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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Terror Tales, January 1935, with "They Dare Not Die!"
What fiendish, evil lust drove on those drooling ancients? Why had the two lovers been lured to the house of horror on the hill? What vital, hidden treasure lay in their youthful bodies that would bring those wrinkled hags and toothless men fighting and clawing over them in blind, slobbering greed?
GRIMLY, Lynn Hart pushed his roadster up the fast narrowing mountain road. The wilderness of tall hemlocks, black with approaching night, seemed to close in on him and the girl at his side with stealthy approach.
The girl shuddered. She pressed closer to his lean, athletic form. The waning light etched sharply the black masses of her hair, the lovely clean profile, the troubled depths of her eyes.
"We'd better go back, Lynn," she said. "This road isn't getting anywhere. We took the wrong turn into the valley." There was a little catch in Jane Porter's voice. "I know I'm foolish, but I'm scared. It feels as if—well—if I were a child, I'd say ogres lived in these woods."
Hart patted her small fingers gently. The engine labored on the stiffening grade; the path grew more narrow, and the trees marched closer.
"I won't let the ogres get you, honey," he said with forced cheerfulness. He and Jane were soon to be married, and this was the third day of a tour in the back stretches of the Adirondacks. "But there's no room to turn the car around. We'll soon hit a house; there's always at least one to a road."
He wished he could be sure of that. There hadn't been a sign of house or human being for twenty miles. They went on in silence, the ominous hush of the mountain broken only by the panting wheeze of their motor. Little lines of strain began to show around Hart's month.
Then, from behind them, over the road they had just traveled, came a new sound. The deep-throated roar of an engine with the throttle wide, the slithering scream of tires whirling madly over gravel and rutted dirt. A high-powered car was coming along at insane speed over the tortuous, bumpy trail.
Damn fools! Lynn thought to himself. But the strained lines relaxed. He'd be able to get his bearings now, learn a way out of here.
He crowded the roadster against the overhang, pulled the emergency. Then he stood up in the seat, white slacks and open shirt a shining target against the dark green of the hemlocks.
The approaching car was still invisible. But the glare of its headlights preceded it, swept with breath-taking velocity over the sinister shadows, beat blindingly about his white-clad form, and raced up the mountainside. The long sleek nose of an Isotta-Fraschini swarmed around the lower bend and sprang like a great cat directly at them.
Lynn Hart waved his hand and shouted. Then he ground out an oath and jerked instinctively toward the girl on his right. Jane screamed.
The great car did not slacken its mad pace. The occupants of its open tonneau did not seem to have heard his hail, not even to have noticed the parked roadster. The chauffeur was a gigantic Negro. His ebony hands wrestled the wheel, the whites of his eyes rolled gruesomely. He ground the accelerator to the floorboard.
The Isotta shot forward to a mad eighty. It rocked and heaved in the ruts. It pounced on the mountain like a tiger clawing its prey.
Lynn shrank from the expected crash. His arm tugged protectively at the girl. There was the scream of rubber, the pounding of cylinders, the shriek of tortured, rending steel—and the Isotta flashed by, taking with it the rear fender of the roadster.
The back seat of the great car held a solitary man. He hunched forward, mouthing one word to the giant chauffeur.
"Faster!"
The yelling wind whipped it from his lips even as it tore the straggling white hair back from his brown, parchment-crinkled skull. He was frail and old, and his expensive clothes hung loosely on his flabby frame. But all the feeble remnants of his life were concentrated in his forward-urging eyes. They glittered with fiery pinpoints of flame, they clutched at some incredible Paradise directly ahead.
"Faster!" he mouthed, unseeing of the road, unhearing of aught but that luring vision. Then they were gone.
LYNN took a deep breath. Jane's face was waxen pale. Death had brushed heavily against them and fled by with whirring wings. Already the juggernaut of destruction was far up the winding path, its passage a rushing diminuendo.
Anger seized Lynn. He jumped out of the car, lifted the quivering girl after him. He shook his fist futilely up the long mountain.
"Damn the blasted fool!" he muttered feelingly.
Jane shuddered close to him. Her breath came in a long broken gasp. Her eyes widened on something they saw in the fast-darkening road.
Lynn stopped his tirade. His gaze followed hers. Just a moment ago there had been no one on the path. Now there were a man and a woman, standing in the middle of the trail, faces half turned from the damaged roadster, eyes fixed intently on the upward slope of the mountain. They did not seem to be aware of the young couple's existence. All their energies were strained to the flying echoes of the Isotta.
Jane whispered: "I—I want to get out of here. They're not human; they're..." Her voice trailed off and died.
"Still thinking of ogres and witches," Lynn whispered back. But he was startled, more than he cared to admit. He felt the slow prickling of his flesh; icy fingers wrested the mantling warmth from the twilight and left him naked to frigid, primeval fears.
Where had they come from, this strange odd pair? The mountain on either side was impenetrable with brambles and closer woven thickets. What were they doing here, in the depths of the wilderness?
The dim reflection of a dying sun made pallid blobs of their faces. Ancient, impossible faces! The musty odor of grave-clothes and moldering churchyards enveloped them in a miasma of rising mist. Male and female from their dress, but sexless alike in their ravaged decay. Leathery brown skins clung to wasted hones, pouched in hideous folds on pendulous chins and scrawny necks.
Mummies! Mummified man and woman standing there in the inscrutable wilderness, wearing modern clothes—Bond Street and Rue de la Paix unmistakably—clutching at a life that should already have passed them by.
So thought Lynn and shivered. For he had seen their eyes. Even as the eyes of the lone passenger in the Isotta, they blasted and seared. But with a strange difference. The ancients in the car were avid with the lure of some unutterable quest; these were crawling with the red worms of hate. With screeching fear lest something within their grasp be swept away, with straining eagerness to catch some change in the rumbling progress of the Isotta.
Lynn tried to shake off his strange reluctance to accost them. Ogre and witch! Ridiculous nonsense! Just a very old man and a very old woman, who could tell them the way. They must live near by, might possibly put them up for the night.
Jane plucked at his sleeve. Her voice was small and imploring.
"Please don't ask them—anything!"
Lynn grinned tightly. He disregarded her.
"Hello there!" he called. His voice boomed hollowly in his ears.
They whirled on him with incredible swiftness, like cats disturbed from a mouse hole. A snarl of rage strangled and died in the old man's withered throat. The ancient beldame's sere, berouged cheeks fell flabbily in, pulled back the corners of even redder lips to disclose the too-perfect whiteness of artificial teeth. Baffled fury and hate changed in the twinkling of an eye to leering, ogling smiles.
Lynn did not know which was the more horrible. Jane hung trembling to his arm. His senses crawled as at the sight of elongated, corpse-white slugs, slimed over with corruption. But he forced his voice to a semblance of casualness.
"We're lost," he said with a disarming grin. "We evidently took the wrong turn at the valley fork. Could you direct us to some shelter for the night?"
The old man and the old woman made no answer. They stood there and stared with strange red-rimmed eyes. The man at Lynn, the woman at Jane. Hot slithering eyes that pawed and defiled every part of their youthful bodies, that edged and wormed their way into every secret nook and cranny of their physical being.
A strange prickling sensation crawled over the girl. She shuddered under the impact of those eyes. She was being smothered in a bath of slimy putrescence.
Lynn shook off his mounting fear. He was strong and vigorous, and the ineffable pair were impotent for physical evil.
"A civil question demands a civil answer," he said angrily. "What's the matter with you? Didn't you hear me?"
THE ancients slowly withdrew their hot avid gaze, turned to each other. A long look of evil understanding passed between them. Simultaneously a hideous cackle burst from their scrawny throats. It bubbled and gurgled and choked them into a fit of retching. It sounded terrifying in the darkling shadows.
"Our hearing's still pretty good," mouthed the old man, still chuckling and retching. "Isn't it, Georgia?"
But the bedizened beldame paid no attention. She tottered closer to the shrinking girl. Her corpse-like head jutted startlingly from a gown of Poiret's creation—a low-cut swank that exposed a shrunken, bony chest. Withered, bony fingers reached out, pawed suddenly over the fresh firm flesh of Jane's cheek, swept downward in a furious strange greed over the lithe tingling body.
Jane gave a little cry of loathing. Her limbs refused to obey the shrieking protest of her brain. The old woman's eyes were balefully hypnotic. They turned her will to flowing water.
The old man, with an agility surprising for his years, literally sprang at Lynn, grasped his arms with feverish hold, and dug clawed hands into the flat muscular flesh.
Lynn jerked away in disgust.
"Now listen, you two." he said harshly. "What do you think we are? Keep your hands to yourselves, or else—"
The old man's face wore a hurt look.
"We mean no harm," he said. "We just love to see such an admirably youthful couple as yourselves. It in a way rejuvenates us, doesn't it, Georgia?"
The old woman smiled toothfully. Her little pointed tongue licked surreptitiously at her lips. Her sallow cheeks quivered with strange emotion.
"Rejuvenates is the word, Thomas," she quavered. "Very good!" And they both thrust back their heads and chuckled until they wheezed in gasping eructations.
"Now don't fret," Thomas spluttered finally. "There's a hotel farther on, at the end of the road. It's a very nice place; as a matter of fact we stay there. You just ask for Dr. Meldon Hunt and he'll be glad to put you up for the night."
A sudden memory struggled in Lynn's mind. He forgot his reluctant fears.
"Meldon Hunt!" he echoed. "Is that the surgeon who disappeared recently?"
The old man bobbed his head. "He did not disappear. He started a private retreat—a rest cure, so to speak. It has turned out to be a very lucrative undertaking."
"Very!" The woman's quaver was bitter, harsh. She thrust forward with sudden energy. "And you be sure and tell Hunt that you're our guests. That Georgia Palfrey claims the sweet young lady and Thomas A. Babbage the pretty young man. No one else is to have you; you are ours, ours!"
Her cracked voice rose to a tremulous shriek. The old man whimpered like a dog slavering over a treasured bone. He stepped closer.
"Remember!" he whispered fiercely. "No one else. You are our guests."
The ancient pair quivered alike with queer eagerness, their hands and jaws moving in trembling unison.
Jane shrank from their baleful, enfolding glare. The blanketing night disembodied them, showed only their wrinkled faces and glowing eyes.
"I don't want to go," she whispered to Lynn, pressing tight for comfort. "They're horrible; they're like evil old beasts. We must get away from them."
Lynn patted her hand absently.
Thomas A. Babbage! Georgia Palfrey! Names to conjure with.
Babbage was a millionaire, a retired automobile manufacturer of incredible age. Georgia Palfrey had been the arbitrix of the social destinies of a past generation. No wonder their diction and speech were impeccable; no wonder their clothes were what they were. But what were these two gargoyles, these ruins, doing in the remote depths of the Adirondacks?
Hunt's Sanitarium was evidently very secretive. The strange disappearance of the famous surgeon had bulked large in the newspapers. Lynn smiled tightly. There was money to be made from the private diseases of the very wealthy.
Then another memory struggled uneasily in his consciousness. There had been something else about Hunt. A strange tale that somehow eluded his grasp.
He gave it up. "In that case," he commenced, disregarding Jane's frantic pressure on his arm, "we'll be glad to avail ourselves—"
He was interrupted by a hideous splintering crash. Immediately on its heels came a piercing scream that choked off abruptly. A thin flicker of fire lifted its sinister finger through the upland forests; it swelled into a blasting sheet of flame and retracted to a red blaze that thrust the yelling darkness back on every side. The report of the explosion came howling through the night.
"Good God!" Lynn cried. "That's the car that just passed us. They've crashed and caught fire!"
All his former anger evaporated. Human beings were in that car.
He thrust the trembling girl into the roadster. He hopped into the driver's seat. He switched the ignition, ground with savage haste on the starter. The engine roared.
THEN for the first time he noted the weird antics of the ancient couple—the retired millionaire and the society leader.
They clawed on the running-board, they shoved incredibly withered faces into the tonneau. Gloating devils danced in their eyes, a mad flame seemed to flow from their shriveled bodies. Babbage drummed an insane tattoo on the running-board with spindly shanks.
"It worked!" he shrilled.
Georgia Palfrey glowered at him. "One less for you, Thomas."
Lynn shouted impatiently: "Now what the devil—"
"Get on with you!" Babbage screamed. "Take us up there, as fast as you can. Hurry!"
"All right," Lynn growled. "Hold on tight."
He shifted into gear, and the roadster leaped up the winding path with headlights lunging before it. Not until later was the conduct of the ancient couple to occur as odd to Lynn. Just now his senses were fiercely intent on the road, his scalp tight at the thought of the wreck. But Jane had noted—and felt the coils winding more and more tightly around them.
The car bounced and jarred in its mad flight, but Babbage and Georgia held on with the tenacity of age gripping life. Lynn swung the wheel hard. The roadster breasted a blind sharp curve that dipped suddenly around a ledge. Tongues of fire flickered off into space. Lynn jammed on his brakes, squealed to a halt not five feet from the holocaust.
He flung the side door open and his feet pounded on the dirt. But the ancient pair were ahead of him. They skipped and danced to the scene like suddenly rejuvenated old goats. Their shriveled forms made bloody blobs against the leaping flames. They seemed like demons—male and female—mocking the tortures of the damned.
Lynn felt the hackles of his skin rise and turn icy cold.
"Don't look!" he cried sharply to the girl in the car.
There was nothing he or any mortal man could do. The great Isotta was a twisted, flaming pyre. Its front was battered in as with a giant blow; it lay on its side gasping out life and upholstery in puffs of red fire.
The two men had been thrown clear. They lay in the sodden dirt of the road like broken worms. The grisly flare of hellish light etched clearly their lolling heads, their maimed and mangled limbs.
The gigantic Negro chauffeur sprawled face forward against the retaining bole of a huge hemlock. His head was twisted at an insane angle. His right arm hung by a bloody thread of pale white tendon.
The furious-driving ancient, mouthing "Faster!" imbued with an apocalyptic vision of his own, had found not Paradise, but Hell! His age-withered head was rammed clear through the jagged center of the secondary windshield; its shapeless, blood-pulped features seemed encircled with a halo of vermilion-starred glass. The neck was sawed in half and the dark blood oozed thickly down a dead-white shirtfront. The thin smear of his lips drew back in a wolfish, soundless snarl.
Babbage quivered like a bird dog. His writhing countenance was aflame with lustful fury. He forgot the presence of the others.
"It's old Will Norcross, by thunder," he crowed. "He won't stand in my way, the damned sniveling devil." He thrust his face almost into that frightful oozing head. "For once, I got the better of you, you and your lousy millions. You're dead, do you hear, Will Norcross? Hunt can't help you—not God Almighty himself."
Georgia minced into the flare of light,
"Now remember, Thomas," she mumbled. "I aided you this time; you do the same for me the next. You've more money than I."
Babbage shook his head cunningly. "Not as much as people think. I lost most of it in the crash."
Lynn Hart stood as if paralyzed at the scene of unutterable horror. Jane moaned through clenched teeth, hands pressing against hot eyeballs to shield them from the frenzied hell.
Now, however, for the first time, strange suspicion awoke in him. It whimpered in his throat, made queer tumbling sensations in the pit of his stomach, sweated his palms with the clammy drench of terror. Years later, he would awake to the sound of his own nightmare screams, reliving that moment.
William Norcross, international banker, man of untold millions, impaled on a halo of splintered glass. And the octogenarian manufacturer and the beldame who had once been society's leader, dancing fantastically like warlock and witch of another time in the flare of the leaping hell-fires, gleefully mouthing curses on the poor dead bodies.
Then Lynn saw the stout tree trunk that barred the road, prone where it had fallen by deliberate axing, hidden from the plunging auto by the swift curve of the path. Against it the Isotta had crushed out its sleek speed and the lives of its occupants. An insanely cunning trap into which Norcross had gone to his death.
Red rage exploded in Lynn's brain. The creeping terrors fled from its hot fury. He took a step forward.
"You devils!" he ground out. "You've done this; its murder, and I'm going to see to it that you pay the penalty."
BABBAGE rose from his ghoulish position, stared at him with evil mocking eyes. He thrust back his head and laughed. Shrill, gasping laughter that racketed through the gloom-filled hills, reverberated in demoniac peals from the clustering hills.
Lynn moved quickly toward him; then froze in his tracks.
A man had stepped from behind the hemlock tree. The dying flames flicked weird shadows on his face, caught and held with glinting fervor on the blue steel that was clutched in a hairy fist.
"Stand where you are—or I'll let you have it."
The brutal raucous tones tore jaggedly across Lynn's consciousness. He opened his mouth to emit an amazed protest.
"Shut up," said the man with the gun as the first words came. The smoldering char of the automobile flared momentarily to reveal thick sloping shoulders, prognathous jaw, flaring nostrils and recessive, apelike brow. The gun shoved unpleasantly forward.
The man's piggish eyes flicked indifferently from the broken corpses to the youthful figure of the girl in the roadster. She had half risen from her seat, a choked gasp in her throat. The little eyes crawled and Lynn tensed desperately for exploding action.
"She's mine, Joe," Georgia shrilled. "You leave her alone!" She too had seen that look.
"Okay," Joe mumbled reluctantly. "Whatcha want done with 'em, Mr. Babbage?"
His tone was obsequious, but the muzzle of his gun was dead-centered on Lynn's heart.
"Heh! Heh!" cackled the old man. "Why, Joe, I'm surprised at you. The young man's my private guest, and Miss Palfrey—well—you know what she thinks of that young woman."
"Yeah!" said Joe. "I know."
"They're coming with us to Dr. Hunt. We'll make the necessary arrangements."
"Now look here," Lynn protested. "You can't do this. We're going back the way we came. We—"
"You're coming with me, brother," Joe growled. "Yuh shoulda looked before yuh got this far. The road's posted ten miles down: Private. Yuh're guilty of trespassin' an' it's up to th' doctor to handle yuhr case. Now get going. You too, lady."
Jane's legs felt wobbly; she could hear the trip-hammer beat of her heart. God! If only she were dreaming, if only this were a nightmare that sunshine and the cooling morning breeze could rid her of. But the fantastic figures ebbed and glowed in the dull sheen of the burning embers; over to one side lay what were now mercifully shadowed shapes; and Lynn, the man she loved, stood stiffly rigid in the last circle of illumination, his face white and strained, his pain-filled eyes warning her with steady gaze.
She tottered to the road and went to him. She linked her arm with his. She felt braver at that comforting touch.
"Good girl," Lynn whispered. "Buck up. We'll get out of this somehow."
Jane squeezed his arm. She dared not trust her voice. She was brimming with withheld hysteria.
Cold steel prodded Lynn rudely in the back.
"Get going," said Joe.
They shuddered past the gruesome relics of what had only minutes before been men, and toiled up the stiffening trail. Pitch darkness enveloped all their forms. A wind moaned in their ears, gravel crunched eerily underfoot. The cold snout of the revolver burned searing fires into Lynn's spine.
Whispering in back! Lynn got small drifts above the panting of the ancient couple, the pounding of feet on slithering stone.
"... must clear the mess up." Babbage's wheezy tones.
Joe's louder grunt. "Mike'll do it... We split..."
Then the blackness lifted as an electric torch sprayed white radiance around them.
"Who's there?" Then the holder of the torch relaxed. "Oh, it's Joe, huh? And Mr. Babbage and Miss Palfrey. Shouldn't be out this late. Dr. Hunt don't like no—"
"Okay, Mike," said Joe. He motioned him to one side. They whispered warily together.
Lynn patted Jane's arm, gritting his teeth silently. But he knew, though he did not see, that the gun was still trained on him. If only Jane were out of it, he thought, feeling the uncontrollable shudders that coursed along her slender body. There was a gate in front of them, a huge, iron-barred gate set in a high wail of solid masonry. Beyond lay—what?
"Sure, I'll do it," Mike's voice rose startlingly. The flash bobbed down the path. Mike was going back to the wreck.
Joe herded his captives through the massive gate. It closed behind them with a hollow clang. In spite of himself, Lynn's muscles tightened, his throat clogged with choking dryness. The sound had an irrevocable quality to it, as if engraved on that gate's portals were the doomful words: All hope abandon, ye who enter here!
A DULL coppery moon scudded from above the torn wrack of black-massed clouds, glittered with weird half-lights over level parkland and a long low structure that thrust wings like radiating fingers into the all-embracing night. Then the moon was gone, swallowed up in the rolling murk. A single yellow beam broke the eyeless glare of blank walls.
They were pushed toward it. A door opened, lights dazzled eyes too long accustomed to the dark.
Lynn stared around in bewilderment. They were in a huge reception hall, and electric torches threw soft reflected light on a scene of incredible luxury. The walls were paneled Circassian walnut; the scattered divans, love-seats and arm-chairs in the gold and ivory of Louis Quinze. Underneath an enormous single Kermanshah rug glowed with the jeweled threads of Persia. Paintings of young and glorious bodies dotted the panels, exquisite nymphs of Fragonard, laughing children of Greuze and Boucher, the virile athletic nakedness of Greek gods, and the warm rosy pinks of Renoir's marvelous nudes. Youth, virility, pulsing young life—not a sign anywhere of age, of the possible decay of the body.
What a bitter contrast they held to the people in the room! These tottered to their feet at the sudden entrance of the newcomers—a full score of them. Men and women in equal proportions.
A cold breeze stirred the short hairs on Lynn's neck. Death, corruption, worms, spawning in the midst of pictured life and laughter! Obscene cartoons out of Felicien Rops, gargoyles from the Gothic, monstrosities from a lazar house, denizens of a Witches' Sabbath!
Age had not mellowed or dignified these creatures. Shrunken, shriveled limbs sagged under bony heads like death masks. They sucked on toothless gums and the spittle drooled unheeded from fleshless lips. Eyes were bleared with rheum and cataracts; baldness vied with stringy lackluster hair. Yet every one of them, visions of death in a setting of youthful elegance, held one thing in common. Greed!—Ineradicable greed for life, for departed youth, ached like a festering tooth in each hideous countenance.
They raised futile shaking hands, they clawed at each other to thrust closer to the shrinking bodies of Lynn and Jane. They peered with red-rimmed eyes into their faces, they slithered grave-cold hands over arms and legs and bodies; they slipped and fell and tottered weakly to their feet again, they pushed and shoved and scrambled and screamed horrible epithets at their fellows who blocked their stealthy hands.
"New ones!" "I want her!" "Mine, all mine!" "I won't be outbid this time!"
A clamor of voices, lustful, avid, filled with strange overpowering fear. They overwhelmed Joe, pushed Babbage and Georgia weeping and screaming out of their path, flowed in loathsome slimy contact over the youthful bodies of the pair. Men to Lynn, and withered creatures who had been women to Jane.
Lynn struggled against the press of ancient bodies. Disgust and loathing shuddered through his every vein at their feeble pawings, the croaking cackle of their voices, the creeping greed in their eyes. As fast as he thrust one away, others fumbled at him.
Babbage skipped around the edges. "Leave him alone." he screeched. "I brought him here. He's mine, I tell you!"
Lynn was suddenly afraid. What did these creatures of death want with him? Why did these ancient men, who should now be at peace with their Maker, assail him with avid eyes and pawing hands? What was it all about? Were they mad, or...?
A horrible thought assailed him. Then he heard Jane's faint scream, her long gasp of repulsion. He lashed out with both fists. He must get to her.
They fell from him, glaring, panting, nursing hurts. Joe stood on the outskirts, making no move to interfere, his thick evil countenance grinning unpleasantly. His hand rested watchfully on the gun in his holster.
Lynn plunged into the press of crones who surrounded Jane, sent them flying and hobbling on all sides.
"Oh, Lynn!" the girl sobbed thankfully. "Take me out of here. What do these terrible creatures want?"
He stood in the center of the room, grim-eyed, holding her protectingly to him. His free hand clenched into a balled fist.
"This has gone far enough. These people are mad," he said. He looked at Joe. "We're going out, and you won't stop us, gun or no gun. Come on, Jane."
HE moved determinedly forward. Joe plucked at his revolver. Its muzzle was terrifyingly huge.
"Zat so?" he snarled. "One more step an' I'll—"
Lynn, face pale but determined, took the step.
Joe's finger compressed. Jane shrieked: "No! No!" Babbage stumbled against the man, clawing with frantic rage.
"Don't shoot, you fool!" he screeched.
Joe's eyes flickered; then he lowered the gun.
"Okay, Mr. Babbage," he growled, "but how in blazes d'yuh expect me—"
A dull toneless voice cut across the clamor of the ancients.
"What's the row about?"
Deathly silence fell like a thunderclap on bedlam. The gargoylish men and women scuttered back to their chairs, trembling. The veins on their paper thin hands were gorged with sluggish blood. Their eyes implored like beaten dogs.
A tall cadaverous man stood in the doorway. His long bony nose twitched from side to side, and white hollows accentuated the bones of his cheeks. Lank black hair hung in a mop over his forehead. The pupils of his eyes were narrowed to black pinpoints and the balls were filmed over with a blank yellowish glaze.
Joe pocketed his gun. He said carelessly, "It's this way, Dr. Hunt. I found this here pair snooping around the road, an' thought I'd bring 'em in."
Lynn stared incredulously. Dr. Hunt's picture had been in the papers, but he would never have recognized the smooth, rounded features, the quick intelligent look of the portrait, in this lackluster individual. Yet he felt curiously relieved. If Hunt were running a private madhouse, if his secret place were a sanitarium for even more horrible perversions of these incredible old people, it had nothing to do with him. A short explanation and the surgeon would let them go, unmolested.
"There's been some mistake, Dr. Hunt," he said. "We had no intention of snooping. We had simply lost our way. You surely realize better than your man does that you have no right to detain us."
Hunt turned to him slowly. His nose twitched perpetually. His eyes held no understanding.
"I—have no right to detain you?" he said in a thick, strained voice. He seemed puzzled, blank. He wrestled with what he had repeated.
"Never mind, Doc," Joe bellowed harshly. "I'm handlin' this. Just you—"
"Joe, I'm surprised at you. Is that the way to talk to the famous Dr. Meldon Hunt?"
It was a quiet, oily voice that nevertheless carried far. It came from a fat little man with a rounded stomach and a pink bald head. His eyes, innocently wide, radiated unctuous good humor. He had come softly in behind the surgeon.
Joe's arrogance collapsed. "I'm sorry, Mr. Sombart," he said humbly. "I didn't mean to—"
Sombart waved a pudgy hand. "Of course not, my dear boy. I know you didn't." He turned to Lynn. His eyes flicked approvingly over the slim contours of the girl. "Welcome, my charming young couple. I'm Dr. Hunt's secretary. He will discuss your problem in his private office. Won't you, Doctor?"
Hunt emerged from his daze to say, "Certainly," then relapsed into blankness.
Lynn, because he could not help himself, went with Jane into the luxuriously furnished office. Now that he had seen Dr. Hunt, he was chill with apprehension. The man was not normal, that was evident. Nor was his establishment normal.
Beside him Jane said softly, "He's as horrible in his way as the others. He'll never let us go alive."
Lynn started. She had given voice to the racing fear in his own brain, but he forced a laugh. "Don't be silly, honey," he whispered.
Hunt sank into a leather chair. Sombart stood alertly at his side. Joe guarded the door. The doctor took a small white pill from an ivory box on the desk, swallowed it. A flush mantled his cadaverous cheeks, his pupils widened, and he spoke with sudden animation.
"You have come at a most propitious time," he said jerkily. "We were running short of subjects and my clients are becoming a bit—impatient."
"What do you mean?" Lynn said sharply. Then suddenly, he did not want to know. The truth, he was certain, would be far too horrible. Jane, swaying on his arm, must not face what was about to be said.
BUT Hunt smiled secretively. It was a ghastly smile and his long nose twitched from side to side. It fascinated Lynn with its macabre dance. The doctor ignored the question, turned to the little fat man.
"I think," he said with a certain feverish intensity, "that it would be better to hold an auction." The pupils of his eyes had widened. They flamed over the man and the girl.
"They are splendid specimens," he went on with peculiar intonation. "My clients will pay handsomely. Yes, by all means, an auction."
Lynn clenched his fists. He breathed heavily.
"You're crazy, all of you," he shouted. "What are we, slaves, to be put on the block like cattle?"
Sombart clucked commiseratingly with his tongue. "I am sorry for you, young man. And for your charming companion. But the doctor has certain obligations. His clients are all very wealthy; they have come here for a definite purpose. It is very unfortunate, but good sound specimens have been hard to get. The clients are particular; they turn up their noses at most of those we have submitted. The doctor seems to think you both are perfect. It is very sad."
Jane's face was drained of blood. "Oh!" she gasped. "Specimens! Us!" She swung blindly to her lover; her voice was edged with hysteria. "Lynn, what do they mean?"
Lynn's heart hammered. He dared not think of what they meant. Jane in the hands of these monsters! Jane exposed to God knew what foul practices! He exploded suddenly into action.
He pivoted swiftly on the ball of his right foot and dove straight for the guard at the door. He caught the apelike Joe by surprise. They crashed heavily to the floor, Lynn's hand clawing for the gun in the holster. Joe cursed and gouged his thumb savagely at Lynn's eye. Lynn ducked, and the sharp nail tore a long bleeding track along his cheek. His short powerful jab rocked Joe's head back on his shoulders.
The guard went limp. Lynn snatched the gun, twisted around just as Jane screamed terrified warning.
Sombart stood directly over him, his soft pudgy hand wrapped around a small but efficient-looking automatic.
"It would be a pity to spoil such a virile body," he said with regretful intonation. "Don't make me do it."
Lynn dropped the gun from suddenly weary hands. He rose slowly to his feet. He had muffed their last chance to escape.
"The auction!" chanted Dr. Hunt. His eyes glittered, his voice was mechanical. "We must go on with the auction."
"In good time, Doctor," Sombart soothed. Then his voice cracked with whiplash scorn. "Joe! Get up, and next time you let anyone take your gun away..."
He left the threat hanging, but the guard paled as he came groggily to his feet. His undershot eyes burned fierce hatred at Lynn. He lumbered back to the door; he held the revolver on his captives as if nothing would have pleased him better than another break.
The fat man turned with a satisfied air to Hunt. "I think," he said respectfully, "that it would be advisable to show your clients the successful results of the last auction. It would very probably raise the final bids to quite substantial figures. Your work, your research, you know, require considerable money."
"A very excellent idea," the cadaverous surgeon nodded. His lank black hair glistened with sweat; beads of moisture showed around his nostrils. The yellowish glaze was creeping over his eyes again.
"Good!" Sombart bowed. "Your orders shall be obeyed."
He pressed a button under the desk. The door opened softly and a man entered. It was Mike, the guard who had eradicated the last traces of Norcross and his chauffeur. He was squat and stocky, with long dangling arms and the face of a rat.
"Mike, you will notify Mr. Clegg that Dr. Hunt will take care of his case at once. And prepare Number Thirty-One in the Life Chamber in the usual manner."
Mike's features quivered with sadistic cruelty.
"Okay, Mr. Sombart."
Dr. Hunt raised his head. "Has Clegg given his check yet?"
Sombart nodded. "In full. One hundred thousand dollars, to be exact. But these, I think, will command considerably more..."
Lynn felt Jane's body go limp against his own. Cold shivered over him, followed by flushes of heat. What nightmare were they entangled in? What were the strange horrors these monsters were discussing so obliquely? What did he and Jane have that senile millionaires were willing to bid fortunes for its gruesome possession?
He whirled in sudden agony, to attempt a last insane dash for freedom. Jane's half fainting form dragged at his clutching arm, impeded his movements. Joe's revolver butt gashed across his forehead, sent him reeling against the desk. His eyes grew dim with pain and nausea; he felt himself being bound with a. stout cord. He was too weak to resist...
BY the time his reeling brain was able to distinguish between objects he found himself walking unsteadily down a long corridor, arms twisted and lashed cruelly together behind his back. Steel against his spine urged him on, sent him staggering along with sharp, jarring blows. Joe was enjoying the game.
Jane moved as in a dream at his side. Her slender white hands were also bound. Her jet-black hair was in disarray, her eyes filled with shrinking terror. Her cheeks were paper white. She smiled wanly at Lynn's quick worried look. She was trying to be brave, but the blood dripped slowly from the lovely curve of her lower lip where teeth had clenched to restrain shrieking hysteria.
The pallid procession came to a halt before a steel door. It was locked and barred with massive chains. Mike fumbled with his keys; there was a creaking, groaning sound and the steel portal swung slowly open.
Mike thrust head and gun cautiously inside.
"Number Thirty-One!" he called.
His voice made metallic clamor as if the interior were a gigantic steel cage.
A girl's low moan was his only answer.
Mike said harshly: "If yuh don't come out, Thirty-One, I'll twist yuhr damn head off."
"I'm coming." The voice was a man's and it trembled uncontrollably.
There was the shuffling of naked feet and a young man, naked except for a pair of shorts, dragged slowly into the corridor. His face was a ghastly mask of terror; he could hardly stand on fainting feet.
"For God's sake," he chattered through blued lips. "What are you devils going to do with us?"
Mike grinned nastily at the wretch's fear. It seemed like incense to his pointed nose.
"Don't yuh worry, fellah. Yuh'll be surprised when yuh see who yuh're gonna turn out to be."
Naked feet rushed inside, beat a desperate tattoo into the hall. A girl flung herself before Mike with an imploring gesture. Her blond hair streamed wildly over tear-drenched features, her somewhat ample bosom heaved tumultuously. A thin slip barely covered her florid charms.
"Leave him be," she blubbered. "He's my man; don't hurt him." She swayed in frightful anguish. "We never did you no harm, mister. We just was looking for jobs. You promised us good ones out here. I swear to God, if you'll let us go—"
Mike licked his thin lips. His beady eyes glowed on her generous bosom.
"I'd like tuh oblige, sister, if yuh'd be good tuh me. But—"
The man spoke with sudden energy. "No!" he shouted. "Do your damndest to me, but let her alone. I'm a-going."
The girl rose and flung her arms violently around him.
"Alec! I won't let them; I won't..."
Joe tore her clinging arms away, thrust her screaming and yelling into the steel chamber. He slammed the door with harsh, irrevocable sound, locked it.
"Get on, all of yuh!" he forced through thick lips. "What's the matter with you, Mike? Want the boss to step on yuh?"
Mike spread his hands placatingly. "Aw, Joe," he said. "We need a little fun."
"Yeah!" Joe answered grimly. "Yuh won't think it's fun if the boss gets wise." The weird procession, augmented by the dragging shuffle of Alec's feet, moved down the corridor. The young man's body was rather scrawny; his ribs showed clearly against the ridge of his spine. He looked undernourished. His legs, too, were a bit spindly and slightly varicosed. His head lolled from side to side as he staggered along.
A right angle turn and Lynn found himself in a huge white-tiled room. The blood surged madly through his veins, pounded with great thudding strokes in his head. He felt faint. He shot a quick side glance at Jane. Thank God she did not understand! She did not shriek or fall unconscious.
BUT Alec saw, and knew. He sank to—his knees in an ecstasy of fear.
"Not that!" he screamed. "Anything but that!"
He groveled on the floor like a dog whose back had been broken; he beat with his fists insanely against the hard white tile.
Mike kicked him deliberately in the ribs.
"Get up," he growled. He bent down, snapped a pair of manacles on the gibbering man, dragged him to his feet, shoved him sprawling into a white-backed chair.
A long porcelain table, extraordinarily wide, stood sinisterly in the center of the room. Floodlights beat white glare from the ceiling on its impeccable surface. A cabinet towered over it, glass enclosed, filled with a shining array of instruments. Surgical instruments!
They were in a modern operating room, completely equipped. White runnels edged the sides of the operating table, spouted over smooth round buckets. Impeccable except for one dark stain over the rim, where fluid had slopped over. Dried blood! The next instant, even as Lynn twisted insanely at his bonds, he was seized from behind by long powerful arms and carried bodily to a high-backed chair. They chained him with clanking steel into immovability. Jane was flung into a similar chair.
"Just in case..." Joe grinned nastily. "The doctor's hand might slip if yuh made a break while he wuz workin'!"
Where he had been thrown like a broken doll, Alec moaned. He slumped over and his body jittered convulsively in a terrible nerve-twitching dance.
Feet made sharp firm contact on the tiles. Dr. Hunt came in through a door at the farther end. His tall thin frame was swathed in gleaming white costume, white rubber gloves covered his hands, an aseptic white mask shrouded his face. He moved with sure swift movements. Once more he was the famous surgeon, the man whose skill had saved hundreds of lives.
Sombart trotted at his side like a dumpy tug alongside a lean ocean liner.
"Mike, get Mr. Clegg," he said.
Mike sidled out of the room. Hunt went to the cabinet, took out sharp gleaming instruments, dipped them into an antiseptic bath, laid them out with loving care on aseptic gauze on a little stand to the right of the operating table.
The sight of those steel-bright tools sent Lynn's heart thudding against his ribs. Wicked-toothed saws, forceps, long razor-edged knives, lancets, artery clamps, all the terrible paraphernalia of a major operation. Meldon Hunt's eyes gleamed through the holes in his mask; the overlaying film was gone.
Alec moaned in a low singsong. Terror had mercifully dulled his perceptions. Jane said faintly, "What is he going to do?"
"Nothing much," Lynn returned as carelessly as he could. "I suppose the poor devil needs an operation. Just you close your eyes. It may be a little nasty to watch."
Jane turned her gaze on him. Her pupils were large with fear; her shapely head sagged as if its weight were intolerable.
"You are trying to shield me from something," she said very low.
Lynn dared not trust his voice. He was almost relieved at the diversion occasioned by Mike's return.
He wheeled into the room an old, old man in a rubber-tired chair. Sly mockery twisted his evil features.
The old man looked almost a hundred. One leg dangled uselessly into the well of the chair; it was paralyzed. His face was seamed with a thousand leathery wrinkles; he snuffled and coughed with asthmatic breathings. The brown clawed hand he laid on the arm of the chair was the hand of a mummy. There was no life in that pallid, wisp-blown body except for the eyes.
"Ready, Mr. Clegg?" Sombart bobbed his head until its pink baldness shone in the glare of the operating lights.
"He! He!" the ancient cackled. His laugh had the dry unpleasant sound of scraping sandpaper. "I've been ready all day. Haven't much time to spare. Another attack of asthma and it'll be too late." His weazened monkey face screwed up anxiously. "You're sure, Dr. Hunt, that it'll work all right? Because I don't want to die. I want to live, live, LIVE!"
HIS voice broke and choked on a half-scream. His hand plucked convulsively. He shrank from death, from oblivion, with all the feeble strength of his wasted body.
Lynn turned in shuddering disgust from the horrible imploring old man. What sweetness could there be in life for that age-racked body? Hadn't he seen enough, done enough, experienced enough in ninety-odd years of existence to have become reconciled to the approach of the comforter, Death? But what was going to be done to restore life to him?
In a red haze he heard Hunt's voice, booming, hearty. The typical surgeon's tone to a frightened patient.
"Don't you worry, Mr. Clegg. You'll never recognize yourself. The operation hasn't failed once. All right, Joe, bring Thirty-One to the table."
Joe moved with catlike tread to the slumped drooling figure. He stooped, unlocked the manacles. He brought a heavy hand down on the thin shoulder, jerked the man erect.
Alec glared wildly around, saw the swathed surgeon, the array of instruments, the hot devouring glare in Clegg's eyes as they fastened vampirishly on his young, starved body.
He shrieked once. Light froth discolored his pallid lips; his face twitched with awful fear.
"You can't do this to me," he babbled. "Oh, God, make them stop! I can't—stand—it!"
He pulled with sudden maniac strength, broke free. He started to run. His blue-veined legs churned futilely over the tile.
Joe ground out an oath and lunged after him. His long hairy arm darted out, wound stranglingly around Alec's wobbly neck, constricted.
Hunt stood coldly calm. "Bring him here," he said in flat tones.
Alec's bare feet shot from under him—they dragged slithering over the floor. His head lolled from side to side; broken phrases yammered through clenched teeth.
Lynn's heart threatened to rip through its ribbed enclosure, his lungs heaved and strangled for air. He remembered now what first had made him uncomfortable at the name of Meldon Hunt.
A certain paper the surgeon had read before the American Medical Association. It had created a furor—though it had been only a tentative report. The ethics of such an operation had been unanimously condemned. Three days later Hunt had disappeared.
Jane's head drooped to her breast. Her face was congested with dark blood, her eyes were closed. Thank God, she had fainted.
Alec was lifted limply to the operating table. The guards strapped him down with immaculate white straps to the farther end. He lay on his right side, exposing the base of his skull.
At a nod from Hunt, Mike took out of the porcelain cabinet brush, shaving cream, and long gleaming razor. He lathered the unfortunate man's nape, and applied the cold bright steel to the hair. Alec screamed once at the swift-flowing blade, but his head was clamped into immovability. The hair came away in thick clots, leaving the rear of the skull ghastly smooth.
"Now, Mr. Clegg," Hunt said.
Joe sprang to the trembling millionaire, lifted him as if he were a child.
Nameless fear eddied into Clegg"s eyes. Foam flecked his lips. He cried out: "I've changed my mind; I won't go through with it. I'll die; I know I'll die!"
"It's too late now to back out," Hunt said in a terrible voice.
Joe disregarded the feeble struggles of the old man, thrust him on the table. His twitching body lay alongside that of Alec, back to back. In seconds he was strapped into position. Mike swiftly shaved the base of his skull to the brown wrinkled skin beneath.
"Okay, Dr. Hunt," he said.
A SUDDEN hush blanketed the room. Even Alec's moanings and Clegg's gibberings died on their lips. The floodlights beat with fierce white glow. The walls rocked to Lynn's fevered vision. There was no air; he was stifling.
Hunt daubed their bare skulls with a dark yellow solution. He took up a thin surgical instrument, shaped like a tiny center-bit.
"It won't hurt very much." he said. His eyes gleamed through the mask with the intensity of a fanatic. "The medieval doctors suspected the truth, but I am the first to prove that the pituitary gland is the seat of nutritional juices which restore youth and energy. Only the glandular secretions must be tapped from a living person and injected directly into the pituitary body of the subject. That has never been done before. Even seconds' delay in transfusing the fluid causes profound chemical changes which destroy their potency. I guarantee you, Mr. Clegg, undreamed of youth."
Lynn cried out, uncontrollably. "And what happens to Alec, the victim of your operation?"
Hunt turned slowly to him, as if he had forgotten his presence.
"Alec! Number Thirty-One?" he said vaguely. "I suppose he'll be all right."
He shrugged his shoulders and set to work. The bit dipped in Clegg's skull. Dry bone grated horribly underneath. It dipped again and again, making the points of a small circle. The millionaire shuddered convulsively; his bloodless lips twisted over each other. But he did not consciously feel the pain, for the yellow fluid was an opiate.
Hunt picked up a miniature saw and set to work again. He finished by breaking off the trepanned segment of skull, dropped it on the pad.
Then he turned his terrible instrument on Alec. It drove deep, and the victim screamed, and screamed again. The anodyne had not taken full effect. But the surgeon worked on remorselessly, swiftly. He was a cold, unhuman machine. The section of bone came neatly out.
Then he picked up a hypodermic syringe, jabbed it deep into Alec's open skull, plunged it through quivering grey matter directly into a small dark rounded structure. He squeezed, and withdrew the glass nozzle. A pale yellow fluid filled the syringe. Without hesitation he squirted it directly into the pituitary at the base of Clegg's brain. Then he picked up two small silver plates, sutured them into the open skulls. He moved back, suddenly. The operation was over.
But Lynn, fascinated in spite of his fear, had seen the swift, surreptitious movement of Sombart. That benign-seeming individual had bent solicitously over the twitching form of Clegg. A silver needle was hidden in his podgy hand. It jabbed into the millionaire's wrist, and withdrew out of sight as if it had never been.
Clegg's body jerked against the straps. The guards untied him.
Lynn groaned and bit his lips. Great God in Heaven! Was he going mad? To his horror-swept gaze it seemed that the dried parchment skin of the wasted cheeks was plumping out, as if fresh new blood were coursing through ancient arteries, bringing immortal food to long-forgotten tissues. A vampirish glow emanated from mouth and eyes and scrawny neck. They grew rosy...
The elderly millionaire moved suddenly to a sitting position on the table, thrust a formerly paralyzed foot lithely to the floor, sprang alertly down. His face twisted and writhed into a triumphant gargoyle; he skipped and hopped like a goatish Pan.
"Look at me," he cried in a cracked voice, "I'm—"
Mike thrust him back with a growl. Hunt said sharply: "You'll have to rest an hour."
"Of course," said Sombart. "Now we can proceed with the auction."
The guards moved toward Lynn. In a haze he felt the leg chains slipping. He came unsteadily to his feet.
Alec, sprawled on the porcelain, turned his head feebly around. Lynn looked into his eyes and cried out. He could not help it. They were the eyes of a mindless idiot, twin portals to a blank hell within. Alec was no longer a man; he was a body without a soul, without a guiding intelligence. The operation had done that to him.
Jane was lifted in Mike's huge arms. She opened her eyes. They fastened on the idiot thing on the table. She moaned and collapsed into a faint again.
Lynn felt himself pushed forward by the cruel steel of a gun. He stumbled out into the corridor. His legs were wobbly but a cold burning rage seared away the last spasms of nausea.
His fists ached with straining against the metal chains. Beasts, monsters, devils! They had defiled nature with foul experiments; they meant to do the same with Jane and himself.
Jane! The thought forced reason, sanity back on him. He must not give way to rage, to blind terror. Otherwise she was doomed—the girl he loved—given over to a horrible life compared to which death itself was a shining glory. He must be cunning, he must plan—there must be some way out. His brain whirled round and round like a squirrel in a revolving cage. There must be some way...
HE found himself back in the great reception room. It was filled with the cackling horde who had clawed at their bodies only a short while before. They swept upon the two, tearing half the clothes from their bodies in their mad desire.
On the outskirts of the whimpering, greed-lusty mob, were Babbage and Gloria Palfrey. They tried vainly to force their way through the panting crowd. They shouted things to Hunt and Sombart, but the noise was too great for them to be heard.
"Put them in the cage," said Sombart.
Lynn was prodded to one side, past the clutching fingers of the ancients. Jane was still conscious in Mike's arms. Lynn stumbled on, the bitterness of utter futility flooding his soul.
A great steel cage, heavily barred, stood in the farther corner of the room. The barred door swung open. Joe unlocked his manacles, sent Lynn sprawling inside. Jane was dumped with a thud. Then the steel clanged into position again.
The shock of the fall jarred Jane back to life. She opened her eyes in bewilderment.
"Where am I?" she asked feebly.
Lynn had her in his arms, straining her to his breast. It might be the last time. There was nothing he could say.
She stared wildly around, saw the thick steel bars, the panting, avid mob outside.
"Oh!" she said faintly, went silent. Her lips met Lynn's fiercely.
Sombart rubbed his hands.
"Now, ladies and gentlemen," he commenced genially, "we shall follow the same procedure as in former cases. Dr. Hunt believes that it is the fairest method."
"It is not," Babbage quavered from the outskirts. "It's a damned money-making scheme. That youngster is mine; I brought him here; I want him!"
"And I brought the girl," Georgia Palfrey shrilled.
"We can not deviate from established methods," Sombart said severely. "Everyone must get an equal chance."
"Yes, yes!" Eager approval from the few whose millions were staggering. Uneasy growls from the others, as if they saw another lost chance of cheating death.
"These are splendid specimens of young men and young women," Sombart went on. "As fine as we have been able to provide thus far. The lucky bidders will indeed be fortunate. Think of it—restored to the youthful twenties, endowed with marvelously smooth and life-drenched limbs, able to eat, drink, love and be merry, in ways that your own elderly frames have long forgotten. A veritable immortality, my friends. Vistas open before you. What is to prevent you from living forever?"
He knew how to whip up the passions, the innermost lusts of these decayed old bodies. Conscience, the dictates of reason and civilization, fled before his smooth periods. They yammered from their seats, they shook feeble fists in the air; their foul breaths seemed to poison the very atmosphere. Each octogenarian pictured himself an athlete, each withered crone the reigning toast of the season.
"Oh God!" Jane moaned, shrinking from those eyes that stripped her to the very bones.
An old man's voice penetrated the uproar, edged with suspicion.
"How do we know Dr. Hunt can make good on his promises? It sounds incredible. In fact I hesitated about coming here."
Sombart smiled. His smile seemed the epitome of good nature.
"You are a newcomer, Mr. Fellowes. You have not had an opportunity as yet to witness the proofs with your own eyes. Fortunately Dr. Hunt is in a position to oblige you. You knew Mr. Clegg?"
"Of course. I saw him this morning. He's an old friend of mine."
"Good. Mr. Clegg was the fortunate bidder in the last auction: he has undergone his operation only an hour ago."
A murmur rustled over the audience. Scraggly necks stretched like rubber.
Fellowes, a multi-millionaire, whose heart was a leaky pump, whose stomach was engorged with cancerous growths, whose bones were twisted with fierce aches, forgot his skepticism.
"What happened to him?" he cried.
"Behold!" Sombart said dramatically.
Two men were walking in through a door behind the platform. One was Dr. Hunt, more cadaverous than ever. Bright red spots made a hectic glow on his cheeks; his eyes were yellow and lifeless...
The second man was William Clegg!
THE ancient paralytic of the wheelchair walked with a youthful springiness; his cheeks were dyed with the red flush of vigor. His eyes were bright and sparkling. His very wrinkles seemed smoothed away.
"Good God!" Fellowes screeched. "Will! It can't be you. You're younger, your face... It is your face; you've regained your youth! Will, speak to me!"
"Hello, George," the apparition grinned. "I feel a hundred years younger. Look!" He executed a pirouette, jumped lithely into the air, came down clicking his heels.
"So long, everybody," he shouted exultantly. "I'm going back to New York. I'm going to live, to enjoy, to live all over again. I am young, young, YOUNG!" He flung out his arms and rushed swiftly through the door behind the platform.
If there had been pandemonium before, there was frantic madness now. They had seen with their own eyes—these life-avid ancients. Clegg had been even as they—and now he was reborn.
Their eyes glared; spittle and slime dripped unheeded down their slavering toothless jaws; every last vestige of humanity was stripped from them. They flung themselves forward; they screamed and yelled and prayed; they cursed and ranted; they clung to the bars of the cage, clawing vainly at the bodies they desired with such insane lust.
"Hurry the auction," Fellowes screeched. "I can't wait; the doctors gave me a week to live. I have cancer. Hurry!"
Their poisonous breaths enfolded the couple, their glaring eyeballs grew into a single writhing nightmare.
"Steady, Jane!" Lynn backed her to the remotest corner. God! There must be a way out. It wasn't possible this could happen to them...
"Shall we start, Dr. Hunt?" Sombart asked respectfully.
The surgeon nodded mechanically.
"Very well, then," the fat man said. "Gentlemen, first. Let us have your bids for this splendidly virile young man."
"Thirty thousand," Babbage yelled.
"Forty thousand," someone answered.
"Fifty thousand!" Babbage screamed defiance.
"One hundred thousand." That was Fellowes.
Babbage tottered. "It's an outrage. I brought him here; you must give him to me. All I have in the world is seventy-five thousand. Take it, take every penny of it. I've been here a month, and every time I'm outbid. I want to live too; I don't want to die. I don't want to die!"
"One hundred and fifty thousand," someone shouted from the side.
Fellowes glared insanely at the bidder.
"Half a million!"
A deathly despair gripped the room. Half a million! Even if they matched it, bid more, up to their entire fortunes, Fellowes could double, triple their bids. They knew it. Another chance at life gone. Perhaps—perhaps the next time...!
"Sold to Mr. George Fellowes!" The inexorable finality of Sombart's voice. "Now we put the young lady up. Look at her lovely form, that smooth soft skin. Ladies, your bids!"
Babbage gave a great cry, tottered and fell flat on his face. No one noticed him.
Georgia Palfrey quavered: "Thirty thousand. All I have!"
Hardly had she spoken when a gross fat woman, a bag of flabby putrescence, shouted: "Fifty thousand!"
Lynn heard no more. He crouched in his corner, panting, holding Jane with a deathlike grip. He felt himself going mad.
Jane Porter went to the swollen, greasy woman for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars!
Sombart rubbed his hands. The financial returns had been beyond expectations. Hunt stood rigid, without expression. A twitching nose was his only sign of life.
The steel door clanged open. Joe entered the cage. Mike stood outside, gun in hand.
"Okay." Joe grinned brutally. "We're going places."
Lynn rose dully from his crouch. Now if ever he must act. He moved slowly toward the door. He seemed dazed. Jane, her hands pressed tightly against her body, went with him. She had drained the last lees of shame and terror.
But as he pressed close to the guard, Lynn galvanized suddenly into a bolt of lightning. His fist crashed out to Joe's jaw. Every ounce of accumulated hatred and red rage went into that blow.
There was the sound of crunching bone. Joe's face smeared into shapelessness. He went down with a crash, blood spurting from pulped flesh. He lay still.
LYNN pivoted in a single flowing motion. He leaped for Mike. The rat-faced guard jerked his gun around. Lynn's fist exploded in his face just as he pulled trigger.
A sear of flame furrowed along Lynn's side. Mike goggled foolishly. He fell slowly, like a tree to whose root the axe has been laid. Lynn snatched the gun out of palsied fingers.
"Jane! This way!" he called.
The girl darted after him. They turned and ran for the door in back of the platform. It was open.
The place was a bedlam of shrieks. Hunt moved quickly toward them. Sombart plucked at his hip pocket. His round good-natured face was transformed. The mask had fallen, and a snarling vicious demon emerged. His gun was out; he fired. The room rocked with the concussion of sound. The door jamb splintered into a rain of wood.
But Lynn and Jane were already through. The stout oak door slammed behind them.
Their feet raced down a long corridor. Behind them was the noise of pursuit. Shouts. Shots. They whined unpleasantly past their heads, crashed into wood.
Then Lynn saw the door to one side. He skidded in, half-carrying Jane. It was the operating room. He whirled, gun thrusting. His face was grim behind its mask of blood. The last bullet was for Jane.
Someone was coming down the corridor. He was coming very fast and his shoes made a clattering sound. Lynn poked his head out quickly.
It was Dr. Meldon Hunt and he was running. His eyes blazed feverishly: his cheekbones were aflame with hectic red. A gun was in his hand. It jerked once. The bullet slammed wildly down the hall.
"You fool!" Lynn cried desperately. "Don't you see—"
The gun made roaring sound again. The steel slug missed Lynn by a hair's breadth. Hunt came on quickly; his eyes were the eyes of a killer.
Lynn groaned and let him have it. Just above the heart. A red splotch oozed through his shirt. He spun once, and went down in a heap.
"Too bad!" Lynn muttered. There was no exultation in him. He had not wanted to kill Hunt. The corridor was clear now. The frightful screaming of the milling mob came faintly through.
"Look out, Lynn!" Jane shrieked behind him.
He whirled, too late.
Sombart stood propped against the wall to one side. His face was contorted with fierce triumph. His right hand held a gun. It was dead-centered on Lynn's belly. Over his shoulder, through an open door, leered the smeared fury of Mike. His lips were puffed abnormally; his nose was a pulped mass.
""Drop it," Sombart snarled.
Lynn went suddenly cold all over. He dropped his gun.
Sombart said: "You didn't know of this passage, eh? You thought you were getting away with it. Well, nobody ever got the best of Julius Sombart. You've busted up things for me, but I'm going to kill you."
LYNN said steadily: "Okay. But before I die. I'm going to tell you something. I've found out what your racket is."
The pudgy little man laughed.
"It won't do you any good. It's a sweet racket. I've got a cool million out of it so far—enough to retire on. But there's millions more in it. I figured everything in advance after I saw that article by Hunt. I fixed this place up. Then I kidnapped the doctor and fed him dope. Made him crazy for the stuff. He'll do anything I want."
"A stroke of genius," Lynn murmured. His muscles were tense, waiting his opportunity. But Sombart's hand was steady, and Mike, the dropped gun trained on them, stood between them and the outer door.
"Yeah." said Sombart. "I contacted every doddering old geezer with dough who had one foot in the grave. You'd be surprised how they fell for the scheme, especially with Hunt's signature to the come-on literature. They lapped it up, secret stuff and all. You'll be dead a long time, and the racket will still be working. It's air-tight."
"I wouldn't be too sure of that," Lynn said softly. His hand brushed Jane's quivering body, his brain raced in vain attempt to overcome the menace of those guns.
"What do you mean?" Sombart queried sharply.
"Just this. The whole scheme depends on Hunt."
"Well?"
"Dr. Meldon Hunt is dead, out there in the corridor, with a bullet in his heart."
The pudgy man's triumphant grin masked to a sickly yellow; his rounded cheeks sagged into hollow folds.
"Dead?" he whispered incredulously. Then his eyes slitted into hard agate lines.
"Mike!" he barked. "See if it's true."
The guard clumped out behind them. In seconds he was back, his face pasty.
"Boss," he gasped, "it ain't nothin' else but."
Never had Lynn seen such insane fury in a human face before. Sombart's features were a twisted mask of unglutted hate.
Lynn awaited with shrinking flesh the tearing torture of a bullet; Jane screamed.
"Don't kill them that easy, boss," Mike cried. "Let me get to work on 'em first." His gory rat face quivered with lusting cruelty.
Sombart released the pressure of his finger. He smiled suddenly. That smile made Lynn's blood chill, sent prickling knives over his body.
"You gave me an idea," Sombart said softly. "Tie them up."
Lynn jerked forward. He'd rather take death now than later, under shrieking torture.
But Mike was too fast for him. He leapt forward, gun upraised. The roof seemed to collapse on Lynn's head.
When he came to, dizzy and retching, he was manacled in the tall-backed chair; and Jane, breasts heaving tumultuously, was in the next one. Mike was gone.
"You devil!" Lynn raged frantically. "Kill us, get it over with!"
Sombart beamed on him. "Not so fast, my dear sir. Do you know where I have sent Mike?"
Lynn groaned. The ache in his head was unbearable.
"I have sent him," Sombart said carefully, "to bring our entire clientele into this room."
For the moment the fiendish deviltry of the scheme did not penetrate Lynn's consciousness. Then it burst in his brain like a Very shell.
"No! No! Anything but that." he said wildly. "Not Jane, not the girl! She was not to blame. Do what you want with me, but leave her out of it!"
Sombart grinned evilly. "I'm afraid they won't be able to make nice distinctions," he asserted.
Already Lynn heard a confused shuffle of feet down the corridor, heard quavering voices shrilling suddenly into hideous lamentations.
"Mike has shown them the dead body of poor Dr. Hunt," Sombart said with gloating satisfaction.
THEY poured into the room, scarecrows clothed in human garments. They came with shrieks and moans and cries of anguished self-pity. Dr. Meldon Hunt was dead, and with him, shattered in the dust, lay life, the universe itself.
Death, rotting death stared at them with slimy eyes. They were no longer human; they were mad with the agony of hope dashed from their greedy mouths.
The leaders paused an instant in the doorway, blinking. They were Babbage and Fellowes and Georgia Palfrey. The tide of thrusting bodies piled up behind them, pushed them irresistibly into the operating chamber.
Sombart raised his hand. "My dear sirs and ladies," he said, "I grieve for you. Dr. Meldon Hunt, the man who could have made you live your youth again, is dead." There was a quiver to his voice, the quiver of genuine grief.
A long lamentation burst from a score of scrawny throats. Georgia Palfrey thrust back her head and howled, while the tears made long hideous channels down her rouged cheeks.
Fellowes lifted his voice. "Who did it?" he shrieked.
Lynn knew what was coming. He saw the whole damnable scheme in its entirety. Only the arch-devil himself could have conceived it. He jerked at his manacles until the iron seared into his wrists.
"Listen to me, friends!" he shouted desperately. "Sombart is—"
Mike dived for him. His bailed fist crashed across Lynn's mouth, sent his already wounded head smashing against the hard back of the chair.
In a daze he heard Sombart's voice go on smoothly, convincingly.
"It was these two who did Dr. Hunt to death, who snatched from you all chance for immortal youth. It is for you to decide their fate."
A savage roaring was his answer. Lynn forced his swollen eyelids open. If the rabble of old people had been unhuman before, they were now ravening beasts of prey, glaring at their kill. Hate made bottomless pits of their eyes; toothless mouths snarled awry and dripped with the drool of spittle; vulture necks stretched in the direction of the chained man and girl.
Jane slumped against her manacles. Lynn yelled, knowing in the depths of his despair that his words were hopeless: "Sombart is deceiving you! He is a criminal. The operation was a fake! He—"
Fellowes led the screaming, blood-thirsting horde. They came forward in a stumbling, clawing rout, more terrible than a pack of wolves, more hideous than devils streaming out of Hell. Weird ululations split the air, hands like skeleton talons groped before them. On they swept, straight for the helpless, fear-chilled pair.
Lynn set his teeth hard, and jerked madly away from the chair. If only he could rip it from its bolted bed, it might smash; the manacles might shatter. The skin tore away into raw flesh from his wrists, agonized pains wracked his arms; but the chair held firm.
Sombart and Mike stood to one side, grinning at his futile struggles. There was no mercy in their eyes. Mike dangled the key to the chains tauntingly.
The next second the horrible ancients were on top of them. Lynn barely heard Jane's cry of repulsion, of quick shrieking agony—then he felt himself overwhelmed under a mass of swarming squirming bodies.
Insane eyeballs glared into his, fetid saliva slobbered over his face, long taloned nails gouged down his cheeks, ripping flesh to the bone, seeking for his eyes. He heaved and twisted his head vainly from side to side, seeking to avoid those terrible hands, trying hopelessly to save his eyes from gouging blindness. He felt his arms and legs twist into unbearable agony; his body was a straining quivering mass of rips and slashes and torn flesh.
LYNN felt himself going down in a red haze of pain. Fellowes, the man with cancer in his stomach and not a week to live, pressed closer and closer. He was like a gigantic crab; his red-dripping nails stabbed again and again for Lynn's shrinking eyes. They dug into his cheek; the next would pierce into soft, fear-struck eyeballs. He arched himself like a monstrous cat for that last downward slash. His sere features writhed with horrible anticipation.
Lynn, his head a leaden immovable weight, could not duck. He forced swollen lids down, shuddering against that last supreme blaze of pain.
A shrill cracked voice seared through the gabbling tumult. In the far-off darkness in which Lynn weltered and sank it sounded somehow familiar. Then, incredibly, the smothering bodies that crawled and swarmed over his went away. His pain-flogged limbs lightened. The awaited blow did not fall.
He opened his eyes, blinking. The hate-ridden mob, blood-smeared, panting, craned toward the door. Lynn's first fearful glance was for Jane. She sagged in her chair, moaning feebly. Her half-nude body was a gridiron of gouged flesh, but her face, pale and taut, was hardly marked. Thank God, she was still alive!
Then his eyes swerved to the doorway. Two men, if they could still be termed men, were coming slowly into the room. Alec, made into a mindless idiot by Hunt's operation, his face a grinning horrible blank, supported with his naked shoulder the dragging feet of William Clegg. Clegg, who but a while before had danced and pirouetted with new-found youth before the avid eyes of his fellow ancients, was now a thing of horror, a loathsome creature that still gripped life with incredible tenacity.
His withered leg dangled with dreadful uselessness. The other barely held the floor. His face was corpse-white and the bones jutted startlingly through the paper thinness of dried skin. Live coals burned deep in creaking sockets. The seal of death was manifest upon him.
He raised a bloodless arm. A hush fell on the nightmare throng.
"We've been cheated!" he shrilled, while his companion swayed and nodded with vacant foolishness. "We asked for life and they gave us death! Look at me, what I am. Hours to live, who wanted youth, who paid—" Sobs ripped his throat apart. The silence grew dreadful. Even Sombart crouched, glaring.
Suddenly Clegg screamed: "Vengeance!"
A sullen roar answered him. Georgia Palfrey, scraggly locks flying, like a Fury incarnate, shrieked back: "Vengeance!"
Too late, Sombart realized what was going to happen. He whipped his gun up and fired. Clegg sagged against the idiot, Alec, and collapsed like a pricked balloon.
Something must have penetrated the tortured dimness of the sense-bereft man. With a hideous yell, he threw himself forward, straight for the pudgy body of the fiend who was responsible for his condition. Sombart, staring white, jerked the lever of his gun again and again. The bullets found their mark, but could not stop the dreadful rush.
Hands, steeled with the super-strength of madness, fastened themselves around his throat. They constricted with awful pressure. Something snapped. Sombart's face, livid with strange surprise, seemed to spread. He crashed to the floor, with Alec on lop of him.
Mike cried out in terror as the old men and women, hunched like animals, went for him. His automatic jerked with spurts of blue flame. Babbage reeled screaming; then the others clawed over him.
Lynn watched with dull horror. Sombart was dead, but he and Jane were still manacled, helpless before the renewed onslaught of these ravening beasts, inflamed with the odor of blood.
Mike went down with a long burbling scream. The human ghouls swarmed over him, plucking, ripping. Lynn turned his face away with a shudder; Jane's eyes were closed.
Something made metallic clattering sound. The chained man's head went down. Hope flared suddenly through his weary, tortured body. He turned cautiously to the snarling mob, but they were busy with their hideous task.
Lynn pushed his foot out as far as it would go. It just barely touched the shiny key. The instrument of salvation, the key to their manacles—if only he could bring it up to his immovable hands!
HE scraped it nearer, strained downward. Impossible to reach it. The sweat beaded on his brow. So near to a fighting chance for life, and yet so inconceivably far. Then a plan came to him.
He brought both bare feet together, with the key between. He lifted. Up it came for six inches and fell down again, with a noise that resounded in his ears like thunder.
The blood-howling throng had not heard, but soon they would be glutted with the dead, would come for the living.
He caught it again, pressing hard with the ridged surfaces of his feet. Up and up, as he bent his knees outward, until it hung, tantalizingly, a few bare inches from the tip of his reaching fingers. Strain and heave as he might, until the blood dripped from his open wounds, it would go no farther.
Lynn gritted his teeth and took the last desperate insane chance. If it failed, he was doomed; the key would be beyond possible recovery. A wild prayer issued from clenched lips.
He jerked his knees as hard as he could. The key left the tenacious embrace of his feet, sailed up into the air. It dropped again in a shining arc, hit the flat of his quivering thigh, rolled uneasily while Lynn held his breath. If it dropped off, it would bounce far out of reach.
The precious metal teetered, rocked, and lay still! Hardly daring to move, Lynn extended his stiffened finger. It touched, worked the key back to where he could grip it.
Feverishly, racing desperately with time, Lynn twisted his hand, stabbed again and again for the tiny keyhole. Already blood-streaming creatures were rising from their gory vengeance, looking as through a red film for more victims.
The key connected. The lock clicked! Lynn, forgetful of pain and wounds, staggered to his feet. He tottered toward Jane. The pallor of her face deepened; she murmured weakly: "Save me!"
His hand trembled as the key went in the orifice. Fellowes, satanic, no longer human, saw him. His shrill cry of warning brought the pack to their feet, growling in their throats like dogs withheld from a toothsome bone.
Lynn worked desperately. He pulled the half-fainting girl up just as Fellowes sprang upon him. Cold, deadly rage surged through Lynn at the sight of those arching talons, that had once tried remorselessly to gouge out his eyes. Holding the trembling girl close to him, he lashed out with his free hand. All his strength went into the blow. There was a sickening crunching sound and Fellowes' face seemed to disappear in a blur of splintering bone and flesh.
Lynn did not wait. He flung Jane over his shoulder and flogged his leaden limbs toward the door. The pack pounded after him, screaming filthy curses, clawing at his naked body with barely-touching hands.
Luckily, they were old and winded from their previous hideous exertions, or the fleeing man, staggering under the weight of the girl, would have been dragged down and torn to pieces. But gradually he pulled away, thudding down the corridor. The avid cries and blood-thirsty yells fell farther and farther to the rear.
Out into the reception room, where the grisly cage still stood, crashing through the door into the cold but blessed dawn, out through the huge portal that had closed with such an ominous clang upon them earlier in this night of terror. Moments later, panting, they reached the spot, down the rutted road, where their roadster stood quietly like a guardian angel.
Lynn shoved Jane inside, followed swiftly. He kicked the starter into thundering action, and slithered the car dangerously around.
At that instant, the wild rabble burst into view at the head of the hill. Like a spew of fiends from the seventh circle of Dante's Hell, he thought. Their weird cries and shaking fists still echoed in his ears as he drove recklessly down the mountain, toward peace and civilization, and the safety of their own kind.
Jane shivered against him. A steamer rug enfolded their bodies. Her eyes still held shadows from the valley of death.
"Tell me, Lynn," she said, "that operation on Clegg—was it—could it possibly be...?"
Lynn shook his head. "I saw Sombart squirt a hypo into Clegg right after the transfusion. Any one of a dozen powerful stimulants could have accounted for his sudden access of energy. Nitroglycerine, for instance. It was purely temporary in effect, of course; just long enough to fool the victim and the others into bidding heavily for the privilege of being next. Within another hour, Clegg would have been dead; his heart would not have stood the strain. I suppose Sombart intended ultimately to place all the blame on Hunt."
A turn in the road and the valley lay shining below, like a rainbow at the end of the trail. Jane said nothing more, only clung more closely to him.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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