The Weird Fiction Megapack

by Various Writers

  He frowned. “The watches were taken from all the sufferers from this strange paralysis, save Weems. By whom? Madame Sin? Weems’ watch is absolutely in good order, but it won’t run. The ball on the roulette wheels stays on a slant instead of rolling down into a slot as it should when the wheel is motionless. But the wheel doesn’t seem to be quite motionless. It apparently moved a fraction of an inch in the forty-five minutes or so that I was in the room.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t touch it, and set it moving?” said Beatrice. “Those wheels are delicately balanced.”

  “Not that delicately! I barely brushed it with my fingers as I examined the ivory ball. No, I didn’t move it. But I’m sure it did move.…”

  There was a tap at the door. He went to it. Gest was in the corridor.

  “Here’s the master key,” he said, extending a key to Keane. “I got it from the manager. But—you’re sure it is necessary to enter Madame Sin’s rooms?”

  “Very,” said Keane.

  “She is in now,” said the president. “Couid you—just to avoid possible scandal—inasmuch as you don’t intend to knock before entering—”

  He glanced at Beatrice.

  Keane smiled. “I’ll have Miss Dale go in first. If Madame Sin is undressed or—entertaining—Miss Dale can apologize and retreat. But I am sure Madame Sin will be unaware of intrusion. In spite of the conviction of your key clerk that she is in, I am quite sure that, at least figuratively, she is out.”

  “Figuratively out?” echoed Gest. “I don’t understand.”

  “You will later—unless this is my fated time to lose in the fight I have made against the devil who calls himself Doctor Satan. Are Chichester and Kroner in the hotel?”

  Gest shook his head.

  “Kroner is in the Turkish bath two blocks down the street. Chichester went home ten minutes ago.”

  “Madame Sin will be unaware of intrusion,” Keane repeated enigmatically and with seeming irrelevance.

  He turned to Beatrice, and the two went to the woman’s rooms.

  * * * *

  Keane softly closed Madame Sin’s hall door behind him after Beatrice had entered first and reported that the woman was alone and in what seemed a deep sleep. At first, with a stifled scream, she had called out that Madame Sin was dead; then she had pronounced it sleep.…

  Keane went at once to the central figure of the living-room: the body of Madame Sin, on a chaise-longue near the window. The woman was in blue negligee, with her shapely legs bare and her arms and throat pale ivory against the blue silk. Her eyes were not quite closed. Her breast rose and fell, very slowly, almost like the breathing of a chloroformed person.

  Keane touched her bare shoulder. She did not stir. There was no alteration of the deep, slow breathing. He lifted one of her eyelids. The eye beneath stared blindly at him, the lid went nearly closed again at the cessation of his touch.

  “Trance,” Keane said. “And the most profound one I have ever seen. It’s about what I had expected.”

  “I’ve seen her somewhere before,” said Beatrice suddenly.

  Keane nodded. “You have. She is a movie extra, working now and then for the Long Island Picture Company. But I’m not much interested in this beautiful shell. For that’s all she is at the moment—a shell, now emptied and unhuman. We’ll look around. You give me your impressions as they come to you, and we’ll see if they match mine.”

  They went to the bedroom of the apartment. Bedroom was like living-room in that it was impersonal, a standard chamber in a large hotel. But this seemed almost incredibly impersonal! There was not one picture, not one feminine touch. In the bath there were scarcely any toilet articles; and in the closet there was only an overnight bag and a suitcase by way of luggage, with neither of them entirety emptied of their contents.

  “One impression I get is that these rooms have not been lived in even for twenty-four hours!” said Beatrice.

  Keane nodded. “If Madame Sin retreated here only to fall into that deep trance, and did not wake again till it was time for her to venture out, the rooms would have just this look. And I think that is exactly what she has done!”

  Beatrice looked deftly through Madame Sin’s meager wardrobe. Keane searched dresser and table and bureau drawers. He wasn’t looking for anything definite, just something that might prove the final straw to point him definitely toward the incredible goal he was more and more convinced was near.

  He found it in the top of the woman’s suitcase.

  His fingers were tense as he unfolded a business letterhead. It was a carbon copy, filled with figures. And a glance told him what it was.

  It was a duplicate of the financial statement of the Blue Bay Development Company—that statement which was held highly confidential, and which no one was supposed to have seen save the three Blue Bay officials, and a bank officer or two.

  Keane strode to Madame Sin’s phone, and got Gest on the wire.

  “Gest, can you tell me if Kroner and Chichester are still out of the hotel?” Gest’s voice came back promptly.

  “Kroner is here with me now. I guess Chichester is still at his home on Ocean Boulevard; at any rate he isn’t in the hotel—”

  “Ascott!” Beatrice said tensely.

  Keane hung up and turned to her.

  “The woman—Madame Sin!” Beatrice said, pointing toward the still, lovely form on the chaise-longue. “I thought I saw her eyes open a little—thought I saw her look at you!”

  Keane’s own eyes went down a bit to veil the sudden glitter in them from Beatrice.

  “Probably you were mistaken,” he said easily. “Probably you only thought you saw her eyelids move.… I’m going to wind this up now, I think. You go back to your suite, and watch the time. If I’m not back here in two hours, go with the police to the home of Chichester, the treasurer of this unlucky resort development. And go fast,” he added, in a tone that slowly drained the blood from Beatrice’s anxious face.

  5. Death’s Lovely Mask

  Chichester’s home sat on a square of lawn between the new boulevard and the bay shore like a white jewel in the sun. It looked prosperous, prosaic, serene. But to Keane’s eyes, at least, it seemed covered with the psychic pall that had come to be associated in his mind with the dreaded Doctor Satan. He walked toward the blandly peaceful-looking new home with the feeling of one who walks toward a tomb.

  “A feeling that might be well founded,” he shrugged grimly, as he reached the porch.

  He could feel the short hair at the base of his skull stir a little as he reached the door of this place he believed to be the latest lair of the man who was amused to call himself Doctor Satan. And it stirred still more as he tried the knob.

  The door was unlocked.

  He looked at it for several minutes. A lock wouldn’t have mattered to Keane, and Satan knew that as well as Keane himself. Nevertheless, to leave the door invitingly open like this was almost too obliging!

  He opened the door and stepped in, bracing himself for instant attack. But no attack of any kind was forthcoming. The front hall in which he found himself was deserted. Indeed, the whole house had that curiously breathless feeling encountered in homes for the moment untenanted.

  Down the hall was an open double doorway. Keane stared that way. He himself could not have told how he knew, but know he did, that beyond that doorway lay what he had come to find. He walked toward it.

  Behind him, the street door opened again, very slowly and cautiously. An eye was put close to the resultant crack. The eye was dark, exotically lovely. It fastened on Keane’s back.

  Keane stared in through the doorway. He was gazing into a library, dimmed by drawn shades. He entered it, with every nerve-end in his body silently shrieking of danger.

  The street door softly closed after admitting a figure that moved on soundless feet. A woman, with a face like a pale flower on an exquisite throat. Madame Sin.

  Her face was as serenely lovely as ever. Not by a line had it changed. And ye
t, subtly, it had become a mask of beautiful death. Her eyes were death’s dark fires as she moved without a sound down the hall toward the library. In her tapering hands was the gold-link bag.

  * * * *

  In the library, Keane stood with beating heart over two stark, still bodies that lay on the thick carpet near a flat-topped desk. One was wizened, lank, a little undersized, with dry-looking skin. It was the body of Chichester. At first it seemed a corpse, but then Keane saw the chest move with slow, deep breaths, as the breast of the woman back at the hotel had moved.

  But it was not this figure that made Keane’s heart thud and his hands clench. It was the other.

  This was a taller figure, lying on its back with hands folded. The hands were red-gloved. The face was concealed by a red mask. The body was draped by a red cloak. From the head sprang two little knobs, or projections, like Lucifer’s homs. Doctor Satan himself!

  “It’s my chance,” whispered Keane. “Satan—sending his soul and mind and spirit from his own shell—into that of others—Madame Sin—Chichester. Now his body lies here empty! If I killed that—”

  Exotically beautiful dark eyes—with death in their loveliness—watched him from the library doorway as he bent over the red-robed figure. Sardonic death in lovely eyes!

  “No wonder Gest thought that Wilson was killed in the conference room, just before he could tell of the roulette wheel, as if Doctor Satan had been there himself! Satan was there! And he was on the roof garden earlier, and in the roulette room! A trance for the woman, the crowding of Satan’s black spirit into her body—and she becomes Madame Sin, with Satan peering from her eyes and moving in her mantle of flesh! A trance for the unfortunate Chichester—and Satan talks with Gest and Kroner as the Blue Bay treasurer, and can strike down Wilson when he comes to report! Chichester and Madame Sin—both Doctor Satan—becoming lifeless, trance-held shells when Satan’s soul has left them!”

  But here was Satan’s physical shell, lying in a coma at his feet, to be killed at a stroke! His deadly enemy, the enemy of all mankind, delivered helpless to him!

  “But if I do kill the body,” Keane whispered, “will I kill the spirit too, or banish it from the material world so that humanity won’t again be troubled? Satan’s spirit, the essential man, is abroad in another body. If I kill this red-robed body, will it draw the spirit out of mortal affairs with it? Or would it simply deprive it of its original housing so that I’d have to seek Satan’s soul in body after body, as I have till now sought him in the flesh in lair after lair? That would be—horrible!”

  He drove away the grim thought. It was probable that with the death of his body, Doctor Satan in entirety would die, or at least pass out of mortal knowledge through the gateway called death. And the mechanics of forcing him through that gateway was to kill the body.

  Behind him, Madame Sin crept closer and closer on soundless feet. Her red lips were set in a still smile. The goldlink purse was extended a little toward Keane. Her forefinger searched for the movable bar that changed angles of the queer, metal cage within.

  Keane’s hand raised to strike. His eyes burned down at the red-clad figure of the man at his feet, who was mankind’s enemy. Behind him, Madame Sin’s finger found the little bar.…

  It was not till then that Keane felt the psychic difference caused by the entrance of another into a room that had been deserted save for himself. Another person would not have felt that difference at all, but Keane had developed his psychic perceptions as ordinary men exercise and develop their biceps.

  With an inarticulate cry he whirled, and leaped far to the side.

  The wall behind the spot where he had been disappeared as the gold-link bag continued to point that way. The woman, snarling like a tigress, swung her bag toward Keane in his new position. But Keane was not waiting. He sprang for her. His hand got her wrist and wrenched to get the gold-link purse away from her. It turned toward her, back again toward him, with the little bar moving as her hand was constricted over the thing in the purse.

  It was a woman’s body he struggled with. But there was strength in the fragile flesh beyond the strength of any woman! It took all his steely power to tear from her grasp the gold-link purse with its enclosed device. As he got it, he heard the woman’s shrill cry of pain and terror, felt her sag in his arms. And then he heard many voices and stared around like a sleepwalker who has waked in a spot different from that in which he had begun his sleep—a comparison so exact that for one wild moment he thought it must be true!

  He was in a familiar room.… Yes, Doctor Grays’ room at the Blue Bay Hotel.

  The people around him were familiar.… There was Gest. There were Kroner and Doctor Grays, and—Beatrice. There were the Blue Bay chief of police, and two men.

  But the limp feminine form he held in his arms was Madame Sin, the fury he had been fighting in Chichester’s library! And in his hand was still the gold link bag he had wrenched from her!

  The woman in his arms stirred. She looked blankly up at him, stared around. A cry came from her lips.

  “Where—am I? Who are you all? What are you doing in my room? But this isn’t my room!”

  Her face was different, younger-looking, less exotic. She wasn’t Madame Sin; she was a frightened, puzzled girl. Keane’s brain had slipped back into gear, and into comprehension of what had happened.

  “Where do you think you are?” he said gently. “And what is your name?”

  “I’m Sylvia Crane,” she said. “And I’m in a New York hotel room. At least I was the last I knew, when I opened the door and the man in the red mask came in.…”

  She buried her face in her hands. “After that—I don’t know what happened—”

  “Nor do any of us,” quavered Gest. “For God’s sake, Keane, give us some idea of what has happened here, if you can!”

  * * * *

  It was over an hour later when Beatrice and Keane entered the door of his suite. It had taken that long to explain to the people in Doctor Grays’ rooms. Even then the explanation had been but partial, and most of it had been frenziedly and stubbornly disbelieved even though proof was there.

  Keane’s shoulders were bowed a little and his face wore a bitter look. He had thwarted Doctor Satan in his attempt to extort a fortune from the resort. But once more his deadly enemy had got away from him. He had failed.

  Beatrice shook her head.

  “Don’t look like that. The fact that you’re here alive is a miracle that makes up for his escape. If you could have seen yourself, and that girl, when the police brought you back from Chichester’s house! As soon as they set you down in the doctor’s rooms, you and the girl came together. You fought again for her purse, as you say you started to do in Chichester’s house ten hours ago. But you moved with such horrible slowness! It was like watching a slow-motion picture. It took you hours to raise your arm, hours to take the purse from her hand. And your expression changed with equal slowness.… I can’t tell you how dreadful it was!”

  “All due, as I said, to this,” Keane sighed.

  He stared at the little metal cage he had taken from the purse.

  “The latest product of Doctor Satan’s warped genius. A time-diverter, I suppose you might call it.”

  “I didn’t understand your explanation in Grays’ rooms, after you’d brought those people out of their dreadful coma,” said Beatrice.

  “I’ll try again.”

  Keane held up the geometric figure.

  “Time has been likened to a river. We don’t know precisely what it is, but it seems that the river simile must be apt. Very well, we and all around us float on this river at the same speed. If there were different currents in the same river, we might have the spectacle of seeing those nearby move with lightning rapidity or with snail-like slowness as their time-environment differed from ours. Normally there is no such difference, but with this fantastic thing Doctor Satan has succeeded in producing them artificially.

  “He has succeeded in working out several s
ets of angles which, when opposed against each other as this geometric figure opposes them, can either speed up or slow down the time-stream of whatever it is pointed at. The final angle is formed by this movable bar in its relation to the whole. By its manipulation, time can be indefinitely retarded or hastened. He utilized the bizarre creation in this way:

  “In New York he contacted a quite innocent party by the name of Sylvia Crane. He hypnotized her, and forced his spirit into her body while hers was held in abeyance. Then ‘Madame Sin’ registered here. She made acquaintance with Weems. On the roof garden, she pointed the infernal figure at him, with the little bar turned to retard time. The result was that Weems suddenly lived and moved at immensely retarded speed. It took about twenty-four hours for his arm to raise the champagne glass to his lips, though he thought it took a second. Our actions were so swift by comparison that they didn’t register on his consciousness at all. He confessed after I’d brought him out of his odd time-state with the device, that he seemed to raise his glass while in the roof garden, and start to lower it when he found himself abruptly in Doctor Grays’ bedroom. He didn’t know how he got there or anything else. It was the same with the nine in the roulette room. They came back to normal speed only a second or two after being retarded in the roulette room. But it was hours to us, and meanwhile they seemed absolutely motionless.”

  “How on earth did you ever get a hint of such a thing as this?” said Beatrice.

  “Weems’ watch gave a pointer. It was all right, the jeweler said, but it wouldn’t run. Well, it did run—but at a speed so slow that it could not be recorded. The roulette wheel was another. The ivory ball did not roll down the side of the wheel because the wheel was rotating—with infinite slowness after being retarded by the same thing that made the people look like frozen statues. Satan, as Madame Sin, couldn’t do anything about the wheel. But he—or ‘she’—could and did take the watches from all concerned, to guard against discovery that way. However, there was no chance to get Weems’ watch; there were always people around.”