Spider (37 page)

There had been something about the growth that suggested more than medical abnormality, something uniform and patterned, as though a deliberate perverted will had planned it so.

"Only the skin," Skull had told her. "It's operable. There's a good chance. You're young—you have a young woman's heart, a young woman's capacity for recovery. . . ."

She had been brave, that frightened little Mrs. Purvins. And so she had taken the chance, a greater chance than her surgeon cared to tell her, and for weeks she had lain in a ward cot at the Mid-City Hospital, too sick to speak, swathed like a mummy, but blessedly, beautifully alive! Alive, and with the malignant growth ripped out root and branch. Yet her greatest battle was just beginning.

With justifiable triumph Dr. Skull began to snip at the white bandages and behind curtains veiling the procedure from other occupants of Ward Seven, his surgeon's handiwork came to light. To no one but a doctor or a nurse, used to the ravages of suffering, would Mrs. Purvins have seemed anything but a horribly scarred and suppurating grotesque imposed upon a human form. But to the two who watched her, she was neither unbeautiful nor disheartening.

"It's a marvelous job, Doctor," the nurse said fervently. "Such a clean incision. . . . I don't think there's another surgeon in the world who could have accomplished anything with her. And a man with your skill, giving all his time to charity cases. . . . Sometimes I just don't understand it."

It was more than either skill or charity that the case of Mrs. Purvins had called for, but the nurse didn't know that. And even now, Dr. Skull, his brown eyes fixed almost unbelievingly on Mrs. Purvins, wondered if he had succeeded. For she had been more than a charity patient with cancer.

Her poor scarred body had been the battleground between Dr. Skull and whatever it was that had been foisted on her—those marks that were like nothing so much as the puckered souvenirs of some cruelly hungry orifice, sucking at her skin!

A battleground for salvation against a fate medically uncharted— Dr. Skull stared into his patient's eyes, and her own eyes stared back unblinkingly. Suddenly he realized that those large grey eyes, which had gazed on Ward Seven through slits in the bandages for days, had not blinked before, either. . . . No, he could not remember seeing her eyelids move! His brows drew together thoughtfully. No, not since the operation!

The raw sutures would heal in time, he knew. The body would be smooth again, and skin-grafting could take care of the scars that might be left on her face. But—those markings! And those eyes!

He made a hurried examination, and a ghastly suspicion crossed his mind. "Nurse," he said brusquely, "please leave me alone with the patient for a few moments."

Alone with Mrs. Purvins, Dr. Skull repeated his examination, more carefully—but his hands still shook as though with ague, and his lined old face was drawn and pale.

The sick woman seemed barely aware of the hands which felt for her pulse, strove to locate her heartbeat—she did not even try to talk, and her fixed, staring grey eyes had somehow an eerie, glistening witlessness.

Dr. Skull took a blood sample, called the nurse back in, and went to the laboratories on the third floor.

It was incredible, this thing that had apparently happened to Mrs. Purvins; yes, utterly, fantastically unbelievable. . . . But still it made his palms wet and his heart race!

Under the white light of the laboratory lamp he tested the blood sample. The thin fluid did not clot, didn't even smell like blood. . . .

And then he steeled himself to the ultimate chemical analysis. He felt his pulse pound in his veins as once more he repeated the test, to make sure. There could be no mistake! The blood was of the temperature and approximate consistency of sea-water!

A telephone sounded in the laboratory anteroom. Someone murmured, "For you, Dr. Skull."

It was the nurse from Ward Seven. "Dr. Skull," she said tensely, "your patient, Doctor—I started to take her pulse, and—and she has-n't any. . . ."

Softly, Dr. Skull put the phone back on its receiver. No pulse . . . ? He had found worse than that. Mrs. Purvins hadn't a heartbeat, either. And yet, when he had taken the bandages off, she had given every outward indication that the operation had been a success.

Sea-water! He opened a drawer marked with his own name, rummaged in it for the newspaper clipping which had first interested him in Mrs. Purvins: "Delirious Woman Picked Up Near East River," the headline read. . . .

They had found her, battered and half-crazed, the victim of an inexplicable assault that left her almost drained of blood. And she had moaned, repeatedly something about an octopus. . . .

Dr. Skull frowned. There are no octopi in the East River—nor anywhere in that part of the Atlantic coastal waters, for that matter. And from his later conversations with Mrs. Purvins, after the first scars of that attack had healed, leaving in their wake a still more inexplicable cancerous growth, he was sure that her attacker had been no monster of the deep, but rather some equally monstrous human being.

Yet the sea was the cradle of all life, for before living organisms had made their slow progress onto land, aeons ago, unicellular creatures had taken their nourishment and vitality from the water of primordial oceans. Arid all life still—even man himself—must carry the chemical composition of ocean water within itself. All living protoplasm cells on land are bathed in blood, which has the same elements as sea-water. The lower forms of life are still bound to ocean.

But blood and sea-water, as media of life, are separated by a million million years of evolution—and it was those millions of years that had slipped from the heritage of Mrs. Purvins!

Either the phenomenon was inherent in those strange puckered markings which had been unlike ordinary cancer—or else, he—Dr. Skull—had created an atavism!

Dr. Skull rushed back to Ward Seven. Surgery couldn't—but it
must
have been his own surgery, his clean simple excision of an cancerous growth. Yet what strange, eerie quirk of the laws of chance had upset in this woman a balance older than the oldest mountain ranges . . . ?

He brushed past the curtains which still veiled Mrs. Purvins from the rest of Ward Seven. And then he paused, some deep-seated instinct muffled the cry in his throat. . . .

Mrs. Purvins' mouth was fastened like a suction pump on the nurse's bosom, and in the staring grey eyes there was stark, maddened hunger!

Dr. Skull seized his patient's shoulders, his muscular fingers pulled against that sucking, intractable force even as he gasped at the hideous strength of those hungry lips. . . . Then, with a soft
whoosh,
he pulled her clear.

The nurse dropped like a dead weight, with a three-inch circle of raw muscle bleeding over her heart, and even more terrifying in its implications, he saw the shredded, torn remnants of part of her uniform on the floor!

The Thing that had been his patient turned its shining unhuman eyes on the doctor. Suddenly it reared—not on its legs, but with a swift upward surge that seemed to involve every molecule of matter in its body. He felt the white surgeon's jacket torn from him as though it were cheesecloth, and suddenly he understood why the nurse had been unable to give alarm when she had been attacked.

The Thing's clammy hand slapped against his mouth, jammed into his throat, nearly suffocating him, while, with the swiftness of a striking snake, that terrible mouth fastened on his shoulder, its suction rending his skin, tearing with intolerable pain at the muscular flesh beneath.

He lunged desperately with arms and legs—felt himself free, and gasped for air. He cried out then, trying to call for help as his staring eyes saw his erstwhile patient rear up at the window, and with a peculiarly undulating movement slip outside. He staggered after it, his fingers clutching the sill as the Thing descended the fire-escape with unbelievable rapidity. . . . And then he saw something else that momentarily caused him to forget his pain, and his horror.

As the Thing passed the third floor, a snakily prehensile arm whirled a net from the window, trapped the creature that had been Mrs. Purvins, and pulled her back inside the hospital.

And that, he knew, was one of the windows opening from the maternity ward!

He heard himself shouting orders to the internes who were streaming into the curtained enclosure. The room was swaying crazily about him, but someone had to look after the young nurse who was lying unconscious on the floor. And someone had to capture the monster that a short while ago had been his patient, Mrs. Purvins; someone had to capture and kill the monstrous thing that had trapped her.

One of the internes was applying a hasty dressing to his shoulder wound when Dr. Borden, head of the hospital, was suddenly and excitedly among them.

Borden cried, "What's this about?"

Dr. Skull didn't answer, but he felt Borden's restraining hand on his arm as he lunged forward.

"Come along, Doctor!" he gasped, "We've got to get—to the— maternity ward!"

He leaned dizzily against Borden in the corridor, struggling to retain consciousness in the descending elevator. The car came to a stop at the third floor.

Skull started out, but a human form slammed into him with stunning impact. He felt his knees folding, felt darkness sweeping over him, and Dr. Borden's grip relaxing on his arm.

Desperately he twisted his body, even as he began to fall—through the humming, drumming darkness that was closing over him he saw Borden struggling—not in the grip of a monster, but of some human adversary. A knife glinted in the hand of Borden's attacker.

His own hand stabbed downward, almost reflexively, and his fingers grasped the small automatic which he carried with him on night-calls about the slum districts of the city. He hardly knew he had pressed the trigger, but there was a deafening explosion in the clean white corridor, and the man who had been grappling with Borden slumped to the floor.

Incredulously, Skull stared at the man he had shot, as Borden shouted: "Do you know this man, Doctor?" Nor did Skull miss the vitriolic accusation in the hospital chief's voice.

At last, Skull nodded. "The—the husband of my patient—Henry Purvins. He tried to kill you, didn't he?"

"Does it occur to you that he might have had a grievance?" Borden asked coldly. "After what you did to his wife—Look!"

Skull's eyes followed Borden's pointing finger, and he saw internes wheeling a stretcher out of the maternity ward—a stretcher on which something formless and gelid struggled frantically against sheets that tied it down—sheets covered with the pale pink compound that had passed for blood in the veins of Mrs. Purvins.

Borden, with almost venomous deliberation, went on, "
You
did that to her. . . . And now, you try to silence a husband's reasonable indignation by murder! Doctor, is it your duty to create malformations, and to kill?"

Chapter Two
The Skull Killer

SKULL'S EYES TRAVELED from Borden's face to those of the three internes who held him; to the nurses who stood about, almost hysterically tense, and the white-jacketed orderlies who bent over that body on the floor.

In the eyes of his accusers he read a completely unreasoning hatred—and something more! Behind the irises of everyone of them, with the exception of Borden, he saw flickering specks of color. . . . And he recognized in that color the mark of insanity! He had seen it before in human eyes. . . .

Again he looked at the face of the man he had shot. Even in death, the gaping unseeing eyes had that unearthly purplish glint. . . . Dr. Skull remembered that even Mrs. Purvins had warned him of her husband's "oddness." Oddness? Most damnable oddness! Murderousness, rather. . . . How close Skull had been to suspecting that Henry Purvins might have been his wife's attacker when she had been found wandering by the East River!

Then Borden stooped sanctimoniously over the corpse, and suddenly the beginning of an incredible conviction snapped into Dr. Skull's mind. The hospital chief's watch fob dangled from his waist. It was of gold, heavy and carefully wrought, and repulsive as artistry could make it. A golden octopus, with one jewelled purple eye gleaming in its head. . . . In her terrified delirium, Mrs. Purvins had babbled about an octopus—and now Mrs. Purvins was hideously, unhumanly dead!

The internes holding Skull were not prepared for the strength and fury of his attack. He bent over swiftly, and the man directly behind him doubled up with his breath knocked out. With an ease that belied his years, Skull ripped his arms free and sent another colleague spinning with a hook to the jaw. As Borden was leaping for him, Dr. Skull side-stepped and swung. Then he jumped for the elevator.

The man at the controls tried to rush him, and Skull grasped his arm, and with a jiu-jitsu hold, threw him into the melee in the hall. He slammed the doors, and his fingers were cold on the control lever as he started the car downward.

His shoulder ached agonizingly, and after that brief desperate spurt of energy, he was again dizzy and weak . . . twice the car bounced jerkily against its basement springs before Skull remembered to release the controls. Blindly, he levered the doors open, and staggered into the cellar's cool dusk.

Into the darkness behind the huge heating unit he delved, leaning heavily against a dusty, jutting plank. There was a brief whir of chains, and a section of the wall gave way. Skull lurched into the opening, and sank to his knees, completely exhausted. Behind him, he dimly heard again the soft whir of the chains, and then he was alone in the cool darkness of an unsuspected hollow in the wall.

Silent seconds passed, bringing with them some return of strength to the old doctor's nerves and muscles. And with the strength, a fiery determination-glinted again in his eyes.

Sparing the torn shoulder as best he could, he slowly removed his white surgeon's jacket, and began briskly to rub his face with it. Then it seemed as if a miracle occurred, for the sunken wrinkles disappeared completely from his jaws, cheeks and forehead. . . . He tore off the strips which secured the grey wig, revealing a head of lustrous dark hair beneath. The removal of two padded wire hooks from his lower jaw altered the shape of his face considerably. It was a far younger Dr. Skull who finally turned on his back, and lay motionless, staring upward into the darkness with alertly thoughtful brown eyes.