by Otto Penzler
He tabulated their names mentally as they circled the expensive white marble Boderman mausoleum, stamping their feet and beating their arms against their bodies in an effort to be warm.
There was Boderman’s widow wrapped in a sable coat that brushed her heels. She looked frightened. There was Judge Taggart, the retired Federal judge. And Marc Long, the merchant. Sam Green, the banker. Pete Harris the labor leader. Grenfal the lawyer. There was Petey Nichols, the gunman who had dropped suddenly of a heart attack in the lobby of the—
Murphy’s mind stopped short in its tabulation. The grim, cold hand of fear clutched at his heart until he gasped for breath. He knew with a sudden, sickening sense of horror what had made their faces seem so strange. But for Max Boderman’s widow, they were dead—had been dead, some of them, for half a year. He, Tim Murphy, himself, had written the obit on most of them, had seen them lowered into the ground and had heard the thump of clods of earth upon their coffins. He leaned back on the cross and fought for sanity. He was mad. This thing couldn’t be. Or could it? He had seen a living woman turn into a mummy right before his eyes—was seeing living dead tramp in a circle around the mausoleum of a man whom the girl had said that Satan meant to resurrect. He forced his eyes back to the circle.
As he watched, a puff of smoke rose from the snow before the mausoleum, turned into a red, blinding glare that forced his eyes to blink. When he opened them the flare had faded and a man stood where the smoke and flame had been. He was a man of medium size, well built, with a jet black mustache and a small goatee that looked like they were painted on the ivory pallor of his face.
Murphy realized he was breathing in huge, labored gasps.
“Satan, I’ll bet you.” He grinned involuntarily.
“That’s right,” a bland voice whispered in his ear. “That’s right. He Satan. Supposing you come meet.”
The reporter felt something prod him sharply in the back and knew without looking that it was a gun. He turned to see the usually smug, now evil and distorted face of Satan’s Oriental secretary not six inches from his eyes.
“Why—” he hesitated.
The snout of the gun dug viciously in his spine.
“You come meet,” the Oriental hissed. “Satan not like spies.”
The gun insistent in his back, Murphy plowed in silence through the snow toward the circle of men and women clustered around the man who had appeared in smoke and flame. Satan was laughing. Murphy could hear him laugh, an unpleasant, tinkling little laugh that cut at his nerves with icy razor blades of fear.
• • •
DOCTOR MEREDITH WAS sober. There were three reasons for that. The first was that he had no money. The second was that in the only bar in which Tim Murphy had guaranteed his credit, a burly Irish cop had replaced the slavering bartender who claimed the dried and fragile mummy he had been discovered pounding into dust with whiskey bottles had walked into his bar alive. The third and most substantial reason he was sober was that Tim had not as yet come home to be imposed upon.
A tall, gaunt man with sad smiling eyes, Meredith had once been the top man in his line. His skill and his fees had been fabulous. And then the post-operative deaths had started. One, two, three, four, five, in orderly succession. Then there had been a lapse of almost two months before they began again. After the tenth death, Doctor Meredith had laid down his scalpel and vowed he had scrubbed for his last operation. And he had. A highly sensitive, cultured man, he had gone to hell fast.
It had taken him fifteen years to climb to the pinnacle of his fame as a surgeon. Ten months from the day he had laid down his scalpel, Doctor Agnew, who had been his assistant, had cut him dead on the street. Two months following that, Tim Murphy had picked him out of a Clark Street gutter and given him a home. For that Jim Meredith was grateful.
His long white fingers beat a tattoo on the frosted window of the apartment as the Doctor stared out at the night. His eyes were bloodshot and his nerves were screaming for a drink. Then the clock on the mantel struck twelve.
Meredith stared at it reflectively. If he could find a hock shop open he could hock it and perhaps buy half a pint. That the clock belonged to Murphy didn’t even enter his consideration. He had fallen too low for that.
He picked up the clock and was weighing it in his hand when Murphy’s key turned in the door. Murphy closed the door behind him and stood leaning up against it. His face was lined and haggard, his eyes deep pools of puzzled horror.
“You look,” Jim Meredith told him, unabashed, “as though you’d seen the devil.”
“I did,” Murphy answered briefly. “And no need to hock the clock. I’ve brought you a quart of whiskey.”
He tugged an unopened bottle from the pocket of his overcoat and set it on the table. The derelict reached for it, stopped, came around the table.
“You look all in, boy. Let me help you off with that coat.”
“No,” Murphy backed away. “Don’t touch me, Doc. I don’t know what the devil’s done to me. But he did tell me I’d die if I talked. And I’ve got to talk to someone before I phone the paper.”
As he talked he stripped off his snow-sodden overcoat and tossed it in a corner. Then followed it with his hat and shoes. He took his money, cigarettes, and notes from his pocket, piled them on the table and stripped to his shorts and shirt.
“You can’t—catch—death, can you, Doc?” he asked.
“N-no,” the once-great surgeon smiled. “I wouldn’t say that death was catching. Why?”
“Because I’ve been rubbing shoulders with it for the last two hours,” Murphy told him curtly. “I’ve been interviewing men and women I saw buried. I’ve been talking to the devil.”
Meredith smiled politely.
“And damn it, don’t smile at me.” Murphy rapped. “Crack open that bottle and pour us both a drink—a big one. I’ll be back as soon as I wash.”
THE SURGEON DID as he was told. His fingers were trembling so he could hardly hold the glass but he waited for his drink until Murphy had finished splashing in the bathroom.
“How long,” the reporter asked him as he sat down at the table, still dressed in only shirt and shorts, “would it take to turn a guy into a mummy, Doc?”
The surgeon sniffed at his drink, savored the bouquet reflectively, then gulped it.
“Perhaps,” he coughed, “two years. Perhaps two thousand, dependent on the condition of the soil. Why?”
“Then you haven’t read the papers?” Murphy asked.
“No,” Meredith admitted, “not the last few days, I haven’t.”
“The devil can do it in no time at all,” Murphy told him. “I saw a woman turned into a mummy in five minutes by the clock. I saw her dry up and die right before my eyes as if by magic. Now look, Doc. Pour us both another drink and listen to me.”
Impelled by the urgency in his voice the older man obeyed.
“Yes—?”
Swiftly, graphically, Murphy told him what had happened in the bar.
“Impossible,” the surgeon said.
“I saw it happen,” Murphy shook his head. “And I saw more. I saw the devil bring a dead man back to life tonight.” He sorted through the papers on the table. “I’ve written down the names of a dozen dead men and women whom I talked to. And if anything happens to me—”
Meredith smiled.
“It won’t. Nothing more than a headache. But you certainly have gotten yourself a peach on, boy. I envy you.”
“That’s what my city editor told me,” the reporter said dryly. He tossed Satan’s red card on the table. “But if anything happens to me, that’s the guy. He told me tonight I was going to die. And somehow I believe him.”
Meredith sat staring at the scarlet card printed in gold that began, “WANTED—CORPSES.”
“I met him tonight out at Maplewood Cemetery,” Murphy told him. “His secretary, a slant-eyed chap by the name of Yoshama, prodded me up to Max Boderman’s tomb with a gun.”
As he talked the air i
n the room grew electric.
“I saw the devil lay his hands on Max, saw Max sit up in his coffin.” The reporter’s voice rose shrilly and broke. “So help me God, I did.”
“Steady, boy,” the surgeon told him. He poured a water glass half full of Scotch. “Drink that.”
The reporter gulped it, stretched his forearms on the table and cradled his head for a moment. When he looked up his eyes were calmer.
“I’m letting it get me, Doc. And I mustn’t. I’ve got to make someone believe me. The devil’s come up from hell and he’s right here in Chicago.”
The derelict surgeon regarded the man who had befriended him. He wasn’t drunk. And he wasn’t mad. Jim Meredith would stake what little honor he had left on that.
“Go on, boy,” he said quietly.
The reporter fished a cigarette from the crumpled pack on the table, lit it, and drew the smoke deep into his lungs.
“I don’t know just exactly what his game is,” he began. “But he’s making millions at it. He charged Max Boderman’s widow a half a million dollars tonight for bringing Max back to life.”
“And it was Boderman you saw?” the surgeon asked.
“I THOUGHT OF that.” Murphy looked up at him sharply. “But it wasn’t a switch as far as I could tell. His widow recognized him and after a few hysterical shrieks she fell into his arms.”
“But not even the devil could bring a dead man back to life.” The surgeon shook his head. “The thing is mad.”
“Or I am,” Murphy said grimly. “I tell you I saw it, Doc. And I talked with Judge Taggart, and Sam Green, and Grenfal.”
“But they’ve been dead for weeks, months.”
“So have the two men whose mummies were found on the streets today,” Murphy said grimly. “I—” he hesitated. “Would you mind getting me a drink of water, Doc? I guess I must have caught cold out there. I feel like I’m burning up.” He gulped the glass of water greedily, sucked deeply at his cigarette, continued. “They were brought back to life, then allowed to die again because they threatened to talk, just like the girl did, just like I’m talking now.”
The surgeon sat eyeing him sharply. His friend seemed somehow older, more haggard than he had ever seen him.
“Did he give you anything out there, Murph, make you drink anything, or inject anything sub-travenously?”
“No. Not a thing,” Murphy told him. He grinned wryly through lips the skin of which seemed taut. “All I had to do was kneel in the snow with dead men and women all around me while Satan said Black Mass.” His voice seemed faint and far away. “He promised us everything here on earth our hearts desire. And in return all those living dead men and women had to promise him—” His voice trailed off inaudible.
Meredith got slowly to his feet, stared with clinically professional eyes at the other man’s face.
“You’re not well, Tim.”
“No,” the reporter admitted frankly. “No. I’m not.” Revulsion filled his face. “I don’t feel any pain, but I’m dying. I—I can feel my insides dissolving, drying up. I—I don’t know how the hell he’s done it, but he has.”
He spoke dispassionately, calmly, drugged by the sleepy torpor of death. He was a dead man and he faced the fact. He had watched another die as he himself was dying.
Meredith stood in silence, his eyes on the other man’s face. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing that anyone could do. He had watched death’s stealthy approach too many times not to know. But this death was obscene.
The reporter’s shrinking lips framed a word. But he never spoke it. The word evaporated in his throat as the liquid and the tissue of his glands and organs dissolved and shrunk into atomic matter in the painless hell flame that was eating at his vitals.
Then Murphy’s eyes began to run, dripped down, a gelatinous mass, inside his skull. He was dead. Only the smoke-plumed cigarette stuck to his withered upper lip was still alive. What once had been a man was but a leering mummy with cracked, dried parchment for a face.
Meredith slopped some whiskey in his glass with shaking fingers, raised it to his lips, then set it down untouched.
“No,” he shook his head. “I don’t need that. Murphy was my friend.” He picked up Murphy’s notes from the table and stared at them through blood-shot eyes. There was something vaguely familiar that the names of the living dead had in common—but what it was, his drink-sodden mind was unable to recall. “Murphy was my friend,” he repeated. “I’ll find the devil who killed him.”
The dead man shifted slightly in his chair as the flesh on his bones contracted. The night wind howled cold and mocking at the window like a laugh—a devil’s laugh straight out of hell.
CHAPTER THREE
PLEASE TO MEET SATAN
The girl at the switchboard was new. She stared dubiously at the unshined shoes, the unpressed suit, and the beard-stubbled chin of the man before the desk.
“Yes—?”
“Doctor James Meredith,” he told her. “To see Doctor Agnew.”
She raised an eyebrow slightly.
“You have an appointment?”
“No,” he admitted. “I haven’t. But I know he always operates on Thursdays and I had hoped I’d find him here.”
The girl had been about to order him out of the lobby, but the obviously cultured voice emanating from the derelict’s bearded lips gave her pause. She consulted a list on her desk.
“Doctor Agnew will be here today,” she admitted. “He’s scheduled to operate at eight.”
Meredith looked at the clock on the wall. It was seven.
“Thank you,” he told her. “I’ll wait.”
His worn shoes scuffing on the tile, he crossed the corridor of the hospital foyer and seated himself in a large, over-stuffed chair just to the right of a door that bore a small brass plate announcing that it was For Doctors Only.
From time to time a surgeon with an early morning schedule passed him. Most of them didn’t even recognize him. The few who did merely nodded.
He opened the paper he had brought and stared thoughtfully at the headline. It was terse and grim with understatement. It read: TERROR GRIPS CITY.
The sub-head read in almost as many points: Tim Murphy Ace Reporter of Morning Reformer is fourth mummified body to be found!
There followed a description of the finding of the reporter’s underwear-clad mummy following an anonymous phone call. There had been no one else in the apartment but there had been a whiskey bottle on the table with two glasses. The whiskey was being analyzed. A homeless derelict known to have been befriended by Murphy was being sought for questioning. It was believed, however, that he could throw little light on the situation. The best medical minds in the city after an exhaustive examination of the three mummified bodies previously found admitted themselves to be baffled.
A new and insidious terror had grown up over-night. Nor was that terror modified by the fact that two of the mummies found, while listed by the department of health as “deceased” some weeks previously, were said by sworn testimony to have been seen alive but a few minutes before their dried and mummified bodies had been discovered. As yet, their families had not been located for questioning.
This was contradicted, in turn, by an A.P. dispatch from Los Angeles. The widow of one of the men had been located there and swore there must be some mistake in the identity of the body. For, despite the fact that she and her multi-millionaire husband had been estranged for some time over another woman, she had been with her husband on the night that he had died in Mercy Hospital. The death certificate had been signed by Doctor Agnew.
MEREDITH FOLDED HIS paper neatly and slipped it back into his pocket. He wondered grimly if it might not have been best for him to take Tim Murphy’s scribbled notes directly to his paper first, decided that it wouldn’t. Tim’s notes consisted mainly of a dozen scrawled names of men and women known to be dead. He, Jim Meredith, had the story, he believed, but he wanted to be certain of his facts before he talked.
> He sat rubbing the worn welts of his shoes together and listening to the conversation in the doctor’s lounge. It was, as was natural, mainly of the gruesome terror and tragedy headlined by the morning papers.
A voice he recognized as Ben Winton’s, the noted pathologist, scoffed at the whole affair.
“But damn it, you know as well as I do,” Winton snorted, “the thing’s impossible. It’s mad. Certainly. Some chemicals can burn up flesh and tissue like that.” He snapped his fingers. “After all, in the chemical composition of the body we find sixty-six percent water, three percent nitrogen, two percent hydrogen, six and seven-tenths percent oxygen—all vulnerable elements easily done away with by an opposing chemical process. But the papers claim that two of those men were dead, climbed back up out of their graves and walked around for several weeks before they dropped dead—mummies.”
“But not Murphy, the reporter,” Glendive the genealogist protested. “Nor the mummy of the girl they picked up in that North Clark Street bar. Both of them were known to be alive at eight o’clock last night.”
Someone else said something that Meredith couldn’t catch. Then he saw Agnew coming in the front door of the hospital and got slowly to his feet as the other surgeon who had once been his assistant paused at the desk for his mail.
Prosperity, he decided, agreed with Bill Agnew. His former assistant, who had taken over his practice when the series of unexplainable deaths had driven him to drink, was plumper, less ferret-like about the features. He wore an expensive broadcloth overcoat lined with fur. His silver mounted bag was of pin seal.
Jim Meredith ran his hands down the sides of his own greasy top-coat. Despite his own fall, he didn’t envy Agnew. The man was a fair surgeon, but he was money-mad. And not even his prosperity could conceal nor heal the twisted and deformed right leg that had left its indelible stamp of bitterness on the mind of the man. Agnew was always conscious of it, thrusting himself forward as if to hide it by making it all the more obvious.
“Hello, Bill,” Meredith greeted him.
