by Otto Penzler
“Oh, God, let me out of here!” screamed one of the business men.
But there was no way out. No doors opened onto the shaft here. All in the cage were doomed to stay and watch the spectacle that would haunt them till they died.
On the cage floor there was a blue-gray fedora hat, and a mound of blackened substance that was almost small enough to have been contained in it.
Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…The cage descended with its horrible, unchangeable slowness.
Twenty-five, twenty-four…
On the floor was Varley’s hat. That was all.
The operator was last to go. Eleven, ten, the red numerals on the frosted glass panel read. Then his inert body joined the senseless forms of the others on the floor.
The cage hit the lobby level. Smoothly, marvelous mechanisms devised by man’s ingenuity, the doors opened by themselves; opened, and revealed seven fainting figures—around a gray-blue fedora hat.
—
Three o’clock. On the stage of the city’s leading theater, the show, Burn Me Down, was in the middle of the first act of its matinee performance.
The show was a musical comedy, built around a famous comedian. His songs and dances and patter carried it. To see him, and him alone, the crowds came. Worth millions, shrewd, and at the same time as common as the least who saw him from the galleries, he was the idol of the stage.
He sat on a stool in the wings now, chin on fist, moodily watching the revue dance of twenty bare-legged girls billed as the world’s most beautiful. His heavy black eyebrows were down in a straight line over eyes like ink-spots behind comedy horn-rimmed glasses. His slight, lithe body was tense.
“Your cue in a minute, Mr. Croy,” warned the manager.
“Hell, don’t you suppose I know it?” snapped the comedian.
Then his scowl disappeared for a moment. “Sorry.”
The manager stared. Croy’s good humor and even temper were proverbial in the theater. No one had ever seen him act like this before.
“Anything wrong?” he asked.
“Yeah, I don’t feel so hot,” said Croy, scowling again. “Rather, I feel too hot! Like I was burning up with a fever or something.”
He passed a handkerchief over his forehead. “And I feel like trouble’s coming,” he added. He took a rabbit’s foot from his vest pocket and squeezed it. “Heavy trouble.”
The manager bit his lip. Croy was the hit of the show—was the show. “Knock off for the afternoon if you feel bad,” he advised. “We’ll have Charley do your stuff. We can get away with it at a matinee—”
“And have the mob on your neck,” interrupted Croy, without false modesty. “It’s me they come to see. I’ll go on with it, and have a rest afterward…”
—
The twenty girls swept forward in a last pirouette and danced toward the wings. Croy stood up.
“It must be a fever,” he muttered, mopping at his face again. “Never felt like this before, though.”
The stage door attendant burst into the wings and ran toward the manager. The manager started to reprimand him for leaving his post, then saw the afternoon newspaper he was waving.
He took it from the man’s hand, glanced at the headlines.
“What!” he gasped. “A man burn up? They’re crazy! How could a…Varley—biggest man in the city!…”
He started toward the comedian.
“My God, could it be the same thing happening here?…Croy! Croy—wait—”
But the famous comedian was already on the stage, catapulting to the center of it in the ludicrous stumble, barely escaping a fall, that was his specialty.
The manager, clutching the newspaper, stood in the wings with death-white face, and watched. Croy went into a dance to the rhythm of the theme song of the show. He was terribly pale, and the manager saw him stagger over a difficult step. Then his voice rose with the words of the song:
“Burn me down, baby. Don’t say maybe. Put your lips against my lips—and burn me down!”
The audience half rose. Croy had fallen to his knees on a dance turn. The manager saw that the perspiration that had dewed his forehead no longer showed. His skin looked dry, cracked.
Croy got up. The audience settled back again, wondering if the fall had been part of his act. Croy resumed his steps and his singing. But his voice was barely audible beyond the fifth row:
“Burn me down, Sadie. Oh-h-h, lady! Look into my eyes and burn me—”
Croy stopped. His words ended in a wild high note. Then he screamed almost like a woman and his hands went to his throat. They tore at his collar and tie.
“Burning!” he screamed. “Burning—”
The manager leaned, shaking against a pillar. The newspaper, with the account in it of what had happened to Varley, rattled to the floor.
It was the same! The same awful thing was happening to Croy! “Curtain!” he croaked. “Bring down the curtain!”
Now the audience was standing up, some of them indeed climbing to their seats to see what was happening on the stage. Croy was prone on the boards, writhing, shrieking. The canvas backdrop billowed a little with the heat coming from his body.
“Curtain!” roared the manager. “For God’s sake—are you deaf?”
The curtain dropped. Croy’s convulsed body was hidden from the sight of the audience. With the curtain’s fall, he stopped screaming. It was as though the thing had sliced through the sound like a great descending guillotine. But it was not the curtain that had killed the sound.
Croy was dead. His limbs still jerked and writhed. But it was not the movement of life. It was the movement of a twisted roll of paper that writhes and jerks as it is consumed in flame.
The manager drew a deep breath. Then, with his knees trembling, he walked out onto the stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, trying to make his voice sound out over the pandemonium that ruled over the theater. “Mr. Croy has had a heart attack. The show will not go on. You may get your money at the box-office on the way out.”
He fairly ran from the stage and back of the curtain, where terrified girls and men were clumped around Croy’s body—or what was left of it. Heart attack! The manager’s mouth distorted over that description.
Croy’s body had shrunk—or, rather, melted—to half its normal size. His features were indistinguishable, like the features of a wax head with a fire under it. His clothes were smoldering. The heat was such that it was hard to stand within a yard of him. The big, horn-rimmed glasses slid from his face. His body diminished, diminished…
A stage hand came racing back. Behind him trotted a plump man in black with rimless spectacles over his eyes.
“I got a doctor,” the stage hand gasped. “From the audience.”
He stopped. And the doctor stared at the place where Croy had lain, and then gazed around at the faces of the others.
“Well?” he said. “Where is Croy? I was told he was dangerously ill.”
No one answered. One after another stared back into his face with the eyes of maniacs. “Where is he, I say?” snapped the doctor. “I was told—”
He stopped, aware at last that something far worse than ordinary illness was afoot back here.
The manager’s lips moved. Words finally came. “Croy is—was—there.”
His pointing finger leveled tremulously at a spot on the stage. Then he fell, pitching forward on his face like a dead man.
And the point on the stage he had designated was empty. Only a blackened patch was there, with a little smoke drifting up from it. A blackened patch—with a pair of comedy horn-rimmed glasses beside it.
2
In the elevator control room of the Northern State Building, a man in the coveralls of an electrician bent over the great switchboard. He was examining the automatic control switch of the elevator in which Varley had ridden down from his top-floor office for the last time in life; had ridden down—but never reached the bottom!
Grease smeared the man�
��s face and hands. But an especially keen observer would have noted several things about the seeming electrician that did not match his profession.
He would have noticed that the man’s body was as lithe and muscular as that of a dancer; that his hands were only superficially smeared with grease, and were without calluses; that his fingers were the long, steely strong ones of a great surgeon or musician. Then, if he were one of the very few in New York capable of the identification, he might have gone further and glanced into the man’s steely eyes under coal-black eyebrows, and stared at his patrician nose and strong chin and firm, large mouth—and have named him as Ascott Keane.
The building manager stood beside Keane. He had treated Keane as an ordinary electrician while the building engineer was near by. Now he gave him the deference due one of the greatest criminal investigators of all time. “Well, Mr. Keane?” he said.
“It’s about as I thought,” Keane said. “A device on the order of a big rheostat was placed on the switch circuit. In that way the descent of the elevator could be slowed as much as the person manipulating the switch desired.”
“But why was the elevator Mr. Varley rode down in made to go slower? Did the slowness have anything to do with his death?”
“No, it had to do only with the spectacle of his death!” Keane’s face was very grim. His jaw was a hard square. “The man who killed Varley wanted to be sure that his death, and dissolution, were witnessed lingeringly and unmistakably, so that the full terror of it could be brought out.”
He straightened up, walked toward the door. “You’ve set an office aside for me?”
“Yes. It’s next to my own on the sixtieth floor. But you aren’t going to it yet, are you?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“Well, there might be fingerprints. Whoever tampered with the control board might not have been careful about clues.”
A mirthless smile appeared on Keane’s firm lips. “Fingerprints! My dear sir! You don’t know Doctor Satan, I’m afraid.”
“Doctor Sat—”
The building manager clenched his hands excitedly. “Then you already know about the phone call to Mr. Varley just before he died.”
“No,” said Keane, “I don’t.”
“But you named the man who called—”
“Only because I know who did this—have known since I first heard of it. Not from any proofs I’ve found or will ever find. Tell me about the phone call.”
“There isn’t much. I’d hardly thought of it till you spoke of a Doctor Satan…Varley was leaving his office for lunch when his telephone rang. I was in his office about a lease and I couldn’t help hearing a little of it—his words, that is. I gathered that somebody calling himself Doctor Satan was talking to Varley about insurance.”
“Insurance!”
“Yes. Though what a physician should be doing selling insurance, I couldn’t say—”
“Doctor Satan is not exactly a physician,” Keane interrupted dryly. “Go on.”
“That’s all there is to tell. The man at the other end of the wire calling himself Doctor Satan seemed to want to insist that Varley take out some sort of insurance, till finally Varley just hung up on him. He turned to me and said something about being called by cranks and nuts, and went out to the elevator.”
Keane walked from the control room, with the building manager beside him. He went to the elevator shafts.
“Sixty,” he said to the operator.
In the elevator, he became the humble workman again. The manager treated him as such. “When you’re through with the faulty wiring in sixty, come to my office,” he said.
Keane nodded respectfully, then got out at the sixtieth floor.
A suite of two large offices had been set aside for him. There was a door through a regular anteroom, and a smaller, private entrance leading directly into the rear of the two offices.
Keane went through the private entrance. A girl, seated beside a flat-topped desk, got up. She was tall, quietly lovely, with dark blue eyes and copper-brown hair. This was Beatrice Dale, Keane’s more-than-secretary.
“Visitors?” said Keane, as she handed a calling-card to him.
She nodded. “Walter P. Kessler, one of the six you listed as most likely to receive Doctor Satan’s first attentions in this new scheme of his.”
Keane was running a towel over his face, taking off the grease—which was not grease but dark-colored soap. He took off the electrician’s coveralls, emerging in a perfectly tailored blue serge suit complete save for his coat. The coat he took from a closet, shrugging into it as he approached the desk and sat down.
“What did you find out, Ascott?” said Beatrice.
Her face was pale, but her voice was calm, controlled. She had worked with Keane long enough to know how to face the horrors devised by Doctor Satan calmly, if not fearlessly.
“From the control room?” said Keane. “Nothing. The elevator was slowed simply to make the tragic end of Varley more spectacular. And there is Doctor Satan’s autograph! The spectacular! All of his plans are marked by it.”
“But you found out nothing of the nature of his plans?”
“I got a hint. It’s an insurance project.”
“Insurance!”
Keane smiled. There was no humor in the smile. There had been no humor in his smiles—or in his soul—since he had first met Doctor Satan, and there would be none till finally, somehow, he overcame the diabolical person who, already wealthy beyond the hopes of the average men, was amusing himself by gathering more wealth in a series of crimes as weird as they were inhuman.
“Yes, insurance. Send in Kessler, Beatrice.”
The girl bit her lip. Keane had told her nothing. And the fact that she was burning to know what scraps of information he had picked up showed in her face. But she turned obediently and went to the door leading into the front office.
She came back in a moment with a man who was so anxious to get in that he almost trod on her heels. The man, Walter P. Kessler, was twisting a felt hat to ruins in his desperate fingers, and his brown eyes were like the eyes of a horrified animal as he strode toward Keane’s desk.
“Keane!” He paused, looked at the girl, gazed around the office. “I still can’t quite understand this. I’ve known you for years as a rich man’s son who never worked in his life and knew nothing but polo and first editions. Now they tell me you are the only man in the world who can help me in my trouble.”
“If your trouble has to do with Doctor Satan—and of course it has—I may be able to help,” said Keane. “As for the polo and first editions—it is helpful in my hobby of criminology to be known as an idler. You will be asked to keep my real activities hidden.”
“Of course,” gasped Kessler. “And if ever I can do anything for you in return for your help now—”
Keane waved his hand. “Tell me about the insurance proposition,” he said.
“Are you a mind-reader?” exclaimed Kessler.
“No. There’s no time to explain. Go ahead.”
Kessler dug into his inside coat pocket.
“It’s about insurance, all right. And it’s sponsored by a man who calls himself Doctor Satan. Though how you knew?”
He handed a long envelop to Keane. “This came in this morning’s mail,” he said. “Of course I paid no attention to it. Not then! In fact, I threw it in my waste basket. I only fished it out again after reading the early afternoon papers—and finding out what happened to poor old Varley—”
He choked, and stopped. Keane read the folded paper in the long business envelope:
Mr. Kessler: You are privileged, among a few others in New York City, to be among the first to be invited to participate in a new type of insurance plan recently organized by me. The insurance will be taken out against an emotion, instead of a tangible menace. That emotion is horror. In a word, I propose to insure you against feeling horror. The premium for this benevolent insurance is seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. If the premium is not paid,
you will be subjected to a rather unpleasant feeling of horror concerning something that may happen to you. That something is death, but death in a new form: If you do not choose to take out my horror insurance, you shall burn in slow fire till you are utterly consumed. It may be next month or next year. It may be tomorrow. It may be in the privacy of your room, or among crowds. Read in this afternoon’s paper of what will shortly happen to two of the town’s leading citizens. Then decide whether or not the premium payment asked is not a small price to pay for allaying the horror the reading of their fates will inspire in you.
Signed, DOCTOR SATAN.
Keane tapped the letter against his palm. “Horror insurance,” he murmured. “I can see Doctor Satan’s devilish smile as he coined that phrase. I can hear his chuckle as he ‘invites’ you to take out a ‘policy.’ Well, are you going to pay it?”
Kessler’s shudder rattled the chair he sat in. “Certainly! Am I mad, that I should refuse to pay—after reading what happened to Varley and Croy? Burned alive! Reduced to a shapeless little residue of consumed flesh—and then to nothingness! Certainly I’ll pay!”
“Then why did you come to me?”
“To see if we couldn’t outwit this Doctor Satan in future moves. What’s to keep him from demanding a sum like that every year as the price of my safety? Or every month, for that matter?”
“Nothing,” said Keane.
Kessler’s hand clenched the chair-arm. “That’s it. I’ll have to pay this one, because I daren’t defy the man till some sort of scheme is set in motion against him. But I want you to track him down before another demand is presented. I’ll give you a million dollars if you succeed. Two million…”
The look on Keane’s face stopped him. “My friend,” said Keane, “I’d double your two million, personally, if I could step out and destroy this man, now, before he does more horrible things.”
He stood up. “How were you instructed to pay the ‘premium’?”
