In a hurry to get the sc.r.a.pings of the sedan's tires a.n.a.lyzed, he drove like a black comet along the boulevards; drove that way till suddenly his hair began to feel as though it were standing on end and every nerve in his body tingled and rasped with exasperating sensitivity.

His face paled a little then. With his lips drawn back to show his set teeth, he jammed down the brakes of the car.

"Static electricity!" he whispered to himself. "The devil! Does he think he can get me that way?"

He opened the hood of the car. Attached to the underside of the dash was a metal container. From it led a fine wire. The wire went to the fan whirling at the front of the motor. And to the fan-blades fine fins of some flexible, colorless stuff had been attached.

With a savage jerk, Keane ripped the wire loose from the metal box. But the box itself he detached carefully to take home to study further. He knew that the secret of the violet explosions lay in that box; a secret consisting in what possible manner of substance could act as a storage battery for static electricity and store the stuff till an explosion point was reached.

With Doctor Satan frustrated and his life no longer in danger, Keane went on his way to his friend's laboratory and presented the tire sc.r.a.ppings for a.n.a.lysis.

"Mixed in with the normal dirt of the streets," the friend reported a little later, "there are two substances which might tell you where the car has been. One is a trace of cinders, such as is to be found in many factory yards. The other, is a powdered chemical which turns out to be a special kind of lime fertiliser."

"So?" said Keane.

"So this," replied the man. "There is only one plant in Detroit which manufactures that particular type of lime fertilizer. That is a plant out on Jefferson Avenue." He gave the address, "It is at least possible that Besson's sedan was driven near the plant during its half-hour absence and picked up a little of the fertilizer, spilled on the street from trucking."

"And the trace of cinders?"

The man shrugged.

"That particular company does not have cinder surfaces in its yards. I telephoned to find out. They must have come from somewhere else."

Keane thanked him and went out. His light gray eyes were glittering, his firm mouth was a bleak slit in his face. Cinders, and dust of a fertilizer made in only one spot in the city! He thought that should provide a trail to the spot in Detroit where Doctor Satan lurked like a human spider spinning new and ever more ghastly webs.

He went to the Book Hotel, to study the shining metal container he'd got from his dash, and try to penetrate its secret, before making the next and last move that should bring him face-to-face with Doctor Satan himself.

At the hotel desk, he told the clerk to ring Miss Dele's room and ask her to come to his suite with notebook and pencil. His phone was ringing when he opened his door.

"Miss Dale is not in her room, sir," the clerk reported.

Keane's eyebrows went up. Then they drew down into heavy, straight black lines over his light gray eyes as apprehension began to gnaw at his brain.

He went to the room in the tower suite which he had set aside to use as office and workroom; "Beatrice," he called, looking around for the quietly beautiful girl who was more right hand to him than mere secretary.

The room was empty. So were the other rooms. With the apprehension mounting to chill certainty in his mind, Keane looked around. He found his hands clenching and sweat standing out on them as his quick imagination grasped the significance of her absence.

An exclamation burst from his lips. Half under the desk in his temporary office he saw a glove. It was a tan glove of the type he had seen Beatrice wear last. Just the one glove.

Near the door, now, he saw the other...

"My G.o.d!" he whispered.

Beatrice had gone out of the hotel. That was a certainty. But - she never went out ungloved. It was one of her fastidious habits. Yet there were the gloves she wore with the brown street costume she'd had on when Keane left here...

His head bent swiftly, and a terrible fear leaped into his eyes. A voice had sounded.

"Ascott Keane," it said - and it was hard to tell whether it was an actual voice or a thought making itself articulate in his own brain. "You escaped the death waiting for you under the hood of your coupe. You shall face death later at my hands, in spite of that. But before death comes for you, you shall have the pleasure of imagining, as you are doubtless doing now, the lingering fate that shall be dealt out to your able a.s.sistant, Beatrice Dale. I have her, Keane. And when you see her, if you ever do, I'm afraid you'll be unable to recognize her."

There was a low, icy laugh, and the voice ceased.

"My G.o.d!" breathed Keane again.

And then he was racing from the room, with agony in his heart but keeping, the agony carefully walled off from the cold and rapid efficiency with which his keen mind could work in times of great emergency.

"There is only one plant in Detroit which manufactures that particular type of line fertilizer." his laboratory friend had said. "That is a plant out on Jefferson Avenue...."

Keane got into his coupe, wrenched the wheel around, aid pressed the accelerator to the floorboard as he sped out Jefferson Avenue.

5. LIVING DEATH.

Keane went straight to the plant from near which the tires of Besson's sedan had picked up the significant trace of fertiliser. There he paused a moment outside the high wire fence enclosing the company's grounds. But he hesitated only a moment. There were no cinders in that yard, as the laboratory man had sad. And the sedan had been some place where cinders had paved a s.p.a.ce. Also the company grounds were swarming with workmen. No one could have driven a car in, tamper with it, and drive away again unnoticed.

He started on away from the plant, and farther away from the center of town. There was only the one direction to go in. The sedan, to have picked up the cinder trace, would have to go beyond this point.

He drove very slowly, examining intently the properties on each side of the street. But it was only with an effort that he kept himself from driving like mad, senselessly, aimlessly, so long as he covered a lot of ground in a hurry.

Beatrice....

Never had he had such urge for speed - but speed did no good when he didn't know where he was going.

Beatrice....

"I have her, Keane. And when you next see her, if you ever do, I'm afraid you will be unable to recognize her."

That was what Doctor Satan had said. Where in G.o.d's name was she? And what was Satan planning to do to her?

He bit his lips, and kept the coupe down to a speed at which he could scan the buildings as he pa.s.sed. And he then started a little, and lowered his head rapidly and drove by the place that had attracted his attention. The place was perfectly innocent-looking. It was a small factory less than fifty yards from the sidewalk on the left-hand side. But two things had riveted his attention.

The first was that the grounds around the factory were cinder-paved. The second was that the place was abandoned, with boarded-up windows and an air of desolation.

An abandoned factory, in a not-to-populous part of the city....

Keane got out of the coupe and walked back a half-block. He saw that an elderly man, patently a watchman, sat in the open side-doorway of the factor.

He hesitated an instant, then walked openly toward the man. He couldn't have hidden his approach anyhow, and thought he could overpower the watchman if his suspicious thoughts of the place were verified and the man tried to give an alarm to others inside.

His eyes fastened to the watchman with increasing curiosity as he approached. He saw that the man was cheaply dressed, with faded blue eyes and a stubble of grayish beard on his face. And he saw that the eyes stared off and sway in the oddest, more unseeing way imaginable. Also, he noticed how unmoving the old man was. He sat in the doorway like a statue, not shifting his position in any way. Even when Keane had come quite close, he did not move.

Keane stared down at him with growing grimness. He could see the man's pulse beat in the vein in his throat; but it seemed to him that the pulse-beat was incredibly slow. He could see the hair of his stubble of beard closer, and it appeared that the flesh of the man's face had receded from hair-roots, more than that the hair itself had grown.

Keane felt a chill touch his spine. Realization, like a spike of ice, began to sink into his brain. But he still could not quite believe.

"h.e.l.lo," he said to the man, in a low voice.

"h.e.l.lo," the man replied.

He said the word with his lips hardly moving, and with his eyes staring boldly straight ahead.

Keeping his voice almost in a whisper, so that it could not be heard through the open doorway, in which the man sat, he said, "Are you alone here?"

"There are - four inside," the watchman replied creakily.

Keane moistened his lips.

"What is your name?'' he asked.

"It Is..."

The man stopped, like a run-down machine. His faded, unblinking eyes stared straight ahead.

Keane stopped, then. He touched the watchman's wrist, and shuddered.

Perceptibly he could feel a pulse, beating perhaps twenty to the minute. He could see the man's chest rise and fall with immensely decelerated breathing.

Pulse, and breathing. And the man could speak and, up to a point, answer questions. But that man was dead!

Dr. Satan confronts Beatrice Dale in a scene from "The Consuming Flame." Art by Vincent Napoli.

Keane dropped the wrist, icy as something long immersed in water. His lips were a thin line in his face. A dead man on guard! A watchman whose presence here would be missed, and who, therefore, had been left in his accustomed place to give pa.s.serbys no suspicion that anything unusual was taking place inside!

He had found Doctor Satan. The presence of a living dead man where a live and vital human being should be, proclaimed the fact like a shout.

Keane drew a long breath. Then he stepped past the dead man, who sat on with faded blue eyes staring into s.p.a.ce. He entered the doorway. His eyes, accustomed themselves to the darkness and detected the presence of the black drapes swathing the interior and making it a smaller voice - a voice that made the hair on his neck crawl with remembrance and primeval fear. The voice of Doctor Satan.

Edging his way along between the drapes and the wall, careful to touch neither, Keane moved to a spot where the soft but imperious voice sounded farthest sway. Then he took out a knife, slit the black fabric, and looked through.

The first thing his eyes rested on - was Beatrice Dale.

She sat on the floor of the abandoned factory with her slim arms down by her sides, and her silk-sheathed legs out in front of her. Arms and legs were bound; and a gag was around her lips. Over the gag her eyes stared out, wide and frightened yet, in the last a.n.a.lysis, composed. Keane felt a hard thrill of admiration for her fort.i.tude go through him as he looked into her eyes.

Over her bent the figure he had seen before several times in the flesh - and many times in nightmares. A tall, gaunt body sheathed in a red robe, with a red mask covering the face and a red skull-cap over the hair.

Keane bit his lips as he noted the k.n.o.bs, like horns, that protruded from the Luciferian skull-cap. Those mocking small projections were the keynote of the character motivating Doctor Satan. A man who took pride in his fiendishness! A man who robbed and killed, and broke the laws of man and G.o.d, not for gain, because he already had more than any one person could spend. But, solely for thrills! A being jaded with the standard pleasures of the world, and turning to monstrous, s.a.d.i.s.tic, acts to justify his existence and give him the sense of power he craved!

Next to the red-robbed figure, Keane saw Doctor Satan's two make believe henchmen, Girse and Bostiff.

Girse, small and monkey-like, was gazing at the girl's form with his pale eyes like cruel beads in the hair covering his face. Bostiff, supporting his giant torso on his calloused hands, swayed back and forth to a sort of full ecstasy.

Again, Doctor Satan's voice came to Keane's ears. "I have not yet decided what I shall do with you," the soft voice p.r.o.nounced. "You are beautiful. I am alone in the world - and it is not inappropriate that Lucifer take a consort. But that consort should not be a mere living woman such as lesser beings have. You noticed the watchman as you were borne into this place!

Keane saw a spasm twitch Beatrice's face, saw her eyes winch with terror.

"I see you did," Doctor Satan said. "And I see you sensed his state. A dead man, my dear - yet a man who will breathe and move in a sort of suspended animation as long as I shall will it. A man whose automatic reflexes can still dimly function, so that the dead brain may direct the muscles of throat and lips to answer verbally any questions not too complex and so that the body may move to orders not too difficult.

Doctor Satan's grating, inhuman laugh sounded out. "It comes to my mind," he said, "that Lucifer might here find a fitting mate. The devil's consort - death. A beautiful woman who must answer as required, and who must move without question to fulfill her master's least demand. That would be unique - and amusing. Think how Ascott Keane would react to that."

Keane, motionless behind the drape, with his eye to the slit in the fabric, felt perspiration trickle down his cheeks. The man was diabolical. Yet was he not mad? He was beyond madmen in the aims he pursued and goals he achieved. He was sane. Icily, brilliantly sane!

And now, Doctor Satan went on with that in his voice which made Keane suddenly tense in every muscle as instinctive small warnings p.r.i.c.kled in his brain.

"The reactions of Ascott Keane to that spectacle....Very interesting. I must see them. In fact - I will see them!

Like a flash of light, the red-robed body whirled. The coal-black eyes of the man glared through the eyeholes of the red mask - glared straight into the eyes of Keane, pressed to the slit in the black fabric.

Impossible that he should see Keane's eyes in the dim red light of the black-shaded room! Impossible that he should have heard Keane breathe or move! Yet, he knew the criminologist was there!

For a moment that seemed an age, Doctor Satan's glittering black eyes stared into Keane's steely gray ones. Then the red mask moved with words. "You will come here, Ascott Keane."

Keane's legs moved. Savagely he fought the muscles of his own body, which were like relentless rebels in the way they disobeyed the dictates and his will. But the muscles won.

His legs moved. And they bore him forward. Like an automation so that the black drapes moved forward with him, slithered over his head, and sank back into place behind him.

He walked up to where Doctor Satan and Girse and Bostiff ringed the bound, helpless girl. There he stood before the man in red, eyes like steel chips as they glinted with savage but impotent fury.

"Will you never learn, Keane, that my will towers over yours, and my power goes beyond yours?" Doctor Satan scorned.

Keane said nothing. He looked at Beatrice, and saw that into her eyes had crept a horror that went beyond the fright that had entered them at mention of the living dead man who guarded his red-lit inferno.

He could feel his body responding sluggishly to the commands of his brain, now. But the recovery was really feeble. He could not have moved toward Doctor Satan to save his life, though with every fiber of him he craved to throw himself on the man and rip the red mask from his face and batter that face into a thing as unhuman as its owner's soul was in reality.

"Girse," said Doctor Satan.

That was all. The little man hopped in obedience. He came close to Keane with his right hand hidden behind his back.

Keane gasped and tried to throw his arms as he read in the little man's mind and sensed the command Satan had wordlessly given him. But his arms moved too slowly to prevent the next act.

Girse lashed forward with his own arm. Something glittering in his right hand pressed into Keane's flesh. He felt a sharp sting, then complete physical numbness.

He sank to the floor. But though his body was a dead thing, his mind continued to function with all its normal perception.

Doctor Satan's glacial laugh rang cut.

"The great Ascott Keane," he said. "We shall see how ho meets his own fate. And that of his secretary, toward whom his secret emotions are not quite as platonic as his conscious mind believes.

He turned to the little man. "Girse," he said again. That was all. The rest of the command was unspoken. But all to clearly, with the telepathic powers that were his, Keane caught that too. He fought in an agony of helplessness to make his body move, as Girse bopped toward Beatrice. But he was an immobile as though paralyzed.

Again, Girse held a hypodermic needle, but this was a larger one than the one he had plunged into Keane's body.