He was seeing the man Doctor Satan had taken the little death to find! His thought of Satan had brought him into materialization and, as one object roped to a second will lift the second when it itself is lifted, with Satan had come the person he had been conversing with when Keane visioned him.

Keane saw a face that was a little hazy and yet very familiar, topped by wavy, iron-gray hair; a face in which a large mouth was mobile over a long, cleft chin; a face often pictured, in life, in the papers. It was the face of Kelly Strong, in life political dictator of the state of Texas, presumed to have been designing the presidency - and not quite the same presidency as that in the minds of the nation's founders! - before he died.

At the same time, Keane perceived with horror the significance of the meeting of these two. The strange but inevitable phenomenon of thought-transference, which was the rule here, instantly spelled it out for him.

Doctor Satan meant to get the whole of Strong's plans of dictatorship, almost completed before he died, and become dictator himself! And the idea of Satan as dictator was one to stagger the mind!

"My G.o.d!" thought Keane. And: "I wonder if I've come in time to stop it ...."

With his first materialization, Doctor Satan, as aware of Keane as Keane was of him, had turned snarling soundlessly from Strong. His black eyes bored into Keane's gray ones, insane with thwarted purpose. And as both he and Keane concentrated only on each other, the materialization of Kelly Strong slowly disappeared.

And in that instant Keane had his answer, given him as helplessly by Satan's involuntary thoughts as Satan's dead informants gave up their secrete to him.

Doctor Satan had not yet sucked the information he wanted from Strong! Keane had got to him in time!

"Keane!" was Satan's enraged thought. And, though the following words were born in Keane's brain, rather than actually heard, he yet thought to hear the man's harsh, arrogant voice. "In the devil's name - how do you manage to cross me here?"

But in Keane's mind, he read the answer, as the question called up in Keane's brain the memory of his talk with Marxman's secretary-a.s.sistant, and the obtaining of a dose of the antidote.

"So Marxman's man made it possible! Satan raged. "And you guessed what I was doing by the results of the death ray on Linton Yates! Yes, I read it all! I tried to find you with the death ray first. But your d.a.m.ned ability, in life if not here, of shielding your thoughts from me, made you an unlocatable target where ordinary men were not! And so you're here - - -"

"And so I'm here," was Keane's response. "And of the two of us, one is going to stay. And I intend that that one shall be you!"

Alone in the great nothingness of gray, misty light, there two were. Alone in the place of the dead. For here nothing existed that was not thought of. And the two had no slightest thought of anything but each other.

Doctor Satan's red-clad, outline shimmered toward Keane, only a projected shadow of the red-clad body that lay in the steel-lined bas.e.m.e.nt room the Furlowe's Folly, but a shadow as sinister and real-appearing as the body itself.

"There is a h.e.l.l in this place, my friend," he stated. "I have been here once before, and I have found that out. It is like its denizens, only to be perceived when it is thought of. In that h.e.l.l you shall remain - while I go back to life, a dictator, and freed from your bungling interference forever."

His black eyes gleamed more brightly.

"A h.e.l.l, Ascott Keane! It's singularly fitting that I, Doctor Satan, should be the one to cast you into it!"

Keane made no reply. He couldn't have if he had wanted to. For now his eyes began to see strange things in the gray mist. Things conjured up by Satan's thought of them.

Slowly, the empty s.p.a.ce around him was being defined in the shape of a hollow globe, of which he and Satan were the center. And slowly the walls of the globe were narrowing down on them and were becoming more definite.

And Keane tried to cry aloud again as he saw of what the globe was composed, but he could not, since there was no such thing as sound there.

The walls of the globe were a solid, or seemingly solid, ma.s.s of bodies. But they were bodies such as had never before been seen outside a nightmare.

Some had no heads. Some seemed all face and mouth, with tiny puny limbs attached. Some were legless or armless or both. And all were blind.

Pallid gray shapes in the pallid grayness, they writhed and reached toward Keane and Satan; yet Keane knew intuitively that it was not Doctor Satan who engaged their attention, but solely himself. And he shuddered as he thought of being engulfed by the crippled, maimed, writhing things.

"This is just what shall happen," he perceived Satan speaking to him. "They shall take your soul here, Keane. These things were men and women on earth. They were "crippled morally", as society chose to express it - just as you believe I am morally crippled when, really.... but we won't go into that."

The black eyes glittered satanically.

"Here, after death, they are warped and deformed as they were in life. Creatures of h.e.l.l, Keane. And as destructive and murderous here as when they had actuality. But it is seldom they have the chance to try their talent for destructiveness now. They shall try it on you."

The hollow globe was very small now; Keane had the impression that he could almost reach out a touch the hideous shapes composing the wall - had there been anything there really to touch.

"They'll get Doctor Satan, too," he thought frantically. There's no reason why they should pursue me and not him."

But he knew as he thought it that there was a reason.

The lean tall figure in the red cloak, and these warped creatures of after-life, were of the same stuff. Satan could command them, not be destroyed by them, because he thought as they did and lived as they had lived before death took them.

"Take him!" he caught Satan's soundless command to the hideous gray shapes. "Take his soul! Hold it here, that on earth his body may be forever a lifeless sh.e.l.l, with soul and intelligence gone!"

And then the gray shapes were on Keane, and he was a wavering form in a monstrous sea.

There was no pain. He saw claw-like hands rip into him, and saw the likeness of his body shredded from him as bits of cloud are shredded from the main cloud bank by a screaming wind. But there was, of course, no pain.

However, there was mental agony far exceeding any physical pain. He had no way of being told it, but he knew the truth: If these clawing hands managed to rip away entirely the thought-mantle that clothed his spirit, if they managed to strip him of his conception of himself, then he could never go back the way he came. He would be really dead, with no link between him and the hulk of himself that sat before the empty water gla.s.s on the ebony desk.

"Take him!" Doctor Satan was exhorting the host he would a.s.suredly join when it was his turn really to die. "Strip his soul! Keep him here!"

No real substance, but mist-stuff that could be shredded and torn as misty veils are torn! Keane struggled in the hideous current of writhing, clawing, venomous forms. Doctor Satan was near him. He got to the red-cloaked form.

He had but half an arm left, though like a man in a nightmare, he could look at it and be appalled and yet feel no pain. But the hand remained on this arm, the whole underside of which had been clawed away. That hand drove for Satan's throat, and found it.

Perhaps it was because Keane was not really dead, and that hence his materialization had a shade more actuality than those of the writhing things about them. Perhaps it was that his hate of the man, whose cruel joke it was to act as Lucifer as well as costume himself in Luciferian manner, was strong enough to take some tangible form here in a place of intangibility. At any rate, Keane's one crippled hand did more damage than all the clawing hands of all the clawing things that tore at him.

Like a ball of mist on a mist-column, Satan's head wavered and seemed about to leave its body as Keane's hand grasped at the shadowy throat.

"Take him!" Satan exhorted, frenziedly, fearfully, to the crawling throng. "Take him - - -"

His own red-gloved hands were wrenching and tearing at Keane's mangled wrist. But they could not tear it away.

"Take him---"

Something was happening to Keane.

Suddenly, impossibly, he was beginning to feel pain. It was as though Keanes' body was being broken and every atom of flesh on it was crushed. As the pain swept down on him in even-increasing waves, the horrible gray shapes faded from his perception - as did the red-clad form of Doctor Satan. The luminous gray nothingness in which he had moved for a unguessable length of time (it might have been a minute or a year or a century) began to fade too.

There was Satan's thwarted, raging command, "Take him - - -" There was a last vengeful tightening of his hand on Satan's throat. Then, the pain mounted over everything else and robbed him of consciousness. ...

A voice was calling to him. A girl's voice, frantic, urgent.

"Ascott! Ascott!"

He tried to open his eyes, and could not for a moment. He was shuddering, and felt clammy with perspiration. He had just undergone some terrible ordeal, but for a little while longer he was spared memory of it.

"Ascott! Darling ---"

He knew that voice. Yes....the Voice of Beatrice Dale....yes....

With an enormous effort he opened his eyes. He saw the polished ebony of his desk-top within inches of his face; saw his hands.

His hands! He gasped, and stared at them as memory returned. But his hands were all right. He had them both, and neither was torn or mutilated. Now were his arms.

"Nightmare!" he muttered.

But he knew better than that. He had undergone an actual experience in an actual place: the land of the dead. Now - - - He sat up. He had been slumped over his desk with his hands supporting his head while his intelligence roamed afar from his body under the influence of Marxman's antidote. But now he sat up - and saw Beatrice's white face.

"Ascott!" Thank G.o.d. You've been unconscious - dead, from all appearances - for an hour over the twelve the drug was supposed to stop working! I was going to call a doctor, the police, anything! But now - - "Now, I'm all right," said Keane, breathing heavily. "All right - now - nightmare I went through."

Beatrice bathed his clammy face, gave him adrenalin, ministered to him with all the affection she kept from expressing verbally for him. And then, when he was breathing normally and, while pale, seemed all right again, she said: "Did you - did you find Doctor Satan, Ascott?"

Keane's nostrils thinned.

"I did. I got him in time. And - he almost got me. He calls himself Doctor Satan - and there is a h.e.l.l, Beatrice, and at his command I was almost kept in it! I wonder... Many a circ.u.mstance is shaped apparently by coincidence, and many a mortal unconsciously acts in a way to bear out literally the conceptions of religion. An actual h.e.l.l....I wonder if our red-cloaked friend really could be an incarnation of the evil force we've always called Satan, though he himself thinks he is only acting a part?"

"Drink this," said Beatrice, handing him a cup of coffee with the practicality of the female. "Ascott, did Doctor Satan come back to life too?"

"I'm afraid he did," sighed Keane.

"Then everything was useless? Satan can return whenever he pleases, and get the secrets of the dead as he did before?"

Keane shook his head.

"That, at least, I think we can stop. There is a h.e.l.l, and creatures in it like maimed demons. Then it follows that there must be beings in the land of the dead who were decent in life and are so in death. And it also must follow that they outnumber the maimed."

He stared at the coffee, making no effort to drink it.

"I was almost kept from returning to life by the things from h.e.l.l. I think Doctor Satan might be kept from returning to life by the decent dead. Anyway, I'm going back, now, to see my father and band the dead against Satan if he should ever return. Go to Marxman's a.s.sistant and get another dose of the antidote."

"For G.o.d's sake, Ascott -- -"

Keane stared at her. His eyes were as grim as death, and as impersonal.

"Get more of the drug, please, Beatrice."

Beatrice Dale's lips parted, closed again without uttering words. She turned and left him.

MASK OF DEATH.

1. THE DREAD PARALYSIS.

On one of the most beautiful bays of the Maine cost rested the town that fourteen months before had existed on an architect's drawing-board.

Around the almost landlocked harbor were beautiful homes, bathing-beaches, parks. On the single Main Street were model stores. Small hotels and inns were scattered on the outskirts. Streets were laid, radiating from the big hotel in the center of town like spokes from a hub. There was a waterworks and a landing field; a power house and a library.

It looked like a year-round town, but it wasn't. Blue Bay, it was called; and it was only a summer resort....

Only? It was the last word in summer resorts! The millionaires backing it had spent eighteen million dollars on it. They had placed it on a fine road to New York. They ran planes and busses to it. They were going to clean up five hundred per cent on their investment, in real estate deals and rentals.

On this, its formal opening night, the place was wide open. In every beautiful summer home all lights were on, whether the home in question was tenanted or not. The stores were open, whether or not customers were available. The inns and small hotels were gay with decorations.

But it was at the big hotel at the hub of the town that the gayeties attendant on such a stupendous opening night were at their most complete.

Every room and suite was occupied. The lobby was crowded. Formally dressed guests strolled the promenade, and tried fruitlessly to gain admission to the already overcrowded roof garden.

Here, with tables crowded to capacity and emergency waiters trying to give all the deluxe service required, the second act of the famous Blue Bay floor show was going on.

In the small dance floor at the center of the tables was a dander. She was doing a slave dance, trying to free herself from chains. The spotlight was on; the full moon, pouring its silver down on the open roof, added its blue beams.

The dancer was excellent. The spectators were enthralled. One elderly man, partially bald, a little too stout, seemed particularly engrossed. He sat alone at a ringside table, and had been shown marked deference all during the evening. For he was Mathew Weems, owner of a large block of stock in the Blue Bay summer resort development, and a very wealthy man.

Weems was leaning forward over his table, staring at the dancer with sensual lips parted. And she, quite aware of his attention and his wealth, was outdoing herself.

A prosaic scene, one would have said. Opening night of a resort deluxe; wealthy widower concentrating on a dancer's whirling concentrating on a dancer's whirling bare body; people applauding carelessly. But the scene was to become far indeed from prosaic - and the cause of its change was to be Weems.

Among the people standing at the roof-garden entrance and wishing they could crowd in, there was a stir. A woman walked among them.

She was tall, slender but delicately voluptuous, with a small, shapely head on a slender, exquisite throat. The pallor of her clear skin and the largeness of her intensely dark eyes made her face look like a flower on an ivory stalk. She was gowned in cream-yellow, with the curves of a perfect body revealed as her graceful walk molded her frock against her.

Many people looked at her, and then, questioningly, at one another. She had been registered at the hotel only since late afternoon, but already she was an object of speculation. The register gave her name as Madame Sin, and the knowing ones had hazarded the opinion that she, and her name, were publicity features to help along with the resort opening news.

Madame Sin entered the roof garden, with the a.s.surance of one who has a table waiting, and walked along the edge of the small dance floor. She moved silently, obviously not to distract attention from the slave dance. But as she walked, eyes followed her instead of the dancer's beautiful moves.

She pa.s.sed Weems' table. With the eagerness of a man who has formed a slight acquaintance and would like to make it grow, Weems rose from his table and bowed. The woman known as Madame Sin smiled a little. She spoke to him, with her exotic dark eyes seeming to mock. Her slender hands moved restlessly with the gold-link purse she carried. Then she went on, and Weems sat down again at his table, with his eyes resuming their contented scrutiny of the dancer's convolutions.

The dancer swayed toward him, struggling gracefully with her symbolic chains. Weems started to raise a gla.s.s of champagne abstractedly toward his lips. He stopped, with his hand half-way up, eyes riveted on the dancer. The spotlight caught the fluid in his upraised gla.s.s and flicked out little lights in answer.

The dancer whirled on. And Weems stayed as he was, staring at the spot where she had been, gla.s.s poised half-way between the table and his face, like a man suddenly frozen - or gripped by an abrupt thought.

The slave-girl whirled on. But now as she turned, she looked more often in Weem's direction, and a small frown of bewilderment began to gather on her forehead. For Weems was not moving strangely, somehow disquietingly, he was staying Just the same.

Several people caught the frequency of her glance, and turned their eyes in the same direction. There were amused smiles at the sight of the stout, wealthy man seated there with his eyes wide and unblinking, and his hand raised half-way between table and lips. But soon those who had followed the dancer's glance saw, too. Weems was holding that queer att.i.tude too long.

The dancer finished her almost completed number and whirled to the dressing-room door. The lights went out. And now everyone near Weems was looking at him, while those farther away were standing in order to see the man.