RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
The Spider, January 1938, with "The Cat From Hell"
Out of the darkness of those poverty-stricken tenements came the killer-cat—ripping and screaming, as it slew the poor. But Doc Turner, that specialist in misery, knew a way to save his people, by trapping a King of the Beggars—who did not rule with a gilded scepter but by the fangs of a bloodthirsty, feline fiend!
LOW at first, then rising into a heart-stopping crescendo, the sound was somewhere between a scream and a groan. Even after it had ended, the slum night throbbed with its uncanny menace, the very shadows seeming to shrink closer within the black vestibules of Morris Street.
Andrew Turner stood rigid in the dim aura of a street-lamp, his slender, age-stooped form motionless, wrinkled face paling, eyes abruptly steely beneath the white eaves of their brows.
The yowls of back-fence cats were a familiar accompaniment to his nightly plodding through tenement-lined blocks all the more desolate now for their daylong bustle and turmoil. The feline cries were as much a part of his routine as the drowsy pharmacy where he had toiled more years that he cared to recall, as the bare and dreary room that was all he knew of home. He scarcely heard those other cats or noticed them.
It was this other feline howl that held him transfixed...
In the welling caterwaul that this moment had faded into palpitant silence, there had been a quality of venom strangely un-animal, a snarling triumph oddly half-human. Doc Turner felt a shudder within him like that his primeval ancestors must have felt, listening to the hunting-call of the saber-toothed tiger outside their caves.
Doc's slender fingers, bony and blue-veined beneath his dry, almost transparent skin, closed slowly, as he peered through the murk under the overhanging low trestle of the el. This was the first time the banshee-howl had come to Doc's ears, but, for a week, the blanched lips of Morris Street had whispered the tale of its hearing and of that which three times had been found in some sequestered alley soon after it was heard.
Across the street, the sidewalk was deserted, the store-windows fronting it, lightless and withdrawn. Slits of darker blackness between these windows were the entrances to the drab tiers of flats wherein the very poor, who dwelt here, lay sodden in slumber. In all the long thoroughfare there was no movement, no sound now except the far-off growl of the never-sleeping city.
Hidden by a grey mustache, ragged and bushy, Doc's thin lips set. A muscle twitched in his hollow cheek.
There was movement over there! Within the Stygian maw of a vestibule, the blackness was changing form, now seeming to project itself out onto the sidewalk. It fell out into the pallid luminance of the very lamp beneath which Turner had halted... and became a feebly scrabbling hand!
The pharmacist regained control of his limbs, darted across the gutter. He attained the doorway and stooped to the hand, to the sprawled figure from which the hand reached—a heaving form that lay across the vestibule's threshold.
Doc's nostrils pinched to shut out the stench of the filth and corruption that met them, but his fingers closed on moldering rags, on the nearly fleshless bone of a shoulder beneath the rags, and his voice betrayed no revulsion but only concern. "What is it? What's the trouble?"
The shape quivered. A tongueless moan came from it. The draggled mass of grey, dirt-crusted hair, that was its head, rolled so that the pale light fell across its features.
Those features were a mask of clawed flesh, the cheek laid open by three long slashes, the nose tattered, the sockets, where eyes ought to be, pits of welling scarlet! Cruel talons had scored the chin, and the scrawny throat beneath revealed three sharp incisions that could only be the marks of fangs that had stabbed deep into the artery.
Turner gasped, "How did it happen?" He had no doubt of the answer, had no real hope that there would be an answer, but the question was a reflex. "What did that to you?"
A bubble of blood formed between torn lips, burst. "King... sent it. King's... cat—"
The shoulder wrenched from Doc's grasp. The body was contorted by a brief spasm of infinite agony. Then it was still, with a significant, final stillness.
Andrew Turner had seen death too often, in too many forms, not to know that he looked at it now. He straightened, slowly. "King's... cat," he murmured. "What kind of cat could have done that? And who, in God's name is King?"
His bleak eyes stared down at the corpse. Scantily clothed in nondescript garments, now stained and matted with blood, it was a gaunt, emaciated woman. The other arm lay back along the body with an odd stiffness, as if dragged back by some weight attached to it.
Doc fumbled in the inner pocket of his worn jacket for the fountain-pen-sized flashlight he carried to light his tired steps through the halls of the house where he lived, and where the electric bulbs were frequently stolen by some petty thief. He thumbed the clip that was its switch.
A thin beam of light shot out, resting on the arm whose tautness had aroused his interest. The gnarled and dingy fingers clutched a burlap bag that gaped open, spilling its contents.
A half-eaten apple, a chunk of bone to which adhered some shreds of meat, greyish brown with long boiling, a formless, torn felt that once had been a hat, a gnawed heel of bread—this jetsam told the old pharmacist the woman was one of that lost legion who skulk the midnight streets, raking with avid claws the debris boxes and garbage cans for refuse that others have discarded, but which enable them to eke out a miserable existence. Few there are who know of these wretches—some habitually late wayfarers like Doc himself, policemen on the twelve-to-eight patrol, milkmen starting out on their early-morning rounds. These few turn their heads away when they see those shadows for sheer shame that humanity should fall so low.
They are the very lowest stratum of society, the poverty-stricken who dwell in teeming rabbit-warrens of the slums which are wealthy by comparison. Yet there is a certain pathetic courage about them. They sustain themselves by their own efforts, refusing, with a curious but admirable pride, to become charges of society. Scavengers they are, pariahs, but at least they scorn to cringe for alms.
The three previous victims of the marauding cat, two men and another woman, had been of this same miserable breed. Doc's brow wrinkled with puzzlement. A beast that attacked them, actuated only by its rabid ferocity and its blood lust, would have seemed understandable. These people prowled the basements and backyards in the wee hours. Unaccompanied and open to attack, they would be the brute's natural victims.
But the accusation he had just heard burble from a dying scavenger involved some human agency. If the beast slew at the command of a human master, what earthly motive could animate the latter? What possible profit could there be in the grisly assassination of these derelicts?
A dull thud penetrated the old man's thoughts, another. He glanced up, saw a policeman, two blocks away strolling leisurely toward him.
Before the officer could spy him, Doc whirled, was swallowed by the darkness investing the vestibule out of which the woman had crawled. He stole through the hallway, fetid with the stench of unwashed bodies, the stale aroma of alien condiments, the peculiar musty smell of the vermin infesting the rotted wood and crumbling walls of the ancient tenement. His shoulder brushed the newel post of a stairway that rose to a faint glimmer of light above. But he went past this, ducking under its slant.
He dared a flash of his slender torch. The darting beam showed him a low door frame under the stairs, the portal open to reveal stairs dipping down into a Stygian basement. It showed him a carpetless floor whose dirt-grey was smeared with the bloody trail that ended at the sidewalk just outside. That trail came up the stairs from the cellar.
Unhesitatingly, Doc Turner went down, alone and unarmed, into the menacing murk out of which that slashed and terribly torn woman had crawled.
The long, bright finger of his flashlight touched the broken, wet-black concrete of the cellar floor, lifted a bit to flick out of obscurity a chaotic jumble of refuse—paint-splattered boards, broken furniture, gaping trunks, in a disorderly, inextricable pile. Past this only a narrow path was open, along a wall of foundation stones once whitewashed and now inch thick with soot, but past this also came the smudged smear of the spoor which the old man was now following.
"She must have come from the backyard," Turner thought, as he reached the bottom of the stairs and without pause went on into that straight passage. "It was out there that—"
Something struck his hand, dashed the torch from it! Blackness smashed down on him. An arm folded across his throat, clamping off sound, leaving space only for wheezing breath. Cruel fingers dug into his left upper arm.
"This is as far as you go," came the mumble in his ear. "Look ahead."
Doc stared into ebony velvet, so thick and tangible that it thumbed dull pain into his eyes. Somewhere, he heard a soft scrape, hardly sound at all but ominous by its very vagueness. And then a pair of emeralds were shining there...
They hung in the tarry darkness, those two spots of lambent green, a little above Doc's head. He knew the pounce of the crouching beast would bring its tearing claws straight to his face, its stabbing fangs to his throat. The space between those eyes was the measure of the cat's head—and that space was wide as the span of his hand, indicating a bigger cat than any he had ever known.
A low whine began, a whine that would swell in a heart-stopping crescendo till, somewhere between a scream and a groan, it would become the banshee howl presaging his own death. The eyes drifted lower telling of the gathering of steel muscles beneath sleek fur...
"Wait, Zamiel," the voice behind Doc said. "Wait."
Zamiel? With queer inconsequence the old man's brain seized the strange name—Zamiel!
Somewhere in the esoterica he had read, when as a young man he had sipped omnivorously at many quaint fountains of supernatural lore, Andrew Turner had run across the word Zamiel. It was one of the names for Satan.
"Was she dead when you reached her?" The throat-grip was released, slightly. "Was she?"
"No," Doc contrived, "but just about."
"What did she tell you?"
There it was, the reason for this attack upon him. The man, at whose direction the cat Zamiel prowled and slew, had followed his victim to silence her—then been deterred by Doc's appearance on the scene. She knew something, then, and had been killed because of that knowledge. If she had passed it on to him, he, too would die. If she had not...
"She didn't say much that made sense," Doc replied. "Something about a cat."
An almost inaudible hiss of breath from his captor spoke of relief.
"Two or three words from a mouth full of blood," the druggist continued, "and then she went over the line. She won't talk to anyone ever again. She won't talk to the cop who's found her by now. There was one coming along..."
"Yes," breathed the man who held him. "That's why..." He checked himself but he might as well have filled out the sentence.
Already, Turner had sensed that, unless the need were absolute, the master dared not loose the cat upon him, with the law so near. Zamiel always accompanied his slayings with that fiend's howl. It would bring the police upon them, before his fangs and claws could accomplish their deadly task.
For a moment of unbearable suspense, there was neither movement nor sound in the weltering blackness, while silently the man meditated his decision. Or was it the man who pondered a decision? Doc recalled a strange note of pleading in that earlier "Wait, Zamiel," as if it were not the man but the beast who was master. And now the shining, brilliant spots of green were narrowing, as human eyes narrow in thought.
They were gone! A whine, a faint scutter... Doc was released, twisting about to face a flood of white light behind him.
"Up with 'em," bellowed a voice out of the light, "or I'll plug yuh!"
Turner's hands shot above his lustrous white thatch of hair. "Down here quick," he snapped. "You can catch him if—"
"Down there is it?" deep-chested tones came back at him. "So yuh pals can get a shot at me? Think again, guy. It's you that's comin' up here, slow, if yuh don't want lead buried in yuh. Get started."
"You fool," Doc groaned. "You utter fool!" There wasn't any use arguing with the cop. Even if he could convince him, the cat was beyond pursuit by now, and even his master had evaporated. "All right, I'll come up."
"Damned right yuh will."
THE druggist stumbled up the basement stairs, limned clearly
in the flashlight beam that dazzled him. At its top, the bulldog
muzzle of a Police Positive thrust into his midriff and a rough
hand pawed him for weapons.
"Thought yuh'd get away with it," the policeman sneered. "Didn't figure on us comin' around the corner in a prowl car an' hoppin' after yuh before yuh could make yuhr getaway. Where is it?"
"Where is what?"
"Whatever yuh ripped up the old gal out there with. D'ja ditch it down there?"
Doc laughed, without humor. "So you think that was done with some kind of weapon. Did you take a good look at the woman's wounds?"
"Not yet, but we're going to now, while yuh tell us how yuh done it. Come on."
There were bruising fingers on Doc's forearm once more, propelling him through the hallway, out the door.
"I got the guy, Corbin," his captor exclaimed. "Nabbed him in the cellar."
The patrolman outside looked up from the notebook in which he was writing.
"Good going, Jenkins… Hey, that's Doc Turner! He's the corner druggist. If he had anything to do with this, I'm a ring-tailed baboon."
"Hell! He was down there, wasn't he?" the cop cried. "He—"
"Turn him loose!" A third policeman came across the sidewalk from the green-painted roadster parked there.
"All right, Sergeant. I gotta, if yuh say so, but I still think—"
"What the hell's a bull from the sticks got to think with?" growled the sergeant. "Sorry the bozo's so dumb, Doc."
"He was quite right," the druggist smiled, rubbing his arm. "He doesn't know who I am and my being down there certainly was suspicious."
"What were you doing in that cellar, Doc? What were you on the track of?" The sergeant waited.
"I saw this woman stagger out of that vestibule. I was back-trailing her when our friend here interrupted me. That's all."
The sergeant stared at the old man, florid face hardening. "There's more to it than that," he muttered. "But you won't tell us what, an' there's no use tryin' to make you."
Doc shrugged, and kept silent. He had nothing against the police. They were all right in their place, but their place was not Morris Street. The people of Morris Street were inarticulate and few of them were voters. If he told what he knew, and what he guessed, a third-grade detective or two might be assigned to the case—if they could be spared. Their blundering would only interfere with him.
Doc needed no help in defending his people, the disinherited denizens of the slum.
"IT just doesn't make sense, Jack." Doc's acid-stained thumb
prodded the edge of the sales counter in his old drugstore. "I've
puzzled over it all night and day, and I still can't find a
glimmer of an explanation. You've checked on the insurance and
the inheritance angle and neither stands up. There's nothing to
tie together the four who died—nationality, sex or
age."
"There must be something, Doc." Jack Ransom gazed moodily at the white-haired pharmacist with whom he had been in so many adventures, "unless the guy and his cat are both cuckoo." Barrel-chested, freckled, carrot-headed, there could have been no greater disparity between two persons than there was between the young garage mechanic and his old friend. "We've been up against plenty of petty rackets, but this one... Well, you might as well try to get water out of a T-head bolt as a penny out of those mugs. Now, if he was even pickin' on the reliefers, or one of these beggars the mayor's blattin' about—"
"What's that about beggars, son?" Turner interrupted. "You said the mayor..."
"Sure—here it is in the paper." Jack stabbed a blunt grease-stained thumb at the Evening Globe a boy had flung on the counter a few minutes before.
The number of beggars on the streets of this city has increased tremendously of late. This condition is not only distasteful and annoying but it is a breeder of crime. The welfare agencies are fully capable of taking care of any cases of bonafide distress, and charitably disposed citizens may make donations to these agencies. The mayor requests that any resident approached by a panhandler refer him to one of these agencies, and, if he becomes annoying, call the nearest policeman.
"That's in all the papers and on all the theater programs," Jack said. "There must be an awful lot of them around."
Doc looked up. "Look here, Jack. Get dressed up and go take a walk on Garden Avenue. When a beggar accosts you, ask him who King is."
The youth stared. "What's the big idea?" he demanded.
"Do what I tell you. Listen..." And Doc laid out his plan.
JACK RANSOM had done a good job of scrubbing the marks of toil
from his hands and face. Dressed in a light grey suit, an almost
white fedora jauntily topping his brick-hued thatch, a gardenia
in his lapel and a cane crooked carelessly over his right elbow,
he looked as if he belonged among the towering cooperative
apartment houses of Garden Avenue.
"Wonder what Doc's driving at," he puzzled. "Maybe he's got an idea, but I can't make it out."
An unshaven, sunken-eyed, lank individual slouched out of the shadow of a close-trimmed hedge, at this moment. He shambled toward Jack, whose stride slowed invitingly.
"Kin yuh spare a cigarette, mister?"
"Sure thing," Ransom replied, fishing in his pocket for his pack. Good stunt, he thought approvingly.
The vagrant took the cigarette and packet of matches. "Yuh don't feel so hungry when you're puffin' on one of these. Yuh almost forget yuh ain't et for three days."
"Oh, I say!" said Jack. "You don't mean to tell me that you haven't..."
"Who me?" The chap's cracked lips twisted in a wry, shame-faced smile. "Say, I don't even know what grub looks like!" The clawed hand, with which he was lighting the cigarette, trembled so hard the match flame went out. "Say, mister, yuh wouldn't believe it but I just had a job offered me, an' couldn't take it."
"Don't want to work, eh?"
"Hell, I'd give my right eye fer a chanct to make an honest dollar," said the vagrant. "But I'm a waiter, an' yuh got to have a suit to get a job. Mine's hocked for a buck an' a half. Kin yuh tie that? Here I got to pass up a fifteen-buck-a-week chance, 'cause I ain't got a buck an' a half—an' me with me belly thinkin' me throat's cut."
"Well, now that's too bad," Jack murmured, his hand going out to the other's elbow and closing on it, as if in sympathy. "Maybe something could be done—"
"As what?" The beggar gave an excellent representation of one who sees a faint glimmer of light.
"As for instance—" Jack's hold clamped tight— "asking King to get your suit…"
"What the—!" Stark, agonizing terror flared in the panhandler's eyes. "What do yuh know about the king?"
"I'm asking the questions." Ransom's fingers bit bone. "Come on; spill it! Who is he? Where does he hang out?"
The skin under the fellow's dirt-laden bristles was livid. "Cripes, mister! I don't know what yuh talking about. Yuh nuts or somethin'?"
"No." Jack lipped a frosty smile. "I'm not crazy. I'm looking for a big cat, and I've got a hunch this King... Oof!" His breath popped from him in a sudden gush as the beggar's fist hammered into his stomach. Before he could recover himself, the seeming vagrant was diving into a convenient areaway.
Jack made no motion to follow. He rubbed his middle tenderly, and a smile hovered about his lips. "Looks like Doc's right again!" he murmured.
THE vagrant who had accosted Jack Ransom waited an instant in
the alley between two of Garden Avenue's looming structures,
watching the high, narrow slit of light that was its entrance to
make sure Jack did not come into it. At last, sighing with
relief, he became a silent, furtive shadow making for the
passage's other end that debouched on a thoroughfare running
parallel to Morris and only two blocks from it. So close in a
great city, do poverty and affluence lie.
If he had glanced back, he might have become aware that he was not the only wraith-like shadow in that alley.
For all Doc Turner's seeming feebleness, his slender frame was wiry and untiring. He kept the panhandler easily in sight, taking advantage of every pool of darkness, every covert.
Thus far the experiment, suggested by that boxed item in the Globe, was wholly successful. He had preceded Jack along Garden Avenue, and marking the beggar lying in wait for a likely prospect, had slipped into the alley while the two talked. With the police instructed to arrest mendicants on sight, none would operate far from a getaway. It had been simple to pick this as the fellow's line of retreat, when Ransom, obeying instructions, allowed him to escape.
The furtive chase led across Morris, into the noisome, brawling slum street called Hogbund Lane. The lank panhandler kept on going. He crossed Pleasant Avenue. There was only one block between here and the river now—a block occupied only by a great, dark, warehouse, brooding in idleness, its windows shattered, its door unlocked and broken. Into this door that beggar darted.
Doc, pressed close against a fence of leaning boards, heard a murmur of voices, hardly distinguishable. This was succeeded at once by silence, but it warned him that the entrance to the warehouse was guarded. His quarry had evaded him at the final moment.
But not for nothing had Doc come to this district when it was a neighborhood of orchards and elm-bordered country roads, nor for nothing watched its growth and decadence. There was not an inch of it he did not know.
HE squeezed his slender frame between two boards, scrambled
down an embankment, found himself in a vacant lot. Through this,
he picked a path toward the dark loom of the warehouse. Presently
he had reached its wall and was clambering up the cliff of
roughly hewn foundation stones.
Doc's hand reached over his head, finally, and closed on the sill for which he was aiming. He drew himself up to it, listened intently.
He was in an arched opening out of which, in the days of prohibition, a great pipe had carried the products of illicit distillation to a bottling-plant a block away. The Federal agents, raiding these premises, had destroyed the pipe, leaving an entrance for him now into the interior of the warehouse.
There were sounds within the decrepit building, footfalls, a rumble of talk—none of it was near.
A grim smile of satisfaction edged his lips. He squirmed around, ventured a tentative foot over the inner edge of the opening, hung from his hands, dropped.
A pile of fabric, rough-surfaced but soft, received him. These burlap bags muffled his fall. Even accident was working out to his advantage, because they must have been left here years ago. He started to push himself erect.
He must have gotten tangled in one of the bags, for something tightened over his back to hold him down. Doc reached to loosen it, touched taut rope.
That was queer. What was stranger was that the rope seemed to be fastened at both ends. Maybe, by dropping flat to the pile of burlap, he could crawl out from under it. He tried it. Curiously, there was some more of the rope around his left ankle. It cut, as his leg jerked, the effort only strengthening its hold as though it had been purposely noosed. His right wrist was caught, too!
There could, no longer, be any doubt of it. His antagonist had anticipated an invasion of his lair, at this point, and provided against it.
The ordinary trespasser would have become panicky, fought the ropes in a frenzied and futile effort to free himself— and, by such a commotion, betrayed himself. Doc merely lay still while he fumbled a hand into his pocket.
His fingers touched the bony handle of the jackknife with which he hoped to cut himself loose, and closed upon it... Then a footfall thudded alongside of Doc, and he was aware of a thickening of the blackness above him.
The voice he had heard once before, in that tenement basement, said, "Zamiel awaits you. We must not keep him." There was a slow, ominous chuckle.
THE barely perceptible apparition dropped down toward Doc
Turner. He felt a knee press into the small of his back, pinning
him down— then the prick of keen metal against the back of
his neck. "If you yell, or make a sound, I will slit your nerve
trunk. That will not kill you, but you will never move again.
Understand?"
"I understand," Doc breathed. "I lose."
"You never had a chance to win. Zamiel knew you were coming, and prepared for you." Again, the chuckle.
Unseen fingers drew his hand from the pocket where it had been buried, took the jackknife from it. He heard it skitter across the floor and thump against some invisible wall. The ropes slid raspingly upon one another. They drew his wrists together behind his back, lashed them tightly. Another rope tied his ankles.
"Get up," the voice commanded.
Doc rolled, managed to attain a sitting posture. "You'll have to help me," he said calmly.
Fingers on his arm lifted. The rope about his ankles gave his legs perhaps four inches of play, no more. He was hobbled so that he could walk. But running, a dash for escape, would be out of the question.
"Straight ahead," the voice told him.
Andrew Turner shuffled into the dark, conscious always of that evil presence behind him, the keen metal that had pricked his spine, threatening a paralysis worse than death.
Doc's shuffling, arduous progress seemed endless, through the thick, damp mustiness of the warehouse's lightless interior. There lingered the sick-sweet memory of whisky mash. A touch on Doc's arm veered him to the right. His toes stubbed against a wall, and he halted.
He felt the man reach past him, heard a scrape of stone on stone, was conscious of space before him, and a cold current of air that had not been perceptible before.
"Go on," his cicerone ordered.
Turner got moving again, and there was no wall to stop him. There had been a moving panel, actuated by some hidden spring. That was not surprising. The bootleggers, who had operated here, must have installed many such devices. Stone scraped behind him, the aperture closing.
A vertical yellow line cut the darkness just in front of Doc. He halted, waiting. The slit widened rapidly, as the harsh scraping continued. It became an opening in a green-slimed stone wall through which he stared, blinking, into a lighted chamber. Windowless, stone-floored, its dripping, soot-blackened ceiling was supported by pillars of roughly-hewn granite.
Directly ahead of him, at the other end of a vista made by the pillars, was a rude dais of splintered, grey lumber. A high-backed chair stood on this, against the wall, and, on the leather of its back, above where the head of the tallest occupant might reach, was painted the head of a cat. It was square-jowled, tawny, and somehow the artist had contrived to invest it with an air of malignant, blood-chilling ferocity.
Before the chair was a rude table, and on this table was piled a great heap of coins. Pennies they were for the most part, and nickels, though Doc could make out a few quarters, half-dollars and a handful of bills.
"Go on," the voice behind him said, and Turner shuffled into a motion again, going down that long aisle. A foul miasma of putrescence enveloped him and on either side there were rustles, hissed whisperings. He stared wonderingly.
THERE was shadowy space beyond the pillars on either side, and this was occupied by rows of broken humanity. There were men with black patches hiding one eye, and others with white and horrible balls where eyes should be. There were women with faces masked by a red, scabrous crust. There were others missing a leg or an arm, and one great-headed, bald specimen without either legs or arms, a pallid slug lying in a wheeled basket whose handle lay on the lap of another whose lower jaw was gone.
Sickened, Doc forced his eyes back to the dais ahead of him. He had passed the last pair of pillars that had obscured the sides of the platform from him, and now he could see all of it.
He saw a cage set on it to the left of the high chair. It was formed of wide meshed, gilded metal netting and its door could be released by a cord running up to the arm of the chair.
Within that cage, upon a chair that was a miniature replica of the other, sat a huge cat, its fur tawny and shot through with flecks of glowing red, its head square-jowled and long-whiskered, and a full eight inches from tufted ear to ear. If the painted cat's-head on the chair-back were malignant, the living one was demoniac, invested with a chill, insatiable hatred wholly and utterly evil.
Hands from behind lifted Doc to the dais, and the owner of the hands said, "Stand there."
The man whom he had not yet seen came around in front of Doc, and seated himself on the chair. His squat, wide-shouldered, big-thewed frame was clothed in skin-fitting black beneath which a play of muscles rippled. His face was veiled by a black mask and capped by a round, flat-topped hat of the same funeral fabric. A slim, gleaming stiletto was thrust into the narrow black belt at his waist.
On his breast, embroidered in shining silk, so artfully contrived that it seemed alive, was the head of a malignant cat, the eyes two emeralds that caught the illumination and became orbs of living green fire.
"My people," the man began speaking, "servants, as I am, of Zamiel, you were gathered here tonight to bring your tribute to him who is our master, and to myself your king, and to receive further instruction in the manner of obtaining the money from which that tribute might be defrayed. Much to my sorrow, however, I have been aware of murmurings among you, of whispered rebellion. 'We have made beggars of you,' was the burden of your plaint, 'by fear of Zamiel's wrath. If it were not for Zamiel, you would defy us. Perhaps, by resort to the police, you would be freed from that fear. Zamiel is but a cat—he can be killed.' "
There was a murmur behind Doc. Fear was in it, but also a hint of defiance.
"You see before you one who is known to most of you—one who is more feared by those who live courageously outside the law than the police, themselves. He set forth to fight Zamiel. He found the way to this hidden kingdom of ours. But you see him now, trussed and helpless, awaiting Zamiel's judgment. What that judgment is, you will soon see. But first, because there are so many among you who, by your thoughts of rebellion against him, merit the wrath of Zamiel, I shall shield you from that wrath ― for this once!"
The hand of the man who called himself 'king'—king of the beggars—reached behind him. He must have pressed some button there. Abruptly, there was a resounding, metallic clang in the chamber. When Doc instinctively turned, he saw that a series of iron bars had dropped between the dais and the grisly audience squatted among the pillars, so that the king and Zamiel and he, himself, were cut off from them in a long, comparatively narrow space.
"Zamiel," the man in black intoned, "stalker of the night, emperor of the outcasts, Prince of Mendicants, what is your will?"
THE great cat rose from its haunches. It stretched its great
body, curved and appalling claws curling out of the furred pads
of its paws. Its mouth opened. Low at first, then rising in a
heart-stopping crescendo, the banshee howl of the killer-beast
filled that fear-ridden chamber... then died away.
The King of the Beggars intoned, "The Death of Zamiel to the interloper, and eternal damnation to his soul." His fingers reached for the cord that would release the murderous feline.
"Wait!" Doc's voice rang out with such force that it stayed the King's hand. "Wait," Doc repeated. "I accuse you of misinterpreting Zamiel's verdict. It is you with whom he is wroth, not me. It is your death he has proclaimed."
The man in the chair was caught in the trap of his own flowery mummery. He must reply in the same tenor. "I dispute that. I have served him well; you have defied him. Yours is the soul he demands."
There was a strange dignity about Andrew Turner, bound and hobbled as he was. "A test," he cried. "I demand a test!"
Puzzlement sounded in the other's tone. "A test? What test do you propose?"
"Simply this. Let me stand on the other side of Zamiel's cage, when you release him. Let him choose, then, between us."
It was a desperate play, foredoomed to failure. Doc was stalling, hoping to gain another few minutes by his demand, hoping against hope that Jack had somehow managed to trace him here, that possibly the police were, at this moment, surrounding the warehouse, and would break in and rescue him.
The King chuckled. "So be it." He nodded. "You may move to the other side of the cage."
Doc hobbled as slowly as he dared past the network behind which the cat, Zamiel, arched its back, snarling. He got as far as the sidewall against which the platform ended. Then he turned.
The king jerked the cord in his fingers. The cage door clanged open. Zamiel bounded out, his swollen tail erect over his arched back, his fangs white and thirstily gleaming. He leaped... straight for his black-clad master!
The king screamed, struck at the beast with his stiletto. But the tawny cat was clamped to his breast, steel claws tearing, white fangs ripping...
Scream after terrible scream ran through the aghast chamber. The man in black collapsed. The cat was no longer tawny, but crimson with blood. So engrossed was the beast in its grisly occupation that it did not observe Doc's approach, or the gnarled old hand that snatched up a stiletto dropped from numbed, nerveless fingers... and plunged it into a furry, gore-smeared body, piercing a ferocious feline heart!
"OF course," said Jack Ransom, "I see how you got your hunch
that you could trace the killer-cat and its master by following
one of the beggars who were suddenly flooding the city. That
newspaper item gave you the tip-off to why those scavengers, who
had less than nothing, were being hunted down. It was the only
way anyone could make money out of them—by terrifying them
into becoming beggars and then taking as much of what they
collected as could be scared out of them... But I'll be damned if
I can understand how you arranged that Zamiel attacked his
master."
Doc Turner smiled faintly. "He didn't attack his master, Jack. He had no intention of doing that, until the fellow struck at him with the stiletto. That enraged him."
"But why? He'd been trained to attack anyone he was commanded to. He'd never failed his master before." Jack was puzzled.
"Something stronger than training that intervened, son," explained Doc. "It was a smell. The smell of the valerian paste I had in my pocket in a collapsible tube. I squeezed some of it out on the man who called himself 'King of Beggars,' while he was tying me up. I knew I had a cat to deal with, and that no cat ever born could resist that smell. Of course, when I fixed up that paste, I didn't anticipate just what use I would make of it, or whether I could find any use for it. That was sheer accident, but I was prepared."
"Accident, hell!" muttered Jack. "You're the accident, Doc, that's sure to happen to any crook—who tries to pull off something around Morris Street!"