Spider (42 page)

"This book? It really belongs to Dr. Skull. He gave it to me a long time ago, when he wanted me to do research for him on something called the Purple Eye. He was writing a paper for the Medical Association. There's something here I didn't tell him. Look here, Jeff—if you should happen to run into him any time, if you should recognize him, you tell him what it is, the way I'm going to tell you. Tell him about the Mid-City Hospital fire, too.

"But this book. . . . It's a book of legends—most of them just can't be swallowed in any shape. And I didn't tell him what I found, because it didn't have anything to do with eyes. There's a story here about Rome—the night before it burned. They saw a purple light around the Coliseum, and then the flames came. Only one man told about it—Dorican Agrippa—but he isn't generally considered a reliable source."

"I'll tell Dr. Skull if I see him," Jeffrey said, his eyes narrowed and thoughtful. Purple lights in the walls of doomed buildings! And now the very sky was threaded by that forewarning of destruction. "Think I'll let you get some sleep, Robert."

"Good idea," said the boy quietly. He sighed, and fell back against his pillow.

Jeffrey turned for another look from the doorway, but Robert no longer seemed aware of him. His face turned to the window, the boy motionlessly watched that arrogant purple signal in the sky.

Half an hour or so later, Jeffrey heard a faint scratching sound as he tunneled toward the underground chamber below Dr. Skull's office. It grew louder; and as he opened the door, he saw his monstrous pair of half-human things scraping the wooden floor under his cot with the nails of their thick spatulate fingers. The violet light there hurt his eyes, and he blinked, standing there on the threshold.

Before he could open his eyes again, a shrill cry of surprise echoed through the little chamber, and a rancid-smelling hand reached for his throat. Helplessly, he flailed at the flesh that hemmed him in.

"It's—the other one!" he heard the woman say, and then he was free. "Wait," she continued, her form seeming to waver and seethe crazily in that dazzling light. "We can change the lights for a few minutes, so you can stay—and talk to us."

In the charged darkness, Jeffrey scarcely knew whether or not another attack would be forthcoming, and then the room seemed half-normal again with the steady blaze of his own old hundred-watt bulb.

"We can last an hour without the other light," grunted the man-thing. His great shrunken eyes traveled unblinkingly the length

of Jeffrey's person. "Are you—Dr. Skull?"

Jeffrey nodded.

"They hate you," the woman said. "They came for you." She paused. The pair took turns in speaking, as though it were difficult for one alone to sustain a conversation.

"I switched your radio," said the man. "Switched it both ways. Upstairs—we heard men upstairs. They talked—they were detectives. They wanted you—and us. They went away soon."

"Then the others," said the woman. "The doctors—the bad doctors—and the one they call the Octopus. . . . They came to find if Dr. Skull—had been arrested. You're not one of them. They said so. They want to kill you. You—may be all right."

"Help us," the man grunted in that thick, half-dead monotone.

Jeffrey backed against the wall. If he only could! Those pitiful outstretched reeds of arms, flattened into hideous fronds at the joints! He had come here to help them, but they would have to help him, too. They would have to tell him what was the matter with them, as best they could; who had done this to them; where he could find the man or men responsible for these atrocities.

"Who was your doctor?" he asked. "When this happened to you, I mean?"

"His name was Borden," the man answered. "But he—there's another, who tells him what to do. Another man—maybe another devil—the one whom I told you about."

"Who is he?" Jeffrey almost shouted.

Tragically, the woman shrilled, "We don't know. We don't know who he is, or how he did it. But he has his people all over. They call him the Octopus, but they all have crazy eyes, except Borden, who's their front. They took us here from the hospital. . . . For a long time they kept us apart. They were bad, bad. . . . But we can't—prove anything. . . ."

Who was the man behind the whole hellish scheme? Jeffrey tried agonizingly to think of a clue to his identity. "Why did they do it?" he asked. "What reason could anyone possibly have for doing this to you?"

For answer, the man squatted, and pulled something out from under the cot. "Maybe—this is the reason," he said.

Jeffrey couldn't answer; didn't know how to answer. Cold little waves of revulsion traveled up and down his spine, and he choked back the spontaneous animal cry that welled in his throat.

The thing under the cot had been a man once, before those tooth-marks had flapped the skin of its throat to loose ribbons.

There was no trace of blood at the severed jugular, no trace of blood in the entire, shrunken, half-naked frame. It was a grey, dried body, suggestively withered, with the flat layers of muscle and fat sagging against a limp bony structure . . . even the whites of the eyes were as bloodless as the belly of a dead fish. But the irises were a livid, staring purple!

"You took his blood!" Jeffrey whispered, when he could speak at all.

The bulbous misshapen head of the man-thing slowly rose and fell. "We must—have living blood. Otherwise—we die. That may be why—they did this to us. They are men who hate many people. They wanted us—to drink the blood of their enemies."

Jeffrey remembered Mrs. Purvins . . . and he tensed expectantly, waiting for some further attack on himself. It was impossible to tell from those hoarse gutturals whether the monsters feared, respected, or
hungered
for him. Their tones were utterly flat and emotionless, save for that heavy undercurrent of dread tragedy. "He came here," the woman said. "He—looked for us. He came in—but he never told the others he had found us. He will never tell now—about anything. We had to silence him. . . . And then we were thirsty."

So the enemy had committed one boomerang atrocity! It was the first time, to Jeffrey's knowledge, that such a thing had happened.

The man repeated, with a tense desperation somehow threading the harsh, lifeless guttural quality of his speech, "Help us. Please help us—Dr. Skull. . . ."

Jeffrey said, "I'll need a blood sample."

The man's lips moved in what might have been a smile. He rolled his bathrobe sleeve, baring a yellowish gash in his arm. "
He
did that," said the man. "That's—all I have for blood."

Jeffrey didn't have to analyze it. He tried to find the pair's pulses, and couldn't. The yellowish stuff . . . was like that cold, primitive compound which had been in the veins of Mrs. Purvins. Sea-water, in human bodies! That's why they needed the constant renewing warmth of living blood. But these people, unlike Mrs. Purvins, gave evidence of logical reasoning.

Jeffrey asked them who they had been, their ages, and how they had come under the care of Dr. Borden.

Her husband caught pneumonia, the woman said, and then she caught it from him. Because there was no one to take care of them, they had both gone to the hospital. And that was where, in the secrecy of a private room, its horror guarded from public knowledge by the almost military discipline of a hospital, the transformation had taken place.

The man was thirty, the woman twenty-six. Their name was Halliday, Stephen and Eleanor Halliday.

From the wall amplifier, came a thudding interruption. Someone was
leaving
the office of Dr. Skull . . . leaving in a hurry!

Chapter Six
The Purple
Warning!

THE MAN-THING threw himself on Jeffrey, keeping him from running up to investigate. "You can't go!" the monster gutturaled. "We know what they're doing—we heard them planning it!"

A deafening detonation roared through the chamber, rocked the walls. For a breathless second, the fore-wall cracked and swayed, and then the quake was over, with all walls in a jagged ungeometric pattern, but they were still standing.

The man-thing kept his broad fingers clutched on Jeffrey's coat. "I saved your life," he rasped. "Remember that. And unless you help us, we will claim that life, as we claimed his—" his malformed thumb, gestured awkwardly toward the drained corpse on the floor. "We will find you, wherever you are.
They
will help us find you, if we go back to them. We don't care—we're not afraid of anything—not even of them. That's why we were made like this—nothing worse can happen, and there's nothing left for us to fear. That's why they expected us to be good tools for them. But they made a mistake—when they brought us here."

These monsters, even with their desperate threats, gave Jeffrey more hope than anything else he had encountered. They seemed to know more about the Octopus than anyone else was willing to admit. . . .

"Do you know anything about the new purple search-light?" he asked. "There's one over Manhattan tonight, and I think it's theirs."

The monsters looked at one another, and shook their great heads. "No. And you'd—better go soon," said the woman, "We—must have our own light on again."

Jeffrey turned toward the door.

"You can work for us in peace, Dr. Skull," said the man. "They think you're dead, now. When one of their men disappeared—the one who found us—they were sure you were somewhere—in the building. We heard them say so. That's why they blew up the building. They think now that you died in the explosion. . . . Remember us. . . . And we shall not forget you!"

The woman busied herself with the light-bulb. "I'll remember," Jeffrey promised.

He could not lock the door again, for that first intruder had smashed the lock. But he was sure the man and woman would await him peaceably enough, secluded both from their enemies and cruel public scrutiny if he came back within a reasonable time.

He wanted to stop at the office, to see if there was anything he could salvage, but debris blocked the way. He couldn't even get past the coal-bin into the basement. Then growing louder above him, he heard the hungry crackle and roar of flames, i

Through that voracious sound of destruction came the approaching clang and whine of the fire-trucks. . . . But Jeffrey knew that before those raging flames could be tamed, the whole building and everything in it would be lost beyond redemption.

For an instant a pang of heart-ache assailed him as he thought of the associations which that humble edifice had for him during the past six years. . . . For Dr. Skull had made it a haven for the poor and the ailing of this downtrodden neighborhood.

Then, after a few minutes, he emerged out on the street, the flaming structure blocks away. He entered a drug store, stepped swiftly into a phone booth, and dialed the number of his garage.

* * *

Excepting for the powerful Diesel motor which he had designed and installed himself, there was nothing to mark Jeffrey's car as different from a thousand other sedans on the streets. He nodded to the garage mechanic as the car was brought up to the drug store, then, alone behind the wheel, he headed southward, toward the Holland tunnel to New Jersey, while the purple beacon sprayed its light into the heavens above Manhattan . . .

A hundred miles out at sea that night, sleepless navigators stared with marvelling eyes at a harbor-light no sailor had seen before. On Long Island, and in the Westchester and Connecticut suburbs to the north of the city, residents wondered at the new splendor of New York's nightlife reflected in the skies.

And in Manhattan itself, people stared—as Manhattanites will at each new marvel their city produces—and some wondered if the glaring ray would not blind aviators rather than guide them. . . . And if there shouldn't be a law, or an ordinance. . . .

Jeffrey headed under the Hudson, and on the Jersey shore he hit for the Newark airport. Occasionally, he had found use for a trim little two-seater kept there. It had a lofty wing-spread, which gave it some of the qualities of a glider, and powerful little motor. At the airport he was known as a wealthy and idle young man, with a penchant for playing with air currents and the scientific side of flying.

The little ship took to the heavens like a bird, and in ten minutes he was circling above the heart of Manhattan, with the jewelled crest of the Victory building glowing below him. He dared not fly through the beacon itself; if its nature were what he feared, such an attempt might mean suicide.

He cut his motor, doused his riding lights, and silently circled in the upward air currents caused by the canyon streets. As he neared the column of purple glare, he felt an almost unbearable heat in his open cockpit.

Holding the stick between his knees, he reached into his pocket for a piece of cloth, which he smeared thickly with a heavy, tar-like substance from a long, narrow flask. After waiting for the cloth to dry, he wrapped it around his hand.

Despite the upward air current, the weight of his little plane carried him lower and lower. The heat intensified momentarily as he dipped into the purple glare, and he felt his hands and face almost blistering—all but that part of his right hand which had been covered with the saturated cloth.

A grim look of satisfaction on his face, he pulled back on the stick, and soared skyward. The beam of light trembled beneath him, then swung slightly, seeking him out. He threw the plane into a steep bank, barely avoiding that purple radiance, and momentarily the little craft, not built for such quick maneuvering, fluttered like a leaf. He steadied her in a long glide, and again nosed up. . . .

Then he knew! The ray on the Victory Building was the purple arm of death—an ultra-violet ray!

Now he was sure that the new building in midtown Manhattan was his enemy's citadel. From the air, it was impregnable. No craft could hope to remain aloft above that death-dealing flare.

By land. . . . Jeffrey frowned, guessing that the light could be deflected downward as well as up. No army in the world could march through a street swept by the purple beam.