* * * *
Arrogantly, imitating Doctor Satan’s stride, Keane went toward then. And he saw again, in every eye, the glazed look he had seen in the eyes of the policeman and the man who looked like a walking skeleton. Doctor Satan was taking no chances of disaffection or insubordination among the rabble he had chosen to set his evil underground house in order. He had made each of them a slave to his hypnotic will.
“Somewhere back in ... the cave system... my master, Doctor Satan, stays.”
So had had the man Keane had come to the caves with. Keane, not glancing at the murderous-looking men who stood at attention, stalked past them and toward the far end of the big cave. But as he went, his mind wrestled with a thought as breathtaking as it was monstrous.
So much like a real Hell, this place looked! So much like actual, inhuman demons appeared the dregs of criminal humanity working in it!
Doctor Satan masqueraded as Satan. Yes, but was it all masquerade? Was it not conceivable that - Lucifer being only a personification and title for the evil passions of men? Doctor Satan was actually Lucifer, or as near to it as a being could ever be?
Keane shrugged the thought aside. True or fanciful, it was beside the point; the point being the destruction of the master criminal who had given rise to it.
He got to the end of the big cave at last, and squeezed through a rock opening barely large enough to admit his lean but powerful body, into another smaller cave. And with his entrance into this he instantly leaped sideways and behind a big stalagmite. For in this second cave was everything he had come here to find.
Tensely, cautiously, he peered around the concealing rock cone....
* * * *
To one side of the cave, which was roughly circular and about fifty feet in diameter, was a legless giant who supported his torso on muscular arms as big as most men’s thighs. The man’s stupid, cruel eyes blinked toward the center of the cave. This was Bostiff, Satan’s main lieutenant in crime since Keane had blasted his other lieutenant, Girse, out of existence. He was looking at two figures in the center of the place.
One of these was a boy of nineteen or so, dressed in expensive clothes which were now wrinkled and stained. The boy’s face expressed terror beyond that tolerable to sanity. His wild eyes glared at the figure that faced him with the fascination in them expressed in the eyes of a small animal hypnotized by a snake.
And this other figure was that of Doctor Satan himself.
Tall and arrogant it towered over the boy, who was Harold Ivor, brother of the girl who had been left, a maniac, on the main street of Louisville. It was garbed in red from head to foot and, point for point, was as like the red-clad figure of Keane, concealed behind the stalagmite, as a reflection of that figure in a mirror.
Only in one detail did the two identical figures differ. The eyes peering through the holes in the mask covering Keane’s face were steel-gray. The eyes of the figure towering over the boy were black, lurid, infernal.
“Who am I?” Doctor Satan rasped to the boy.
Harold Ivor, panting, glaring helplessly into the arrogant black eyes, replied: “You are Lucifer.
“You truly believe that?”
“I truly believe that.”
Keane, behind his concealing pillar, felt glacial rage flood through him. He had got here just in time to witness Doctor Satan’s method of driving his victims mad. He had turned Jane Ivor into a maniac. Now he was doing the same to Harold Ivor. Then the boy would be released in the town as Jane had been - a second horrible object-lesson as to what happened to the children of the rich if their parents did not pay to prevent it.
“Whom do you serve?” rasped Doctor Satan to the lad.
“I serve you, Satanic Majesty. And I will kill your enemies.”
There was a silence, while the black eyes of the masked figure stared into the glazed, mad eyes of the boy.
“Bostiff,” Doctor Satan said.
The legless giant swung his body toward his master, using the calloused backs of his hands as feet.
“Take him to his prison. Another session like this and he will be ready for release.”
“Yes, master.”
Bostiff seized the boy’s hand, propelled him toward an opening in the cave. He dragged himself after. The two went through the opening.
The red-robed figure in the center of the cave was alone.
* * * *
The red-robed figure behind the stalagmite near the door, drew up to its full height, then stepped out of its place of concealment.
Doctor Satan had been staring at the opening through which Bostiff had gone with Harold Ivor. How he whirled like an uncoiling spring, and stared at Keane. And in his black eyes was a sudden madness of surprise, hate and rage.
Keane drew near him. He stood before Satan, and the result was fantastic.
Two Satans stood there; two Lucifers, clad in red, red-masked, with Luciferian horns. The Devil and his double! Crimson twins, with death in the eyes of each.
Then Doctor Satan stepped toward Keane with right hand clenched.
“Keane!” he grated. “Again! At every turn I find you - squarely in my path! But this time that path shall lead ahead without obstacles, to limitless power.”
“No, said Keane softly, “this time the path shall be blocked if my dead body must be used to block it!”
* * * *
5. The Scarlet Twain
Doctor Satan took a step nearer the figure so closely resembling his own. His black eyes played sardonically over Keane’s red cloak.
“So,” he grated, “in order to get past my men you imitated my trappings. You made a mockery of the masquerade it amuses me to wear.”
Keane shrugged.
“It seemed the easiest way. I was sure you had many serving you here. I didn’t want to kill them. It seemed easier to get past them by trickery.”
“And having passed them,” said Doctor Satan, “what then?”
Keane’s mask stirred to the deep breath he drew.
“This,” he said softly. “A thing I think even you are unfamiliar with, Doctor Satan. You will learn of it shortly. And it will be the last thing you ever will learn about!”
His hand went under the red cloak. It came out of his pocket with the weapon he had carried from the hotel - his one weapon, on which he was staking everything.
He opened his fingers and let Doctor Satan see the egg-shaped thing lying on his palm. It was smooth, perhaps two and a half inches long by two inches through. It seemed to be made of gray vitrum.
“Long ago,” Keane said, “there were inquiring minds more versed in their own science than our present-day scientists, with their research laboratories and fine equipment, are in theirs. That was the science of Black Art. This is one of the results. I found it in the ruins of a Druid monastery in England.”
Doctor Satan stared at the thing in Keane’s hand. And as he stared, his black eyes lost their arrogance and became filled with the shadow of dawning fear.
“Where did you...get your knowledge of what this is?” he breathed, voice thick. “Why, it is...it is the—”
He stopped, and a silence like that of the grave held the cavern.
“It is the Blue Death of Saint Sartius,” said Keane. “It was first used in Rome. Then its secret was forgotten till the black ages, when a Druid monk rediscovered it. I have read records of the death of everyone in a certain town in England. The records stated that an odd sort of plague was responsible, but intimated that death was caused by some of these.”
His fingers clenched over the vitreous shell.
“Sarlfolk,” whispered Doctor Satan hoarsely. In his black eyes was a fear he had never shown before. “I have read the records, too. The town of Sarlfolk - depopulated overnight and never occupied again - But that can’t be the Blue Death you hold In your hand! Its secret was again lost when England was still a wilderness with men like animals populating it.”
Keane’s masked lips moved in a bleak smile. He raised the egg-sh
aped thing in his hand.
“You’ll find out,” he said.
And he threw the thing with all his force at the feet of Doctor Satan!
* * * *
Satan screamed. It was the first scream of terror that had ever come from the shielded, perpetually hidden lips. He leaped back from the object that had burst like a tiny bomb save that no explosion accompanied it. But quick as he was, he had acted too late.
Keane had thrown it so that it burst to pieces between him and the only two openings from the cave - the one into which Bostiff had taken Harold Ivor, and the one through which Keane had come. And with the instant of its bursting, the vitreous egg had emitted that which rose as a barrier to those exits.
From the broken shell a bluish, heavy mist rose rapidly and moved toward Satan as though acting with a will and intelligence of its own.
Another scream tore from Satan’s shielded lips. He was probably the only man on earth, aside from Keane, versed enough in the occult to know what terror it was that crawled toward him. But he knew well enough!
The bluish mist spread with the rapidity of flame devouring straw. It poured from the broken shell like a rolling wall. And it formed in a half-circle around Satan, forcing him back toward the rock wall of the cavern.
In Keane’s eyes was the glitter of triumph long delayed.
“You’ll know now some of the anguish you’ve caused others,” he said savagely. “You’ll know some of the torment endured by the men you’ve killed - some of the mental torture being undergone at this moment by the parents of the children you threatened. I could feel sorry for anyone facing the Blue Death of Saint Sartius, but not for you.”
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 egglike 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 which still showed a little reddish through the blue crust over it - the form of Doctor Satan.
* * * *
Terror-filled, dulling bleak 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 t
hat 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---”
Dr Satan - [Pulp Classics 6] Page 11