Dwight had heard in the passage.
His captors had made no move; they seemed to be awaiting orders. Here and there about the walls of the room, numbers of the repellent creatures were squatting on their haunches like apes, their lean, hairy arms dangling, their bloodless faces stamped with a listless and dismal despair. And worse—hunger, stark hunger was in their insane eyes as they watched him through the red, uncanny mist of light which fell from globes in the ceiling. Dwight shuddered.
“Prepare the girl!” The words came from somewhere behind, in a lisping voice that was somehow vile and unnatural.
Dwight jerked his head about. Beyond a nearby laboratory table, the shaggy head of Dr. Magwood was visible, thrusting up from the hunched shoulders, caped in black like the body of some loathsome bat. He was moving about briskly with tubes and phials.
The fiend who held the girl moved away with her. Dwight held himself in check, trying to formulate some plan. With a morbid fascination he watched the frightful doctor’s hands, thought of the man’s unspeakable practices. Those were the hands that cut human beings to pieces—for pleasure! God! It would be better if he and the girl were dead and in decent graves!
Magwood was holding a test-tube in each hand. He poured liquid from one to the other. Pfff! A small explosion shattered the tube and sent billows of acrid smoke into the air. The doctor sprang back, neither injured nor alarmed, and began wiping his hands on a towel. Now he looked at Dwight, fingering him with his eyes as a butcher might a calf brought in for slaughtering.
“Strip him and bind him,” Magwood lisped, “and take him to the meat room.”
The meat room! Dwight fought again, straining and snarling like a trapped animal. But other monsters sprang to the assistance of those who held him. Their rasplike hands tied him and lifted him and carried him, still struggling, to that place of unspeakable dread.
THEY WENT THROUGH a narrow doorway, and Dwight was flung without ceremony upon the floor. He heard the door close; he lifted his eyes, and an almost intolerable impulse to retch and vomit seized him. The reek of the place was frightful, and what he saw was indescribably worse. For from the walls of this small abattoir, there hung by meat hooks, like so much beef in a market, four hideous bodies, headless, naked, with small glass bowls beneath each gory neck to catch the dripping blood!
There was a small, round hole in the door at about eye level, a peek-hole apparently, where the captors could stare in at their victims. Dwight staggered to his feet, inched his way to the door and stared out.
He gasped, grinding his teeth together and digging the nails of his fingers into his palms. For two of the nauseous revenants were carrying the body of the girl toward the seesaw contraption. Limp and inert, her slender body lay in their clutches like a wilted flower, her dark hair trailing back from the pallid face.
Horror and a sickened fascination glued Dwight’s eyes to the scene. He saw the ghouls halt the motion of the seesaw, narrowed his eyes to stare at the great muscular body that lay upon it. Panic swept over him as he recognized in the square, brutal features the face of the murderer, Bysshe Guttman, the man who had been drowned a month before in the swift currents off Alcatraz!
Disgust, loathing and a vertigo of incredulous terror gripped him then, held him in its frozen talons as he watched the inert body of the girl being placed upon the machine, saw her strapped there at the side of the dead cannibal, while a strange contrivance of tubes with a dial and siphon was fastened to her numb wrists. He went berserk then, writhing at his bonds, beating his helpless body against the door which would not yield.
Gradually he sobered, took a desperate grip on his throbbing nerves and tried to think. The opening of a door behind him caused him to swing his body clumsily about. A man had come into the room and stood confronting him, and for a wild instant Dwight thought that his reason had cracked. For the man who stood in the doorway was Professor Collins!
After a moment the professor spoke. “It seems,” he said calmly, “that we are in the same boat.”
Dwight found his voice. “Good God! What—? I thought—”
“It might
have occurred to you,” said the professor, “that I would be more valuable to them alive than dead. That headless wax figure on the floor in a pool of blood was a thing easily contrived. It served to establish my death and they stole it out of there later.”
“Good God!” Dwight burst out. “They’ll use you in this business too, then?”
“Perhaps . . .” Collins seemed resigned now, all trace of his erratic temper vanished. “And you too—if you’ll permit a rather grisly jest.”
“What do they intend to do with us—the girl and me?”
“The girl is being used now,” Professor Collins said, “in the process of resurrecting Guttman.”
“Then Guttman is . . . ?”
“Technically alive now. Magwood tells me that he had planned the thing before Guttman’s escape. Guttman expected to be drowned, but Magwood had promised to revive him, and he thought it worth the chance. For almost thirty days the man’s heart has been beating. There are moments, he says, when a flicker of consciousness is evident. In the end, I have no doubt, he will live.”
“With your chemicals in his veins—like these others?”
Collins shook his head; there was the hint of a smile on his lips now.
“I’m afraid I exaggerated a bit in my excitement,” he said. “Frankly, there is no magical chemical, as you believe—only a system. I have used it with considerable success on animals and it consists in the use of artificial respiration, artificial heating of the body, injections of defibrinated blood, physiological salts and epinephrine, or adrenaline. Even my seesaw plan, which you see them using, has been experimented with before. It forces the blood to circulate by constantly shifting the center of gravity.”
“But these monsters,” Dwight protested. “What is it that flows in their veins—surely not blood? They won’t bleed.”
“Not after Magwood has dosed them with a newly developed hemostatic, the work of a Canadian doctor who perfected it to the extent that it will instantly stop bleeding from even a major blood vessel.
“These creatures you see are not reanimated corpses. They did not die. When they were weakened by pain and fear and loss of blood, which Magwood extracted for his use, they were dosed with the hemostatic and told that they were no longer human. Magwood’s hypnotic suggestion and the fact that they would not bleed has convinced them that they are nothing but walking cadavers. It also awakened an insane craving for blood. He feeds them small doses and keeps them in a state of docile slavery.”
“And these?” Dwight jerked his head toward the banging bodies.
“They were too unruly, Magwood informs me. He finds other uses for them.”
Dwight’s face twisted into a sickened scowl; a crawling nausea turned and twisted in the pit of his stomach. The tense silence of the place was punctuated by the creaking of the machine on which the body of the girl was strapped like a human sacrifice, while the blood in her veins was being sapped by the loathsome thing beside her. In the end she would be another of these repulsive ghouls!
Some emotion deeper than fear stirred in Dwight then, something primeval, inherent in his blood. His black eyes blazed with a new fire as he lifted them now to Professor Collins’ face.
“Look here,” he said, “you’re not in the same fix as we are. He won’t kill you; he needs you. But with your help, I’ll destroy this monster, even if it costs my life, which it probably will. It’ll likely cost yours too. But you won’t stand back on that account, will you, Professor?”
Collins did not answer at once. As Dwight stared at him, he felt the blood draining from his own cheeks, felt a more appalling horror than any which had gripped him. For Collins had looked away, was staring abstractedly at the wall.
“Speak, man!” Dwight half screamed. “Are you a fiend too, or just a coward?”
Collins’ glance swung back; the eyes were cold, emotionless. “You cannot understand, perhaps,” he said, “but neither life nor death nor any human value means anything to me—nothing but science. Science is my life, my god!”
“You’re a coward!” Dwight snarled. “You’re yellow to the quivering marrow of your bones!”
He stopped, biting off his words sharply. A queer alarming light had sprung into the professor’s eyes. It was the lurid glimmer of monomania, the flame that hides in darkness, unseen by normal eyes except when betrayed by a moment’s passion!
“My God!” The words forced themselves in a half groan from Dwight’s throat. “My God! I see it now. There is no Magwood; there is only Collins!”
No flicker of emotion showed in the professor’s face, but strange yellow lights were crawling in his eyeballs. “Have it your way,” he said quietly. “What of it? Society has dogged me with its taboos, refused me living men for my experiments. But science will not be thwarted. I wondered how long the wig and whiskers and cape would fool you. It doesn’t matter. In a few hours you will be hanging on the wall here like any other dog.” A look of deep-rooted cruelty betrayed itself in the immobile features as he added, “But first I’ll let you see the girl, let you see what we do to her!”
That was the last straw. Dwight’s nerves cracked. Reason was swamped; only the blind and driving impetus of outraged instincts remained as he threw his shackled body toward the fiend.
Heels against the wall, he thrust out his lowered head like a battering ram, drove with all his power. It caught the professor in the belly, jarred him back against the opposite wall. Dwight toppled to the floor, writhing and kicking like a tied cat.
Rage, suddenly unleashed, burned like an angry fire in the professor’s face. A knife leaped into his hand and he sprang like an insane, gibbering monkey upon the helpless body of his victim. Dwight kicked, butted with his head, rolled over and over, threshing his bound body from right to left, while the little monster clung to him like a catamount. He seemed determined to cut Dwight’s throat without injuring the rest of the body. And it was this intent which gave Dwight his few minutes’ respite from death.
But Dwight was weakening. At last, with burning lungs racked by the unequal struggle, he found himself flat on his back, saw the blade of the knife inexorably descending toward his jugular vein.
The knife stopped in mid-air. From the main room had come the staccato sound of gunfire! Pandemonium seemed to break loose then. There were cries and curses, the crash of objects thrown and broken, the slap of running feet!
Collins sprang to his feet, dropped the knife, dived through the door.
Flinging his body about, Dwight seized the knife with savage eagerness. While out there the sounds of battle heightened, he struggled with his bonds. He managed at last to free his wrists and ankles. Then he peered out the door. His mouth widened in amazement.
Already the place was a shambles of corpses and milling bodies. The grey-faced monsters were fighting in a pack, like wolves. Urging them on was Collins, with an automatic in each hand, firing at the three men in the curtained entrance.
Those three, automatics in their hands, were spraying the room with a murderous fire! Shoulder to shoulder they stood, shouting cries and jeers at the cornered ghouls, and their faces were like the faces of their foes. They were, Dwight realized now, the three who had sworn to come back and wipe out this place of torment. One of them he recognized, by his split mouth and hanging lower jaw, as the brother of the dark-haired girl. They had arrived just in time.
But the relief which had flared in Dwight’s breast was smothered a moment later by mounting despair. He had turned toward the now motionless seesaw. Bullets were whistling through the air, spattering the plastered wall behind it. The half-alive murderer and the living girl were equally exposed to that annihilating gunfire—and it was evident, as men tumbled from the grey and howling ranks of the ghouls, that the crazed gunmen had failed to see or recognize the girl, and would not stop until all life was wiped out of the place.
Dwight measured the distance between him and the girl. He might reach and free her—but they could never escape. They would never surv
ive that fire.
Then inspiration dawned upon his brain with a wild surge of joy. It was a single picture, flashed from his memory—the doctor, the two chemicals which when mixed had caused the small explosion!
Dwight dropped to his hands and knees. He darted out the door and scuttled like a rabbit for the shelter of the nearby laboratory table. One of the ghouls loomed up before him, with up-raised knife. He tackled the hideous shape by the legs. It fell heavily to the floor and he raced on. Bullets sang past him; a slug tore a bite from his heel but he did not stop.
A moment later the two bottles were in his trembling hands. He placed one of them against the wall, then darted back a few yards and hurled the other at it.
A dull concussion thundered in the air. A sheet of fire leaped out like a spreading stain across the room. Abruptly the atmosphere was choked by a thick and soggy smoke, acrid and stifling, that rolled and boiled its blinding vapor over the scene of carnage.
The cries redoubled. For a moment bullets ceased to fly.
Knife in hand, Dwight plunged through the smoke, fought his way through the struggling, blinded ghouls to the girl. He found her struggling weakly into consciousness, slashed the bonds that held her, threw her across his shoulder. Then, following the wall, he groped toward the entrance. Now the maniacs had come to grips in the blinding fog of smoke with knife and tooth and claw. Heaving bodies were all about him; a knife slashed his shoulder. But he fought his way to the entrance, plunged down the now deserted passage. He climbed painfully through the trap-door that opened in the floor of the waxworks. There he laid the girl aside and heaped a pile of heavy furniture over the basement’s only exit, locking the battling fiends in their smoky hell.
Then he called the police.
AN HOUR LATER Dwight, with the weak but otherwise uninjured girl, sat cozily in the back seat of a police car which was whisking them to their respective homes.
Still a little dazed, the girl had listened to his explanation in silence. Now she asked: “But why did he do it? Why would a respected scientist stoop to such a thing?”