Doctor Death Vs. The Secret Twelve - Volume 1 Page 6

  “I will need your assistance tonight,” he said. “You are quite willing to aid me?”

  “Quite willing,” Holm responded.

  Nina Fererra rose slowly to her feet. For an instant Holm gazed at her, imagining that she was about to speak. Then, with another shudder, she turned away and left the two men alone.

  INSPECTOR JOHN RICKS was sitting alone in his office when the telephone suddenly rang. Shifting his cigar, he leaned forward and picked the receiver from the hook.

  “Yes!” he snapped.

  The reply that came back to him caused him to sit up with a jerk.

  “This is Doctor Death!” said a cold metallic voice. “My warnings have been in vain. The world still goes on as usual. Tonight I strike again. Doctor Karl Munson will, as I told you, be the next. It would please me if you would double your guards about him and invite the newspaper men to be present. And, as an added feature, will you please take command yourself...”

  The metallic voice suddenly died away. Ricks leaped to his feet with an oath, galvanized into action. Jiggling the hook up and down for an instant, be placed the receiver to his ear again.

  “Trace that call!” he commanded of the officer at the switchboard.

  “What call, sir?” the other demanded.

  “The call that just came to me, you idiot!” Ricks shouted.

  The switchboard operator gulped.

  “I beg your pardon, sir, but there was no call,” he answered. “There hasn’t been a call for the past ten minutes. I—”

  But Ricks had hung up with an oath.

  From every direction policemen were moving toward the palatial home of Doctor Karl Munson, America’s number one scientist and the man marked for assassination by the sinister being who called himself Doctor Death. Sirens shrieked and rent the air with their raucous wails. Motorcycle policemen halted traffic and patrolled the streets for blocks in every direction. Little squads of blue-clad men filled the yard, the alley, the side streets.

  Inside the spacious drawing room Detective Inspector Ricks sat, revolver drawn, by the side of the white-faced scientist. With him, coldly alert, was the Commissioner himself, summoned from a theater party to see that no stone was left unturned. The room was filled with uniformed policemen and detectives all armed to the teeth. In the hall stood two sergeants, a box of tear bombs on the little table before them.

  “This is once that the devil will he foiled,” Ricks growled. “He made a mistake in telling me what he intended doing.”

  Munson’s teeth chattered.

  “Nevertheless, I must confess that I am frightened,” he said whimsically. “I feel like a condemned man must feel just before the execution.”

  “Brace up,” Commissioner Quigly said kindly. “I have personally gone over the defenses. Nothing has been left undone. Even the other houses in the block have been searched. Their occupants have been sent away. The rooms are filled with guards. A thousand armed men are within a block of us, all waiting for a chance to get a shot at this fiend. A fly couldn’t get through the cordon that we have placed around you.”

  “Is there nothing else that we can do?” Munson asked, his voice quivering.

  Ricks glanced at him contemptuously. Because there was no fear in his own makeup, he loathed it in others.

  “We’ve got every available man on the force here now,” he growled. “Do you think we ought to have the regular army, too?”

  “Yes-s,” Munson gulped. “If this creature is what reports say he is, even that would not suffice. I feel—feel, gentlemen—that I am as good as dead.”

  “Bunk!” Ricks roared. “Leave it to the police!”

  EVEN as he spoke there was a shot. He leaped to his feet with a startled exclamation and rushed to the window. Then another shot. Shouts! A fusillade!

  “My God!” he exclaimed, gazing out at the panorama that spread before him.

  Down the sidewalk marched a group of men. There were half a hundred of them at least—strange-acting, peculiar things, their faces white and pasty, their eyes staring straight to the front. They walked with a slow, jerky motion, lifting their feet carefully, their legs acting as if hinged. From another direction came a second group. The sound of shots at the rear of the house told him that still a third party was there.

  His men were firing rapidly, turning loose a hail of lead from machine guns, rifles and revolvers. The bullets had no more effect on the oncoming horde than the spray from a hose. Tear bombs were thrown. But still the strange, weird beings came forward. He saw a bullet strike the head of one of them—saw the black mark that appeared on the white, puttylike skin as the slug entered. The thing staggered, thrown off balance, then straightened itself and continued its onward march.

  They made no movement in defense. Instead, they walked with arms hanging stiffly by their sides, charging steadily forward like a tank upon a battlefield. The policemen fell back, firing as they ran. And still, the horde pressed on.

  Now they were inside the yard. The policemen grouped to meet them. They plowed through the massed ranks of the bluecoats like a football team on a scrimmage field.

  “You can’t kill ’em!” a sweating policeman shouted up to his superior. “They are like putty. Bullets bounce off from them, curse ’em! What the hell are we going to do?”

  “Club ’em!” Ricks shouted. “Give ’em the wood. Knock ’em over. And stop giving ground, damn you! Stand up and fight ’em like men!”

  “You can’t fight dead men,” the bluecoat retorted doggedly. Nevertheless he turned to the others.

  “At ’em with the wood, the boss says!” he shouted, dragging his own club from its holster.

  Ricks heard the dull thud of wood as it crashed against flesh and bone. Some of them went down. But they got up immediately, fell in behind the others. And always their advance continued.

  Clomp! Clomp! Clomp! They were on the porch now. They swarmed into the house, pressing the bluecoats back by sheer weight.

  “It’s ghosts we’re fighting,” a policeman shouted as he hurled his club into a pasty face and broke for cover.

  They were in the room. Ricks fired his last shell, then dropped his gun and charged at the oncoming horde like an angry bull. The dead things went down like tenpins before his mad rush. They arose and continued coming. He was trampled on, crushed beneath the weight of their feet. He caught a glimpse of the Commissioner, his dress coat torn from his back, his white shirt in shreds, battling like a fiend.

  In the background Munson cowered in a corner... They were on him now... Dead hands encircled his throat... He shrieked...

  When Ricks recovered consciousness the Department doctor was working over him. The house was filed with bruised and maimed bluecoats. They were scattered about like wounded men on a battlefield. In one corner the Commissioner lolled back in a big overstuffed chair, his clothes nearly torn from his muscular body.

  On the floor lay Professor Karl Munson, America’s greatest scientist. His eyes protruded from his head. His tongue lolled from his mouth. His face was mottled and black.

  Doctor Death had kept his word.

  Ricks pointed at the body, too horrified for utterance. The great form was losing its shape. The skin was growing wrinkled and parchment-like—like a lemon that has been sucked of all its juices...

  There was a chill in the air—a feeling of horror and loathsomeness. They sensed some sinister thing about them. A sturdy bluecoat, dying, gasped and struggled, his huge hands clutching at his throat.

  “It’s got me!” he shrieked. “For God’s sake, take it away. I feel its... arms about... me... Sucking me... dry... Drawing the life and vitality... from me...”

  He died, shrieking and struggling like a man who sees himself on the brink of hell.

  And over everything was a peculiar odor—the horrible stench of death and decay. It choked them—overpowered them...

  Chapter X

  Public Enemy No. 1

  “PUBLIC Enemy Number one!”

  Th
e words glared at Doctor Death from the newspaper. They were printed a second time beneath his picture. “Scientist is Evidently Crazed,” they said. Professor Rance Mandarin scowled. To be branded as the arch-enemy of mankind was bad enough; to be dubbed insane was worse. It was something that he had not anticipated.

  “Orders were issued today to every police agency in the country to get Doctor Rance Mandarin, alias, Doctor Death.”

  He crumpled the newspaper angrily.

  “The devil! The clever, clever devil!” he snarled.

  “Eh?

  Jimmy Holm looked up, a perplexed look on his face.

  The old man’s mood changed. His face lighted up with a smile.

  “I merely remarked that your Inspector Ricks is a very clever man,” he said quietly.

  “Ricks?” Helm’s face wore a quizzical expression. “The name has a familiar ring about it. Yet I can not seem to remember anyone by that name.”

  “You worked for him—once,” Doctor Death said with a low chuckle.

  It was as he had said. Inspector John Ricks was the man who had pointed the finger of suspicion in his direction and had definitely linked him up as being the sinister Doctor Death. Identification was the one contingency that Mandarin had not anticipated. He imagined that he had left nothing undone. Yet Inspector Ricks had uncovered him.

  For days the search for Doctor Death had gone on relentlessly. Spurred on by the press, the police of the nation had waged a war such as they had never fought before. Petty politics, graft—everything was forgotten in the frenzied search for the mysterious killer who called himself Death.

  The underworld had been combed. Men were being arrested by the hundreds, only to be turned loose again for lack of evidence. The newspapers had assigned their best men to the case. Everything else was forgotten in this, the biggest piece of news that had come their way in a lifetime. The presses couldn’t keep up with the demand for news.

  The President had taken a personal hand in the affair. Under his direction the cream of the Secret Service and the best men of the Department of Justice had been called in from important cases and put to work on this, the sensation of the century. Postoffice Inspectors were assigned to it to the sacrifice of everything else. Even the narcotic men and such prohibition agents as were left had been ordered to drop their work and give the regular police their assistance.

  COMMISSIONER CANFIELD, head of Scotland Yard’s Big Four, had come to America to assist his fellow detectives on this side of the Atlantic. The Paris Sûreté had sent Hercule Bloc, its star operative, on the lame assumption that a Frenchman might be at the bottom of the affair. Germany and Italy had loaned their best men. For, they argued, if the wheels of industry were closed in America, the whole world would suffer.

  Yet, in spite of all this array of brains, it was Inspector Ricks, the least scientific of them all, who had finally settled upon the man and set the pack aright. And his discovery was due more to accident than to deductive ability.

  Yet it was deduction, nevertheless, that had brought about the solution of the problem. The capture of Doctor Death had become an obsession with Inspector Ricks. Day and night it was never off his mind. The bringing into the case of the star operatives of the nation and the world irked him, angered him.

  “I’ll beat them all,” he growled to himself in the solitude of his own office. “I’ll beat them all. But how? That’s the question: how?”

  For the thousandth time he went over every detail of the case in search of what the Scotland Yarders call “the essential clue.” Suddenly it came to him.

  “Some scientific sharp is jealous of the rest of them,” he said, sitting suddenly erect. “The question is—who?”

  He jammed one of the many buttons on his desk. A sergeant responded.

  “Beat it to the public library and get me a copy of Who’s Who in the World of Science and Invention,” he commanded.

  The book spread out on the desk before him, he had carefully, painstakingly checked off the names Stark, Munson, Bosworthy, Spafford, Whipple, Hamilton, Drexell, Henworthy, Munz, Darrow, Peabody, Hallover—and several score of others—all were there. Looming at the head of the list—a leader in many lines—was the name of Doctor Rance Mandarin. Mandarin, he remembered with a start, had not been among those whose frenzied appeals for help had come his way.

  “Now why the hell hasn’t he received a letter?” Ricks asked himself.

  Picking up the telephone, he put in a call for Sneed, head of the Sneed string of newspapers.

  “Who the dickens is Doctor Rance Mandarin?” he demanded, once the newspaper magnate was on the wire, “and where is he? Where does he live and what does he do?”

  “Your first question is easily answered,” the newspaper man replied. “You’ve probably heard of him, but can’t place him. He’s the world’s greatest occultist. Years ago he occupied the chair of psychology at Yale. Left that to go on a lecture tour. Traveled in Egypt and India and studied occult science with the best of them. Afterwards—”

  “Hell’s bells! Who’s Who tells all that!” Ricks roared. “Where is he now? What’s he doing and where does he live?”

  For a moment there was silence at the other end of the wire.

  “I’ll have to find out,” the newspaper man finally cut in. “You don’t think, do you, Ricks, that he’s—”

  “It doesn’t pay to think in my business,” Ricks interrupted. “I’m just a dumb copper and coppers are not paid to think. Get me the dope and ring me back.”

  Half an hour later the information came across the wire that Doctor Rance Mandarin had sailed for Egypt several weeks before, accompanied by his secretary, one Miss Nina Fererra. State Department officials confirmed the information. A passport had been issued to each of them.

  But, said the Egyptian government when appealed to, no such persons had landed in Egypt. A search of the passenger lists of the larger boats sailing for Egypt had disclosed the two of them as booking passage on the Transatania. The ships’ officers remembered them; they had landed at Alexandria. Where, then, had they gone?

  Someone remembered a small boat that had been waiting at the dock. It had sailed within an hour after the Transatania had docked. A man and woman answering the description of Mandarin and his secretary had been seen going aboard. The Alexandrian police so reported to Inspector Ricks. And Ricks, wise old man hunter that he was, nodded his head and issued several hasty orders. Whereupon the detective bureau, which had already been stirred to a pitch of frenzy, was galvanized into renewed activity.

  That night Inspector Ricks, armed with a search warrant, headed a party of picked men which surrounded the residence of Doctor Rance Mandarin. Receiving no response to their repeated rings, they broke in. The place was deserted.

  In the bottom of an overturned wastebasket was a bit of paper. It was only a scrap, torn half across and thrown away—a part of a letter written weeks before and for some reason, never mailed.

  But the paper on which it was typed was similar to that upon which had been written the letters signed by Doctor Death.

  Experts in the department confirmed the evidence. The same typewriting machine that had written the Death letters had been used to type the words on the paper.

  Whereupon Inspector Ricks issued his famous order—an order which went thundering over the wires to every city and hamlet in the civilized world:

  “Get Doctor Rance Mandarin, alias Doctor Death!”

  “Get Doctor Rance Mandarin, Public Enemy, Number One!”

  “It is too bad that Miss Fererra’s name is linked with this,” Jimmy Holm said, gazing down at the picture on the printed page from which the beautiful eyes of Mandarin’s secretary smiled back at him.

  The old man nodded.

  “True,” he said. “But, when the time comes that the world is free, these papers will be priceless because they will show martyrdom at the start.”

  He read the description of himself aloud, chuckling at some of the phrases.

>   “IT had to come some time,” he said. “Yet I had hoped to stave it off. I presume that it is natural to fight the inevitable, just as we, knowing that death is only around the corner, cling to life as long as we can. Nevertheless, it was careless of me to leave that torn letter in the wastebasket. However, water that has gone over the dam cannot be recalled. It merely means that we must place more work on your shoulders since neither Miss Fererra nor I can show ourselves again until our noble purpose is achieved. But no; you, too, would be recognized. Now they believe you dead.”

  “Do you know anything of the science of metempsychosis?” he said, changing the subject abruptly.

  The young detective nodded.

  “It has to do with the transmigration of the soul, does it not?” he asked. “I seem to have read up on it at some time, but remember paying little attention to it.”

  “Probably thinking it the idle dream of a diseased mind,” the old man chuckled. “Then let me enlighten you, Jimmy. Metempsychosis as a lost art has been revived. Several years ago, while I was in Egypt, I had occasion to dabble in the subject a bit. It intrigued me. I searched the records. The ancient Egyptians were, as you are probably aware, experts in the Black Arts. Necromancy, sorcery, demonology, divination—all were as open books to them. But of all the arts, metempsychosis was developed to the highest degree.”

  He stopped suddenly. Leaning back in his chair he smoked in silence.

  “There is no such thing as death,” he said finally. “The Egyptians proved that. In the beginning the Creator made a certain number of souls—entities. There are just as many today as there was in the beginning—no more and no less. What we call death is merely a passing on. Metempsychosis is merely the borrowing of a body—a shell—just as we borrow an article of clothing. You and I can exchange bodies at will.”

  “Do you mean that?” Holm asked excitedly.

  Doctor Death chuckled.

  “You will have an opportunity of witnessing a demonstration—of taking a part in it—soon,” he said. “For I tell you, thought is everything.”