The Doctor Satan Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  DOCTOR SATAN, by Paul Ernst

  THE MAN WHO CHAINED THE LIGHTNING, by Paul Ernst

  HOLLYWOOD HORROR, by Paul Ernst

  THE CONSUMING FLAME, by Paul Ernst

  HORROR INSURED, by Paul Ernst

  BEYOND DEATH’S GATEWAY, by Paul Ernst

  THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE, by Paul Ernst

  The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  The Doctor Satan MEGAPACK® is copyright © 2017 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

  * * * *

  The MEGAPACK® ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

  * * * *

  “Doctor Satan” was originally published in Weird Tales, August 1935.

  “The Man Who Chained the Lightning” was originally published in Weird Tales, September 1935.

  “Hollywood Horror” was originally published in Weird Tales, October 1935.

  “The Consuming Flame” was originally published in Weird Tales, November 1935.

  “Horror Insured” was originally published in Weird Tales, January 1936.

  “Beyond Death’s Gateway” was originally published in Weird Tales, March 1936.

  “The Devil’s Double” was originally published in Weird Tales, May 1936.

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Here are fascinating tales about that weird genius of crime who calls himself Doctor Satan. He is no madman, but is as sane as you or I. An immensely rich man, he has turned to crime for the thrill of it, and strikes down those in his path ruthlessly, heartlessly, and thoroughly. He is master of amazing powers that make him the world’s weirdest criminal. If you have not yet made the acquaintance of this fearsome master of crime, meet him today in The Doctor Satan MEGAPACK®!

  Enjoy!

  —John Betancourt

  Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  ABOUT THE SERIES

  Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK® ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

  The MEGAPACK® ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

  RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

  Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the MEGAPACK® ebook series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://wildsidepress.forumotion.com/ (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

  Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

  TYPOS

  Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

  If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at [email protected] or use the message boards above.

  DOCTOR SATAN, by Paul Ernst

  Originally published in Weird Tales, August 1935.

  CHAPTER I

  Business was being done as usual in the big outer office of the Ryan Importing Company. Calls came over the switchboard for various department heads. Men and girls bent over desks, reading and checking order blanks, typewriting, performing the thousand and one duties of big business.

  Yet over the office hung a hush, more sensed than consciously felt. The typewriters seemed to make less than their normal chatter. Employees talked in low tones, when they had something to communicate to one another. The office boy showed a tendency to tiptoe when he carried a fresh batch of mail in from the anteroom.

  The girl at the switchboard pulled a plug as a call from the secretary of the big boss, Arthur B. Ryan, was concluded.

  The office boy looked inquiringly at her as he passed.

  “How’s the old man?”

  The girl shook her head a little. “I guess he’s worse. That last call was important, and he wouldn’t take it himself. He had Gladys take it for him.”

  “What’s the matter with him, anyhow?”

  “A headache,” said the girl.

  “Is that all? I thought from the way everybody was acting like this was a morgue, that he was dying or something.”

  “I guess this is something special in the way of headaches,” the switchboard girl retorted, smoothing down the blonde locks at the back of her head. “And it came up awful sudden. He walked past here at nine, two hours ago, and grinned at me like he felt great. Then at ten he phoned down to the building drugstore for some aspirin. Now he won’t take a call from the head of one of the biggest companies in the city! I guess he feels terrible.”

  “A headache?” snorted the office boy. “Well, why don’t he go see a doctor?”

  “I put through a call for Doctor Swanson on the top floor of the building, ten minutes ago. He was busy with an appointment, but said he’d be down soon.”

  “A headache! And he can’t take it! Wonder what he’d do if he got something serious the matter with him.”

  He swaggered on and the hush seemed to deepen over the office. A premonitory hush? Were all in the big room dimly conscious of the sequence of events about to be started there? Later, many claimed they had felt psychic warnings; but whether that is a fact or imagination will never be known.

  A hush, with a drone of voices and machines accentuating it in the outer office. A silence, in which the doors of the executives, in their cubicles along the east wall of the office space, remained closed. A quiet that seemed to emanate from the blank, shut door marked Arthur B. Ryan, President.

  And then the hush was cracked. The silence was torn, like strong linen screaming apart as a great strain rips it from end to end.

  From behind the door marked President came a shriek of pain and horror that blanched the cheeks of the office workers; a yell that keened out over the hush and turned busy fingers to wood, and which stopped all words on the suddenly numbed lips that had been uttering them.

  Ryan’s secretary, pale, trembling, ran from her desk outside the office door and sped into Ryan’s office.

  “Oh, my God!” the shriek came more clearly to the general office through the opened door. “My head… oh, my God!”

  And then the screams of the man were swelled suddenly by the high shriek of the secretary. “Look, look…”

  There was the thud of a body in Ryan’s office, telling the plain message that she had fainted; an instant later the agonized shrieks of the man in there were stilled.

  For a second all in the general office were gripped by silence, paralyzed, staring with wide eyes at the door to the private office. Then the sales manager stepped to the open door.

  He glanced into Ryan’s office, and those outside saw his face go the color of ashes. He tottered, caught at the door to keep from falling.

  Then, with the air of a man dazed by a physical blow, he closed the door and stumbled toward the switchboard.

  “Phone the police,” he said hoarsely to the girl. “My God, call
the police… though I don’t know what they can do. His head…”

  “What what’s the matter with his head?” the girl faltered as her fingers stiffly manipulated the switchboard plugs.

  The sales manager stared at her without seeing her, his eyes looking as if they probed through her and into unplumbed chasms of horror behind her.

  “A tree growing out of his head,” he gasped. “A tree… pushing out of his skull, like a plant cracking a flower-pot it outgrows, and sending roots and branches through the cracks.”

  He leaned against the switchboard.

  “A tree, killing him. Hurry! Get the—”

  He lunged for her, but was too late; the switchboard girl had slid from her chair, unconscious. Blindly, with fingers that rattled against the switchboard, the man put through the call himself.

  That was at eleven in the morning of July 12th, 193—, a day that made criminal history in New York.

  At eleven-ten, in a great Long Island home, the second chapter was being written.

  The home belonged to Samuel Billingsley, retired merchant.

  It was a huge estate, high-walled. In the walls a new iron gate glistened, closing off the front driveway. It was a high gate, heavily barred—the kind of a gate that would be installed by a man afraid for his life. Beside that gate two men lounged.

  Each was big, heavily muscled, with a bulge at his armpit speaking of a gun in readiness.

  At the front door of the house another man was stationed; and there was one at the rear, and still another patrolling the grounds. This last one carried a rifle.

  The summer sun gleamed bright over the estate. The silence of the suburbs enveloped it, yet danger lowered like a black veil over the place.

  A long low roadster slid to a stop before the closed iron gate. A young man, dark-haired, with dark gray eyes, sounded the horn. Reluctantly the gate was opened. The man drove the roadster in and started toward the house, but was stopped by the two guards who stood before the car with an automatic apiece covering its driver.

  The young man glared. “Well?” he snapped. “Who the devil are you? What are you doing here?”

  “Same to you, buddy,” rasped one of the men, coming closer. “What’s your business here?”

  The young man glanced at the new, high gate and back to the guards.

  “I’m Samuel Billingsley’s nephew,” he said. “My name’s Merton Billingsley, I’ve been away for a month—and I come back to be stopped at the point of a gun at my own uncle’s house…”

  “Take it easy,” said the man gruffly. “We’re the old— I mean we’re Mr. Billingsley’s bodyguards. Hired us two days ago. Orders were to investigate everybody driving in here. Have you got any proofs that you’re his nephew?”

  The young man showed letters. His annoyance was giving way to curiosity and alarm.

  “Bodyguard!” he exclaimed. “Why a bodyguard? Is my uncle’s life in danger?”

  The man shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, but I guess it is or he wouldn’t have hired us. He didn’t tell us anything except to keep everybody out of the grounds.”

  Merton Billingsley clutched at the man’s arm. “Is he all right now? Have there been any attempts on his life so far?”

  “None yet,” said the man, holstering his automatic. “And I guess he’s all right—except he’s got a headache.”

  “A headache?”

  “Yeah. His high-hat butler came down here a half-hour ago, and said a doc had been called and we were to let him through. The old— Mr. Billingsley had a bad headache. The doc came ten minutes ago and is up in his room with him now. But aside from the headache, he’s all right…”

  Through the golden summer sunlight, like jagged lightning impinging on the eardrums instead of the optic nerves, a scream lanced out. It was a thin, high shriek that drove the color from the faces of Merton Billingsley and the two guards.

  It came from behind a shaded window in the front corner of the great house.

  “My uncle’s room,” breathed Merton. “What…”

  He swallowed, and jerked his head to the two guards. “On the running-board,” he snapped. “We’ll get to the house…”

  The whine of gears drowned his words. With a guard on each side, the roadster sped down the graveled driveway and to the house.

  The door opened as Merton got to it. A gray-headed butler faced him.

  “Willys!” exclaimed Merton. “My uncle… what in God’s name is the matter with him?”

  The man shook his head. “I don’t know. He complained of having a terrific headache, sir. And I phoned for Doctor Smythe. Then, just a minute ago he screamed…”

  Down the curved marble staircase to the front hall a man was stumbling—a middle-aged man whose features were distorted.

  “Smythe!” said Merton. “Uncle Samuel… tell me! Quick!”

  The doctor stared at him. He moistened his lips. “Your uncle is dead.”

  “Dead! But what happened to him? He was an old man, but he was in good health. What killed him?”

  “A plant,” whispered the doctor. “A kind of bush. Thorn-bush—God knows what! That thing, blossoming from his head…”

  Merton shook his shoulder savagely. “Are you insane? Pull yourself together! What’s this talk of bushes?”

  “A bush… growing out of his head,” whispered the doctor, moistening his pale lips again and again.

  Merton started up the stairs. Smythe, rousing himself, grasped his arm. “Don’t go up there, Merton! Don’t!”

  Merton wrenched his arm away. “My uncle lied up in his room, dead—and you tell me not to go up to him!

  He took the stairs two at a time.

  “I’m warning you,” came the doctor’s shrill voice. “The sight you’ll see…”

  But Merton went on, around the curve in the staircase, down the hall at the top.

  The door to his uncle’s room was closed. Impetuously he opened it and leaped inside the big bedroom. It was dim in there, shaded against the sunlight; but after a few seconds he saw it—his Uncle’s body.

  It lay beyond the big bed, the corpse of a man of seventy, thin, clad in a silk robe. The body was twisted and distorted, but it was not the body that riveted the gaze of the dead man’s nephew; it was the head.

  The head was turned so that, though the body lay on its side, the face was pointed toward the ceiling. And from the top of the skull something was protruding. Merton’s hands crept toward his throat as he looked at it.

  A sort of bush, with leafless, sharp-pointed twigs branching out in all directions, grew from the top of the skull. It was like a hand with many small sharp fingers that had thrust up through the bone, with its thick, wrist-like stem rooting in the brain beneath.

  A tree, quick with life though rooted in death! Quick with life? As Merton stared with glazing eyes, he saw the leafless, sharp little branches crawl out a little farther. The thing was growing even as he watched it!

  With a low cry, he turned and ran from the room.

  CHAPTER II

  In a Park Avenue penthouse two men were seated in a great room fitted out as a library. The room was lined with books, in sections which were unobtrusively but precisely labeled as sections of shelving in public libraries are labeled. Science, one of the largest sections, crammed with books, was tagged. Another read, Mythology; a third, Occult. Then there were Psychology, Engineering, Biology, many others, each containing dozens of volumes.

  The focal point of the big, lofty chamber was a huge ebony desk. It was at this desk that the two men were seated, one in a leather chair beside it, the other leaning back in a swivel chair from before it.

  The man in the visitor’s chair was about fifty, expensively dressed, a typical big business man with the suggestion of a paunch that comes with success and a striving after more millions instead of physical fitness. But the
re was one thing about this business man that was not typical. That was the expression on his face.

  Fear! The blind terror of an incoherent animal caught in a trap beyond its comprehension!

  His face was gray with fear. His lips were pallid and his hands were shaking with it. The sound of his ragged breathing was clearly audible in the almost cathedral-like hush of the great library.

  The man sitting proprietorially at the desk watched his visitor with almost clinical detachment, though sympathy showed in his deep-set eyes. A man to attract attention in any gathering on Earth, this one.

  He was a big man, but supple and quick-moving. His eyes, deep under coal-black eyebrows, were light grey; they looked calm as ice, as if no emergency could disturb their steely depths. He had a high-bridged, patrician nose, a long chin that was the embodiment of strength, and a firm, large mouth.

  His mouth moved, clipping out words with easy precision.

  “You say you got the note yesterday, Walstead?”

  Thus casually he addressed Ballard W. Walstead, one of the richest men in the city.

  “Yes,” said the man in the visitor’s chair.

  “Why did you come to me with it?”

  “Because,” said Walstead, raising a trembling hand in a repressed gesture of pleading. “I thought if anyone on Earth could save me it would be you. Oh, I know about you, though I realize that not a dozen people in the world are aware of the real life of Ascott Keane. These few know you as one of the greatest criminal investigators that ever lived—a man whose achievements have something almost of black magic in them. They know that you’ve raised a hobby of criminology into an art that passes beyond the reach of genius.”

  Ascott Keane’s calm, steely eyes stared steadily into the frantic depths of the other man’s pale blue ones.

  “I am a dilettante,” he murmured. “I inherited a fortune, and I loaf through life playing with first editions, polo ponies and big game hunting.

  “Yes, yes, I know. That’s the picture the world has of you. The picture you’ve deliberately painted; but I tell you I know your capabilities! You’ve got to help me, Keane!”