However, there was mental agony far exceeding any physical pain. He had no way of being told it, but he knew the truth: If these clawing hands managed to rip away entirely the thought-mantle that clothed his spirit, if they managed to strip him of his conception of himself, then he could never go back the way he came. He would be really dead, with no link between him and the hulk of himself that sat before the empty water glass on the ebony desk.
“Take him!” Doctor Satan was exhorting the host he would assuredly join when it was his turn really to die. “Strip his soul! Keep him here!”
No real substance, but mist-stuff that could be shredded and torn as misty veils are torn! Keane struggled in the hideous current of writhing, clawing, venomous forms. Doctor Satan was near him. He got to the red-cloaked form.
He had but half an arm left, though like a man in a nightmare, he could look at it and be appalled and yet feel no pain. But the hand remained on this arm, the whole underside of which had been clawed away. That hand drove for Satan’s throat, and found it.
Perhaps it was because Keane was not really dead, and that hence his materialization had a shade more actuality than those of the writhing things about them. Perhaps it was that his hate of the man, whose cruel joke it was to act as Lucifer as well as costume himself in Luciferian manner, was strong enough to take some tangible form here in a place of intangibility. At any rate, Keane’s one crippled hand did more damage than all the clawing hands of all the clawing things that tore at him.
Like a ball of mist on a mist-column, Satan’s head wavered and seemed about to leave its body as Keane’s hand grasped at the shadowy throat.
“Take him!“ Satan exhorted, frenziedly, fearfully, to the crawling throng. “Take him - - -”
His own red-gloved hands were wrenching and tearing at Keane’s mangled wrist. But they could not tear it away.
“Take him---”
Something was happening to Keane.
Suddenly, impossibly, he was beginning to feel pain. It was as though Keanes’ body was being broken and every atom of flesh on it was crushed. As the pain swept down on him in even-increasing waves, the horrible gray shapes faded from his perception - as did the red-clad form of Doctor Satan. The luminous gray nothingness in which he had moved for a unguessable length of time (it might have been a minute or a year or a century) began to fade too.
There was Satan’s thwarted, raging command, “Take him - - -” There was a last vengeful tightening of his hand on Satan’s throat. Then, the pain mounted over everything else and robbed him of consciousness. ...
* * * *
A voice was calling to him. A girl’s voice, frantic, urgent.
“Ascott! Ascott!”
He tried to open his eyes, and could not for a moment. He was shuddering, and felt clammy with perspiration. He had just undergone some terrible ordeal, but for a little while longer he was spared memory of it.
“Ascott! Darling ---”
He knew that voice. Yes....the Voice of Beatrice Dale....yes....
With an enormous effort he opened his eyes. He saw the polished ebony of his desk-top within inches of his face; saw his hands.
His hands! He gasped, and stared at them as memory returned. But his hands were all right. He had them both, and neither was torn or mutilated. Now were his arms.
“Nightmare!” he muttered.
But he knew better than that. He had undergone an actual experience in an actual place: the land of the dead. Now - - -
He sat up. He had been slumped over his desk with his hands supporting his head while his intelligence roamed afar from his body under the influence of Marxman’s antidote. But now he sat up - and saw Beatrice’s white face.
“Ascott!” Thank God. You’ve been unconscious - dead, from all appearances - for an hour over the twelve the drug was supposed to stop working! I was going to call a doctor, the police, anything! But now - -
“Now, I’m all right,” said Keane, breathing heavily. “All right - now - nightmare I went through.”
Beatrice bathed his clammy face, gave him adrenalin, ministered to him with all the affection she kept from expressing verbally for him. And then, when he was breathing normally and, while pale, seemed all right again, she said:
“Did you - did you find Doctor Satan, Ascott?”
Keane’s nostrils thinned.
“I did. I got him in time. And - he almost got me. He calls himself Doctor Satan - and there is a hell, Beatrice, and at his command I was almost kept in it! I wonder... Many a circumstance is shaped apparently by coincidence, and many a mortal unconsciously acts in a way to bear out literally the conceptions of religion. An actual hell....I wonder if our red-cloaked friend really could be an incarnation of the evil force we’ve always called Satan, though he himself thinks he is only acting a part?”
“Drink this,” said Beatrice, handing him a cup of coffee with the practicality of the female. “Ascott, did Doctor Satan come back to life too?”
“I’m afraid he did,” sighed Keane.
“Then everything was useless? Satan can return whenever he pleases, and get the secrets of the dead as he did before?”
Keane shook his head.
“That, at least, I think we can stop. There is a hell, and creatures in it like maimed demons. Then it follows that there must be beings in the land of the dead who were decent in life and are so in death. And it also must follow that they outnumber the maimed.”
He stared at the coffee, making no effort to drink it.
“I was almost kept from returning to life by the things from hell. I think Doctor Satan might be kept from returning to life by the decent dead. Anyway, I’m going back, now, to see my father and band the dead against Satan if he should ever return. Go to Marxman’s assistant and get another dose of the antidote.”
“For God’s sake, Ascott -- -”
Keane stared at her. His eyes were as grim as death, and as impersonal.
“Get more of the drug, please, Beatrice.”
Beatrice Dale’s lips parted, closed again without uttering words. She turned and left him.
<
* * * *
MASK OF DEATH
1. THE DREAD PARALYSIS
On one of the most beautiful bays of the Maine cost rested the town that fourteen months before had existed on an architect’s drawing-board.
Around the almost landlocked harbor were beautiful homes, bathing-beaches, parks. On the single Main Street were model stores. Small hotels and inns were scattered on the outskirts. Streets were laid, radiating from the big hotel in the center of town like spokes from a hub. There was a waterworks and a landing field; a power house and a library.
It looked like a year-round town, but it wasn’t. Blue Bay, it was called; and it was only a summer resort....
Only? It was the last word in summer resorts! The millionaires backing it had spent eighteen million dollars on it. They had placed it on a fine road to New York. They ran planes and busses to it. They were going to clean up five hundred per cent on their investment, in real estate deals and rentals.
On this, its formal opening night, the place was wide open. In every beautiful summer home all lights were on, whether the home in question was tenanted or not. The stores were open, whether or not customers were available. The inns and small hotels were gay with decorations.
But it was at the big hotel at the hub of the town that the gayeties attendant on such a stupendous opening night were at their most complete.
Every room and suite was occupied. The lobby was crowded. Formally dressed guests strolled the promenade, and tried fruitlessly to gain admission to the already overcrowded roof garden.
Here, with tables crowded to capacity and emergency waiters trying to give all the deluxe service required, the second act of the famous Blue Bay floor show was going on.
In the small dance floor at the center of the tables was a dander. She was doing a slave dance, trying to free herself from chains. The spotlight was on;
the full moon, pouring its silver down on the open roof, added its blue beams.
The dancer was excellent. The spectators were enthralled. One elderly man, partially bald, a little too stout, seemed particularly engrossed. He sat alone at a ringside table, and had been shown marked deference all during the evening. For he was Mathew Weems, owner of a large block of stock in the Blue Bay summer resort development, and a very wealthy man.
Weems was leaning forward over his table, staring at the dancer with sensual lips parted. And she, quite aware of his attention and his wealth, was outdoing herself.
A prosaic scene, one would have said. Opening night of a resort deluxe; wealthy widower concentrating on a dancer’s whirling concentrating on a dancer’s whirling bare body; people applauding carelessly. But the scene was to become far indeed from prosaic - and the cause of its change was to be Weems.
* * * *
Among the people standing at the roof-garden entrance and wishing they could crowd in, there was a stir. A woman walked among them.
She was tall, slender but delicately voluptuous, with a small, shapely head on a slender, exquisite throat. The pallor of her clear skin and the largeness of her intensely dark eyes made her face look like a flower on an ivory stalk. She was gowned in cream-yellow, with the curves of a perfect body revealed as her graceful walk molded her frock against her.
Many people looked at her, and then, questioningly, at one another. She had been registered at the hotel only since late afternoon, but already she was an object of speculation. The register gave her name as Madame Sin, and the knowing ones had hazarded the opinion that she, and her name, were publicity features to help along with the resort opening news.
Madame Sin entered the roof garden, with the assurance of one who has a table waiting, and walked along the edge of the small dance floor. She moved silently, obviously not to distract attention from the slave dance. But as she walked, eyes followed her instead of the dancer’s beautiful moves.
She passed Weems’ table. With the eagerness of a man who has formed a slight acquaintance and would like to make it grow, Weems rose from his table and bowed. The woman known as Madame Sin smiled a little. She spoke to him, with her exotic dark eyes seeming to mock. Her slender hands moved restlessly with the gold-link purse she carried. Then she went on, and Weems sat down again at his table, with his eyes resuming their contented scrutiny of the dancer’s convolutions.
The dancer swayed toward him, struggling gracefully with her symbolic chains. Weems started to raise a glass of champagne abstractedly toward his lips. He stopped, with his hand half-way up, eyes riveted on the dancer. The spotlight caught the fluid in his upraised glass and flicked out little lights in answer.
The dancer whirled on. And Weems stayed as he was, staring at the spot where she had been, glass poised half-way between the table and his face, like a man suddenly frozen - or gripped by an abrupt thought.
The slave-girl whirled on. But now as she turned, she looked more often in Weem’s direction, and a small frown of bewilderment began to gather on her forehead. For Weems was not moving strangely, somehow disquietingly, he was staying Just the same.
Several people caught the frequency of her glance, and turned their eyes in the same direction. There were amused smiles at the sight of the stout, wealthy man seated there with his eyes wide and unblinking, and his hand raised half-way between table and lips. But soon those who had followed the dancer’s glance saw, too. Weems was holding that queer attitude too long.
The dancer finished her almost completed number and whirled to the dressing-room door. The lights went out. And now everyone near Weems was looking at him, while those farther away were standing in order to see the man.
He was still sitting as he had been, as if frozen or paralyzed, with staring eyes glued to the spot where the dancer had been, and with hand half-raised holding the glass.
* * * *
A friend got up quickly and hastened to the man’s table.
“Weems,” he said sharply, resting his hand on the man’s shoulder.
Weems made no sign that he had heard, or had felt the touch. On and on he sat there, staring at nothing, hand half-raised to drink.
“Weems!” Sharp and frightened the friend’s voice sounded. And all on the roof garden heard it. For all were now silent, staring with gradually more terrified eyes at Weems.
The friend passed his hand slowly haltingly before Weems’ staring eyes. And those eyes did not blink.
“Weems - for God’s sake - what’s the matter with you?”
The friend was trembling now, with growing horror on his face as he sensed something here beyond his power to comprehend. Hardly knowing what he was doing, following only an instinct of fear at the unnatural attitude, he put his hand on Weems’ half-raised arm and lowered it to the table. The arm went down like a mechanical thing. The champagne glass touched the table.
A woman at the next table screamed and got to her feet with a rasp of her chair that sounded like a think shriek of fear. For Weems’ arm, when it was released, went slowly up again to the name position it had assumed when the man suddenly ceased becoming an animate being, and became a thing like a statue clad in dinner clothes with a glass in its hand.
“Weems!” yelled the friend.
And then the orchestra began to play, loudly, with metallic cheerfulness, as the head waiter sensed bizarre tragedy and moved to conceal it as such matters are always concealed at such occasions.
Weems sat on, eyes wide, hand half-raised to lips. He continued to hold that posture when four men carried him to the elevators and down to the hotel doctor’s suite. He was still holding it when they sat him down in an easy chair, bent forward as though a table were still before him, eyes staring, hand half-raised to drink. The champagne glass was empty now, with its contents spotting his clothes and the roof garden carpets, spilled when the four had borne him from the table. But it was still clenched in his rigid hand, and no effort to get it from his oddly set fingers was successful....
* * * *
The festivities of the much-heralded opening night went on all over the new-born town of Blue Bay. On the roof garden were several hundred people who were still neglecting talk, drinking and dancing while their startled minds reviewed the strange thing they had seen; but aside from their number, the celebrants were having a careless good time, with no thought of danger in their minds.
However, there was no sign of gayety in the tower office suite atop the mammoth Blue Bay Hotel and just two floors beneath the garden. The three officers of the Blue Bay Company sat in there, and in their faces was frenzy.
“What in the world are we going to do?” bleated Chichester, thin, nervous, dry-skinned, secretary and treasurer of the company. “Weems is the biggest stockholder. He is nationally famous. His attack of illness here on the very night of opening will give us publicity so unfavorable that it might put Blue Bay in the red for months. You know how a disaster can sometimes kill a place.”
“Most unfortunate,” sighed heavy-set, paunchy Martin Gest, gnawing his lip. Gest was president of the company.
“Unfortunate, hell!” snapped Kroner, vice president. Kroner was a self-made man, slightly overcolored, rather loud, with dinner clothes cut a little too modishly. “It’s curtains if anything more should happen.”
“Hasn’t the doctor found out yet what’s the matter with Weems?” quavered Chichester.
Kroner swore. “You heard the last report, same as the rest of us. Doctor Grays has never seen anything like it. Weems seems to be paralyzed; yet there are none of the symptoms of paralysis save lack of movement. There is no perceptible heart-beat - yet he certainly isn’t dead; the complete absence of rigor mortis and the fact that there is a trace of blood circulation prove that. He simply stays in that same position. When you move arm or hand, it moves slowly back to the same position again on being released. He has no reflex response, doesn’t apparently hear or feel or see.”
“Like catalepsy,” sighed
Gest.
Kroner nodded and moistened his feverish lips.
“Just like catalepsy. Only it isn’t. Grays swears to that. But what it is, he can’t say.”
Chichester fumbled in his pocket.
“You two laughed at me this evening when I got worried about getting that note. You talked me down again a few minutes ago. But I’m telling you once more, I believe there’s a connection. I believe whoever wrote the note really has made Weems like he is - not that the note was penned by a crank and that Weem’s illness is coincidence.”
“Nonsense!” said Gest. “The note was either written by a madman, or by some crook who adopted a crazy, melodramatic name.”
Dr Satan - [Pulp Classics 6] Page 15