Dr Satan - [Pulp Classics 6]

by Edited By Robert Weinberg

  Standing around the room were the nine others, each in the position he or she had been in when rigidity overtook them in the roulette room. They stared wide-eyed ahead of them, motionless, expressionless. It was like walking into a waxworks museum, save that these statuesque figures were of flesh and. blood, not wax.

  “They’re all dead as far as medical tests show,” Grays said. There was awe and terror in his voice. “Yet - they’re not dead! A child could tell that at a glance. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  “Why don’t you put them to bed?” said Keane.

  “We can’t. Each of the ten seems to be in some kind of spell that makes it impossible for his body to take any but that one position. We’ve laid them down - and in a moment they’re up again and in the former position, moving like sleep-walkers, like dead things! Look.”

  He gently pulled Weems’ arm down. Slowly, it raised again till the champagne glass was near his lips. Meanwhile the man’s eyes did not even blink. He was as oblivious of the touch as if really dead.

  “Horrible!” said Chichester. “Maybe it’s some new kind of disease.”

  “I think not,” said Keane, voice soft but bleak. He looked at a night table, heaped with Jewelry, handkerchiefs, wallets, small change. “That collection?”

  “The personal effect of these people,” said Gest, wiping sweat from his pale face.

  Keane went to the pile, and sorted it over. He was struck at once by a curious lack. He couldn’t place it for an instant; then he did.

  “Their watches!” he said. “Where are they?”

  “Watches?” said Gest. “I don’t know. Hadn’t thought of it.”

  “There are ten people here,” said Keane. “And only one watch! Normally at least eight of them would have had them, including the women with their Jeweled trinkets. But there’s only one.... Do you remember who owned this, and where he wore it?”

  He picked up the watch, a man’s with no chain.

  “That’s Weems’ watch. He had it in his trousers pocket.”

  “Odd place for it,” said Keane. “I see it has stopped.”

  He wound the watch. But the little second hand did not move, and he could only turn the winding-stem a little, proving that it had not run down.

  The hands said eleven thirty-one.

  “That was the time Weems was paralyzed?” said Keane.

  Gest nodded. “Funny. His watch stopped Just when he did!”

  “Very funny,” said Keane expressionlessly. “Send this to a jeweler right away and have him find out what’s wrong with it. Now, you say your assistant manager was struck dead just as he said something about the roulette wheel?”

  “Yes,” said Gest. “It was as though this Doctor Satan were right there with us and killed him with a soundless bullet Just before he could talk.”

  Keane’s eyes glittered.

  “I’d like to look over the roulette room.”

  “The police are here,” said Grays, turning from his phone.

  Keane stared at Gest. “Keep them out of the roulette room for a few minutes.”

  He strode out to the elevators...

  * * * *

  His first concern, after locking himself into the room where nine people had been stricken with something which, if it persisted, was worse than any death, was the thing the assistant manager had mentioned before death hit him. The roulette wheel.

  He bent over this, with a frown of concentration on his face. And his quick eyes caught at once a thing another person might have overlooked for quite a while.

  The wheel was dish-shaped, as all roulette wheels are. In its rounded bottom were numbered slots, where the little ivory ball was to end its journey and proclaim gambler’s luck.

  But the little ball was not in one of the bottom slots!

  The tiny ivory sphere was half up the rounded side of the wheel, like a pea clinging alone high up on the slant of a dish!

  An exclamation came from Keane’s lips. He stared at the ball. What in heaven’s name kept it from rolling down the steep slant and into the rounded bottom? Why would a sphere stay on a slant? It was as if a bowl of water had been tilted - and the water’s surface had taken and retained the tilt of the vessel it was in instead of remaining level!

  He lifted the ball from the sloping side of the wheel. It came away freely, but with an almost intangible resistance, as if an unseen rubber hand held it. When he released it, it went back to the slope. He rolled it down to the bottom of the wheel. Released, it rolled back up to its former position, like water running up-hill.

  Keane felt a chill touch him. The laws of physics broken! A ball clinging to a slant instead of rolling down it! What dark secret of nature had Doctor Satan mastered now?

  But the query was not entirely unanswered in his mind. Already he was getting a vague hint of it. And a little later the hint was broadened.

  The phone rang. He answered it.

  “Mr. Keane? This is Doctor Grays. The autopsy on Wilson has been begun, and already a queer thing has been disclosed. It’s about his heart.”

  “Yes,” said Keane, gripping the phone.

  “His heart is ruptured in a hundred places - as though a little bomb had exploded in it! Don’t ask me why, because I can’t even give a theory. It’s unique in medical history.”

  “I won’t ask you why,” Keane said slowly. “I think - in a little while – I’ll tell you why.”

  He hung up and strode toward the door. But at the roulette table he paused and stared at the wheel with his gray eyes icily blazing.

  It seemed to him the wheel had moved a little!

  He had unconsciously lined up the weirdly clinging ball with the knob on the outer door, as he examined it awhile ago. Now, as he stood in the same place, the ball was not quite in line. As if the wheel had rotated a fraction of an inch!

  “Yes, I think that’s it,” he whispered, with his face a little paler than usual.

  And a little later the words changed in his brain to: I know that’s it. A fiend’s genius....This is the most dangerous thing Doctor Satan has yet mastered!”

  He was talking on the phone to the jewler to whom Weems’ watch had been sent.

  “What did you do to that watch?” the jeweler said irritably.

  “Why?” parried Keane.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. And yet it simply won’t go. And I can’t make it go.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it at all?”

  “As far as I can find out - no.”

  * * * *

  Keane hung up. He had been studying for the dozenth time the demand note Doctor Satan had written the officials:

  “Gentlemen of the Blue Bay Development: This is to request that you pay me the sum of one million, eight hundred and two thousand, five hundred and forty dollars and forty-eight cents at a time and place to be specified later. As a sample of what will happen if you disregard this note, I shall strike at once at one of your guests, Mathew Weems, within a few minutes after you have read this. I guarantee that disaster and horror shall be the chief, though uninvited, guests at your opening unless you comply with my request. Mathew Weems shall be only the first if you do not signify by one a.m. whether or not you will meet my demand. DOCTOR SATAN.”

  Keane gave the note back to Blue Bay’s police chief, who fumbled uncertainly with it for a moment and then stuck it in his pocket. Normally a competent man, he was completely out of his depth here.

  One man with a heart that seemed to have been exploded internally; ten people who were dead, yet lived, and who stood or sat like frozen statues....

  He looked pleadingly at Ascott Keane, whom he had never heard of but who wore authority and competence like a mantle. But Keane said nothing to him.

  “An odd extortion amount,” he said to Gest. “One million, eight hundred and two thousand, five hundred and forty dollars and forty-eight cents! Why not an even number?”

  He was talking more to himself than to the president of Blue Bay.
But Gest answered readily.

  “That happens to be the precise sum of the cash reserve of Blue Bay Development.”

  Keane glanced at him sharply. “Is your financial statement made public?”

  Gest shook his head. “It’s strictly confidential. Only the bank, and ourselves, know that cash reserve figure. I can’t imagine how this crook who signs himself Doctor Satan found it out.”

  * * * *

  4. THE SHELL

  The house was serene and beautiful on the bay shore. The sun beat back from its white walls, and glanced in at the windows of the rear terrace. It shone on a grotesque figure there; a man with the torso of a giant, but with no legs - a figure that hitched itself along on the backs of calloused hands, using muscular arms as a means of locomotion.

  But this figure was not as bizarre as the one to be found within the house, behind shades drawn to keep out any prying eyes.

  Here, in a dim room identifiable as a library, a tall man stood beside a flat-topped desk. But all that could be told of the figure was that it was male. For it was cloaked from heels to head in a red mantle. The hands were covered by red rubber gloves. The face was concealed by a red mask, and over the head was drawn a red skull-cap with two small projections in mocking imitation of Lucifer’s horns.

  Doctor Satan!

  In the red-gloved hands was a woman’s gold-link purse. Doctor Satan opened it. From the purse he drew a thing that defied analysis and almost defied description.

  It was of metal. It seemed to be a model in gleaming steel of a problem in solid geometry; it was an angular small cage, an inch wide by perhaps three and a half inches square. That is, at first it seemed square. But a closer look revealed that no two corresponding sides of the little cage were quite parallel. Each angle, each line, was subtly different.

  Doctor Satan pointed it at the library wall. The end he pointed was a trifle wider than the end heeled in the palm of his hand. On this wider end was one bar that was fastened only at one end. The red-covered fingers moved this bar experimentally, slowly, so that it formed a slightly altered angle with the sides.

  The library wall was mist, then nothingness. The street outside was not a street. A barren plain stood there, strewn with rocky shale, like a landscape on the moon.

  The little bar was moved back, and the library wall was once more in place. A chuckle came from the red-masked lips; a sound that would have made a hearer shiver a little. Then it changed to a snarl.

  “Perfect! But again Ascott Keane interferes. This time I’ve got to succeed in removing him. An exploded heart....”

  He put the mysterious small cage back in the gold-link purse, and opened the desk drawer. From it he took a business letterhead. It was a carbon copy, with figures on it.

  “Bostiff....”

  On the rear terrace the legless giant stirred at the call. He moved on huge arms to the door and into the library...

  In his tower suite, Keane paced back and forth with his hands clasped behind him. Beatrice Dale watched him with quiet, intelligent eyes. He was talking, not to her, but to himself; listing aloud the points uncovered since his arrival here.

  “A few second after talking with Madame Sin, Weems was stricken. Also, the lady with the odd name was seen coming from the roulette room at about the time when a party entered and found the croupier and eight persons turned from people into statues. But she was nowhere around when Wilson died in the conference room.”

  He frowned. “The watches were taken from all the sufferers from this strange paralysis, save Weems. By whom? Madame Sin? Weems’ watch is absolutely in good order, but it won’t run. The ball on the roulette wheels stays on a slant instead of rolling down into a slot as it should when the wheel is motionless. But the wheel doesn’t seem to be quite motionless. It apparently moved a fraction of an inch in the forty-five minutes or so that I was in the room.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t touch It, and set it moving?” said Beatrice. “Those wheels are delicately balanced.”

  “Not that delicately! I barely brushed it with my fingers as I examined the ivory ball. No, I didn’t move it. But I’m sure it did move...”

  There was a tap at the door He went to it. Gest was in the corridor.

  “Here’s the master key,” he said, extending a key to Keane. “I got it from the manager. But - you’re sure it is necessary to enter Madame Sin’s rooms?”

  “Very,” said Keane.

  “She is in now, said the president. “Could you - just to avoid possible scandal - inasmuch as you don’t intend to knock before entering - - -”

  He glanced at Beatrice. Keane smiled.

  “I’ll have Miss Dale go in first. If Madame Sin is undressed or - entertaining - Miss Dale can apologize and retreat. But I am sure Madame Sin will be unaware of intrusion. In spite of the conviction of your key clerk that she is in, I am quite sure that, at least figuratively, she is out.”

  “Figuratively out?” echoed Gest. “I don’t understand.”

  “You will later - unless this is my fated time to lose in the fight I have made against the devil who calls himself Doctor Satan. Are Chichester and Kroner in the hotel?”

  Gest shook his head.

  “Kroner is in the Turkish bath two blocks down the street. Chichester went home ten minutes ago.”

  “Madame Sin will be unaware of intrusion,” Keane repeated enigmatically and with seeming irrelevance.

  He turned to Beatrice, and the two went to the woman’s room.

  * * * *

  Keane softly closed Madame Sin’s hall door behind him after Beatrice had entered first and reported that the woman was alone and in what seemed a deep sleep. At first, with a stifled scream, she had called out that Madame Sin was dead; then she had pronounced it sleep...

  Keane went at once to the central figure of the living-room; the body of Madame Sin, on a chaise-lounge near the window. The woman was in blue negligee, with her shapely legs bare and her arms and throat pale ivory against the blue silk. Her eyes were not quite closed. Her breast rose and fell, very slowly, almost like the breathing of a chloroformed person.

  Keane touched her bare shoulder. She did not stir. There was no alteration of the deep, slow breathing. He lifted one of her eyelids. The eye beneath stared blindly at him, the lid went nearly closed again at the cessation of this touch.

  “Trance,” Kean said. “And the most profound one I have ever seen. It’s about what I had expected.”

  “I’ve seen her somewhere before,” said Beatrice suddenly.

  Keane nodded. “You have. She is a movie extra, working now and then for the Long Island Picture Company. But I’m not much Interested in this beautiful shell. For that’s all she is at the moment - a shell, now emptied and unhuman. We’ll look around. You give me your impressions as they come to you, and we’ll see if they match mine.

  They went to the bedroom of the apartment. Bedroom was like living-room in that it was impersonal, a standard chamber in a large hotel. But this seemed almost incredibly impersonal] There was not one picture, not one feminine touch. In the bath there were scarcely any toilet articles; and in the closet there was only an overnight bag and a suitcase by way of luggage, with neither of them entirely emptied of their contents.

  “One impression I get is that these rooms have not been lived in even for twenty-four hours’.” said Beatrice.

  Keane nodded. “If Madame Sin retreated here only to fall into sleep and did not wake again till it was time for her to venture out, the rooms would have just this look. And I think that is exactly what she has done!

  Beatrice looked deftly through Madame Sin’s meager wardrobe. Keane searched dresser and table and bureau drawers. He wasn’t looking for anything definite, just something that might prove the final straw to point him definitely toward the incredible goal he was more and more convinced was near.

  He found it in the top of the woman’s suitcase.

  His fingers were tense as he unfolded a business letterhead. It was a car
bon copy, filled with figures. And a glance told him what it was.

  It was a duplicate of the financial statement of the Blue Bay Development Company - that statement which was held highly confidential, and which no one was supposed to have seen save the three Blue Bay officials, and a bank officer or two.

  Keane strode to Madame Sin’s phone, and got Gest to the wire.

  “Gest, can you tell if Kroner and Chichester are still out of the hotel?”

  Gest’s voice came back promptly. “Kroner is here with me now. I guess Chichester is still at his home on Ocean Boulevard; at any rate he isn’t in the hotel - - -”