The Doctor Satan by The Complete Series from Weird Tales

Author:The Complete Series from Weird Tales [Tales, The Complete Series from Weird]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: weird, crime, mystery, fantasy, criminal
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

HORROR INSURED, by Paul Ernst

Originally published in Weird Tales, January 1936.

CHAPTER I

In Satan’s Crucible

It was noon.

The enormous National State Building hummed like a beehive with the activity of its tenants. Every office spewed forth men and women on their way to lunch. The express elevators dropped like plummets from the seventy-ninth floor, while the locals handled the crowds from the fortieth floor down.

At the top floor an express elevator tarried beyond its usual schedule. The operator paid no attention to the red flash from the starter downstairs signaling the Up cages to start down as soon as possible. He acted as though he was beyond schedules, as indeed he was.

This elevator, though not entirely private, was at the disposal of Martial Varley, owner of the building, whose offices took up the top floor. Others could ride in it, but they did so with the understanding that at morning, noon and evening the elevator waited to carry Varley, whose appearances at his office occurred with time clock regularity. Hence, if the cage waited inactively those in it knew why and did not exhibit signs of impatience.

There were half a dozen people in the elevator that paused for Varley to ride down. There was an elderly woman, Varley’s office manager and two secretaries; and there were two big business men who had been conferring with Varley and were now waiting to go to lunch with him.

The six chatted in pairs to one another. The cage waited, with the operator humming a tune. Around them, in the big building, the prosaic business of prosaic people was being done. Nothing farther from the abnormal or horrible could be imagined. Yet terror and death were there, in that cage, with the others.

The glass-paneled doors to Varley’s office opened. The operator snapped to attention and those in the cage stopped talking and stared respectfully at the man who came to the cage doors.

Varley was a man of sixty, gray-haired, with a coarse but kindly face dominated by a large nose which his enemies called bulbous. He wore the hat that had made him famous—a blue-gray fedora which he ordered in quantity lots and wore exclusive of all other colors, fabrics or fashions.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Ed,” Varley boomed to one of the two business men in the cage. “Phone call. Held me up for a few minutes.”

He stepped into the elevator, nodding to the others.

“Let’s go,” he said to the operator.

The cage started down.

The express elevators were supposed to fall like a plummet. They made the long drop to the ground in a matter of seconds, normally. And this one started like a plummet.

“Damn funny, that phone call I got just before I came out of my office,” Varley boomed to the two men he was lunching with. “Some joker calling himself Doctor Satan—”

He stopped, and frowned.

“What’s wrong with the elevator?” he snapped to the operator.

“I don’t know, sir,” the boy said.

He was jerking at the lever. Ordinarily, so automatic was the cage, he did

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