by Norvell Page
But blood and sea-water, as media of life, are separated by a million million years of evolution—and it was those millions of years that had slipped from the heritage of Mrs. Purvins!
Either the phenomenon was inherent in those strange puckered markings which had been unlike ordinary cancer—or else, he—Dr. Skull—had created an atavism!
Dr. Skull rushed back to Ward Seven. Surgery couldn't—but it must have been his own surgery, his clean simple excision of an cancerous growth. Yet what strange, eerie quirk of the laws of chance had upset in this woman a balance older than the oldest mountain ranges . . . ?
He brushed past the curtains which still veiled Mrs. Purvins from the rest of Ward Seven. And then he paused, some deep-seated instinct muffled the cry in his throat. . . .
Mrs. Purvins' mouth was fastened like a suction pump on the nurse's bosom, and in the staring grey eyes there was stark, maddened hunger!
Dr. Skull seized his patient's shoulders, his muscular fingers pulled against that sucking, intractable force even as he gasped at the hideous strength of those hungry lips. . . . Then, with a soft whoosh, he pulled her clear.
The nurse dropped like a dead weight, with a three-inch circle of raw muscle bleeding over her heart, and even more terrifying in its implications, he saw the shredded, torn remnants of part of her uniform on the floor!
The Thing that had been his patient turned its shining unhuman eyes on the doctor. Suddenly it reared—not on its legs, but with a swift upward surge that seemed to involve every molecule of matter in its body. He felt the white surgeon's jacket torn from him as though it were cheesecloth, and suddenly he understood why the nurse had been unable to give alarm when she had been attacked.
The Thing's clammy hand slapped against his mouth, jammed into his throat, nearly suffocating him, while, with the swiftness of a striking snake, that terrible mouth fastened on his shoulder, its suction rending his skin, tearing with intolerable pain at the muscular flesh beneath.
He lunged desperately with arms and legs—felt himself free, and gasped for air. He cried out then, trying to call for help as his staring eyes saw his erstwhile patient rear up at the window, and with a peculiarly undulating movement slip outside. He staggered after it, his fingers clutching the sill as the Thing descended the fire-escape with unbelievable rapidity. . . . And then he saw something else that momentarily caused him to forget his pain, and his horror.
As the Thing passed the third floor, a snakily prehensile arm whirled a net from the window, trapped the creature that had been Mrs. Purvins, and pulled her back inside the hospital.
And that, he knew, was one of the windows opening from the maternity ward!
He heard himself shouting orders to the internes who were streaming into the curtained enclosure. The room was swaying crazily about him, but someone had to look after the young nurse who was lying unconscious on the floor. And someone had to capture the monster that a short while ago had been his patient, Mrs. Purvins; someone had to capture and kill the monstrous thing that had trapped her.
One of the internes was applying a hasty dressing to his shoulder wound when Dr. Borden, head of the hospital, was suddenly and excitedly among them.
Borden cried, "What's this about?"
Dr. Skull didn't answer, but he felt Borden's restraining hand on his arm as he lunged forward.
"Come along, Doctor!" he gasped, "We've got to get—to the— maternity ward!"
He leaned dizzily against Borden in the corridor, struggling to retain consciousness in the descending elevator. The car came to a stop at the third floor.
Skull started out, but a human form slammed into him with stunning impact. He felt his knees folding, felt darkness sweeping over him, and Dr. Borden's grip relaxing on his arm.
Desperately he twisted his body, even as he began to fall—through the humming, drumming darkness that was closing over him he saw Borden struggling—not in the grip of a monster, but of some human adversary. A knife glinted in the hand of Borden's attacker.
His own hand stabbed downward, almost reflexively, and his fingers grasped the small automatic which he carried with him on night-calls about the slum districts of the city. He hardly knew he had pressed the trigger, but there was a deafening explosion in the clean white corridor, and the man who had been grappling with Borden slumped to the floor.
Incredulously, Skull stared at the man he had shot, as Borden shouted: "Do you know this man, Doctor?" Nor did Skull miss the vitriolic accusation in the hospital chief's voice.
At last, Skull nodded. "The—the husband of my patient—Henry Purvins. He tried to kill you, didn't he?"
"Does it occur to you that he might have had a grievance?" Borden asked coldly. "After what you did to his wife—Look!"
Skull's eyes followed Borden's pointing finger, and he saw internes wheeling a stretcher out of the maternity ward—a stretcher on which something formless and gelid struggled frantically against sheets that tied it down—sheets covered with the pale pink compound that had passed for blood in the veins of Mrs. Purvins.
Borden, with almost venomous deliberation, went on, "You did that to her. . . . And now, you try to silence a husband's reasonable indignation by murder! Doctor, is it your duty to create malformations, and to kill?"
Chapter Two
The Skull Killer
SKULL'S EYES TRAVELED from Borden's face to those of the three internes who held him; to the nurses who stood about, almost hysterically tense, and the white-jacketed orderlies who bent over that body on the floor.
In the eyes of his accusers he read a completely unreasoning hatred—and something more! Behind the irises of everyone of them, with the exception of Borden, he saw flickering specks of color. . . . And he recognized in that color the mark of insanity! He had seen it before in human eyes. . . .
Again he looked at the face of the man he had shot. Even in death, the gaping unseeing eyes had that unearthly purplish glint. . . . Dr. Skull remembered that even Mrs. Purvins had warned him of her husband's "oddness." Oddness? Most damnable oddness! Murderousness, rather. . . . How close Skull had been to suspecting that Henry Purvins might have been his wife's attacker when she had been found wandering by the East River!
Then Borden stooped sanctimoniously over the corpse, and suddenly the beginning of an incredible conviction snapped into Dr. Skull's mind. The hospital chief's watch fob dangled from his waist. It was of gold, heavy and carefully wrought, and repulsive as artistry could make it. A golden octopus, with one jewelled purple eye gleaming in its head. . . . In her terrified delirium, Mrs. Purvins had babbled about an octopus—and now Mrs. Purvins was hideously, unhumanly dead!
The internes holding Skull were not prepared for the strength and fury of his attack. He bent over swiftly, and the man directly behind him doubled up with his breath knocked out. With an ease that belied his years, Skull ripped his arms free and sent another colleague spinning with a hook to the jaw. As Borden was leaping for him, Dr. Skull side-stepped and swung. Then he jumped for the elevator.
The man at the controls tried to rush him, and Skull grasped his arm, and with a jiu-jitsu hold, threw him into the melee in the hall. He slammed the doors, and his fingers were cold on the control lever as he started the car downward.
His shoulder ached agonizingly, and after that brief desperate spurt of energy, he was again dizzy and weak . . . twice the car bounced jerkily against its basement springs before Skull remembered to release the controls. Blindly, he levered the doors open, and staggered into the cellar's cool dusk.
Into the darkness behind the huge heating unit he delved, leaning heavily against a dusty, jutting plank. There was a brief whir of chains, and a section of the wall gave way. Skull lurched into the opening, and sank to his knees, completely exhausted. Behind him, he dimly heard again the soft whir of the chains, and then he was alone in the cool darkness of an unsuspected hollow in the wall.
Silent seconds passed, bringing with them some return of strength to the old doct
or's nerves and muscles. And with the strength, a fiery determination-glinted again in his eyes.
Sparing the torn shoulder as best he could, he slowly removed his white surgeon's jacket, and began briskly to rub his face with it. Then it seemed as if a miracle occurred, for the sunken wrinkles disappeared completely from his jaws, cheeks and forehead. . . . He tore off the strips which secured the grey wig, revealing a head of lustrous dark hair beneath. The removal of two padded wire hooks from his lower jaw altered the shape of his face considerably. It was a far younger Dr. Skull who finally turned on his back, and lay motionless, staring upward into the darkness with alertly thoughtful brown eyes.
A half-naked young man, his were an athletes' trained and rippling muscles. . . . Weary as he was, with the bloody shoulder bandage, there was an aura of health, strength and competence about him. Hospital authorities would have recognized him as Jeffrey Fairchild, son of the late Dr. Henry Fairchild, who had achieved medical fame and a sizable fortune before his death.
Jeffrey, as administrator of his father's estate, had been instrumental in the erection of the Mid-City Hospital, and from that estate, large sums were still available to the hospital on request. That much he had done for humanity in his father's name and his own. There were people who said he might have done more, for Jeffrey, a brilliant student, had graduated at the head if his class from the best medical school in the country, and was not known ever to have started practice.
But people did not know about Dr. Skull. . . .
It was as Dr. Skull, the kindly philanthropic little East Side surgeon, that Jeffrey Fairchild had been able to fight more battles for humanity than confining his skill solely to the struggle against disease. He had been born with a love of adventure and a genius for compassion, and inevitably he had allied himself against those who have no compassion, and who prey upon the defenseless and helpless. In the slums, breeding-place of crime, Dr. Skull had been the unyielding adversary of all criminals.
No Park Avenue surgeon could have done what Dr. Skull had done, known what Dr. Skull knew. They came to him in the slums, the victims of poverty and ignorance and fear, and they trusted him to heal more than their bodies. For behind Dr. Skull himself, unknown even to his patients, there was the almost phantom figure of the Skull Killer, known only by the corpses he left behind him.
It was typical of Dr. Skull that he should have tried to find a reason for that unholy glint of purple madness in the eyes of Henry Purvins when he first began to treat the man's wife. Another doctor would have either disregarded it entirely, or considered it a phenomenon he had not been called upon to delve.
He'd labored through months and years of untiring research, research that was also adventure—and then, in the half-factual, half-superstitious chronicles of forgotten medieval savants, Dr. Skull had found the reference he sought.
He had been excited, moved—and at the same time wondered if he were allowing his credulity to be conditioned by the inevitable superstitions of the patients with whom he worked. He remembered the article he had actually written, intending it for the American Medical Journal, and which he had then decided not to send, as too fantastic for men of science to accept:
During every great social catastrophe in ancient history, purple eyes have made their appearance as eternal harbingers of destruction. They have been either the cause or effect of terror among a people already ravaged by war or pestilence, inducing an unaccountable mass hysteria, often leading to wholesale atrocities.
This mass hysteria reduced the population in some cases as high as seventy percent in certain districts of Central Europe, after barbaric invasions, and ruined entire sections of civilized society. By dint of incredible and impoverishing taxes, terrorized peoples have sometimes bought off self-claimed leaders of the purple eyes, whom many insist to have been the same person, living through centuries.
Superstition? Certainly. And yet, there was the undeniable fact of those purple eyes in modern, up-to-date New York. But whereas the medieval leaders of the purple-eyed ones had been able to operate openly in a superstitious civilization separated by the thinnest of veneers from chaos, their modern counterpart would be driven to operate through the weak-minded and credulous. He would be forced to use some startling and fear-invoking disguise. . . .
The Octopus! Mrs. Purvins, who had been marked for a sentence worse than death, had babbled its name. . . . Again, Jeffrey Fairchild remembered Borden's watch-fob of the purple-eyed octopus. Did Borden know its implications, or was he an unwitting tool in a more sinister hand, as Henry Purvins undoubtedly had been?
Jeffrey trembled slightly, as he rested in the coolness of his basement chamber, which was the terminus of an abandoned water main reaching far under the city's streets. He came to his feet, steadied himself, and moved deeper into the subterranean passage. From a wall niche, he took a concealed gun, to replace the weapon he had lost in the scuffle upstairs, and thus armed, re-entered the basement of the Mid-City Hospital.
Through the shadows he skulked, a pale moving figure in the darkness, toward a little white-washed door. For a moment, he listened behind it, and then Jeffrey Fairchild slipped into the cool, sterile-smelling interior of the hospital morgue.
One by one, he drew the sheets from cold white faces, with some innate reverence in him asking forgiveness of the helpless dead for this intrusion. One by one, among those silent speechless people who had passed beyond earthly help or harm, he sought the man he wanted—the man he himself had killed.
Jeffrey stared with growing concentration into the wide eyes of Henry Purvins' corpse, and his mouth went grim. Was his imagination running riot, or did he actually see even in the darkness, those inhuman jewel-like eyes glowing purple . . . ? No; someone had been behind that series of concerted and unrelated incidents which he had just experienced, a series too concerted not to be directed by some purposeful malevolent agency. In life, Henry Purvins had been the tool of the most malignant personality ever spewed out of hell, and in death, the devil would claim his own!
There was just a chance—more than a chance—that the evidence he needed was here, in the form of Purvins' body, with those ghastly, purplish luminescent eyes. . . . Did it point to a hospital whose staff would not bear investigation, to someone unknown who must, for some evil purpose, soon commune with this body?
He uncovered the corpse, placed it on another stretcher. Then he took its place, and pulled the sheet over him. Quiet as the dead he lay, and the only sound in that half-way station to the tomb was his own whispered breath.
Old Angus Burke, the morgue-keeper of the hospital, didn't like the tone they'd used when they brought down the latest corpse.
"Shot?" grunted Angus. "Now that's the damndest yet! You've brought me some funny stiffs lately, lads, but for a man to die of hot lead in a hospital . . . !"
"You're not being paid for your opinions," the young interne had answered tartly, and old Angus didn't like that. He'd been handling stiffs before that whipper-snapper was born, and he knew how people died in a hospital, and how they didn't.
They didn't die, for instance, of diabetes and lockjaw at the same time. Not in a proper hospital, that is. Maybe in some beleaguered army ward where the enemy had cut off surgical supplies—but even in war, old Angus remembered, you didn't get much blood-poisoning.
He thought uneasily of the sort of cases they'd been bringing down there recently. Tetanus, elephantiasis, and other things he couldn't even name, and didn't like to think about—sure, they'd been bringing him mighty strange stiffs lately!
And now this one, with a bullet between the eyes. . . . The doctors must be crazy, he thought; like as if they didn't know their business, and the poor folks who trust 'em might better have saved their money and die peaceful.
Well, he was glad to know about it, old Angus thought, as he played double solitaire against himself in his cubby-hole of an office. He'd been thinking of asking one of the doctors for something for his rheumatism. He wouldn't now, no-sirree! Ex
cept he'd been sure of that nice old Dr. Skull. A real gentleman, he was, who didn't treat a man any different because he kept dead stiffs instead of dying ones.
But it was Dr. Skull, so they said, who'd made the latest stiff, the oddest one of all. Shot him dead, they said. Old Angus shook his head. A mighty peculiar business, and he didn't like any of it. Shouldn't be surprised if they all lost their jobs of it, either. . . .
"Can't you hear anything?"
Old Angus stood up, looking at his visitors, two of them, dressed in civilian clothes. "I ain't so deaf that you have to yell loud enough to wake these poor peaceful dead folks down here," he said with asperity. And he added, "I'm the keeper here. I suppose you're looking for that Purvins fellow?"
One of the men nodded. "I'm his brother. Where is he?"
A pretty strange sort of a brother, old Angus thought. Usually folks came down here with their eyes red and sniffling, not caring what you said to them. . . . It's the world these days, he considered, as he led the unfeeling brother and his companion into the morgue itself.