Weird Tales volume 31 number 03 (9 page)

Slow seconds passed. Then Dmitri spoke, spoke in that vibrant, beautiful voice of his that was like the chanting of a cathedral organ.

"You are asleep, Mary Roberts?"

There was a moment's pause. Warn-ingly the police automatic in Peters' hand touched the sodden flesh at the base of Dmitri's neck.

Through the stillness came Mary's reply: "Master, I am asleep."

By not so much as a single, involuntary shudder had Dmitri betrayed even the slightest awareness of the cold gun-muzzle. Yet Peters knew that even now

the man was planning, calculating chance against chance. . . .

"Who am I?" The words boomed like great mellow bass notes.

Mary's answer came unhesitatingly: "You are the Voice that Speaks from Beyond the Darkness. You are the Infallible One."

Peculiarly, Peters sensed that in that instant Dmitri had reached a decision. . . .

The strong, resonant phrases rolled on, "You will forget the assignment that I have given you." There was a pause, and Peters realized with a curious, crawling anticipation that Dmitri was gathering himself together, concentrating himself upon himself, ominously.

Then the black words boomed, "Let your nerves go mad and your muscles tense and writhe until death releases you!"

"Damn you!" Peters snarled the curse; his gun-muz2le sloughed savagely into Dmitri's obese flesh. Yet the gun did not speak, and Dmitri, wincing beneath the torturing steel, chuckled. . . .

"I gambled that you would not fire," he gasped, his voice suddenly gloating. "And now we are no longer stalemated; before I will consent to release Mary Roberts from the agony she endures you will promise me immunity, and more than immunity—you will promise me protection, henceforth. Take that cannon from my neck "

The ceiling light flashed up, the whirling of the multicolored vanes slowed and died. And, as the eyes of Ethredge and Peters grew accustomed to the increased illumination within the room, the two men felt their bloodflow pause, then run like ice-water in their veins.

For Mary Roberts had toppled from her chair, and now lay weirdly, unnaturally sprawled on the naked floor beside Dmitri's table, her spine bent backward like a tight-drawn bow, the slender heels

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of her tiny shoes nearly touching her chestnut hair beneath her chic little hat, her throat and jaw muscles stretched like oversharp violin strings, her teeth and pink gums bared in a ghastly grin. Her breasts were rising and falling spasmodically; she breathed in dioking, rattling gasps. The fair, pale flesh of her oval face was purpling.

"God!" Ethredge stumbled to his feet, stood swaying drunkenly, his hands outstretched; he had utterly forgotten the servant Stepan. For an instant the little man struggled to rise, then sank back weakly.

The obscene colossus grinned. "Do not fear; she will live a long time. Her nerves will tire; then she will relax for a moment. She will breathe more easily, then."

And, as though the prophecy were a command, Mary's body went suddenly, horribly limp, melted against the barren floor as though death had abruptly collapsed every straining muscle. Only her gulping, hurried breathing and the gradual fading of the terrible purple congestion from her face told that she was still alive. Mucus was beginning to run from her loosely open mouth.

Ethredge took a slow, uncertain step forward. "God!" he mumbled, again. Then he found words, babbling, pleading words. "You—devil! Free her, only free her, and "

"Commissioner!" It was Peters' voice,

harsh, rasping. "Commissioner "

With a sudden, gasping sob he paused, for, with the sharply reiterated exclamation Mary's body had once more tensed, knotted into a backward-bent bow more terrible to look upon than had she twisted and writhed.

"Dear God!" Ethredge moaned. He took a second, wavering step forward. And then Peters found speech.

"Commissioner!" His voice was im-

placable, steely. "Stop! Do you know what you are doing, in surrendering to this—beast of hell? You are dishonoring yourself for ever, you are promising him immunity to torture, and murder, and debase—yes, for he has done all of these things "

Ethredge's lips were a twisted snarl, "Peters, I would promise him my soul— to free Mary!"

Dmitri was grinning, grinning. . . .

Peters' words were like the flicking of a rapier, "Mary would loathe you—if she knew. Mary would never permit this —sacrifice of honor."

Ethredge took another step forward. He seemed not to have heard.

10. A Utile White Pellet

With sudden, grim determination Peters plunged his left hand deep in his breast pocket. His right hand dropped the gun to the floor, his right arm constricted about Dmitri's throat There w r as a small white pellet in the fingers of his left hand.

"Dmitri!" he snarled, "this tablet; can you guess what it is?—it smells of almonds!"

The powerful biceps of his right arm tightened. Caught in that strangling embrace, Dmitri writhed weakly, horribly, his pig-like eyes wildly staring.

Peters' face was inches above Dmitri's fear-maddened eyes. The pellet moved closer to Dmitri's slavering, gasping jaws.

"Just a touch against the tip of the tongue! You attempted trickery, Dmitri; had you not done that we might have drawn your fangs and let you live. But now "

Swiftly, then, he forced the bitter-smelling pellet into Dmitri's wide-distended mouth, crushed the man's jaws violently together,

WEIRD TALES

The taste of almond was strong on Dmitri's tongue.

For a split second his eyes seemed bursting from their sockets. A horrible, retching moan ■welled from his saliva-drenched mouth; blue veins leaped on his hairless temples. Then, like a pin-pricked balloon, he collapsed; his massive head rolled forward upon his flaccid chest; he huddled there, stilly, in his chair, . . .

"The end of you, Dmitri," Peters was whispering. "The end of you!"

And then he heard Ethredge's voice, dazed with the horror he had undergone, yet implacable, now, with heartbroken resolve.

"We must kill htm, Peters! You are right; Mary would not have us sell honor. even to save her!"

Ethredge, his eyes unseeing, his mind Dear-crazed by suffering, did not know that Dmitri was already dead. And yet

"Dmitri is dead," Peters said softly. His whole attention was focussed upon Mary, upon the small huddled figure that, in the instant of Dmitri's passing, had suddenly relaxed, lay now in semiconscious exhaustion. And in Peters' heart there leaped exultation; for in his mind had been, all along, the strange, weird conviction that the end of Dmitri would bring release to those he had enslaved. For Peters knew that Dmitri had instilled into the subconscious of his victims the belief that he was infallible, the belief that he was a kind of god, protecting them, shielding them, curing them of their ills. But now the man-god was dead, and, of necessity, in each of his dupes the blind, limitless sea of the subconscious was rejecting the theories he had taught, spewing out his broken image, obliterating him, in disillusionment. from the chasms of memory. Before Peters' eyes the unnatural tendency to

convulsion that Dmitri had instilled in Mary Roberts' subconscious, the cruel weapon he had implanted within the core of her being and goaded, in terror-ridden desperation, into life, had died in the instant her subconscious became aware of Dmitri's passing, had ceased as abruptly as though a circuit had been broken, as completely as though an evil light had been extinguished. . . .

Peters, stooping over Mary, now limply, weakly relaxed, slipped his strong right arm beneath her shoulders, murmured swift, soothing words. Sanity, he saw, was flooding back into her eyes. And then she looked toward and beyond Ethredge, and she screamed-—and screamed again.

Peters' eyes followed her rigid gaze, and as he looked at the servant Stepan his nerves crawled and the short hairs at the base of his neck bristled in an ecstasy of horror.

'Dear—God!"

In that second of unsurpassable horror there blazed across Peters' mind a strange kaleidoscope of tableaux, tableaux that were all the same, tableaux of the obese Dmitri and the small, self-effacing Stepan enacting a multitude of Dmitri's experiments, experiments in which invariably the small automatic hammered bullets into Stepan's chest, the blow-torch flamed in Stepan's face, hot coins were dropped with seeming harmlessness on Stepan's wrists! That horror on the floor, that horror that had been the servant Stepan. that horror that had. in the moment of Dmitri's passing, fha

"Dear—God!"

For the flesh-and-blood face of the servant Stepan had vanished, and in its place there remained only nightmare, only a flame-charred, crimson skull! The horror lay upon its back, its arms outfluni;, as it had lain while Ethredge pii it down. Its jacket was open,, and the

THE THING ON THE FLOOR

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exposed expanse of shirt-front was a stick}' crimson smear.

"Dear—God!"

Those bullets, those hundreds of bullets, that Dmitri must have fired, during the months and years, through Stepan's chest! And somehow Peters knew, as he gazed through mercifully glazed eyes upon the horror outsplayed there, that beneath the red-drenched shirt there remained no shred of mortal flesh, but only a bleeding, bullet-blasted hole!

And on Stepan's wrists Peters saw the holes, the great fire-seared holes, the charred, circular holes the size of a half-dollar. . . .

"Dear—God!" Peters was babbling. over and over, inanely.

Dimly, while his brain reeled and his soul retched as he gazed upon the ghastly thing on the floor, he yet realized that the same release that had, in the instant of Dmitri's passing, loosed Mary Roberts" nerves and muscles from the death-laden throes of convulsion, had also, and in that same awful instant, freed Stepan's subconscious from the enjoin-ment that his body was invulnerable to physical injury. And with that release had come Stepan's doom—the long-delayed death that should have been his in the instant, now perhaps years in the past, that Dmitri had first blasted a bullet through his heart.

In that moment Peters was hardly a man—he was more an animal, terrified, near mad with horror. He realized only vaguely that his hands were clenched into rigid fists, that his heart was pounding with frantic rapidity. He could feel his spine crawl and bristle; sweat, reeking with adrenal secretions, leaped from his pores.

But warningly, through waves of horror, some tiny figment of his brain was reiterating the command, "Don't let go

of yourself! Don't let your nerve break!"

Slowly, then, he tore his gaze away from that horror on the floor. And, gradually, his vision cleared, his brain resumed its functioning. He had been close to madness. . . .

He saw Ethredge, then, standing close beside the table, gazing at the horror at his feet, swaying, tottering drunkenly. Just as the Commissioner would have reeled to the floor Peters stumbled to his feet, grasped the man, guided him like a shambling cretin to a chair, fumbled in the Commissioner's hip pocket for his whisky-flask.

"Dear Lord!" Peters whispered, as he forced whisky into Ethredge's trembling mouth. "Dear Lord! if this doesn't drive him—drive her—mad "

That horror—that horror on the floor!

But the hot, burning stimulant was bringing color back into Ethredge's face. Swiftly Peters turned to Mary, tilted her head back, poured a staggering draft down her throat. Gently he lifted her up, supported her to a chair, where she sat dazedly. Mercifully, she was in almost a comatose condition.

Ethredge was beginning to find words. "That thing—that—thing!" he was mumbling.

Incisively, then, Peters spoke.

"Commissioner, you've got to get hold of yourself. We must get the medical examiner here, get Hanlon and Delaney and men from the Medical Association; we must hush this affair up. Thank God we have influence; thank God the horrors Dmitri has perpetrated on this man have been witnessed by many persons. Perhaps the story will be—a private experiment that failed, and Dmitri dead— of heart-failure. Dmitri was, after all, diabetic, and his heart was untrustworthy. But—we cannot waft; we must call Hanlon at once," He moved toward the telephone.

WEIRD TALES

"But Dmitri!" Ethredge whispered. "Dmitri — dead of cyanide poisoning! The medical examiner will know. Dmitri —murdered!"

Peters turned. His face, as he slowly shook his head, was enigmatic.

"No, Commissioner. Remember that I once told you that there might even be a certain poetic justice in the manner by which Dmitri might be most safely— destroyed? That pellet was harmless, made of crushed almonds and flour; Dmitri was his own executioner. He believed that he was tasting cyanide, and so he died; his own weapon, the power of suggestion, killed him—justly."

He was lifting the telephone to his

ear. But before he dialed the well-remembered number he looked, thoughtfully, for a long moment, at Dmitri, at the bloated, repulsively hairless hulk that had once housed a brilliant, utterly evil soul.

"Poor, warped devil!" he softly mused; "he could treat and cure others by suggestion, but he could not treat himself. And now he is dead. Well "

The short, stubby fingers of his right hand were dialing the number. And, as he listened to the small, reiterated grating sound of the whirling dial, he realized, vaguely, that Ethredge had gone to Mary Roberts, that Ethredge was stooping over her comfortingly, soothing her within his strong, embracing arms.

Vhe

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hadow on the Screen

By HENRY KUTTNER

A weird story of Hollywood, and the grisly horror that cast its dreadful

shadow across the stiver screen as an incredible

motion-picture was run off

rORTURE MASTER was being given a sneak preview at a Beverly Hills theatre. Somehow, when my credit line, "Directed by Peter Haviland," was flashed on the screen, a little chill of apprehension shook me, despite the applause that came from a receptive audience. When you've been in the picture game for a long time you get these hunches; I've often spotted a dud flicker before a hundred feet have been reeled off. Yet Torture Master was no worse than a dozen similar films I'd handled in the past few years.