RGL e-Book Cover©
RGL e-Book Cover©
The Spider, August 1938, with "Bargain Counter Corpse"
Into Doc Turner's impoverished neighborhood came the man who dealt out invisible death—and no power could stop him until Doc double-crossed this devil's disciple by performing a little murder-magic himself!
THE thumb-cushion of the man's right hand was freshly slashed. The gash was an inch long, and so deep that the blue-white string of a tendon lay exposed. But strangely enough the glistening wound did not bleed at all... Coming forward from behind the sales-counter of his ancient pharmacy, Doc Turner noted this unusual fact, and a chill prickle scampered down his spine. It explained why the two pushcart peddlers, who had led the man in from Morris Street's hurly- burly, were greenish under the grimy stubble of their beards. Their eyes were wide-pupiled, staring.
The shorter of the pair was Aaron Pitsker, vendor of kosher delicatessen from a white-painted cart. "Aye, Doc Turner," he exclaimed. "He stopped by my wagon—and right away got cut. How it happened, I can't figure out."
"'How' does not matter." The voice was oddly low-pitched and resonant for the stranger's gaunt frame. The hollow tones, somehow, seemed ominous. "Metal has entered flesh, and flesh is not water that ignores the severing blade." Skeleton thin, he was head-and-shoulders above his guides. "Or forgives it."
A curious hush, as of sudden fear, stilled the polyglot jabber of the jostling, curious crowd that jammed the drugstore's doorway, peering in. Pitsker let go his hold on the black-sleeved arm. The second huckster, a swarthy Sicilian Doc knew only as Angelo, stepped backward stiff-kneed, crossing himself.
It was not alone the man's sepulchral tones, nor even the amazing circumstance of the unbleeding wound, that enveloped him with an atmosphere of uncanny menace. He was clad in black, even to the clerical collar that enclosed the scrawny throat above his high-necked, seamless vest. The skin of his countenance was tight-stretched over unpadded bone, yellow as old parchment and as devoid of hair. His eyes... Where his eyes should have been were two empty sockets, so deep and shadowed that they appeared burned into that grim visage by red-hot irons that had left them lined with coal!
Andrew Turner took the injured hand in his own gnarled fingers, bent to examine the cut. Sunlight, coming in over the heads of the crowd, made of the old druggist's hair a silvery cloud. Doc seemed very small and fragile, in the brooding silence.
"It's pretty bad," he murmured, his low voice calm and steady, "but the tendon has not been touched." The wide wings of his bony nose flared a bit, and a tiny muscle twitched in his wrinkled cheek. The hand in his was clammy and heatless, and the sides of the gaping gash were not scarlet as human flesh should be but a pallid grey. "I'll clean it with antiseptic and bring the edges together with adhesive tape. Then it will heal cleanly."
"Your antiseptics and your tape will not heal it," the blind man declared. "Not yours!"
"Such foolishness," Pitsker squealed, indignant. "When Doc Turner says it will heal, it will!"
The sightless head turned to him. Turner felt the hand he held quiver, as if some fierce vibration ran through its owner's lank form. Aaron, mere feet away, screamed and pitched forward. He struck the floor with a thud—and lay still!
A moan, from a score of blanched lips, came in through the doorway. His mouth abruptly parched, Turner stooped to the prostrate figure. It was flaccid, utterly motionless. The druggist's practiced fingertips found a corded wrist, pressed it. There was no pulse.
"Dead." He pronounced the one word flatly.
"His hand!" a voice shrilled. "Look!"
Doc twisted, still bent. The blind man had turned to the crowd. He was holding up his wounded hand, palm toward the ogling eyes—the hand that had been wounded. Now there was no cut across its thumb-cushion. The saffron skin was completely joined—not the faintest semblance of a scar remaining to show where the ugly gash, seconds ago, had sliced across it.
"There are other forces, old man," the blind one boomed, "than your science knows or can cope with. There are powers that for centuries have slept and now awaken."
"Madre mia!" Angelo groaned. "Maria Sanctissima!" His fingers clawed a sacred medal through the opening of his shirt, and he started mumbling a rapid prayer.
"Nor will your superstition avail against the powers for whom Abaddon speaks," the blind man threw at the Sicilian, his fleshless lips contorted in a dreadful grin. "The reign of Him you serve has ended." He was moving now toward the exit. He reached the threshold and lifted that miraculously healed hand, and the knotted crowd opened a lane for him—a passage walled with blood-drained countenances, with gaping mouths and eyes in which unmanning terror flared.
IF he who called himself Abaddon had thrust a knife between
Aaron Pitsker's ribs, no one there would have had enough courage
to halt him. But he had not. That the blind man had slain the
peddler no one doubted, but how he had killed, no one
knew. No jury would convict him of the murder, committed in full
sight of twenty witnesses and more—not on any evidence
they could give.
Pitsker had been over a yard away from him in the fatal instant. Abaddon had not moved or raised a hand. He had only turned his sightless gaze upon the man, and the man had died.
Doc Turner straightened, very slowly. His narrow shoulders were bowed, as if a heavy burden had been laid upon them. His wrinkle-netted face was almost as grey as the drooping, bushy mustache that hid his tight-pressed mouth. Deep in eyes whose keen blue even the long years had not faded glimmered a bleak resolve Abaddon might have done well to see and heed.
"Forces my science cannot cope with?" he whispered. "Now, I wonder."
He looked about him. On shelves once painted white were ranged the fluid extracts and tinctures of Doc's profession. In showcases, whose glass fronts were clouded with the slow chemistry of age, were piled the products of a science that has taken Man a great distance from barbarism and superstition. In the partitioned-off back-room behind him was a radio, and right-angled to the entrance door stood a telephone booth. From beyond the still silent, still nightmare-paralyzed crowd in the doorway came the rattle and pound of a passing "El" train, the roar and blare of many rushing trucks.
Yet, here at Doc Turner's feet lay a man slain by a look from eyeless sockets—and the old pharmacist had seen that grey flesh that had healed itself, at the instant of this corpse's death. A cold shudder ran through Doc's spare frame.
The knotted figures at the door moved, and a burly, blue-uniformed policeman thrust through.
"What's up, Doc?" the cop demanded. "Trouble here?"
"Trouble, Gerrity," the druggist replied, "but nothing for you to do except call an ambulance—and the medical examiner."
The officer closed and locked the door, stepped into the phone booth. His nickel pinged and Turner heard, "Official call, operator. Police Department. My badge number is one-six-four-three." The machinery of civilization, of science, was whirring again. Aaron Pitsker was suddenly dead, and the State would find out why.
"THE autopsy showed Aaron died from a coronary embolism, Jack.
A clot of blood stopped his heart as a clogged feed line stops a
gas motor." It was the following evening that Doc Turner said
this to a barrel-bodied, carrot-topped youth, as the two stood in
the doorway of the pharmacy on Morris Street.
They made an odd contrast—the stooped, ascetic old man and the husky, big-fisted, bulky-molded youngster. One who did not know them would have flatly denied that they had anything in common, yet there was between them a communion built of common perils, of dangers met together and together overcome.
Morris Street and its environs were a city slum, its denizens aliens who had not learned the ways of a strange country any better than they had learned its language, whose material poverty was no greater than their poverty of friends. Andrew Turner had been their druggist more years than he cared to recall. He had been far more than their druggist—guide, friend and protector.
There are human wolves who prey upon the very poor, men who batten upon the friendless, helpless, and ignorant among the city's forgotten people.
Andrew Turner had crossed these vultures in many a strange adventure—and his strong right hand had been young Jack Ransom.
"Then Pitsker's dropping dead was just a coincidence?" Ransom puzzled. "This guy Abaddon had nothing to do with it?"
Doc's thin fingers drummed against the sash of his display window. "I'm not so sure of that, my son. Everything that had happened—the blind man's cutting himself, his letting himself be led in here so that a crowd collected around the door, the theatrical way in which he spoke when he had his audience —seemed too obviously a build-up for the moment when Pitsker dropped dead and that damned cut healed itself. That climax was somehow much too pat to be coincidence or accident."
"Maybe," Ransom grunted. "But if you're right, what would be his reason for putting on a show like that?"
A deep wrinkle creased Doc's brow. "I don't know—yet. But look here, Jack—isn't there something queer about Morris Street tonight?"
The auburn-topped youth looked up and down the thoroughfare over whose debris-strewn cobbles sprawled the long, dark trestle of the "El." Along the curb were ranged the pushcarts of that slum market, each with an unshaded electric bulb spilling glare down upon its attendant and wares. The raucous hucksters were so many fierce-eyed, talon-fingered servitors at the altars of their trade—vivid with the piled green and scarlet of fruits and vegetables, fluttering with a rainbow spectrum of ribbons or garish ginghams.
"Looks like any other Saturday night," Jack said at last, his tone quizzical. "I don't get what you mean."
"Don't you notice that some of the carts are doing a whale of a business, while others—right next to them and with exactly the same merchandise—have no customers at all? Look at Erbin Stortz there. He hasn't sold one of his garlic strings or red peppers for half an hour, while Dominic Gallupi, three stands down, is handing them out just as fast as he can go."
"Good reason why," Ransom responded. "Look at their price cards. Stortz is three to five cents higher on everything."
"Precisely. When did you ever know any of these peddlers to vary even a cent in their prices?"
"Never. They all buy from the same wholesalers and take the same profit." A thoughtful note crept into Jack's tone. "But Erbin doesn't seem worried at all. He's just standing there and kind of grinning down at Dominic, like he didn't give a damn whether he does any business or not."
"Does that strike you as being quite usual? And Stortz is not the only one who's acting like that. There are a dozen others who..." Doc broke off. "Look, here he comes!"
The blind man was moving toward them, along the sidewalk. They could see him easily, for the throng parted in front of him. Anyone else would have had to force himself through a swirling stream of humanity, but that tall, black figure, with its vacant, terrible sockets, stalked straight and unimpeded on his way.
"Lord," Jack whispered. "He's enough of a grisly-looking sight. Gives you the creeps, don't he?"
Abaddon came opposite the stand of Dominic Gallupi. He paused, turning toward the Italian's cart.
"The devil!" Doc exclaimed, and jumped away beside Jack.
Gallupi's push-cart was enveloped, suddenly, by a burst of fire—by great, leaping flames of green and yellow, and scarlet as the furnace fires of hell! Dominic hurled himself away, screaming, from that heated blast, beating at little flutters of flames that flickered from the long smock he wore. His screams were lost in a great chorus of shouts and shrill cries.
Five feet away from the blazing pyre, Abaddon's tall, Stygian form was silhouetted against it. In that moment, he seemed a veritable fiend poised in the gate of some incandescent Hades. The white-haired druggist pelted up to Abaddon, snatched his hands, caught his right... Abaddon's left hand flailed swiftly, tapped Doc's chest. The blow seemed light, but it broke the pharmacist's hold and sent him reeling across the walk till the tiled open front of a soda store stopped him.
He clung to the syrup-smeared counter, a coughing fit racking him. The glare of fire out there had vanished as suddenly as it had come. A tossing, shrilling, swirl of bodies now cut off Doc's view of Gallupi's cart, or what was left of it...
"DOC!" Jack Ransom's shout crashed in the dazed old man's
ears. "Doc!" The youth shoved out of the surging crowd and took
hold of his shoulders. "You're hurt—I can see it!"
"No." Turner straightened. "I'm all right." His old face was twisted with pain. "Abaddon—where did he go?"
"I don't know, Doc. You jumped away from me so quick it took me a second to get started after you. By that time, the fire had broken out and the crowd held me up. When I got here, the guy was gone. I guess nobody saw where or how—I know I didn't. What did you see?"
"Nothing." The old man looked at his friend with haunted eyes. "Nothing at all." Oddly enough, he had shoved his left hand into the pocket of the alpaca jacket he wore. "I saw him stop, and I had a hunch. My hunch was right, but I was too late." A movement in the crowd made a gap through which he could see the blackened ruins of Dominic Gallupi's cart, the utterly unsalable embers that had been his stock in trade. "Maybe the next time I won't be so late. Come on back to the store."
He walked slowly. Once his hand went to his chest and pressed there, but could not stop the cough that racked him. His old face was lined with pain, yet there was something indomitable in it, too. The two reached the pharmacy, went into it. Doc caught at a counter, leaned there.
"Jack," he said, "call the medical examiner's office—ask for Doctor Roberts. Give him my name and request him to look at the stenographic records of the autopsy on Aaron Pitsker. Ask him if there's any mention of an incision, a pin prick perhaps on the fingers or the palm of—let's see, of Pitsker's left hand, or perhaps the wrist."
"What the—"
"Do as I say," Doc ordered.
Ransom shrugged and obeyed. When he came out of the booth, the sound of coughing told him Turner was in the prescription room at the rear of the store. The youth went back there, pushing through the dust-crusted curtain that closed an archway in the partition behind the sales counter. Doc was standing at the long, white-scrubbed compounding table. A small white paper, such as those into which powders are folded, lay on the counter, and the old druggist was staring at it. Jack saw only a grey lump on it, like a soft pill that had been pressed out of shape, and the tiniest possible fleck of something yellow.
"Well?" the old man asked, as Ransom returned.
"There was a scratch in the angle between Aaron's thumb and first finger, but Doctor Roberts said it could not possibly have had anything to do with his death."
"Doctor Roberts should know," Turner observed. Jack thought there was a little emphasis on the word 'should,' but he could not be certain. "Thank you, son."
"You're on the track of something, Doc," the latter exclaimed. "What is it?"
"Can't you guess?"
"I'll be damned if I can," Ransom admitted.
"Go outside and take a look around, and maybe it will dawn on you," Doc said.
"Gee, Doc—"
"I said go outside and take a look," Turner repeated. "Ask questions."
"What kind of questions? From whom?" Ransom was puzzled.
"You'll know when you get out there."
RANSOM shrugged and went out. When the old man was in this
mood nothing could be done with him. It did not occur to Ransom
that he was being trained to take his friend's place when that
friend should pass on.
He went out into the street. The larders of the slum are depleted by Saturday; no matter what happens, they must be replenished for Sunday. The crowd around Dominic Gallupi's burned pushcart had broken up, although a shifting knot still kept a watchful eye on a single hose-cart that wet down the smouldering remains. The other hucksters were busy again.
Not the same hucksters, however. Those who had been idle before were the busiest now. They had not changed their prices, but their competitors had raised theirs, above those who, before, had been so high... those of their competitors who remained. Here and there in the serried ranks were black and vacant gaps. A score of the peddlers had closed up business, at ten o'clock on a Saturday night. It was unheard of!
"Fifteen cents for a bunch of schav!" Jack heard a bent little woman exclaim, on her head the black wig with which the orthodox Jewess replaces her shorn locks on her wedding day. "Ah, schwarz yohr, you should have! Minka Semmel paid you ten cents only twenty minutes ago—not more!"
[shav = sorrel; schwarz yohr = black year.]
Nikolaus Papolos spread his hands wide. "Me, I can't help it! You want sour grass now—well, pay fifteen cents. Otherwise, nothing doing."
"No." His customer shrugged. "It is a hold-up—two bunches for a quarter."
Ransom stepped up to Papolos. "What's the idea, Nick?" he asked. "Don't you want to do any business here?"
The huckster stared at him, his skin dough-yellow under its olive film. "Sure, I want to do business. How will my kids live, if I don't?"
"Then what's the idea of jacking up your prices?" Ransom asked.
"I can't make any profit, if I don't."
"You seemed satisfied with the profit you were making on sour grass at ten cents, a half-hour ago." Ransom waited.
"But I didn't have to pay..." Papolos checked suddenly, as if suspicious. "What's your business, huh? Why're you asking so many fool questions? Go away and let me alone."
"You didn't have to figure in a rake-off to whom, Nick?" Ransom insisted. He moved closer to the huckster. It was clear, too clear, why Doc had told him to ask questions. The destruction of Gallupi's cart had been the second move in a reign of terror. "To someone called Abaddon, maybe?"
The Greek's eyes glared with sudden frenzy. He snatched a long keen knife from his cart and shrieked, "Go away! Go away, before I—"
Jack walked back to the drugstore. He didn't have to ask any more questions. He knew the story now. Some of the peddlers had fallen under the blind man's domination at once, after his dramatic appearance on Morris Street. Others had hesitated until tonight's demonstration, and were paying the price of that hesitation. It wasn't they who would pay the price in the end—it was the poverty-stricken people who had to buy from them. It was these who would pay tribute, a few cents at a time, to the man who had taken possession of the marketplace by force of fear.
"We've got to get Abaddon," Jack muttered, striding toward the rear of the drugstore. "We've got to smash him." He shoved through the curtain into the back-room. "Doc!"
Doc wasn't there! The prescription room was empty. There was no sign of a struggle. Everything was exactly as it had been when Ransom had gone out, just a few minutes before—all except two things. The white powder paper, with its mysterious little grey lump, was gone from the counter. And the side door, beside Doc Turner's old-fashioned, high-backed roll-top desk, was just a little ajar.
Jack pulled in his breath between clenched teeth. That door was always kept locked. Doc wouldn't have opened it or gone out through it. Not of his own will. "Get Abaddon, huh?" The carrot-top grunted. "Looks like Abaddon smelled Doc was getting wise to him and..."
A crashing blow landed on his skull from behind! He went thudding down into a black and dizzy oblivion...
HE was in Hell. Jack Ransom knew beyond any doubt that he was
in Hell. The stench of brimstone was in his nostrils, pungent,
stinging. The red glare of Satan's furnaces glowed through his
closed eyelids, and their torrid heat beat about his nude body.
He was prostrate, his shackled legs and arms spread as wide as
they would go.
Around him was the rustling sound of many garments, the thudding of many feet. Jack Ransom was afraid to open his eyes, afraid to see whose garments it was that rustled, whose feet that thudded.
It flared into terror in his pounding brain as a deep, resonant voice rolled hollow above him. "Silence, you disciples of Antichrist—silence! The Presence is here to look upon the sacrifice we offer and pass judgment whether it be acceptable to his sight."
The sacrifice! What could that mean but him? Ransom's eyes flew open.
Red blaze beat upon his eyes, scarlet, dazzling. He rolled to avoid the blinding light. Now he saw, row upon row between green-scummed granite pillars supporting a low ceiling, a horde of shadowy figures. They were too far away for the wavering, crimson glare to reach fully, but here and there a big-eyed, lax-mouthed face stuck out.
These were not the countenances of imps, but swarthy faces he knew well. There was Erbin Stortz's rough-moulded visage, eyes glinting redly beneath shaggy brows. There was Isaac Avrom's bearded countenance; the narrow, olive-tinted features of Nikolaus Papolos. They were the peddlers of Morris Street, the hucksters.
"Oh, great one," the deep, booming voice Ransom had heard before intoned. "We have laid before thine altar one who has defied thy will and the will of thy vicar upon earth. Oh, Lord of the Nether Regions—oh, avatar of evil to whom rightful empire over earth and the fruits thereof long hath been denied—we humbly offer this heretic to thee that thy flames may devour him."
Ransom twisted his head. He saw that he was spread-eagled on a sort of dais a little higher than the floor of the crypt-like chamber. On the other side of this, the scarlet flames leaped out of a grave-shaped pit, hissing and giving off the fumes of burning sulphur. Across this pit rose a tremendous black cross on whose lustrous surface glinted the scarlet reflections of the fire. The ebony shaft of the cross rose to the very ceiling of the crypt and through it, but its crosspiece was a bare three feet from its lower end!
It was an inverted cross, symbol of the Black Mass—of the worship of Satan, from time immemorial. And before it, seemingly as tall as the cross itself, thin and emaciated and black habilimented as the evil he served, genuflected the blind priest of Shaitan.
Abaddon intoned: "If it be thy will, oh, Lucifer, in this hour of thy triumph, to accept from thy faithful this sacrifice—vouchsafe to us a sign. Send high thy flames to receive him. Take him with thine own hands, oh, angel that mightily hath fallen and mightily hath risen again." He straightened, turned, tall and terrible in that scarlet light. His hands outstretched over the blazing, grave-like pit. "We await thy will." His great voice sobbed into a last hushed sigh.
The flames leaped higher out of that narrow abyss, leaped high above Jack Ransom, till they almost reached those yellow hands of the priest of evil. And then Jack felt movement beneath him.
The platform on which he lay was tipping, slowly, very slowly, so as to slant its top toward the pit.
It was cold sweat now that dewed Ransom's forehead and ran streaming from his naked limbs despite the heat. He was shackled, not to the platform itself, but to a plate laid upon it—a plate that, when the right angle was reached, would slide with him into those avid, darting flames! Was he beginning to slide already? He dared not struggle, dared not breathe, for fear that any slightest movement of his would hasten, by a second or two, the fearful death to which he was doomed.
That second or two was very precious to him now. He did not want to die—
"Shaitan refuses your sacrifice!"
From where did that high, clear voice come?
Abaddon jerked, glanced startled about him...
IT was darker! Good God, those leaping flames were dying down.
A curious white froth was quenching them—a creamy-white
foam that hissed, eddied and bubbled eerily on the surface of the
flames. It blanketed them, so that now it was very dim in the
crypt. The platform was no longer tipping.
It was also very dark in the crypt now—so dark that Ransom could no longer see the cross, or the throng of devil worshipers. But he could hear their whimpers, shouts, screams of fear. Wrought up to a pitch of exaltation, by whatever fantastic ritual had gone on over his unconscious form, they were terror-stricken now by the failure of Abaddon's set-back.
Abaddon's arms were raised on high, and he was booming forth, in a last frantic effort to hold his disciples in his power: "This is not Shaitan but some interloper who speaks. Shaitan bids you find him and rend him limb from limb."
"Thou liest, false priest!" That high, clear voice answered him, from behind.
Abaddon spun around, and there against the vertical limb of that blasphemous cross a spectral green glow wavered, formless and yet somehow terrible.
"Thou liest, and hast lied from the beginning," said the voice. "I am content to remain in my lower realm, to which aeons ago I was condemned by my own grievous fault. I am content to seek no disciples here upon God's earth. You who have been deceived by Abaddon, I bid you return to the worship of your fathers—to the worship of Him who reigns supreme over the earth and the firmament thereof!"
"False!" Abaddon screamed. "It is false and all lies." His arms waved above his head, frantically. "This is not Shaitan who speaks. If I were not Shaitan's true vicar—would I have had the power to smite one dead, though I touched him not; to have devoured with the fires of Hades the appurtenances of another? I shall smite all of you with that same death, if you do not come to my aid and cast this interloper from Shaitan's temple."
Jack caught his breath as the tenor of the crowd's cries changed. They started to surge forward toward the cross and that green glow before it that now was taking on the outlines of a small, stooped man—Doc Turner!
"With this hand, I shall blast the interloper amongst you," Abaddon shouted, victory within his grasp. He held his right hand high, and it was clenched as if to hurl a thunderbolt. "With this hand, to which Shaitan has given his power of death and damnation —"
But the hand was suddenly gone—vanished! Lifted above the black priest's head was only the stump of an arm!
"Vanished is the hand that betrayed the power I gave it," Doc Turner cried, in his high, clear voice. "And if you do not return to your beds and your faiths—"
His voice died. There was no longer any need for him to speak. The peddlers, howling and screaming in their terror, were rushing out of the crypt, the thunder of their panic-stricken feet like a stampeding herd.
But Abaddon had twisted around and was leaping for the little pharmacist. There was a knife in his hand—
The light that had flowed from Doc was gone. Pitch darkness smashed down into that chamber of horror. Jack, trembling, his throat dry, his eyes bulging with the effort to see through the blackness, heard the pound of feet, swish of garments... then the sudden clang of steel and a high-pitched, shrill scream that ended with a gasping sob.
Now came silence, except for the wheezing breath of someone who had fought hard and was almost at the limit of his strength. That breath came nearer, nearer. Was Abaddon, having killed Doc, stealing now upon Ransom to finish him off?
Then Doc's form was abruptly visible in that tar-barrel murk... Doc's form, alight with an eerie green glow.
"Phosphorescent paint," the old pharmacist chuckled. "It was very effective. But the best stunt was the Foamite with which I extinguished the fire. I wonder if the firemen have missed the extinguisher from that hose-cart yet!"
"VERY smart, Doc," Jack grunted, as the old man bent to him to
examine the shackles and unfasten them. "But what was the idea of
all the trickery?" He was still weak from the ordeal.
Doc laughed. "He had them absolutely persuaded that he was the devil himself, or very close to him, and they'd never have been disabused of that notion if I'd licked him in any less dramatic fashion. Now they've had a good scare. They'll go back to their homes and be much better religionists for their momentary straying."
"I get it," Ransom said. "But how—"
"There are a lot of 'hows' you want to know about." Doc nodded. "I've got the idea of these chains now—I'll get you free in a few minutes. In the first place, I slipped out through the side door of the store to get hold of Rudolph Katz. He's an atheist and wouldn't fall for Abaddon's spiels—but I told him to pretend to, and let me know what he found out. When I got back to the store, I waited for you to show up. You never did. I figured that you'd decided to track Abaddon down yourself. I didn't worry about you, till I found you here after Katz had told me about this meeting place."
"Abaddon must have been hanging around and heard me talking to Papolos—then slipped in behind me to knock me out and carry me away." Ransom frowned.
"I suppose so, Jack," Doc agreed. "He was a clever brute. The way he killed Pitsker showed that. While Aaron was leading him to my store, he pricked the poor fellow's hand with a hypo syringe, injected a bubble of air into his blood stream. That made a clot that traveled to his heart. It might have been his brain instead, but either one would take only a minute or two, and Abaddon stalled until death came. He threw a little sulphuric acid into a pile of potassium chlorate and manganese dioxide, that he'd previously strewed under Gallupi's cart, and the acid set off an explosion—"
"Wait," said Ransom. "How could he use a hypo on Aaron, without being detected?"
"Easily enough," Doc explained. "That right hand that was cut wasn't his real hand. It was made out of putty painted yellow—which was how the miraculous healing occurred. He simply smoothed it together. His real hand was up his sleeve, and he manipulated the syringe with that."
"I get it," Ransom said. "It was the putty hand that disappeared just now?"
"Precisely—I lassoed it with a wire and pulled it off." Doc chuckled. "You see, I pinched a little of the putty loose, when I grabbed him there on Morris Street, and that gave the whole show away to me. He wasn't blind, either. That was a mask he had over his face. It came in handy just now. If he'd been blind, I could never have got near enough to him in the dark to trip him and tumble him into that pit. He would have heard me. Being a sighted man, he didn't think of listening for my whereabouts but blundered about to his own defeat."
"Well, Doc," Jack decided, "maybe he wasn't Satan's servant —but you sure played the devil with him!"