Keane’s icily calm gray eyes grew colder yet with bitter anger.
“No one knows it yet, including the police - but eight rich men in the city have received notes from Doctor Satan. Each note demands a sum varying from two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollars. Each note threatens kidnapping and induced insanity for the child of that man if the money is not paid on demand! Jane and Harold Ivor are but the first of many victims - if we can’t stop that red-robed devil!”
Beatrice Dale faced him, cheeks a little pale, a light in her eyes that Keane had never yet really observed.
“So again you go after this man,” she murmured. “Ascott, be careful. I feel - this time - that you may not come back - - -”
Keane’s rare smile flashed out.
“Save your sympathies for Satan, Beatrice. This time, he will be killed, and our work completed!”
* * * *
3. Road to Hell
At ten o’clock of the night when Jane Ivor had amazed and then horrified Louisville by doing her mad dance in the open street, a tall man in an enveloping topcoat approached the unfinished building where Ivor had delivered half a million dollars from his town car.
The man had his coat buttoned and the rim of his hat down over his face, though the night was warm. He carried a bundle under his arm.
At the building, on the deserted walk, the man paused. Light from across the street shone on his ice-gray eyes for an instant. Ascott Keane.
Across the street were many people. Before the building there were none. Back from the empty sidewalk yawned the cavernous entrance of the brick shell.
Steps sounded from down the walk. Keane tensed a little and looked at his watch. It was three minutes after ten. In his pocket was a note - one of the eight extortion notes sent to the city’s eight leading citizens. The note read:
If you do not want your son kidnapped and returned a hopeless lunatic, you will deliver four hundred thousand dollars at five minutes after ten tonight at the address given below.
The given address was that of the unfinished building. The signer of the note was Doctor Satan.
Four minutes after ten. The approaching footsteps, slow, leisurely, came yet closer. Keane looked toward them.
For an instant Keane was startled and disappointed. For the maker of the steps was a uniformed policeman. He had expected anything but that; had expected an accomplice of Satan, perhaps disguised as a tramp, perhaps dressed as a sleek and respectable citizen....
“Disguise,” breathed Keane. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean as tramp of business man . . . .”
Eyes wide with the thought, he stared harder at the approaching policeman. And then his eyes narrowed and his jaw tensed.
The policeman’s eyes were glazed, drugged-looking. He was walking like something moved by a spring - or like a person moving in his sleep. His wide, staring eyes were fixed on Keane as though they didn’t really see him.
“My God!” whispered Keane, as the full extent of Doctor Satan’s scheme burst home to him. “He’s using the police as his messengers now! This man is hypnotized - perhaps drugged first! But what more efficient way of collecting extortion money could he devise than to have a patrolman in full uniform, apparently only walking his beat, pick it up?”
The policeman came nearer, glazed eyes fixed on Keane’s face. He slowed as he got to Keane, as if waiting for something.
Keane extended the bundle he carried.
“Have you come here for this?” he said, staring at the man’s drugged, vacant eyes.
“Perhaps,” the policeman spoke. His voice was thick and pitched in a monotone. “What is in the package?”
“That which will keep Malcolm Tibbet’s boy from sharing the fate of Jane Ivor,” said Keane.
“The word?” said the policeman.
Keane was staring into those drugged eyes with all the power of his will, now. And, as a result of his concentrated gaze, those eyes were flickering a bit.
“The word is ‘immunity’,” said Keane, quoting the password given in the letter.
For a moment the policeman hesitated. And Keane knew that his brain was struggling to catch the message of the master mind that had hypnotized him. Where was that message coming from? Keane had to find out, and do it through this man.
“‘Immunity’ is the correct word,” the man said monotonously. “Give me the package . . . .”
His voice trailed off as Keane continued to stare at him, hypnotically, powerfully. His eyes widened and grew perplexed. Slowly but surely Keane’s brain was hammering down the wall of hypnosis induced by Doctor Satan previously. Keane realized, when the man was free of Satan’s spell and not entirely under his own!
“The package - - -” the policeman reiterated vaguely. And then his eyes, clearing more and more, blinked as he stared around him, for an instant in full possession of his faculties.
“Hey, what the hell! What am I doing here? Who are you? What’s this package you got?”
He stepped a swift pace back from Keane, hand driving for his gun.
“This is the joint where Ivor was to have handed over the kidnap dough! Now you’re here with a bundle! By God, you must be one of the guys - - -”
* * * *
His gun was half drawn before Keane’s eyes completed their work. He stood rigidly still in that attitude, gun half out of its holster, face hostile, staring at Keane.
Keane spoke.
“You will do what I command,” he said.
The man’s breathing had become regular again. His eyes were glazed once more; but not, this time, from the hypnosis of Doctor Satan!
“I will do what you command.”
“You were sent here for this package. Who sent you?”
“A man in red, with a red mask.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“He was in a blue sedan. He stepped out of it as I came near. He looked at me a long time, and then told me what to do.”
“Where were you to deliver the bundle you got from the man who brought it to this building?”
“To the blue sedan, at the same corner.”
He named an Intersection toward the eastern limit of the town. Keane’s fists clenched. Would Doctor Satan be in that sedan again? If so, he was going to meet him in less than fifteen minutes! And this time - - -
Keane felt of a small, egg-shaped thing he carried gingerly in his coat pocket. Bullets, knife-blades, clubs - these ordinarily lethal weapons could not be used on Doctor Satan. He had means of protecting himself against such crude weapons. But this thing he had in his pocket! That, Keane thought, spelled death for the man!
“We’ll go to the blue sedan,” he said to the policeman. “My car is down a block. Come with me to it.”
* * * *
A dark intersection, with an abandoned factory on one corner throwing black shadow. In the shadow, a blue sedan - the car from which Jane Ivor had been pushed that afternoon.
Keane gripped the egg-shaped thing in his pocket. Then he cursed in his heart as he drew near the sedan with the cop. For there was only one person in the car, and that one was a man on whose face was stupid cruelty, who sat at the steering wheel.
Doctor Satan himself had not come; he had merely sent a casual accomplice to get the money. Keane’s quest of the red-garbed devil who engaged in crime for the love of it as some men hung big game in Africa, was not to be so easily ended.
The man at the wheel of the sedan eyed the two doubtfully as they drew near. Obviously he had been expecting only the uniformed patrolman; his fingers clutched the gear-shift lever uncertainly then he saw Keane too. But he waited till Keane got to the car. And that was his mistake.
Keane’s eyes bored into his as they had drilled into the cop’s. The man blinked uneasily, tried to turn his head as instinct warned him of some danger he could not understand.
“You were to receive a package from this man,” said Keane, indicating the policeman. His voice was level, quiet, soothing.
&n
bsp; “Yeah.” said the driver of the sedan. “But where did you come from?”
“I’m the one who took it to the building. I’m to go with you to your master with it.”
The man’s lips tightened.
“Oh, no, you’re not. You - - -”
He stopped. His eyes were helplessly held by Keane’s.
“You can’t - - -” he mumbled.
His face became stony, his eyes unwinking. Keane got into the car beside him. Then he turned to the policeman, and made a pass with his hand before the other’s heavy face.
“Drive!” he snapped to the man at the wheel.
The command was given none too soon. With the passing of Keane’s hand across his face, the cop came out of his trance. He saw Keane, really, instead of through a hypnotic mist. He remembered seeing him before, in connection with some suspicious place or happening that he couldn’t quite spot at the moment.
“Halt!” he roared, as the car Jumped forward.
“Faster,” said Keane to the staring driver.
Gun shots sounded from behind. The policeman was trying to shoot the tires of the blue sedan. But they left him behind and sped on, toward the city limits.
“You will drive me to your master,” Keane said to the man he had enslaved momentarily to his will.
“I will drive you to my master,” the man repeated.
* * * *
Thirty miles they went, from the limits of Louisville. They got to a farmhouse that was a tumbledown ruin. Behind it there was a barn, in even worse shape.
The man turned into the drive of the vacant place. He got out of the car. Keane followed. The man went into the barn.
There he walked directly to a mound of hay. There was a bit of wood at the edge of the mound. The man grasped this and pulled it. The hay mound turned, as though resting on a turntable. A square hole was revealed in the barn floor with steps leading down.
“Where does this go?” demanded Keane.
“It strikes a short tunnel that leads into a cave. I don’t know where the cave ends. I think it is a far part of the Mammouth Cave system. Anyhow, I know it goes for a long, long way. And somewhere back in it, my master, Doctor Satan, stays.
Keane took a deep breath. He had trailed Satan to many different lairs, but none of them promised to be as appropriate as this. It was fitting that a man masquerading as Lucifer should have his haunt in the bowels of the earth - near Hell, if there were such a place.
The man who had driven him walked down the steps and touched a projecting stone. The hay mound above slid into place, leaving them in thick darkness.
“Now?” said Keane.
The man pointed. Keane felt his arm go up, looked in the direction of its extended finger. Far ahead, he saw a pin-prick of light.
He turned to the man.
“You will sleep,” he said quietly, his hand on the man’s arm.
“I will sleep,” was the somnolent answer.
Keane felt the man lowering himself to the rock floor of the crude tunnel they were in. He felt him lie down, heard no further movement. Alone, he started toward the pin-prick of light far in the distance - and toward whatever weird place Doctor Satan had fixed down here as his lair.
“A lair near Hell,” Keane muttered as he felt his way along toward the distant light. “Please God I can send you to Hell tonight.”
* * * *
4. Hell’s Anteroom
The tunnel down which Keane walked grew constantly lighter. As it lightened, it turned faint rose-colored from the oddity of the light ahead. And now Keane heard a faint roaring from that same light.
He got nearer, and saw that the light across the tunnel ahead of him was not constant; it flickered and twisted, like a great yellow serpent.
Then he saw the nature of it.
Up from the rock floor roared a column of flame at least two yards across. It disappeared through an orifice in the rock ceiling, stretching from floor to top like a solid column, save it twisted and writhed constantly like the fiery serpent it resembled.
Keane stopped. The rock beneath him was trembling with the fury of the pillar of fire. The heat blasted at his face twenty feet away. It was a door to what lay beyond the tunnel more forbidding than any portal of steel.
“Natural gas,” he muttered.
But a guess as to the nature of the column did not help him pass it. That stopped him, for the moment. But, he reflected, there must be a way to tame the pillar. People passed along there. They couldn’t do that if the flame persisted constantly.
He thought of going back and getting as guide the man he had left in hypnotic slumber at the tunnel mouth. But that was not necessary. Even as he thought that, he heard the roar of the pillar diminish a little, felt the rock shake less violently under his feet.
The fiery column was dying down. It burned less brightly as he watched it. It sank till he could see the leaping crest of it top under the low ceiling.
And over that crest he saw a man’s head, on the other side. It was a head to induce nightmares. Like a naked skull it was, with unbelievably little flesh to clothe it. In deep eye-sockets, drugged eyes peered forth.
The flame” died down still lower. Keane saw the man’s body, as skeletal as the head. And as the emaciated body was more and more revealed by the subsiding of the flames, Keane shrank back into a niche in the wall to be out of sight. He opened the bundle he had brought with him.
From the bundle he took the costume he had worn in the hospital to restore Jane Ivor’s sanity; red cloak, red mask, red skull-cap, red gloves - point for point a costume matching Doctor Satan’s own as Keane remembered it from former encounters.
He donned cloak and gloves, started to put on the mask.
But by now the pillar of fire had sunk below the floor level, down into the hole from which it sprang. It left only a ragged orifice like the mouth of a well in the rock floor. The opening was only about six feet across. Keane, looking around the corner of his small alcove, saw the emaciated man with the drugged, staring eyes, leap this hole and start walking down the tunnel toward where he hid.
There was no time to don the mask and skull-cap. The man was abreast of the niche before Keane could get them on. He stared at Keane in the lessened light of the lowered flame. His mouth opened for a shout.
Keane felled him with a blow to the jaw. There was neither time nor need for subtler measures. He caught the falling, thin body and lowered it to the floor just out of the way of the tunnel itself. Then he put on the mask and the skull-cap and with the two projecting knobs mocking imitation of Satan’s horns.
Tall and spare, with the red robe arrogantly draped over his broad shoulders, he stalked toward the hole into which the flame had sunk - an exact replica of Doctor Satan himself. Already the roar of the fiery pillar was increasing again, and he saw the tip of the flames as it started to rise once more to bar the tunnel.
He leaped the two-yard opening. Heat seared him for an instant, threatened to set fire to his robes even in the half-second of his jump. But he got to the other side ....
Behind him the fire column rose to the ceiling in its full strength. His way back was cut off. Before him - - -
Keane looked, and gasped aloud.
He was in a great, low cave, extending before him farther than the eyes could penetrate. Stalagmites, like withered, warped bodies, thrust up from the floor. Stalactites dripped from the low ceiling. Among the stalagmites half a dozen figures moved; figures no less warped and distorted than the limestone pillars around them.
Keane’s eyes narrowed as he looked at them. He had guessed that Doctor Satan had more accomplices here than he normally used in his devilish business; the layout of the place had indicated that. But he had not reckoned on so many, and he had not dwelt on the possible caliber of the accomplices.
Doctor Satan must have scoured the underworld to get these men who were smoothing the floor of the cave, storing supplies, In general working to make of it a permanent and sumptuous base for their d
iabolical master. Keane had never seen such seamed, degenerate, evil countenances! Why, with the red light from the flame pillar flickering over the weird cavern, and over their twisted bodies, they looked like demons in a real Hell!
Now two of them glanced toward him, and shouted aloud. They straightened, and the others straightened with them. At attention, like ghouls parading before the Devil himself, they waited the orders and coming of the one dressed in Lucifer’s red robe.
Dr Satan - [Pulp Classics 6] Page 10
