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Old Angus hobbled up to the latest stiff, and lifted the sheet from its face. . . .
And then the corpse yelled at him, "Duck, they'll kill you!" And a bullet sang above the old man's head! . . .
He hadn't really ducked, it had been more like his knees gave way. And then, in the darkness, the corpse and his brother started firing at one another. . . .
Angus tried to whine for help, but nothing audible was coming out of his windpipe.
Like nothing dead, the stiff was letting them have it with the revolver. . . . Old Angus shut his eyes, and his brain busied itself with a prayer.
When the shots stopped, he peered dazedly about. The two visitors were dead, and the corpse was doing something to their faces.
"A-aah!" managed old Angus.
The corpse glanced at him briefly, and then it darted out of the room.
Minutes later, the old man looked at his visitors. Red and plain on their foreheads, the corpse had branded the mark of a human skull!
Later, when he told the newspapermen about it, old Angus realized that he had been a hero.
"So that was the Skull Killer?" he mused aloud. "Him as always leaves his mark, and never gets caught?"
"That's right, Mr. Burke," said the reporter. "You're the only man alive who's ever seen him make a kill. It's a wonder you're here to tell the tale. If you're not afraid—and I don't think you're the type of man who scares easy, Mr. Burke—suppose you try to tell us what you noticed about him. It would be a great help to the police, and a big story for us."
Old Angus peered importantly at the reporter. No, he wasn't afraid. He leaned over close. "They brought him down here dead," whispered old Angus solemnly. "One o' my regular stiffs, with a bullet between the eyes. And mister, they don't come deader than that!"
Newspapers didn't print it quite as old Angus gave it to them. They didn't swallow that bullet between the eyes, although they did ask if the Skull Killer were vulnerable at all.
For six years, that phantom image had preyed on the population of New York's underworld, sporadically and without detection. No one had ever seen him, but everyone had seen pictures, on the front pages, of the corpses he left in various parts of the city, with that red brand burned into their foreheads as if by acid.
His motive? The newspapers guessed him to be some lone fanatic, crusading against crime. Or, as one newspaper guessed, he might be a higher-up in the Police Department, for he knew so much about criminals and where to find them. He must be a gangster, said another, for it's the gangsters who kill their own kind. A prominent psychologist, when interviewed, explained technically and at great length, that a killer who left his mark was an incurable exhibitionist. He had probably had a thwarted childhood, said the prominent psychologist, quoting effectively from Freud and Jung.
In the end, people knew as much about the Skull Killer as they had known before, which was nothing. There was a momentary connection between the fact that a certain Dr. Skull had left the third floor of the Mid-City Hospital under hurried circumstances, only twenty minutes before the Skull Killer appeared in its basement.
But old Angus Burke, whose opinion had to be respected, since there was no one to contradict him, swore that the Skull Killer was a young man, a good thirty years younger than Dr. Skull, whom old Angus would have known if he'd met him in hell. This seemed to tally with the facts, for it was ridiculous to suspect an old man who has spent his life in study and medical practice, of murdering the toughest gangsters in the city single-handed, over a period of six years.
Chapter Three
A Surprise For Dr. Skull
CAROL ENDICOTT, standing beside an old-fashioned roll-top desk in the clean and shabby doctor's office, stared wide-eyed at a slip of paper in her hand. For the second time she read the neatly typed words:
My Dear Dr. Skull:
I have followed with the greatest interest your efforts in behalf of the unfortunate Mrs. Purvins, whose remarkable story regarding my existence received so little credence on the part of the authorities.
Fisherman's luck! I find I am to be congratulated on the size of my catch! When I set poor Mrs. Purvins out as bait for an old East Side medico, I had no idea that I should shortly be playing a most extraordinary young man on the end of my line.
By the time you receive this note, you will have met— and found out how you may co-operate with
The Octopus.
Carol's slim fingers sought out and rested on the bulky thing in the pocket of her neatly starched nurse's uniform, and she frowned almost imperceptibly. The note had arrived in an unsealed and unstamped envelope in the doctor's morning mail, and she had neither been able to reach the doctor—who had an important appointment at the Mid-City Hospital in connection with the Mrs. Purvins whom the note mentioned—nor had she been able to figure out the meaning of the missive. So she had spent the past half-hour oiling and cleaning the old revolver which her father had used twenty years ago in France.
Consequently, at this moment, there was about Carol Endicott little of the immaculate nurse whom Dr. Skull's patients were accustomed to seeing. Her white uniform had grease smudges on it, and a large smudge bridged her freckled, pert little nose, while there was a rather unprofessional competence about her movements. She was again the independent and rather harassed New York slum girl whom Jeffrey Fairchild had persuaded to trust the old East Side doctor in order that she might have a home, decency and security.
Decency had always been one of Carol's attributes, though often, in the old days, she had had to fight for it. Young, tall, with a clear ivory skin and lustrous dark hair that carried in it a reddish glint, she had attracted considerable attention in the tenement district where she lived. Personal danger wasn't exactly a new thing to her. This particular type of danger, however, was.
She shivered a little, remembering Mrs. Purvins as she had looked when the doctor had first interested himself in her case, shortly after they'd found her unconscious near the East River, mumbling incoherently about "the octopus." She shivered, and took a slightly firmer grip oh the butt of the old revolver. She didn't know whether she could actually fire it, or what would happen if she tried, but its comfort was good.
The ringing of the telephone almost made her jump. Then, wiping her hands on her skirt, thereby adding a few more spots to it, she picked up the phone.
"Dr. Skull's office," she said.
"Board of Health calling. This is a routine call. Is the doctor in?"
"I'm his nurse. I'll take a message."
"Very well. We're warning all doctors not to hospitalize their patients unless it's absolutely necessary, until further notice. We're checking all hospitals, doing the best we can. Thank you."
"What!" she exclaimed. "Say, what's been—" Then she realized that she was talking into a dead phone, and hung up.
This was serious, Carol thought. She couldn't tie things together, but this was the second extraordinary telephone call she had received that morning, after discovering the crank letter.
Dr. Steele had called, asking if Skull couldn't join him at once in a consultation . . . and Steele had been most unprofessionally vague about details. Then a little Italian boy, one of the doctor's former patients, had run in a short while ago, to say his father was looking for the doctor, and the doctor had better watch out.
She'd tried calling the Mid-City Hospital then, but the hospital authorities had been most uncooperative about disturbing the doctor, and she hadn't even been able to put her message through.
And now this warning about hospitals. Dr. Skull had another patient at the Mid-City, besides Mrs. Purvins—one Robert Fairchild. Robert Fairchild, the crippled eighteen-year-old, who idolized the old doctor so that he had become a resident patient.
Robert had been taken to the Mid-City a few weeks ago for another of a series of operations through which the doctor eventually hoped to cure the boy, and lift him from the wheelchair, to which he now seemed condemned for life.
Carol decided to
try the Mid-City again, and see if she could talk to Robert. . . . Not that anything bad would happen to Robert—about whom too many people worried already. There was Dr. Skull, for one, who treated him like a son. And there was Jeffrey Fairchild, Robert's brother, with whom, oddly enough, Robert couldn't get along at all. . . .
Carol smiled a little grimly when she thought of the relationship between the two brothers.
It was Jeffrey, whom she privately considered worth a half-adozen Roberts, who made all the overtures, and it was Robert who rejected them—the spoiled, ungrateful brat!
She dialed Mid-City Hospital again, and got the switchboard girl.
"Private Pavilion," she said, and tried to light a cigarette during the ensuing pause. She had to laugh at herself, she was so nervous. Three matches, and none of them took!
"Mr. Robert Fairchild," she demanded, when they gave her the floor phone.
"Who's calling, please?"
"I'm his nurse. This is Dr. Skull's office."
"Oh—is the doctor there?" the voice inquired.
"No," said Carol. "He should be at the hospital. If you could find him for me, it's impor—"
But a definite click at the other end of the wire told her that the connection had been killed. And the operator informed her, "Your party hung up, miss.
Carol's cheeks flushed, and then went white again. She was as angry as she had ever been in her life—almost angry enough to forget what she had tried so very hard to remember lately, namely, that she was a lady.
It was Jeffrey Fairchild who had first impressed that idea upon her, when he had gotten Dr. Skull to give her her present job, and it was for the sake of Jeffrey that she nearly forgot it now. If anything were to happen to Robert Fairchild, it would break Jeffrey's heart . . . and Jeffrey, at one point in her life, had been her very real saviour.
The tough look that came over Carol's piquantly lovely features had nothing lady-like about it. Rather, it reflected a portion of her life she had nearly forgotten—her upbringing in a rough-and-ready slum neighborhood, and the battle she had waged continually not only for respectability among the worst elements of humanity, but for her very survival.
She lifted the phone receiver again, and dialed Jeffrey Fairchild's Park Avenue apartment. While she waited, her fingers again sought the reassuring bulge of the ancient revolver in her pocket.
There was no answer.
Slowly Carol Endicott replaced the receiver. A stony determination spread over her face as she turned toward the closet for her coat. If the hospital authorities chose to be snooty about giving her information about Robert Fairchild, she'd find a means of getting it out of them!
It was at this point that the door opened, and a perfectly strange voice told her to stand right where she was.
* * *
Her unexpected visitor's command to Carol carried farther than Dr. Skull's office. In a small chamber hidden behind a basement wall in the same building, a tall young man was in the act of changing from a blood-stained surgeon's uniform into a custom-made tweed suit. He put his ear to a wall amplifier as the stranger's command snapped out to Carol Endicott. Jeffrey Fairchild, after his battle in the morgue of the Mid-City Hospital, had again taken his secret exit from the hospital basement. From there, he had proceeded through a maze of abandoned gas and water mains which peppered the earth under New York's streets. Relics of another era, these passages had been forgotten by citizens and authorities alike. Jeffrey had come upon them accidentally as a young boy, and later they had suggested to him the feasibility of his double life.
The terminals of that underground maze had been Jeffrey's chief reason for the location of Dr. Skull's office, of his own apartment, and even of the site he had chosen for the Mid-City Hospital.
The chamber where he was now dressing had been furnished with a cot, a chair, and a bureau. Its wall amplifier enabled him to keep posted on events in the office above, and its location made it a convenient dressing-room for exchanges of personality between Dr. Skull and Jeffrey Fairchild.
"What do you want?" he heard Carol demand.
There was a sinister purring note in the reply. "We're waiting for the doctor—got a little present for him. O.K., boys, bring in the crate."
Shuffling sounds, the scrape of wood across the floor—and then staccato little footsteps.
"You stay right here, sister!" snapped the intruder's voice. "You're not going anywhere till the doctor comes—this is a surprise party!"
As Jeffrey finished dressing, into the silence above broke the screech of metal, the scream of the girl. Carol, the innocent gambit in a desperate battle whose stakes Jeffrey could only guess, was alone up there with the spawn of hell. . . .
Swiftly Jeffrey moved through the coal-bin door, took the cellar staircase three steps at a time, and emerged through the rear door to Dr. Skull's office, his gun drawn.
A startled oath broke from a man's lips, and the girl cried out defiantly. Jeffrey saw the flare of explosive brilliance before he heard the shot . . . and then Carol, entrenched behind the roll-top desk, swayed dizzily. Her bloody hand unclenched and dropped, and the shattered remnants of the revolver she had been holding fell to the floor.
Somehow that gun had exploded in her grasp at her first attempt to use it!
Jeffrey's bullet snarled just as one man reached the unconscious girl. The startled intruder spun to his knees, and as Jeffrey leaped into the room, he realized that he had drawn fire from two hostile guns.
He lunged forward as lead whined past his cheek, and let them have it again. Two men were sprawled on the floor, and the third was retreating. Agonizingly, Jeffrey shifted his bandaged shoulder to avoid a shot and fired half-blindly in the same gesture.
The third man had fled.
And then they crawled out of the open wooden crate which Jeffrey had barely noticed on Dr. Skull's floor. With a sick sense of fatality, Jeffrey realized that he could not fire upon those obscenely crawling, even if they killed him. His physician's instinct, outraged and muted by the ghastly sight, still was strong enough to make him lower the smoking weapon in his hand.
Once they had been a man and a woman. Jeffrey recognized their grayish flannel bathrobes as the regulation equipment in the city's largest charity ward. But the bodies under those bathrobes, spindly as matches in the bony structure, hideously swollen and protruding at every joint, were like no patients Jeffrey had seen in that hospital or any other.
The man's shoulder-joints were bulbous as huge gourds on the frail vine-like torso, and the woman's pelvic girdle was flattened, wide till she seemed to be sitting on a portable chair even as she moved painfully toward him.
And their faces! The wide eyes stared, hideous with hatred and pain, from their shrunken mummy sockets. The lower jaws were huge, contrasting inhumanly with the shrunken craniums, like platters supporting a pointed pudding.
So this was the surprise party!
Slowly, deliberately, the creatures were advancing on him. . . . These ghastly abortions, obviously abducted from hospital wards, would have been further damning evidence against Dr. Skull—if there had been anything left of Dr. Skull when his enemies were through with him.
"What do you want of me?" Jeffrey asked softly. His nerves were stinging with pain and shock, but he stood erect and untrembling. "Can I help you?"
The man-thing's monstrous lower jaw moved gigantically, and a hoarse, unearthly laugh with no joy in it ripped from the match-stick chest.
"There—is no—help," he stated in harsh, deliberate gutturals, as though speech had become difficult. "If you're—a doctor, I want to— kill you."
The woman-thing started to laugh in high, tinny laughter. Maybe the damned laugh that way in hell, Jeffrey thought feverishly. But this wasn't hell! This was New York, civilization. . . .
"I am a doctor, of sorts," he admitted to the monstrous creatures. "And I don't want to hurt you. As you see, I have a gun. I can defend myself, but hope that won't be necessary. I want you to trust me!"
He didn't finish, for at that moment, the two foul distortions of human shape leaped upon him. Their huge hams of hands covered his throat, his face, pinned his arms to his sides . . . unutterable revulsion rose in him, as he smelled the faint but undeniable tinge of putrescence in that sick flesh. . . .
He twisted his body at the waist, used his upper torso as a club, and then he was free. A guttural howl thudded against his ear-drums, and then a powerful lower jaw sank into his arm. With both hands, Jeffrey seized the man-thing's throat, squeezed till the eyes popped and the jaw loosened.
The woman-thing fell to her knees beside the sprawled figure of her mate, and from her round bulbous eyes a few tears squeezed out.