“Now you’re going to town!” laughed the man who clapped. “More, more!”
Jane Ivor---” panted the traffic cop, tearing his way forward with ever less ceremony.
“My daughter!” groaned the elderly man from the town car, fighting the heedless mob between him and the girl.
The girl began to sing more wildly. And now the crowd stilled a bit as a few words could be distinguished in her chant, and as more and more of the swathing gauze was torn from her body. People began looking at one another inquiringly.
“Satan...my master...” some of the words of the girl’s chant sounded. “Devil...worship....”
The swathing gauze was nearly all on the street now. And a woman cried out a bit as the meaning came home to all. No publicity seeker would go quite so far. No girl would dare such censure in a mere quest for notoriety.
“Let me through, damn you.“ shrieked the elderly man, fighting at the heedless ranks still between him and the girl.
“Get out of the way, you dumbbels,” raged the cop, beginning to use his night stick. Jane Ivor - let me get to her!”
There was stunned silence, in which the girl’s chant sounded louder, more weird than ever. Then, like a concerted echo, the crowd repeated the name.
“Jane Ivor! Jane Ivor!”
A young man in the outer fringe of the crowd gasped.
“Good God! It is Jane Ivor! Most beautiful deb in the city: Daughter of John Ivor, the distilling magnate! Kidnapped a week ago, along with her kid brother! And now she comes back - like this!
In the cleared spot on the avenue now danced a girl with moonlight hair and eyes, who wore nothing but frayed, high-heeled slippers. Her eyes were frenzied as she waved the slim sword above her head and chanted. And now the words of the incantation were only too clear.
“Satanic Majesty, I worship you. You, the Devil, are my master. Death to your enemies!”
* * * *
The crowd, coming through heedless laughter and growing confusion to something like terror, gave back before the girl’s shimmering blade. That sword was obviously razor-sharp, and she was slashing it around with horrifying abandon.
“The Devil’s my master! Death to his enemies!”
The pirouetting white figure circled the ring of cars and people shutting it in. And then a man yelled.
“My God! - look at her eyes!”
The girl’s black eyes seemed about to start from her head. Wild white formed a rim around the pupils.
“She’s mad! Get her before she kills somebody!”
“Satan is my master! I worship the Devil ---“
Screaming now, the crowd that had been laughing rolled back from the girl. The man who had been clapping time, ashen-faced, led the rush. Several other men, with the traffic cop beside them, leaped for her.
“Back!” she screamed, slashing with the sword. “You are enemies of Satan! I will kill all enemies of the Devil!”
“Jane,” cried the elderly man, breaking at last through the milling crowd. “Jane - my own daughter - - -”
“Back - I’ll kill --- “
The elderly man, sobbing, gasping, fell back from the keen blade that had darted toward his heart.
“Jane - don’t you know me? It’s Dad!”
“Back---”
The traffic cop sprang at her. Like a tigress she stepped away, blade flashing. The cop’s face turned sickly as the blade grazed his cheek. And then, the others were on her, horrified, deathly afraid of the blade in her mad fingers, but risking their lives to catch the lovely maniac before others in the crowd died to the bite of the blade.
“Enemies of the Devil! Enemies of the Devil!”
Her shrill voice was a clarion call, a bugle note of madness. But they got her at last, hands gripping her white flesh firmly, though as compassionately as possible.
The elderly man approached her as she struggled in the grip of the men, who tried to cover her writhing white body with their coats.
“Jane,” he groaned, “Look at me, recognize me! It’s John Ivor, your father, Jane.”
The girl only glazed at him out of great eyes in which the whites were lunatic rings around the pupils, and tried to gouge his face with taloned fingers.
“Jane Ivor!” “Released by the kidnappers - but insane!” the young man breathed. “Wait till I get that story into the paper! Insane heiress back from kidnap hell to do nude sword dance in the main street!
He ran for a phone. And the knot of men holding Jane Ivor, once the city’s most popular debutante, went with her to the town car which still stood beside the half-completed building, and put her in it with her white-faced father.
* * * *
2. Satan’s Threat
The air was tense, still, in the best private room of Louisville’s finest hospital.
Four people were in that room. One, tied with webbed linen to the iron bed, was Jane Ivor. The second was her father, who sat with fingers gripping the edge of his chair till they showed white in the reflected sun-glare from the cream-colored walls. The third was the chief of staff of the hospital, an internationally known psychiatrist. The fourth was a figure such as might have stepped out of a nightmare or a masquerade ball.
This figure was tall, spare. It was cloaked from heat to heels in a red garment that enveloped it utterly. Over its face was a cloth mask, also red. On its hands were red rubber gloves, and hiding the head and hair was a red skull-cap from which projected two knobs in mockery of Lucifer’s horns.
Keen eyes blazed through the eyeholes of the mask. Steel-gray eyes, icily calm.
The girl with the mad eyes writhed on the bed against the bonds. But her struggles were patently to get to the weird red figure, although in her eyes was stark horror of it.
“Satan,” she whispered. “Master, I must serve you.”
The figure uttered words which made the red mask move a bit over shrouded lips.
“Yes. I am Satan. And you must serve me. You hear?”
“I hear and I obey,” whispered the girl.
“Jane —” faltered John Ivor, in a cracked voice.
The red-garbed figure held up a stern hand. The fingers of that hand seemed shielded in fresh blood as the sunlight caught the smooth red rubber of its glove.
John Ivor, Louisville’s richest citizen, bit his lips for silence. The red mask moved with more words.
“You must serve me, even though, perhaps, I be not Satan after all.”
For an instant the wildness in the girl’s eyes faded a very little. Perplexity, fear, took its place.
“But you are Satan. You told me so, many times. And you told me I must serve you.”
“That is true,” the red-clad figure droned. “But I may have deceived you. Would it matter if I had deceived you?”
The girl said nothing for an instant. The light of perplexity was still stronger in her lovely eyes, still was robbing the light of madness that had originally showed there. And as it did so, the doctor and the father leaned tensely forward; for perplexity is a thing of sanity, not madness.
“Would it matter if I had deceived you, and was not Satan after all, but only a man?” the red-clad figure said.
The girl answered indirectly.
“You are Lucifer. You told me so. And you told me I must obey you, and kill your enemies...”
“I am sure it would make no difference to you if I were only a man, instead of Satan incarnate,” said the masked lips smoothly.
“But you are Lucifer - - -”
It was almost a scream that came from the girl’s lips. But again, there was a subtle difference from that scream and the mad laughter that had come from her lips before.
“Watch,” commanded the red-garbed one quietly.
He took off the red rubber gloves, revealing long-fingered hands that were almost inhumanly powerful, but which yet were indisputably human. He removed the skull-cap and mask from his face.
And that face, like the hands, was indisputably mortal. It was a strong fac
e, with level gray eyes under coal-black brows; and with a high bridged, patrician nose over a long, firm chin.
The girl half rose in spite of her bonds. Her eyes were wide and glazed as they glared at the revealed face. Her cheeks were white with nerve shock.
“You are a man,” she whispered in a strangled voice. Then more loudly: “A man! You are only a man! Then I need not serve you! Oh, God, you’re not Lucifer, and you have no power--”
Her words stopped as though cut with the sharp sword she had waved an hour before. She dropped back to the bed. The doctor rose quickly, and the father gasped.
“She has fainted,” said the man in red quietly. “That is all. A tremendous nerve-shock, but she will be all right. And when she comes to, she will no longer be mad. The discovery as far as she is concerned, that the dread master she thought she must serve is only mortal, will restore her sanity.”
The doctor stared at him.
“I can almost believe you, Mr. Keane,” he said slowly, “though when Miss Ivor was brought in here I would have sworn nothing could ever cure her madness. Who are you, that you know the mind so well, and know so well the exact thing to do to cure her? “
Ascott Keane shrugged powerful shoulders.
“It doesn’t matter who I am.” He turned to John Ivor. “We’ll leave her here in good hands for a little while,” he said. “Shall we go to your home?”
“Yes,” breathed the father of the girl who had been mad. “Yes. Anything you say. You have saved my girl. Now, if you could only do something for my boy - - -“
“That’s what we shall talk about,” said Ascott Keane.
* * * *
In John Ivor’s home on the boulevard, Keane and Ivor faced each other in a quiet library room. The phone has Just rung, and word came from the hospital that Miss Ivor had regained consciousness and was indeed sane, though broken by some terrible experience she had gone through and of which she refused to speak. John Ivor’s face was still pale, and his hands still trembled; but in his eyes there was a measure of relief.
“Thank God for your arrival!” he said brokenly. “If there is anything I can do to - -“
Keane waved his hand.
“Forget that. I’m a wealthy man myself, perhaps richer than you are. Tell me everything about the kidnapping. I think I know most of it, but tell me anyway.”
John Ivor sighed brokenly.
“It’s hard to speak of it. A week ago today my daughter, Jane, and my son, Harold, started for the country club. Jane was going to play tennis with some friends, and Harold had a golfing engagement. They left - and did not come back.”
“At six-thirty, an hour after they should have returned, I phoned the club. They had not gone there. No one had seen them, or knew anything about them. I wasn’t too much worried, however, till my man came to me with a plain envelope and said there was a message in it left by some man who refused to wait for an answer.
“I opened the envelope and took out the message. It was the one that ha been shown in the papers: an announcement that Harold and Jane had been kidnapped and were being held for ransom, the amount of which and place of delivery would be given later.
“I still wasn’t sure the letter was anything but the grim prank of some moron, but then the police phoned that they had just found Jane’s wrecked roadster. It was in the ditch. And in the car - Ivor’s voice cracked - was a man’s handkerchief saturated with chloroform, and my daughters racket. With the racket were Harold’s golf clubs.
“That night I got a note demanding that I pay one million dollars for the return of my boy and girl. I was to give the money at two in the afternoon, a week from that day, to a man who would receive it at a certain building under construction, where there would be no one on the sidewalk to try to stop him.
“I went to the police with everything. I knew it was risky, but so often kidnappers kill their victims anyway, and go on with their plans as if the victims were still alive, that I thought it more risky to keep the thing to myself.”
Keane nodded.
“All as I have read for myself,” he said. “Go on.”
Ivor bit his lips.
“That much you have read. But there are two things you haven’t read - which no one knows about yet.”
“One is that I paid the ransom money today, just before my girl was pushed from the blue sedan. The other - -“
Ivor mopped his forehead with a trembling hand.
“I didn’t have a million in cash where I could get to it. That’s a terrific sum, Mr. Keane. I could only get half a million. So, I wrapped that up in newspaper, and gave it to the man who came to my town car for it.
“Half a million, Mr. Keane. And the kidnappers gave me back my daughter - half of the pair they kidnapped!
He started beseechingly, fearfully at Keane.
“No one knew I was going to pay only half the ransom. Yet they came in the sedan with only my girl - somehow knowing in advance that I hadn’t the full sum with me!”
He paced the library, while Keane watched him.
“If that were all there was to it, I might think the return of half what I lost, in trade for half the sum demanded, was a coincidence. I might think that the kidnappers were playing the usual double-crossing game - expecting the full million but hoping to get still more by returning only my daughter. But there is more. I found this note in my pocket, thrust there by someone in the crowd, a little while after we’d got to the hospital.”
He handed a crumpled bit of paper to Keane, who read:
John Ivor: When you deliver the other half-million, you shall get your son back. Meanwhile, your daughter’s madness shall be your punishment for not giving the full sum in the first place.
The note was unsigned.
“You see?” Ivor said almost pleadingly. “Days ago, the kidnappers knew I was going to give only half the ransom, though not a soul on earth but myself knew that!” He jerked around. “Have you any explanation for that?”
Keane’s long fingers touched softly.
“An excellent one,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand, however. All I will say is that it only confirms my knowledge of the kidnapper.
Ivor gasped. “You know who he is?”
Keane nodded.
“Then - my God, man! - the police---”
“Can do nothing, if it’s the person I think it is. Think! Know! The kidnapper is Doctor Satan himself. The huge sum asked made me think so in the first place, which is why I came to Louisville from New York when I first read of the affair. The diabolically induced madness was another indication. ‘The Devil is my master. I serve Satan.’ I knew who had inspired that delusion, all right! Now, the apparent magic by which the kidnapper knew you were going to pay only half the demand. Doctor Satan read your mind, my friend.”
“Doctor Satan?”
“So the name means nothing to you! I wish it didn’t to me.” Keane sighed wearily. “He is a man who performs crime for the sheer, icy love of it - a devil if ever there was one. Your daughter in her delusion about having been in contact with Satan himself, was not so far wrong, my friend!”
He strode toward the door.
“Don’t tell the police or anyone else my name or my connection with this,” he warned. “I want to work alone. Give me twenty-four hours to try to track this man down and rescue your boy.”
He nodded and was gone; a man, Ivor thought, like a steel blade; a man to inspire hope when all hope was lost, as he had inspired it in that bizarre and still inexplicable cure of Jane Ivor . . .
* * * *
“But of course it was apparent at once what had happened,” said Keane a few minutes later.
He was talking to a tall, lovely girl with deep blue eyes and reddish hair, in her hotel suite. The girl was Beatrice Dale, secretary, companion, right-hand man.
“Knowing that Doctor Satan was behind this, we could guess at the source of the girl’s madness. Doctor Satan was seen by her only in his crimson costume, of course, in that costume
he subtly and deliberately induced madness in her. Therefore, her cure suggested itself: Dress as Satan did, and unmask before her, letting her see that the being she thought the Devil incarnate was only a man after all.”
Beatrice was frowning a little. She nodded impatiently.
“Yes, I see how the cure would suggest itself. But why did Doctor Satan drive her mad in the first place?”
Keane sighed. “It was in line with his usual process: A reign of terror among wealthy citizens - then demands for money. Satan kidnapped Jane and Harold Ivor intending from the first to send them back to society incurably and horribly mad. With that as a precedent, no other father would hesitate a minute to part with a fortune to spare madness in his own child!”
Dr Satan - [Pulp Classics 6] Page 9
