by Otto Penzler
After that I stopped sneering. I stopped saying anything. And by morning they let me go.
Before I left, I asked a question. I was told Oscar had been released a couple of hours before.
I made my way home and Stella was waiting and I reached for her.
But there was no rest for my weariness against her cuddly body. She told me Oscar had been here looking for me with a gun.
“When was this?”
“Half an hour ago,” she said. “He looked like a wild man. I’d never seen him like that. He was waving a gun. He said you’d beaten up Abby and he was going to kill you. Honey, did you really beat her up?”
I had taken my jacket off. I put it on.
Stella watched me wide-eyed. “If you’re running away, take me with you.”
“I’m not running,” I said.
“But you can’t stay. He said he’d be back.”
“Did he?” I said hollowly.
I got my gun from where I’d stashed it and checked the magazine and stuck the gun into my jacket pocket.
She ran to me. “What are you going to do? What’s going on? Why don’t you tell me anything?”
I said, “I don’t want to die,” and pushed her away from me.
I went only as far as the top of the stoop and waited there, leaning against the side of the doorway. I could watch both directions of the cheerful sun-washed street, and it wasn’t long before Oscar appeared.
He looked worse than he had yesterday afternoon. His unshaven face was like a skeleton head. There was a scarecrow limpness about his lean body. All that seemed to keep him going was his urge to kill me.
Maybe if I were living with Abby, had her to love and to hold, I wouldn’t give a damn what suspicions I had about her and what facts there were to back them up. I’d deny anything but my need for her body, and I’d be gunning for whoever had marred that lovely face.
I knew there was no use talking to him. I had seen Oscar Trotter in action before, and I knew there was only one thing that would stop him.
I walked down the steps with my right hand in my pocket. Oscar had both hands in his pockets. He didn’t check his stride. He said, “Johnny, I—”
I wasn’t listening to him. I was watching his right hand. When it came out of his pocket, so did mine. I shot him.
15
And now we are all dead.
There were five of us on that caper. Four are in their graves. I still have the breath of life in me, but the difference between me and the other four is only a matter of two days, when I will be burned in the chair.
It was a short trial. A dozen witnesses had seen me stand in the morning sunlight and shoot down Oscar Trotter. I couldn’t even plead self-defense because he’d had no gun on him. And telling the truth as I knew it wouldn’t have changed anything. The day after the trial began the jury found me guilty.
I sent for Stella. I didn’t expect her to come, but she did. Yesterday afternoon she was brought here to the death house to see me.
She didn’t jiggle. Something had happened to her—to her figure, to her face. Something seemed to have eaten away at her.
“Congratulations,” I said.
Stella’s voice had changed too. It was terribly tired. “Then you’ve guessed,” she said.
“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it. Oscar didn’t have a gun on him. I know now what he was about to do when he took his hand out of his pocket. He was going to offer me his hand. He had started to say, ‘Johnny, I made a mistake.’ Something like that. Because he still had a brain. When he’d learned that Tiny had been knifed in bed, he’d realized I’d been right about Abby. But the irony is that I hadn’t been right. I’d been dead wrong.”
“Yes, Johnny, you were wrong,” she said listlessly.
“At the end you got yourself two birds with one stone. You told me a lie about Oscar gunning for me, and it turned out the way you hoped. I killed him and the state will kill me. I’ve had plenty of time to think back—how that night at Oscar’s, as soon as we arrived you hurried into the kitchen to give Abby a hand. Why so friendly so quickly with Abby who’d taken your man from you? I saw why. You’d gone into the kitchen to put arsenic in the chopped liver.”
“You can’t prove it, Johnny,” she whispered.
“No. And it wouldn’t save me. Well, I had my answer why you were so eager to take up with me the minute Oscar was through with you. You had to hang around his circle of friends, and you had to bide your time to work the killings so you wouldn’t be suspected. You succeeded perfectly, Stella. One thing took me a long time to understand, and that was why.”
“Wally,” she said.
I nodded. “It had to be. If you’d hated Oscar for throwing you over for Abby, you mightn’t have cared if you killed the others at that party as long as you got those two. But there was Tiny’s death—cold, deliberate, personal murder. The motive was the same as I’d thought was Abby’s. The same master plan—those who’d been in on Wally’s death must die. And so it had to be you and Wally.”
Stella moved closer to me. Her pretty face was taut with intensity.
“I loved him,” she said. “That wife of his, that Abby—she was a no-good louse. First time I ever saw her was when she came up to the apartment to see Oscar, but I knew all about her. From Wally. That marriage was a joke. You wouldn’t believe this—you were crazy over her yourself, like Oscar was—but she was after anything wore pants. That was all she gave a damn for, except maybe money.”
“I believe you,” I said. “You must have been the one who persuaded Oscar to take Wally in on the caper.”
“We fell for each other, Wally and I. One of those screwy, romantic pickups on a bus. We saw each other a few times and then planned to go away together. But we hadn’t a cent. I knew Oscar was planning a big job. He thought he kept me from knowing anything that was going on. But I knew. Always. And I was smarter. I got a guy who owed me a favor to bring Oscar and Wally together. Oscar took him in on it.” Her mouth went bitter. “How I hated the rackets! I wanted to get out of them. I hated Oscar. We had it all figured. We’d take Wally’s cut, the few thousand dollars, and go out west and live straight and clean. A little house somewhere and a decent job and children.” Her head drooped. “And Oscar killed him.”
“He might have died anyway from the bullet wound.”
“But not to give him at least a chance!” Stella hung onto her handbag with both hands. “You know why I came when you sent for me? To gloat. To tell you the truth if you didn’t know it already and laugh in your face.”
But she didn’t laugh. She didn’t gloat. She looked as sick and tired of it all as I was. She looked as if, like me, she no longer gave a damn about anything.
“It doesn’t give you much satisfaction, does it?” I said. “It doesn’t bring Wally back. It doesn’t make it easy to live with yourself.”
She swayed. “Oh, God! So much death and emptiness. And I can’t sleep, Johnny. I’ve had my revenge, but I can’t sleep.”
“Why don’t you try arsenic?” I said softly.
She looked at me. Her mouth started to work, but she didn’t say anything. Then she was gone.
That was yesterday. Today Bill Brant visited me and told me that Stella had taken poison and was dead.
“Arsenic?” I said.
“Yeah. The same way Georgie Ross died. What can you tell me about it?”
“Nothing, copper,” I said.
So that makes five of us dead, and very soon now I will join them, and we will all be dead. Except Abby, and she was never part of the picture.
Wasn’t she?
Stella was kidding herself by thinking she’d killed Oscar and me. Georgie and Tiny and finally herself, yes, but not us.
I needn’t have been so quick with my gun on the street outside the brownstone house. I could have waited another moment to make sure that it was actually his life or mine.
Now, writing this in my cell in the death house, I can face up to the truth.
I had shot him down in the clear bright morning because he had Abby.
Villain: Doctor Satan
Horror Insured
PAUL ERNST
PAUL FREDERICK ERNST (1900–1983) was a frequent contributor to Weird Tales, notably with his series about Dr. Satan, “the world’s weirdest criminal,” whose nemesis is the occult detective Ascott Keane. The series ran in the mid-1930s. Ernst claimed that most of these stories, and his other supernatural tales, came to him in dreams so perfectly constructed, which he remembered in the morning, that he merely had to sit down and transcribe them.
Doctor Satan wears a red cloak, red gloves, a red mask, and a skull cap with horns on it. We never learn who (or what) he is. Doctor Satan is assisted by the ugly, monkey-like dwarf Girse and the legless giant Bostiff. Keane is accompanied by his secretary, with whom he is in love, the beautiful Beatrice Dale.
The Doctor Satan series lasted only eight episodes. Ernst created works in a wide variety of genres, including mystery, horror, and, most famously, his pseudonymous hero character, The Avenger, written as Kenneth Robeson. The Robeson byline was used by Lester Dent for a long run of Doc Savage magazines, one of the most successful pulps of its time. Because of the tremendous sales in recounting the adventures of “The Man of Bronze,” the publisher convinced Ernst to write about “The Man of Steel,” The Avenger, which the author claimed was the worst writing he ever did, though fans disagreed and his twenty-four novelettes were later reprinted as paperback books.
“Horror Insured” was originally published in the January 1936 issue of Weird Tales; it was first collected in The Complete Tales of Doctor Satan (Boston, Altus, 2013).
HORROR INSURED
Paul Ernst
IT WAS NOON. The enormous National State Building hummed like a beehive with the activity of its tenants. Every office spewed forth men and women on their way to lunch. The express elevators dropped like plummets from the seventy-ninth floor, while the locals handled the crowds from the fortieth floor down.
At the top floor an express elevator tarried beyond its usual schedule. The operator paid no attention to the red flash from the starter downstairs signaling the Up cages to start down as soon as possible. He acted as though he was beyond schedules, as indeed he was.
This elevator, though not entirely private, was at the disposal of Martial Varley, owner of the building, whose offices took up the top floor. Others could ride in it, but they did so with the understanding that at morning, noon, and evening the elevator waited to carry Varley, whose appearances at his office occurred with time-clock regularity. Hence, if the cage waited inactively those in it knew why and did not exhibit signs of impatience.
There were half a dozen people in the elevator that paused for Varley to ride down. There was an elderly woman, Varley’s office manager, and two secretaries; and there were two big business men who had been conferring with Varley and were now waiting to go to lunch with him.
The six chatted in pairs to one another. The cage waited, with the operator humming a tune. Around them, in the big building, the prosaic business of prosaic people was being done. The glass-paneled doors to Varley’s office opened. The operator snapped to attention and those in the cage stopped talking and stared respectfully at the man who came to the cage doors.
Varley was a man of sixty, gray-haired, with a coarse but kindly face dominated by a large nose which his enemies called bulbous. He wore the hat that had made him famous—a blue-gray fedora which he ordered in quantity lots and wore exclusive of all other colors, fabrics, or fashions.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Ed,” Varley boomed to one of the two business men in the cage. “Phone call. Held me up for a few minutes.”
He stepped into the elevator, nodding to the others. “Let’s go,” he said to the operator.
The cage started down.
The express elevators were supposed to fall like a plummet. They made the long drop to the ground in a matter of seconds, normally. And this one started like a plummet.
“Damn funny, that phone call I got just before I came out of my office,” Varley boomed to the two men he was lunching with. “Some joker calling himself Doctor Satan—” He stopped, and frowned. “What’s wrong with the elevator?” he snapped to the operator.
“I don’t know, sir,” the boy said.
He was jerking at the lever. Ordinarily, so automatic was the cage, he did not touch the controls from the time the top floor doors mechanically closed themselves till the time the lobby was reached. Now he was twitching the control switch back and forth, from Off to On.
And the elevator was slowing down.
The swift start had slowed to a smooth crawl downward. And the crawl was becoming a creep. The floor numbers that had flashed on the little frosted glass panel inside the cage as fast as you could count were now forming themselves with exasperating slowness. Sixty-one, sixty, fifty-nine…
“Can’t you make it go faster?” said Varley. “I never saw these cages go so slow. Is the power low?”
“I don’t think so, sir,” said the operator. He jammed the control against the fast-speed peg. And the cage slowed down still more.
“Something’s wrong,” whispered one of the girl secretaries to the other. “This slow speed…And it’s getting warm in here!”
Evidently Varley thought so too. He unbuttoned his vest and took his fedora off and fanned himself.
“I don’t know what the hell’s the matter,” he growled to the two men with him. “Certainly have to have the engineer look into this. There’s supposed to be decent ventilation in these shafts. And if they call this express service…Gad, I’m hot!”
Perspiration was bursting out on his forehead now. He began to look ghastly pale.
Fifty-two, fifty-one, fifty…the little red numbers appeared on the frosted glass indicator ever more slowly. The elevator would take five minutes to descend, at this pace.
“Something’s the matter with me,” gasped Varley. “I’ve never felt like this before.” One of the secretaries was standing near him. She looked at him suddenly, with wide eyes in which fear of something beyond normal comprehension was beginning to show. She shrank back from him.
“Get this cage down,” Varley panted. “I’m—sick.”
The rest looked at each other. All were beginning to feel what the girl, who had been nearest him, had felt. Heat was beginning to radiate from Varley’s corpulent body as if he were a stove!
“Good heavens, man!” said one of the two business men. He laid his hand on Varley’s arm, took it away quickly. “Why—you’re burning up with fever. What’s wrong?”
Varley tried to answer, but couldn’t. He staggered back against the wall of the cage, leaned there with arms hanging down and lips hanging slack. There was no longer perspiration on his face. It was dry, feverishly dry; and the skin was cracking on his taut, puffed cheeks.
“Burning!” he gasped. “Burning up!”
The girl secretary screamed, then. And the man who had put his hand on Varley’s arm jerked at the operator’s shoulder.
“For heaven’s sake get this cage down! Mr. Varley’s ill!”
“I—I can’t,” gasped the boy. “Something’s the matter—it never acted like this before—”
He jerked at the controls, and the elevator did not respond. Slowly, monotonously, it continued its deliberate descent.
And abruptly a scream tore from Varley’s cracking lips. “Burning! Help me, somebody—”
The slowly dropping cage became a thing of horror, a six-foot square of hell from which there was no escape because there were no doors opening onto the shaft at the upper levels, and which could not be speeded up because it did not respond to the controls.
Screaming with every breath he drew, Varley sank to the floor. And those who might otherwise have tried to help him cowered away from him as far as they could get. For from his body now was radiating heat that made a tiny inferno of the elevator.
“God!” whispered one of the m
en. “Look at him—he really is burning up!”
The heat from Varley’s body had become so intense that the others in the cage could hardly stand it. But far worse than their bodily torment was the mental agony of watching the thing that for a week had New York City in a chaos.
Varley had stopped screaming now. He lay staring up at the gilded roof of the elevator with frightful, glazing eyes. His chest heaved with efforts to draw breath. Heaved, then was still.
“He’s dead!” shrieked one of the secretaries. “Dead—”
Her body fell to the floor of the cage near Varley’s. The elderly woman quietly sagged to her knees, then in a huddled heap in the corner as her senses fled under the impact of a shock too great to be endured.
But the horror that had gripped Varley went on. “Look! Look! Look!” panted the office manager.
But he had no need to pant out the word. The rest were looking all right. They’d have turned their eyes away if they could, but there is a fascination to extremes of horror that makes the will powerless. In every detail they were forced to see the thing that happened.
Varley’s dead body was beginning to disappear. The corpulent form of the man who a moment ago had been one of the biggest figures in the nation seemed to have been turned to wax, which was melting and vaporizing.
His face was a shapeless mass now; and the flesh of his body seemed to be melting and running together. As it did so, his limbs writhed and twitched as if still imbued with life. Writhed, and shriveled.
“Burning up!” whispered the office manager, his eyes bulging with horror behind their thick lenses. “Melting away . . . burning up….”
It was so incredible, so unreal that it was dream-like.
The cage descended slowly, slowly, like the march of time itself which no man could hasten. The operator stood like a wooden image at the controls, staring with starting eyes at the heap on the floor which had been Varley. The two business men shrank together, hands to their mouths, gnawing the backs of their hands. The office manager was panting, “Look…look…look…” with every breath, like a sobbing groan. And Varley was a diminishing, shapeless mass on the floor.
