Satan's Incubator by Randolph Craig -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER ONE - City of the Damned WHEN Dr. Skull came back to his office that morning, the dust was unusually thick on his desk. He looked about him with oddly young brown eyes. The bust of Galen on his bookshelf, the books themselves... No, Mrs. Timiny had not been in to clean, which was strange, for she had not missed a morning before in six years. Absently, then, Dr. Skull employed the black sleeve of his neat and ancient coat to rub the city grime from his desk top. The old man frowned. He had seen much dust that morning during his calls, dust that lay unheeded in houses where misery had ended all thought of daily chores. He thought too, while his back straightened as against some invisible burden, that thus it must have been at the destruction of other cities, with the dust at last burying outraged ruins from the eyes of the future. And now there was dust in his own office... Suddenly he wheeled about, at the whoosh of a falling weight hurtling through the half-open door. A cry died in the doctor's throat--for the thing that lay inside his threshold had once been a little boy. He was Michael Timiny, one of the doctor's great army of godsons. Four years ago, Skull had brought him into the world--and now, with a great icy blast of outraged sorrow, the doctor knew he would see little Michael out of the world. One of the child's eyes was a gaping red hole; the left arm, clawed and tooth-marked, hung limp and gory at his side, and in at least one spot, through that torn little linen suit, Skull could see how the vitals had broken out of the skin. "Michael!" He thought he must be screaming, but the name came out in a gentle whisper, as he lifted the moaning child and carried him to a couch. "Michael, boy.... Who--what?" And then he clenched his lips against further questioning. He guessed what the answer would be, if the child could still make an answer. He had seen other mangled human wrecks in the past fortnight, heard a dozen horrible, unbelievably shocking accusations. It wasn't only he. It was everyone in New York who had eyes to see. This was new, this attack on the threshold of a doctor's office--but then, some of the doctors had gone mad themselves, turning, bare-toothed and blood--lusting, on the very patients they had been called in to help. One tiny hand was reaching up toward him. From the small flecked lips, working spasmodically against the approach of death, came faintly terrified, incredible words: "Mamma--Mamma hit me...Hurt me..." So that was why the office hadn't been dusted. That was why every simple routine in the City's vast life had been disrupted by the forerunning events of terrifying, complete collapse. Men were turning on the women they loved, people tortured children and cats and dogs, anything helpless they could lay their hands on. The infection had spread to widowed Kitty Timiny, who had sworn she would get on her hands and knees to lick the streets clean, if she had to to provide for her beloved Michael. Now she had become the carrier of this pestilence of mad brutality and violence. Skull whispered to the child, "Where is your mamma?" "Mamma--gone..." He was talking in a dream before death, was Michael Timiny, in an infant nightmare of pain and treachery. Skull filled a hypo needle and gave him the blessing of morphine. It was all a human being could have done. DR. SKULL stepped to his threshold and looked up and down the hall for some sign of Kitty Timiny. Neither she nor anyone else was there. The attacks had always happened that way, when attacker and victim were alone. Always, afterwards, the attackers had disappeared, and not one of all the hundreds had been found for questioning, though police were working night and day. He straightened and shut his door. The office was dark, with its thick curtains muffling the blazing Indian Summer heat outside. A neat, modest, but well-equipped office, with no sign of disturbance save the ominous dust and the child's blood on the couch. A metallic hatred came into those oddly young brown eyes. Kitty Timiny? It was impossible for him to believe Kitty Timiny criminally responsible. No, something had been done to her, and to all those others who had committed unspeakable atrocities and then vanished. Ordinary homicidal mania would not take the same pattern, always, with this terrifying frequency of occurrence--surely, unless a single brain were behind the whole monstrous epidemic of murder and torture, some of the maniacs would have been found! It was too hard to believe that hundreds of persons, insane enough to kill their loved ones, should suddenly become clearheaded enough to effect a complete escape from New York's trained police force! In all his medical study and research, Dr. Skull found only one phenomenon which might account for the murder epidemic. He remembered a quotation from the article he had actually written, intending it for the American Medical Journal, but then he had decided not to send it, believing it too fantastic for men of science to accept: The recurrence of garnet-purple pigmentation in the irises of such persons as I have mentioned above should be taken as a grave warning to the world at large. During every great social catastrophe in ancient history, purple eyes have made their appearance as eternal harbingers of destruction. They have been either the cause or effect of terror among a people already ravaged by war or pestilence, inducing an unaccountable mass hysteria, often leading to wholesale atrocities. This mass hysteria reduced the population in some cases as high as seventy percent in certain districts of Central Europe after barbaric invasions, and ruined entire sections of civilized society. By dint of incredible and impoverishing taxes, terrorized peoples have sometimes bought off self-claimed leaders of the purple eyes, whom many insist to have been the same person, living through centuries. For some time, the phenomenon of changeable garnet-colored eyes had been observed in New York, and commented upon by some of Skull's colleagues. But none of them had made any connection between that phenomenon and the wave of murder threatening the City, for the good reason that no one but Skull had tapped the ancient books which contained the little-known legend of the Purple Eye. Superstition? Certainly. But--Dr. Skull thought back to the single human agency he suspected behind these multiple atrocities. At his desk--the desk Kitty Timiny had not cleaned and would never clean again--he wrote another of those death certificates which had so annoyed authorities to whom the matter was obvious. It was for Michael Timiny, aged four, giving as cause, murder--by person or persons unknown. Sooner or later, that unknown murderer would attempt to silence the one doctor who sought to pierce the screen hiding his existence. So engrossed was Dr. Skull that he did not hear the garbage truck pulling to a noisy stop just outside his door. And then the door opened again. THE man on the threshold was short and he wore a battered grey suit, and a low-pulled cap that shielded half his face. Two other male figures, dressed with similar anonymity, their eyes like-wise shielded, hovered behind him. The man in grey snapped, "I know what's on that certificate. Change it. The mother did it." And for emphasis, he steadied the revolver in his hand. Dr. Skull put his pen down slowly. Was this the direct attempt at silencing him that he had expected? His brown eyes were intent and unafraid as he returned the stranger's scowl. If he could only fathom the color of the man's eyes---but the very fact that he and his comrades kept their eyes covered was a sign in itself. "You're sick, my friend," Skull said. "Sick?" The man turned to those behind him, snorted, then took a further grip on his revolver. "Listen, doc, you got us wrong. We're not sick. But you're going to be sick--if you don't make out a new certificate." They advanced. Skull did not move. His eyes were fixed on those cap visors. The cold bore of a revolver touched his temple. "I'm afraid you lose," he said simply. "Dead men don't write--and while I'm alive, this certificate stands." They must have known that, there must have been more planned than the mere bravado of threatened murder. And then he smelled the chloroform coming. It was that split-second of recognition, for which he could thank his medical training, which saved him. Had he waited an instant longer... but he didn't wait. The man who held the chloroform-soaked handkerchief felt that handkerchief jerked upward into his eyes. Skull ducked, and the self-appointed anaesthetist's howl of rage rang out simultaneously with the gunman's shot. He had learned before that the odds are not always on the side of numbers, and in the brief instant before the three disentangled themselves from one another, Skull tackled the gunman with surprisingly modern football tactics, floored him and hurled the weapon from his grasp. He flung himself toward the gun, seized it just before the third stranger's foot covered the spot where it had landed. Another bullet buried itself in the floor moulding, missing Skull by less than an inch... and then the doctor was facing them, armed himself. A humorless grin played over his old mouth as he stood erect at last. What they had planned for him after the chloroform, he didn't know, but he knew it would have been unpleasant. The scrap was his own impromptu addition to the proceedings, and he was having the best of it. Before the trio recovered from their astonishment at this coup by a scholarly old doctor, the gun in his hand sp...
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