But then, as he got to the door, a hoarse shout was wrung from his lips. He leaped to the spot where Doctor Satan had been lying, eyes wide with a shock of astonishment that almost unnerved him.
The spot where Doctor Satan had lain was empty. His blue-sheathed form was no longer there. And over the bodies of the seven who had served him, the blue casing was a little thicker.
“Damn him,” raged Keane, trembling fists raised. “Damn him!!“
Satan had gathered the remnants of that icy, terrific will of his while Keane was away with the boy, and had, out of his own fragmentary knowledge of Saint Sartius’ Blue Death, contrived somehow to divert its hardening shell from his own body and onto the others that lay near by.
That was obviously what had happened. But, sick with defeat when victory had been tasted, Keane refused entirely to believe it till he got to the anteroom cavern with Harold Ivor.
* * * *
The flaming pillar was down. Someone had just passed this way and had hurdled the well-mouth opening from which the fire hissed.
Had that someone hurdled it feebly, barely dragging his body up the opposite edge? Keane thought so. For on the far edge of the small abyss was a single, torn, red glove.
But, feebly or not, Doctor Satan had escaped from the caves. Again he had cheated with death to which Keane had driven him closer than he had ever been before in his satanic existence.
The flame pillar was already rising again.
“You must Jump that hole,” Keane said to the boy.
He set the example. The youth followed. Clinging to Keane’s hand, Harold Ivor went with him down the outer tunnel.
The concealed trap-door above was open, as Satan had left it, too hard-pressed and weak to bother to shut it after him. Under the door the man Keane had hypnotized after his use as guide had been no longer needed, lay stretched on the floor. Eyes open and blank, he slept the sleep from which there is no awakening save by the action of the one who induces that sleep.
Keane started toward the man, then stopped. He was a human rat. The emanations from his hazed mind caught by Keane’s superhuman psychic perception whispered that he was at least once a murder, perhaps twice or thrice.
Face bleak, Keane went on past him with the shuddering boy. He left the man sleeping there...
Outside, in the driveway of the abandoned farm, the blue sedan was gone. Keane bit his lips as he visioned the swaying, raging figure in red at its wheel, speeding off somewhere into the night - to strike at humanity again when he had recovered.
Somberly, with his shoulders drooping, Keane started toward town with the boy. He had stopped the reign of terror in Louisville - but his real work was not yet done.
<
* * * *
BEYOND DEATH’S GATEWAY
The sea was as calm as a pond. Over it the great ship floated like a ghost vessel, dipping a little to long, slow swells but otherwise as motionless as a thing on a backdrop. The white moon poured down its peaceful flood, but somehow the peace was an eery thing and not reassuring.
In a large cabin on deck A, two men sat behind a locked door and talked in whispers too low to be recorded if there were a dictograph receiver concealed anywhere. One of the two had the often-photographed face of .Assistant Secretary of War Harley. The other was Jules Marxman, inventor and manufacturer.
Harley, a slim, precise, elderly man who looked more like a high school principle than an important Government official, shook his head a little.
“Then, as the invention now stands, it is useless,” he summed up.
Marxman, the inventor, nodded his bushy gray head. His heavy grizzled brows drew into a straight line.
“Useless,” he conceded. “I have the formula for the poison gas completed. It is perfect - a gas so volatile that it spreads at a rate of a hundred feet a second in all directions, and wipes out all living things, including vegetable matter. But its very speed makes it impossible to use it as other war gases are used. It would wipe out the men releasing it as well as the enemy.”
“Special masks to protect our own men?” suggested the Assistant Secretary of War.
Marxman shook his head.
“I thought of that, of course. I worked along that angle for a long time. But no mask can be devised to protect a man from the gas. So the answer lies in another direction. That is, an antidote of some sort for it that will permit the men releasing it to feel no ill effects from it.”
“That sounds difficult. Look here, couldn’t the stuff be shot from guns to explode and radiate at a distance?”
“No. It is so highly explosive itself that no shell can be designed to keep it from exploding when the gun charge bursts, when its high volatility spreads it all around the gun. Again, our own men would die from it. No, the only answer is the antidote that will make the corps releasing it immune to its deadly effects.”
Harley stroked his long, spare chin.
“You’ve worked along that line, Marxman?”
“Yes, I have been working on an antidote for eighteen months. The final solution is not yet worked out. But I’m getting close.”
Marxman looked at the locked cabin door, and lowered his voice still more.
“I have an antidote at present that will counteract the effects of the gas. But its own effects are almost as serious: The man who takes it literally dies for a short space of time. His heart and breathing stop. Blood circulation ceases. He’s a dead man - for about twelve hours. Most curious.”
“And, most unfortunate,” Harley said dryly. “In twelve hours the enemy from beyond the radius of the spreading gas could gun and bomb the helpless crew out of existence. But tell me, how can men ‘die’ for twelve hours, with the blood stream stilled and liable to coagulate, and then come to life again? Or - do they?’
“Yes, they do, I don’t yet know how. The blood should coagulate, but it doesn’t. Perhaps some life force beyond power of detection still functions enough to keep the body in shape to be reanimated when the effect of the antidote wears off. Anyhow, that’s what happens to a man who takes it in its present state. He literally dies for half a day, then comes slowly back to life again.”
“Have you tried it on anyone?”
Marxman nodded. His face was a little paler than normal.
“What happens to the subject of experiment?”
* * * *
Marxman looked at Harley for a moment before replying,
“I tried it on a dock laborer, several times. He wasn’t a clever or educated man. He didn’t manage to express very well the things that happened to him. But as far as I could gather, he was in the land of the dead during the coma induced by the drug.”
“Land of the dead.’“ Harley exclaimed. Then he smiled.”And where is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s it like?”
“I don’t know that, either, my man hadn’t the vocabulary to describe such things in the first place. In the second, he didn’t want to talk! And, though he was fearless in a blunt, animal way, he refused to take the stuff more than twice.”
“Probably it has some sort of hashish effect,” said Harley shrugging. “Land of the dead! That’s a little thick! But regardless of that angle of it - the poison gas invention is not yet ready to turn over to the war department. Is that it?”
“That’s it,” said Marxman. “The gas is perfected, but the antidote is not. And until it is, the whole thing remains only a novelty, a dream of empire that can’t be crystalized till I have finished work.”
Harley fingered his lean chin.
“Don’t overlook the fact that, even as matters stand, you have a very valuable secret,” he warned. “Any power on earth would pay millions for the uncompleted formulae, on the chance that they could work out the conclusion in their laboratory. You have the formulae written out?”
Marxman nodded.
“They’re too complicated to carry in my head.”
“You keep the papers in a safe place?�
��
Marxman smiled a little. He drew from his vest pocket a small capsule, like a quinine capsule. It looked like some sort of dsypepsia medicine he carried for use after meals.
“The formulae are on onion-skin paper, in this capsule. If ever I am threatened for them, I swallow them. The capsule dissolves in my stomach - and so do the formulae! I hope the necessity for swallowing them doesn’t arise, for it would take me six wasted months to rediscover a few of the obscure chemical combinations in the formulae. But it can be done if necessary.”
Harley nodded. “As safe a way as any, I think. Well, goodnight, Marxman. Take care of yourself, and for God’s sake give the United States first chance at your gas and antidote when its worked out.”
“I am American,” was Marxman’s simple answer. “I have worked in France because a colleague there has just the laboratory equipment I needed. That’s all. My own country gets the invention when it is completed, as a matter of course.”
The two men shook hands. Harley left Marxman’s cabin.
* * * *
Marxman stared at the little capsule in his hand, which contained the nucleus of the mightiest war weapon ever devised. Then he slipped it into his vest pocket again.
The night was warm, almost stuffy. He lit a cigar, put on a plaid cap, and went up on deck....
At that moment, in the salon at the opposite end of the ship, from which he had not stirred all evening, a man who looked like a high school principal but was really Assistant Secretary of War Harley, was talking in low tones with his secretary, a good-looking young fellow of twenty-eight.
“I hear Marxman is on board with an interesting invention,” the secretary was saying. “Are you going to see him?”
“By all means,” said Harley. “I think a little later in the evening.”
Marxman passed the windows of the salon without looking in. Assistant Secretary of War Harley had already seen him, he thought. It never occurred to him that a man could make up like Harley so exactly as to fool him - he was well acquainted with the man - and then proceed to pump him dry of details concerning his latest invention.
He walked to the rail, fingers touching the capsule in his vest pocket.
* * * *
Sea calm as a pond. Great ship like a ghost vessel floating over it. Moon pouring down a peaceful but somehow eery white flood.
From the stern came strains of music as the ship’s orchestra played for those in evening dress who cared to dance. From the salon nearest to where Marxman stood by the rail came a burst of laughter as members of a salesmen’s convention to Europe laughed over a Joke.
Right behind Marxman there was an iron staircase leading up to the boat deck. From that deserted upper deck a figure appeared. It blotted out the faint light at the head of the stairs. It began to descend, slowly, without a sound, like a great snake slithering down on its prey.
Once Marxman turned for a moment. The black figure became a motionless blot on the staircase. Marxman looked out over the sea again. Then the figure recommenced its crawling descent. A faint streak of light from the drawn shutters of a near-by cabin flicked over it.
It revealed a form in a black cloak with a black hat pulled low. That was all. The face could not be seen. Yet evil radiated from the form as heat radiates from black-hot iron.
The black figure reached the deck and took two rapid strides toward the inventor....
Gay laughter from the salon - casual music from the dance floor - and on the deck, death!
Marxman tried to cry out. A steely arm hooked around his throat prevented a whisper from coming from his lips. His hand darted for his vest pocket and he raised the capsule to his lips and took it into his mouth.
The arm around his throat was replaced by steely hands. He couldn’t swallow. His face grew blue, purple, with eyes starting from their sockets as he fought for breath. Then his writhing body became still. It hung from the iron grip of the hands around his throat.
One of the hands shifted. Fingers, gloved, pried open Marxman’s Jaws. They took the melting capsule from his mouth. Then the dark figure heaved upright.
A thing like a badly tied bundle of rugs went over the ship’s rail. There was a faint splash, almost inaudible in the plashing of the ship’s progress.
The dark figure watched Marxman’s body float astern like a drift log in the white wake of the moonlight. Then it turned, and melted into the darkness of the nearest companionway. And with it went the formulae of the new gas - and its partly perfected antidote.
* * * *
2
On a hill fronting the shore of the bay among great estates forming the cream of the big houses in the wealthy resort town on Red Bank, New Jersey, was the home of Linton R. Yates. A thirty-room mansion, it crowned the hill like a coronet of gray, cut stone.
At the moment it was dark. No lights showed from any window, even the windows in the servants’ quarters. It looked empty. But it wasn’t. In the darkness of the side driveway a roadster stood. The roadster had been driven there, alone, by Linton Yates himself. And Linton Yates was at present in the basement of the house.
Down there, with none of the electric light showing from any barred and steel-shuttered basement windows, he stood beside the square furnace at the end wall. His withered old hand went out. He touched a small, discolored patch in the wall next to the back of the furnace. A section of the wall hinged out.
Gray bearded, wizened, crafty-looking, the rich man stared furtively around him before he stepped into the hidden basement room revealed by the swinging back of the concealed door. As he entered the room he touched another discolored patch in the stone wall, and the door closed after him.
There was a great safe door in the floor of the ten-by-ten cube. So large was it that it almost formed the floor of the room. Rubbing his hands together with a dry, rasping sound, Yates walked over the safe door to a big knob in its center. He twirled that to the required combination, walked off the door, and threw a small switch.
There was a hum as a half-horsepower electric motor spun gears that slowly raised the ponderous door. Yates went down two steps into the safe. Here was a great heap of small, dirty yellow bars, and a square steel box. The yellow bars were gold; tons of the stuff, hoarded here by Yates against the day when the country would return to the gold standard - at a new and high dollar-value that should give him two dollars for every one he had spent for the precious metal. The steel box....
Yates chuckled aloud as he passed the bars of gold and went to the box. It weighed perhaps a hundred pounds. It was with a panting effort that the wizened old man managed to open the lid. With the lid opened, he crooned aloud, as a man might talk to an adorned pet.
A coruscating, varicolored fire came from within the box. It was cold fire. Yates plunged his hands in and lifted them. The fire trickled back down between his fingers and into the box again. The fire of diamonds, hundreds of them, unset but perfectly cut.
Diamonds and gold! The two commodities, particularly gold, that always have at least some solid worth, no matter to what low price other commodities sink.
“With these,” whispered Yates, eyes gleaming, “I am secure. No man or form of government can harm me - make me poor.”
He let diamonds trickle through his claw-like fingers again, then stiffened suddenly.
But his stiffening was not that of alarm, nor was it that of listening. He stared straight ahead of him, at the steel and copper wall of the sunken safe. But he did not see that wall. His filmed eyes were glazing rapidly, as the eyes of a man glazing in death. His body was as stiff suddenly, and for no apparent reason, as a thing of wood.
For perhaps a full minute he stood there, bent over the box a little, with the last of the diamonds trickling from his cupped hands to the strong-box. Then slowly, he began to sag toward the floor. He sank to his knees, his rigid stare still centered on the safe wall. He fell, like a falling log, prone beside the treasure box.
He was dead. A glance could reveal that fact. Bu
t in a moment it was revealed that his death was not the most horrible part of the unseen drama to be played in the sunken safe.
The dead body abruptly began to lose its solidarity of outline. Its demarcations became blurred, as the surface of hot stone is blurred when heat waves shimmer up from it. And as the outlines became more and more blurred, they commenced to dwindle.
The dead body shrank, like wool in hot water. It got smaller till it was like the form of a doll dressed in doll’s clothes to resemble an old man. And then - there was nothing in the safe but the dirty bars of gold and the small box of gems. At least, a glance would have intimated that there was nothing. Only a careful look would have shown, on the floor beside the box, a tiny thing like a watch-charm shaped in human form.
Dr Satan - [Pulp Classics 6] Page 12
