Dr Satan - [Pulp Classics 6]

by Edited By Robert Weinberg

  Through a red haze, Keane saw the girl get to her feet, slowly, unsteadily. She walked toward the figure in red, moving like one asleep. “You are mine, Beatrice Dale,” Doctor Satan said softly.

  There was a perceptible hesitation. Was the girl’s brain, even in death, struggling against the monstrous statement? Then her lips moved, as the lips of the thing in the doorway had moved, like the lips of a mechanical doll. “I am yours.”

  Keane panted on the floor. He could not even cry out. His vocal cords were numbed by the drug, as was the rest of his body.

  Doctor Satan started down at Keane. “And so, my friend, we see the end. Your aide has become - as you see. You yourself shall presently die as Besson and Dryer and Corey died. The end....Bostiff.”

  The legless giant hitched his way forward on his long arms.

  “The flywheel, Bostiff,” Doctor Satan said. “Girse, attached the cube of death to Keane.

  * * * *

  And now Keane glanced at a thing he had seen only perfunctorily, and noticed not at all, until now: On a length of rusty shafting in the rear of the factory room was a big flywheel, which had performed some power service when the factory was busy. To this, was belted an electric motor.

  Bostiff hitched his way to the flywheel. As he went, he trailed behind him a fine wire only too familiar to Keane, the kind of wire that had led to the metal box Keane had detached from his coupe before death should strike him. To the spokes of the flywheel, Keane knew, were fastened the colorless, unobtrusive fins which generated the static death that had struck down the motor millionaires.

  Girse fastened to Keane’s chest a metal cube which had been resting on a low bench near by. Bostiff fastened the other end of the wire leading from it, to a point near the flywheel. Then he started the motor.

  The big flywheel started moving and turning over. Doctor Satan’s eyes burned down at Keane.

  * * * *

  “In five minutes, approximately,” he said, “there will be a violet flare. In that flare, you will be consumed. Just before it occurs, the drug that holds you will begin to disappear, so that you shall be the more keenly aware of your fate. We shall, naturally, wait outside till the bursting into flame of the building announces that you are no longer alive to annoy me.”

  He turned toward the dead girl. “Come, my dear.”

  Beatrice walked toward the draped door, her body swaying a little from the impairment of her sense of balance, her eyes staring unblinkingly ahead. Doctor Satan followed. Behind came Girse and Bostiff.

  Doctor Satan raised the drape. The three passed through ahead of him. He stared toward Keane. “Four minutes, now,” he said. And then he followed the others.

  * * * *

  6. TWO METAL CUBES

  Keane was lying so that he could see the watch at his wrist. He watched the little second hand fly around its circle three times. He listened to the whirling of the great flywheel, gathering static electricity through its fins; such a colossal store of it as even the lightning could not rival - to be held in the mysterious metal cube on his chest till it had gathered beyond the cube’s power to contain it any longer. Then the cube would be consumed, and consume everything around it like a tremendous blown fuse...

  Keane stared at the watch. He had a hundred seconds of life left. One hundred seconds...

  But his counting of the seconds was not actuated solely by the fear of death. His mind had never been keener, colder than it was now. Ascott Keane was waiting for the first sign of returning movement in his muscles. When that occurred he had a plan to try. It was a plan the success of which hinged on facts unknown to him. But its steps seemed logical.

  He felt burning pain in his finger ends, then in his hands. Grimly he moved his fingers, searing with returning life. He flexed his hands. He had forty seconds. Perhaps a little longer, perhaps a little less, for Doctor Satan could not foretell to the second when the static force stored in the metal cube should burst its bonds in the terrific violet flare.

  Now he could move his right arm feebly from the elbow. He dragged it up by sheer will till it went to his coal pocket. In that coat pocket was a factor - which Doctor Satan had not reckoned with: the metal cube with its broken end of wire, which Keane had taken from his coupe for analysis which he had not had time to make.

  He got the cube from his pocket. His watch told him he had twenty seconds, a third of a minute, to live.

  With maddening slowness, his hand moved. It found the wire from the box in his pocket. With numbed fingers it pressed the broken bit of wire to the other cube....

  The fifteen seconds that passed then were an age.

  Keane’s idea was that with two of the storage cubes hooked together, it would take twice as long for the spinning flywheel to generate the static force that was presently to consume him. As simple as that! And, even though he knew nothing of the substance in the cubes capable of storing the force, he thought its action must be as logical as it was simple.

  If it took minutes longer for the building, with Keane in it, to go up in violet flames, Doctor Satan might come back to see what was wrong.

  The zero second approached, passed. Keane held his breath. Ten seconds passed, and still death did not strike. The flywheel turned, the gathering static electricity rasped his nerves and stood his hair on end, but the violet flare did not dart toward the heavens.

  Twenty seconds went by, and Keane breathed again - and watched the draped door. He could move arms and legs now, and a bath of flaming agony told that all his body would be soon released from the grip of the paralyzing drug.

  Two minutes had gone by before he saw the drapes at the door move. And then Girse came in. Girse! Not his master! But Girse, Keane thought, would do.

  The monkey-like little man came into the red-lit room, and to his merited end. Keane’s steely eyes were on him. Through them, as through shining little gates, his iron will leaped at the man.

  Girse stiffened in the doorway. Then, in obedience to Keane’s unspoken command, he walked to Keane’s side.

  “You came to see why the violet flame has not burst out?” Keane said.

  “Yes,” said Girse, his wide, helpless eyes riveted on Keane’s.

  “Doctor Satan is outside with Bostiff and the girl?”

  “Yes,” said Girse. A spasm passed over his hairy face, as though apprehension, struggled with the deep hypnosis in which he was held.

  “Answer this,” snapped Keane, “and answer it truly. The girl, Beatrice Dale, is now dead. Do you know of a way to make her have life again?”

  God, the agony that went into Keane’s waiting for that answer! And then Girse’s lips moved. “Yes.”

  Keane drew a deep breath. He stood now, tottering a little, but almost entirely recovered. “What is the method?” Tell me quickly - and truly.”

  “The drug that killed her is its own antidote. More of it will bring back to life any who have been dead for not more than half an hour.”

  “Thank God!” said Keane.

  And then he acted. And as he did so, before his mind ran the list of crimes this man, with Doctor Satan as his leader and the unspeakable Bostiff as his comrade had committed. The list took all pity from his face.

  He fastened the two metal cubes to the man whose body was held in his mental thrall. Then he went to the door, backing toward it with his commanding eyes over Girse.

  The flywheel turned with a monotonous whirring. The fins attached to its spokes sent down the fine wire the accumulation of current. Millions, billions, of volts, filling the mysterious storage capacity of the first cube, reaching toward the capacity of the second.

  Keane looked at his watch. In thirty seconds, if Doctor Satan were right, the two cubes would explode with double the violence planned on...

  There was a violet flare that seemed to fill the world. Keane was knocked backward out of a doorway that an instant later became nonexistent.

  A glimpse he had of a man who sprawled over and over with the force of the shock and
then relaxed to lie at last in the actual death hitherto denied him. The dead watchman! Then he was staring into coal-black eyes that glinted with a fear that never before had touched their arrogant depths.

  “Keane!” whispered Doctor Satan, as the criminologist faced him. “You weren’t...then it was Girse....”

  “It was Girse who died,” said Keane - and sprang.

  With a pleasure that sent a savage thrill to his finger-tips, he got his hands around the red-swathed throat.

  The drug that made that girl as she is,” he grated. “I want it.”

  Doctor Satan’s voice gurgled behind the red mask. His hand went under his robe. The fear of death - that exaggerated fear felt by all killers when they themselves feel death approach - glassed in his eyes. He drew out the big hypodermic.

  “How Much is the reviving amount?” said Keane.

  “Two...calibrated marks...on the ... plunger,” gasped Doctor Satan as Keane relaxed his fingers. “The same as...the lethal dose...”

  “Death, or renewed life, the same,” whispered Keane.

  Then a bleak smile shaped his firm lips. He took the hypodermic.

  With the swiftness of a leaping serpent his hand moved. And death poured into Doctor Satan’s veins!

  Keane shot the stated amount into Beatrice’s white arm. There was barely enough. With his heart in his throat he watched her reactions.

  “Thank God!” he whispered.

  Color was slowly seeping into her cheeks. Her eyes blinked, then began to lose that deathly dullness. The pulse increased toward normal in the throat vein.

  Keane turned toward Doctor Satan and his face wore the same grim look it had worn when he left Girse to his merited destruction.

  “Get up,” he said.

  Slowly, stiffly, Doctor Satan rose. His dead eyes peered straight ahead.

  The factory building was a solid blaze. Shouts and sounds of running feet announced the beginning gathering of a crowd in the street.

  “Walk straight ahead - and keep walking.” Keane snapped.

  The red-clad figure, like a dread automation, walked straight ahead - toward the roaring flames. Keane waited, with bleak victory in his tired eyes, till the figure was on the brink of the flames. Then he turned to Beatrice.

  “What?” she faltered.

  He helped her up. “Don’t talk. Just come with me,” soothed Keane. And, in answer to the look in her eyes: “Doctor Satan? He’d dead at last. In the flames. It’s triumph for us.”

  He helped her to the curb and through the milling crowd to his coupe....

  It was the one of the few major mistakes of Keane’s life.

  “Two calibrated marks on the plunger,” Doctor Satan had said was the reviving dose of the drug. “The same as the lethal dose....”

  The revival amount had been correct: Beatrice was alive again to prove it. It did not occur to Keane that Satan might have lied about the other.

  So he did not see the red-clad figure draw back from the flames as soon as he had returned and started leading the girl from the cinder yard. He did not see Doctor Satan crawl behind a rusted pile of metal tanks, nor see, a moment later, a figure clad in conventional dark clothes emerge, leaving behind a red, Luciferian costume that would have been too conspicuous to wear where many could observe.

  “Victory,” Keane said again, with shining eyes, as he drove toward the hotel.

  But nor far from the blazing factory behind him and Beatrice, a tall figure had drawn itself up with clenched fists, and the soft voice quivered with fury as Dr. Satan Whispered:

  “Ascott Keane thinks he has killed two of us, you, my faithful servant, Girse, and myself. He shall learn his mistake. I shall bring you back, Girse, and together, we shall have proper and fitting revenge for the humiliation we have suffered at his hands. This I swear by the Devil, my master!

  * * * *

  (the ending of this story is slightly revised)

  <>

  * * * *

  THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE

  It was the middle of an early summer afternoon in Louisville. The sun bathed the streets with hot gold. People thronged the main avenue. Women shoppers streamed in and out of the stores; men hurried on business; traffic rolled in orderly haste.

  The middle of a prosaic afternoon. All seemed as it should be ...

  The town car turned onto the avenue from a side street. It was a big foreign car, speaking of great wealth. Its curtains were drawn.

  The town car stopped before a building which was under construction. The sidewalk here was railed off to prevent pedestrians on the walk from being struck by falling bricks. But as the town car halted, a man appeared from the interior of the unfinished building. He walked unobtrusively past the car.

  As he passed, one of the curtains over the car windows was raised. A shaking hand came out with a newspaper-wrapped package in it. The man from the building took the package. He walked back into the building again.

  The town car’s motor raced preparatory to going away. But before it could get into motion, another car with curtained windows swung onto the avenue. This did not stop anywhere. It slowed a little near the town car, but that was all.

  However, in the short time of its slowing, it discharged a passenger. Of the hundreds on the avenue, only a few noticed the car, a big blue sedan. Of these few, only two or three saw the passenger get out. At first, that was!

  A prosaic street, crowded with prosaic people going about their commonplace affairs ....

  And then, seemingly all at once, they began to stare at the discharged passenger. Once they had seen, they craned their necks to look again, shocked out of all commonplace, living by what their eyes were regarding.

  The person who had come from the blue sedan was a woman - a girl, rather, scarcely more than twenty. She was tall, maturely curved, strikingly lovely. She had dark hair and great dark eyes, and skin so fair that it looked snow-white in contrast to the blackness of her hair and eyes.

  She had descended from the car, run a few paces to get her balance as she hit immovable ground from a moving object, and then stood still in the middle of the avenue, with surprised drivers jamming their brakes to keep from running her down.

  For an instant she continued to stand there, in the middle of the street, as if dazed, with traffic a twin river around her. Then cars began to stop on each side of her, and cars and staring crowds began to ring her in.

  “What’s the matter with her?” a woman snapped. “Is she walking in her sleep?”

  “Might be, at that.” a man snickered beside her. “Looks like she’s got a nightie on.

  Dazedly the beautiful girl looked around at the crowds. And it could be seen that the nightgown simile was not far from the mark.

  Sheer strips of some stuff swathed her body, were draped loosely around her legs. That was all she wore, the sheer stuff through which her form could be vaguely seen as through mist.

  “What is she - a veil dancer?” snorted another man.

  The traffic cop from the corner began to force his way to the block-up in the center of the square. Like a statue swathed in mist, the girl stood in the cleared space. And now the door of the town car opened and an elderly man stumbled out. His eyes were wide with horror. He staggered toward the girl, hands outstretched as though groping his way.

  Suddenly the girl moved. She poised on one slippered foot and from the folds of gauze that covered her she drew a short, slim blade. Her voice raised in a shrill, eery incantation, the words of which could not be distinguished. She waved the sword. She began to dance.

  “A publicity gag,” someone shouted. “She’s a sword-dancer after a newspaper write-up.”

  The crowd laughed and yelled agreement. Some fool began to beat time to the girl’s slow rhythmic steps by clapping his hands. But horror was growing on the face of the elderly man from the town car. And on the face of the cop, as he came nearer through the crowd, was amazement and. something like awe.

  “It’s Jane Ivor,” he
panted suddenly. “By the saints - Jane Ivor’“

  The dancing girl whirled more rapidly, more wildly. Her great dark eyes glitters with lurid fires. She performed her sword dance in the middle of the city’s main street with more abandon.

  “That’s the girl,” shouted the man who was clapping time. “If publicity’s what you want, you’ll get it.”

  The girl seemed not to hear him - seemed not to hear or see anybody. Her supple left hand tore at her breast, and a strip of the gray gauze enfolding her came loose and floated to the ground, exposing her smooth white shoulders.