Spider (43 page)

Excitedly, Jeffrey tried to imagine the purpose of the citadel, and its connection with the monsters that the Octopus had created. It was important now for him to warn all aircraft in the vicinity about the light.

His plane was equipped with a two-way transmitter. As he switched it on, he heard a loud spluttering that ran through all wave lengths, as though an important political speech were being broadcast over every station.

As he tried to clear it, he ran into the broadcast itself. It was the most bizarre and unholy announcement, Jeffrey realized, that had ever gone through ether:

Station WVI, on top of the Victory Building, New York City. We bring you our half-hourly announcement again. All other stations please sign off. The life of every man, woman and child in New York City is at stake.

A short, spluttering pause. And then a deep, indefinably sinister voice that sent the nerve-ends in Jeffrey's spine into a dizzy jig.

Citizens of New York! You are in the grip of an epi

demic with which your ordinary health facilities cannot

and will not deal. Even more than your lives are at stake.

Tonight there will walk among you the patients of your

hospitals. They have been hospitalized for the ordinary diseases, but now they come from the hospitals
unrecog

nisable as human beings.
They are monsters.

Another pause. Jeffrey's plane stirred southward for seconds, poised above Radio City, and circled there during the broadcast.

Not one of you is immune to this spreading plague. Do not trust your doctors! Do not trust your hospitals! They are the chief agents of this unnamable disease! In their hands, you too may become unfit to bear the name of man.

There is one way, and one way only, to keep the plague from torturing your' selves and your families. We have gathered here, in the offices of the Victory Building, all those doctors who are still worthy of the name—men of national and international reputation, who will co-operate with you to stamp out this plague. They have come together under the name of The Citizens' Emergency Medical Committee.

Tomorrow, all citizens employed in gainful occupation, whether by private or government enterprise, are requested to send one day's pay to the Citizens' Emergency Medical Committee, address, the Victory Building, New York City, as the only safe form of health insurance for yourselves and your families. Thus insured, you will receive medical treatment by New York's only safe doctors in the event that disease strikes.

To outlying territories, we broadcast this warning: Do not permit trains, busses, pleasure cars, boats or aircraft to cross your borders from metropolitan New York, lest you bring the epidemic on yourselves. Warning especially the State of New Jersey, Westchester County, and the City of Yonkers in particular. Since all of Long Island has been stricken also, we warn the State of Connecticut to prohibit ferry traffic across Long Island Sound to and from the counties of Nassau and Suffolk.

Do not hesitate to comply. This is for your own good. Do not attempt to enter the Victory Building until you require the services of a physician. Send all insurance money by mail, and you will receive your receipt-cards the following day. To those cranks and fanatics who are always ready to attack a new development, we broadcast a warning: By attacking the Victory Building, you cut New York completely off from medical salvation. You doom three millions of innocent human beings! We welcome an investigation by proper authorities, peaceably conducted.

We will bring you another broadcast within the half hour.

Jeffrey stared at the silent transmitter as the broadcast ended, almost wishing it were alive, so that he might throttle the thing that had uttered those words. Extortion—with the stakes not mere loss of reputation, nor even life itself, but a warping in body and mind of great sections of the population!

He was almost directly above Radio City, then he switched on his own shortwave transmitter, and spoke into it. "This is the Skull Killer, calling Radio City. Please rebroadcast over your regular wave length. Reply when ready."

There was no answer. . . .

"Skull Killer, still calling Radio City. This is in relation to the broadcast by the Citizen's Emergency Medical Committee, which you have just heard. Please reply."

For silent seconds, Jeffrey despaired of receiving any response. They must have taken the first broadcast as a practical joke, as they might be taking his own plea. And then, faintly and uncertainly, a voice said, "Ready. Go ahead, Skull Killer. . . ."

And so that night, the voice of the Skull Killer, whose face no man could describe, was heard through the length and breadth of a thousand square miles through the City of New York.

"Citizens of New York!" he began fervently. "This is the Skull Killer. . . . I wish to advise you about this so-called Citizens' Emergency Medical Committee. It is not a joke. Neither is it to be taken at face value.

"I have only this to go by: The purple light seen over the Victory Building tonight is an ultra-violet ray of hitherto unknown strength. All aircraft are warned not to venture near or through the light. The motives of the new medical committee seem bent more toward destruction than conservation of human life.

"They have invited the investigation of authorities; see to it that your authorities really do investigate. And in the meanwhile, on my own part, I tell you that there will be a thorough private investigation. That is all."

As Jeffrey flew southward from Radio City, there was a fresh broadcast from the Victory Building:

Tonight we are submitting to the authorities undeniable proof of the Skull Killer's identity, and of the fact that he himself, in the guise of a doctor, is responsible for several of the monstrosities which you see on the streets tonight.

What would New York's streets be like, during the remainder of the night, Jeffrey wondered as he headed again toward Newark. As he had expected, no emergency measures had as yet been adopted; no cordon of official planes were quaranteeing Manhattan. Most people who had heard that early morning broadcast from the Victory Building would have taken it as a practical joke—gruesome, perhaps, but a joke still.

And that broadcast of the Skull Killer? Didn't the very fact that the Skull Killer had been granted a use of popular airwaves bespeak the fact that the Citizens' Emergency Medical Committee's speech had made some impression. He wondered how many people he had reached, and what they thought—or had they really given him a wavelength at all?

They must have, for the Medical Committee's last words had been an oblique answer to his message! Jeffrey Fairchild felt a thrill of elation. He was starting his greatest battle; already he had made some progress and must make more if he hoped to save the nation's greatest metropolis from ghastly destruction!

He was allowed to land at the airport without interference, and to drive back to the City through the tunnel.

He wondered at the ability of his enemy to make broadcasts at regular half-hour intervals without interference from the authorities. WVI must be a newly-licensed station—and the threat in those announcements of the Citizens' Medical Committee had been so cunningly veiled, that outside their definite disquieting influence, even those who took them seriously might never recognize them for the sinister demands they were. Unless the true nature of that purple beacon was known, listeners would not even look upon those announcements as threats.

That much he had accomplished, but even now some sort of account must be had from the City authorities regarding the Committee. . . . And that account he knew, it was his responsibility to get at once.

Chapter Seven
Creatures That Once Were Men

MR. ANTHONY STEELE took the position which had been assigned to him, at the entrance to the Victory Building. It was an hour after midnight, and up the steel canyons, came a sharp Hudson wind. Dr. Steele shivered—the War must have been like this, he thought, the War in which his uncle had been an army doctor, from which he had not come back.

Thus it was to serve your country, or even your city, against a still-unconquered enemy, an enemy even more formidable in its hidden, sinister mystery. Dr. Steele had been shivering a little bit all day.

When they'd told him that old Dr. Skull was responsible for a new and ghastly form of disease, he'd been upset about that, and had tried to get in touch with the man. But Dr. Skull could not be reached. . . .

Then, the call from Borden, at Tony Steele's customary comfortable bed-time, impressing him into this Emergency Medical Committee. . . .

Wild talk, frightening talk—that had been his impression of the first Committee meeting in the new Victory Building. If it hadn't been for Borden, he wouldn't have been there; he wouldn't have trusted any of the others. And if ever he had seen the fires of insanity reflected in human eyes, he had seen them in the eyes of several of the supposed leaders of the Committee, and they all seemed to belong to a secret order of sorts; all wearing watch fobs in the shape of a purple-eyed octopus.

But how could you tell? Those might have been fever-lights, signs of this growing pestilence! The men might have been stricken with the first stages of the malady, and were working on nevertheless, sacrificing themselves for their fellows, for nobody could tell yet how this thing really started.

There was nothing really to go by, except the talk, and a few apparently unrelated facts. The Mid-City Hospital had burned down, and some Committee members had openly accused the monstrous patients, who apparently hated doctors and hospitals. Borden and a few of his medical friends had accused Jeffrey Fairchild, of all people! Said his wealth had made him a thrill-criminal. Borden even claimed to have seen Jeff at the fire, purposely, he said, contributing to the confusion. Jeffrey Fairchild, that amiable and intelligent young man about town who had been so helpful when Steel first started practice, four years ago!

And now the monsters were coming, for aid, for treatment, and it was Steele's job to admit them. It hadn't been hard getting them out of hospitals, he surmised, or away from the care of their private physicians—it seemed part of the disease to mistrust any known sort of medical help. Tony Steele looked at them, not realizing how he trembled. . . .

Hundreds of headlamps, from ambulances and private cars, played a false dawn on the pavement about the Victory Building. Escorted by police, by internes and nurses, by private citizens who seemed normal in all but their distraught perplexity,
they
were coming. Hundreds of them, scrambling for the lighted doors of the Victory Building. As though the lame and halt of the world had converged at the purple point. . . . As though the lame and the halt of history had risen half-rotting from their graves for some weird rite of resuscitation.

And the overpowering odor! Not even the effluvium of stale sweat, this thing; It was more like the humors that might arise in an overheated morgue. . . .

And he was supposed to help, to cure, he who had specialized in those diseases which are a luxury.

A policeman joined him, and then the crowd became something between a mob and an Act of God. For what seemed hours, Dr. Steel stood there, assorting those who sought to surge inward, allowing only the damnably sick to pass, and in spite of the dark morning's chill, he began to sweat. His voice grew hoarse with shouting directions. All about him, he sensed the press of grotesque and tragic humanity, hobbling toward possible salvation from God knew what hell of self-loathing. . . .

He didn't know! He hardly knew what great work he was engaged in, what was the beginning and the end of this process which began when the monsters left their ward beds, to end their grim trek upstairs on the forty-fourth floor of the Victory Building. He somehow felt himself a sentient tool, taking orders, standing at the doorway between mystery and mystery. . . .

How had they sickened? How would they be cured? What was he about here, and how had this vast and grisly chaos come so unpredictably, so violently, into his pleasant life? He wondered if Charon had felt as he did, bound forever to the Styx, witlessly rowing souls between remembered life and anticipated death. . . .

Another man tapped Tony Steele's shoulder, and said, "I'll relieve you, doctor. You're needed upstairs."

Steele sighed, the breath coming hard through his nostrils. Upstairs, at least, was more where a doctor belonged. Tony Steele was no tough-minded man. He liked people, liked to see them well and happy. It was for that reason, as much as for anything, that he had concentrated on rich patients. The rich, when they were ill, could be cheered so easily, could be sent to handsome hospital suites, could be ordered to take Napoleon brandy as a tonic, or luxury cruises on palatial liners. . . .

But the poor. . . . No, there was less you could do for the poor. You had to see them hungry-eyed and listless, in those airless sunless flats, worrying about money, worrying about bills, worrying about the cost of medicine. . . . You had to see a fifth child born into a three-room hovel, knowing that from its birth that the child would have to fight for its right to food, its right to a corner of the world, its very right to live. . . .

But now, Tony Steele was looking on human suffering in a stark and inexplicable shape. What good was a bedside manner for these shapes that might have been conceived in hell?

It was more than a clinical manner they needed, something of the all-wise, little father attitude. . . . Tony Steele went up to the forty-fourth floor, where the emergency clinic had been equipped to diagnose these patients.

Shuddering at some internal chill, Steele took his place in the busy clinic, and waited for the monsters to file in. He had not long to wait, for a nurse escorted a hobbling
thing
to him, a thing that looked at him with strange malevolence out of its huge unblinking eyes. . . .

"Name?" he asked, trying hard to remember the clinical manner.

The thing grunted its response. Steele asked the other questions, insanely irrelevant questions, about age, address, and occupation. Those are the things you ask a
man
, he thought. But this thing isn't a man—not any more! It's a shell around a private hades. . . .