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The wiring appeared only as a thinnish white ridge along the gleaming floor. It was almost imperceptible to the casual glance, but once recognized, it was easy to follow. Momentarily Carol wondered that it hadn't been hidden more thoroughly, and the same idea seemed to have occurred to White.

"He probably didn't want this wiring out of reach of handy repair, if it ever went wrong," White murmured. "That's why it's not in the wall—thank God! Look, that's the direction we've got to go, because there's a junction."

Suddenly the constant messages changed in tenor, became addressed directly to Carol and her companion.

"Don't be fools, you two! I know you're coming—and what you seek to do is hopeless. The city is full of the dead and deformed who have only incidentally displeased me—how much more terrible do you think my vengeance will be on you who deliberately seek to ruin me? You still have a chance to save yourselves. Go back, before it is too late!"

Carol shuddered, then she heard White whisper exultantly, "He's scared! We must be almost there. He's afraid his men won't get to us in time, and he's starting to bluff!"

Carol tried hard to be sure of that, and kept her eyes downward on the guiding white ridge. Suddenly she cried out with dismay, for the ridge ended in a blank wall.

And from somewhere on the other side of the wall came a muffled series of shrieked pleas, as of a human being in prolonged death agony.

Carol looked about the jointure of wall and floorboard, almost as though she might find a loose seam there—and suddenly she was less concerned with further progress than with defense. For people were coming toward them, and already she was conscious of the peculiar overpowering smell heralding the approach of that evil and parasitic life.

White knew it, too. He stepped rapidly in front of her, and his brown eyes, the only recognizably human feature in his face, grew suddenly cold with alarm.

There were two people, a man and a woman. Carol recognized them as the pair with whom she had come to the Victory Building. They hadn't seemed evil then, only sick. . . . But now she didn't know. For, as the two came nearer, those grotesque faces were utterly without expression.

The omnipresent murmuring voice broke into command to the two approaching monsters. "Capture these people, and bring them to me! They are enemies of your own kind."

Carol braced herself for swift attack, but there was only the guttural voice of the man-thing, saying, "Give us light. Without the light, we are too weak."

Instantly, a dull steady indigo glare flooded the corridor. It was not strong enough to send Carol again into semi-consciousness, but her eyes smarted to the point of dizziness and her whole body trembled.

She heard White's startled exclamation, and when her eyes could penetrate the glare she realized that the dead-end wall had become transparent in the glow. And beyond that wall was the thing whose voice had followed them through the building.

A young girl's nearly nude body was hanging taut, and suspended by the wrists from a rope in the ceiling, her feet barely grazing the floor. Her body was pitted with little black holes—and it was only too obvious what had caused those holes.

The gruesome Thing with its weaving tentacles stood beside the girl; she could see the dark blood on the rim of the knife-like circular suction cups of its tentacles. On the girl's other side stood a deformed monster, drawing still more of the life-fluid from that white body, by means of a sharpened metal pipe which he had inserted in the victim's side. Carol stared, weak with horror, while the shapeless living mass was finishing its ghoulish feast with passionate greed!

Carol looked behind her, almost ready now to run recklessly back the way she had come, shrieking for human aid, but the passageway was closed.

Over a score of the misshapen, ravenous monster-things choked the corridor!"

Chapter Twelve
Voice Of The Skull Killer

WHITE'S HAND CLOSED about hers firmly, as though he knew what berserk madness was hatching in her brain. "They won't kill their own kind," White had said—but she, Carol, wasn't their kind! The girl—the girl whose blood was being drained. . . . They'll do that to me, Carol thought, with only death as the end of agony. . . .

But the monsters, though they circled impassably about, made no move to attack. Their bodies seemed to wax in the purple glow, and an eerie sheen played on the sick flesh. . . .

The green Octopus seemed to laugh softly as a tentacle reached out with a sinuously caressing movement that meant death. The nude girl's body writhed a very little bit. . . .

The voice came again: "When I raise this wall, my people will attend to the young lady. You, White—you're going to see that girl with you drained as this girl is being drained. I know what you are, and it's not what you pretend to be. The Skull Killer, monster though he appears, is
not
one of our patients."

Carol could almost hear the rigidity of the diseased bodies about her as they stiffened. "They won't kill their own kind!" but, as she had half suspected, the Skull Killer wasn't their kind at all. He was disguised, and now the Octopus had shattered the Skull's safety.

Then she realized that it was another thought which had caused the monsters to become so tensely rigid. She could not read it in their immobile expressions, but that very immobility was eloquent. It was not the Skull Killer their leashed fury waited to attack, for the Octopus, by stating that the Skull Killer was not one of his patients, had undermined the very reason for the monsters' allegiance! The disease was supposed to be epidemic, and in an epidemic, no man can say who will, and who will not be stricken. Looking upon the hideously malformed White, how could he say then, that the Skull Killer was positively not afflicted? To all practical purposes, the monstrosity had admitted to his victims that there was a deliberate plan behind their deformity—and that the plan was his!

Carol's heart pounded almost triumphantly. She looked again at the man named White, and her terror-numbed brain struggled with the thought that she should have known him. Those brown eyes. . . . No, the identity eluded her. Leering like a carrion thing about to strike, the Octopus rose erect, his snake-like tentacles slowly waving, and the wall began to raise!

Carol and White were fairly swept into the chamber by the onrush of waiting monsters. Now the murmuring voice was loud with hatred. Carol, strangely fascinated by the weird, sea-green thing before her, the cupped, weaving tentacles, the hideously malformed legs, and the small mask through which glowed the purple, luminous eyes, heard orders concerning herself that chilled her to the marrow, but only for a tense moment.

After that moment, their throats raucous with a battle cry of the vengeful damned, the monsters rushed to the attack. But the object of their attack was—the Octopus himself!

Now a new voice arose in command, clear and calm. It was the voice of the Skull Killer beside her and he seemed not at all surprised at the turn of events. As Carol flattened herself against the wall to avoid the trampling, seething mob of monsters, she realized that White and the two man- and woman-things with whom she had come to the Victory Building were working together as though by some carefully pre-arranged plan.

Again her mind flashed back to the time when those two monsters had aided her and the Skull Killer's escape from their fellows. Though she had been too dazed to realize it then, that room where the monsters had been kept must have been a pre-arranged meeting place between White and his malformed helpers. They must have made their plans at some point either when she had been unconscious or had her attention diverted.

It had been the duty of those friendly monsters to convince their fellows that, in White's words, "The Skull Killer was a better bet than the Octopus." They had succeeded, and then followed White and herself through the long corridors, biding their time, waiting for the opportunity to avenge their wrongs.

The sight of that vengeance now sickened Carol. Man after sniveling man, Borden, and the white-jacketed orderlies, were being torn to shreds by the fury of that attack. She felt the Octopus screaming, saw the room grow darker, as those indigo eyes were extinguished. Then merciful darkness closed over her . . .

Slowly she became conscious of the Skull Killer's voice again. He was speaking into a microphone contained in a little glass cage set apart in one corner of the room, like the control-room of a radio station.

"This is station WVI, on top of the Victory Building, New York City. Skull Killer speaking. In reference to my previous broadcast, which promised an investigation of the Citizens' Emergency Medical Committee, that investigation has taken place. The Committee has been purged of various vicious and deadly elements which had control of it.

"The disease against which you have been warned in previous broadcasts from this same station, is no natural disease at all—but was the work of fiendish human beings. I speak of them in the past tense, because they have ceased now to exist."

There was a pause, then White went on, "You will be glad to learn that there is no further danger of contamination to you, nor need you send any but voluntary contributions to aid your stricken fellow-citizens. A cure has been suggested for them by Dr. Anthony Steele, late member of the Emergency Committee, who died heroically, doing his duty as a doctor.

"Authorities are requested to come to the west wing of the fortyfifth floor of this building, where they will find corroboration of what I have just said, in a hitherto inaccessible part of the Victory Building. . . . That is all!"

White suddenly rushed out of the glass-enclosed booth. He paused before her, his hideously swollen, yellow face inches removed from her own.

He whispered, "I must go now. When the authorities come, tell them what Steele said. That'll clear you—then tell them everything else. These—people," his arm gestured briefly towards the monsters, who had fallen silent and stood regarding him, "will corroborate your testimony, and help clear any friends of yours from charges. . . . Do your best!"

He reached for a switch, and the room became dark. Carol was conscious of an almost overwhelming physical relief as the purple glare of the ultra-violent light was extinguished. She had hardly noticed its torturous presence in the recent excitement, but now she was weak and faint.

Strong arms encircled her, supported her. She thought they were White's, but when presently the room was flooded again with the light, she saw that he had disappeared. A frightened cry escaped her lips. She was completely alone and surrounded by the hideous, half-human malformations, and it was a woman who held her up.

"Don't worry," the woman said gutturally, "you'll be—all right."

And then the police, with their red and healthy human faces, were entering that place of deadly violet dusk. . . .

Jeffrey Fairchild picked her up at Police Headquarters. She had told her story, and had only been half-believed. Still, Jeffrey's influence had been sufficient to secure her release, and the pending investigation, the quizzing of the monsters, was all in her favor, and thus, automatically, in favor of her employer, Dr. Skull.

She wondered a little where Skull could be, and remembered the brown eyes of the monster, Robert White, the Skull Killer. She realized, shuddering, that with a little altering of the lines about them, those eyes might have been Dr. Skull's.

Had the elderly physician given himself those same treatments, that turned men into monsters, simply so that he would be able to fight that dread disease? Then she remembered the youth and strength of White . . . it was impossible that old Dr. Skull could have been as strong as that.

Seriously, however, she offered her surmises to Jeffrey, who laughed at them.

"Silly kid," he said indulgently. "You've just risked your life with the net effect of clearing Dr. Skull, and now it seems you've convinced everyone but yourself! Personally, I always thought those rumors about the doctor and the Skull Killer were so much dream-stuff. I just saw Dr. Skull, half an hour ago, and he was no more diseased than I am."

Carol shook her head perplexedly. "I wish he'd have let me know that earlier," she said. "I suppose my job's still open?"

Jeffrey nodded. "Dr. Skull's going to do some special work at the Victory Building. You'll probably be working right there with him."

Already Jeff had opened negotiations for purchase of the skyscraper whose owners could not be found. For he realized that, with its magnificent medical equipment, the Victory Building would be a logical substitute for the ruined Mid-City Hospital in service to the community.

But the Octopus—that incredibly evil personality who had been the skyscraper's first master—would his presence really be gone forever from the place he had lorded? Jeffrey recalled those old legends of the Deathless One, and he couldn't swear that the man was dead. It had been impossible to identify all the mangled bodies after that dreadful revenge.

He forced himself to think sensibly of the whole matter. It was true that he could not account for the Octopus, nor for his purple-eyed followers, neither in their origin or nature.

Albinism, attended by a mental aberration—he thought of that as an explanation. But why should there have risen a leader for these suddenly-appearing purple-eyed albinos?

Jeffrey sighed. He had done his part in the freeing of his city; he could only continue to do his part in the interests of its welfare. If sometime in the unpredictable future that essence of evil threatened once more to tests its malignant, deadly powers, the new owner of the Victory Building would have to do his part again. . . .

Exhibit
Spider
Robot Titans Of Gotham

TM and Copyright © 2007 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

DEATH REIGN OF THE VAMPIRE KING
originally appeared in the November 1935 issue of
THE SPIDER
magazine. Copyright © 1935 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1963 and assigned to Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.