Empire of doom, p.1
EMPIRE OF DOOM, page 1
EMPIRE OF DOOM
By Grant Stockbridge (Norvell Page)
EMPIRE OF DOOM
Table of Contents
EMPIRE OF DOOM
By Grant Stockbridge (Norvell Page)
This page formatted 2005 Blackmask Online. http://www.blackmask.com
• CHAPTER ONE Death in the Snow
• CHAPTER TWO The Professor's Secret
• CHAPTER THREE The Flesh Eater
• CHAPTER FOUR The Green Hand
• CHAPTER FIVE A Blow at the Spider
• CHAPTER SIX A Rugged Individualist
• CHAPTER SEVEN The Green Hand Strikes
• CHAPTER EIGHT The Green Terror Again
• CHAPTER NINE “You Are the Spider”
• CHAPTER TEN A Futile Disguise
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Madame Ba.nt.soff
• CHAPTER TWELVE Trap For the Spider
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Spider Is Crippled.
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN City of Horrors
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Death Trail
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN Death Keeps Watch
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN On to Washington
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Death to the Spider
• CHAPTER NINETEEN Vapor of Hell
• CHAPTER TWENTY Jonathan the Just
Originally published in the February, 1934 issue of The Spider
A facsimile reprint of this work, with the original illustrations, has been published by Bold Ventures Press, and is available from the Vintage Library.
America faces certain doom as its citizens fall in screaming thousands before the noxious death vapors loosed upon them by the Green Hand. How can the SPIDER, harried and threatened by a hundred new and deadly perils, check the rising power of the next Dictator— and lay bare the scheming, criminal mind which seeks to enslave the nation?
CHAPTER ONE Death in the Snow
THE bearded fur trapper, snowshoeing through the still cold of the forest night, was muffled to his ears in a Mackinaw. He mushed out into a moon-white clearing, breath steaming from his nostrils. His pace was slow beneath the heavy pack on his back, but there was an alert watchfulness about his every movement. His feet were loose in the thongs of his snow-shoes as if he were prepared to shed them instantly. . .
From the blackness, a rifle spat. The bearded trapper jerked with the blow of the lead. He threw high his hands, pitched face down in the knee-deep snow. His feet flew up with the force of his fall, kicked clear of the shoes, flopped again. After that he did not move. In all the world nothing moved; nothing disturbed the black silence of the forest.
The snow, which had been threatening for hours, began to drift down, a few uncertain white flecks in the blackness. It thickened rapidly, made a soft hissing sound. The moon thrust a frightened face between the clouds. Its pale light glinted on metal, a rifle in the edge of the dark woods. Distantly a wolf howled.
For five minutes that was all, then came that glint of metal again, as the rifle moved. It was followed by sound— as stealthy feet whispered over the snow. A black shadow detached itself from the darker shadows of the trees and crept forward.
It was a man, a short man, with shoulders like an ape, terminating in long arms. A rifle was in the hands, half raised, ready to spit leaden death.
The man jerked to a halt. The rifle snapped to his shoulder— and the dead man in the snow moved!
He hurled sideways, rolling, and flame spat from his hand. The rifle spoke, too, and a fluff of white snow spumed into the air where a moment before the trapper had lain. The trapper jerked to his knees. His pistol barked again, lancing fire into the blackness.
The rifle seemed frozen in the gunman's hands. He stood with it pressed against his shoulder as rigidly unmoving as one of those black trunks behind him. Then stiffly he toppled, arms jerking upward. The rifle turned a slow somersault, struck muzzle down. It stood straight an instant, then settled out of sight in the snow. The rifleman lay on his face, arms thrown out in the last surrender of death.
The trapper got slowly to his feet. With his left hand he wiped the coldness of the snow from his face.
Teeth gleamed amid his black beard. It was well that he had expected some such attack as this, well that he had wadded his pack with a thick pad of bullet-proof raw silk. He walked forward, automatic still ready in his fist. He moved cautiously, yet with speed. Swiftly he bent over the woodsman, rolled him, found that he was dead, a bullet between the eyes.
Then the trapper did a curious thing. He slid his hand beneath his mackinaw and pulled out a small cigarette lighter of platinum and black enamel, such as surely no trapper ever carried before. But he did not snap flame to it. A thin smile distorted his fine lips that the black beard disguised, as he detached the base of the lighter and, bending over, pressed the lighter itself to the forehead of the man he had killed.
And when he had removed that platinum toy, there remained upon the forehead of his victim, a small seal of rich vermilion— the ugly, hairy seal of the Spider!
RICHARD WENTWORTH— for the trapper was he, though none of his society friends would have recognized the millionaire clubman beneath the crude exterior of his faultless disguise— smiled thinly. Would these backwoodsmen, he wondered, recognize his calling card— that tiny red seal which marked the Spider's crusades against the Underworld? He was inclined to think they would. For it was known throughout the Underworlds and the police bureaus of a dozen countries as the signature of a man whose life was devoted to a long-drawn battle against those super criminals before whom the police themselves seemed helpless.
Here in the North Michigan woods, he was taking up that battle again, this time against a menace that threatened not a city, not a state, but the entire nation— perhaps every civilized power in the world!
Wentworth bent swiftly again and went through the man's pockets. They carried the usual paraphernalia of waterproof match case, compass, pipe and tobacco. But they carried also a letter. Wentworth flashed on it the beam of a small pencil light. The envelope bore the date of Loveland, Michigan. And the letter read:
Enclosed is five thousand, as agreed. Good work. Go ahead as planned.
The letter was unsigned. Five thousand dollars to a lumberjack! A backwoodsman who tried, with foolish confidence, to kill the Spider! Wentworth's smile vanished. The shaggy brows that disguised his own were drawn down heavily above gray eyes. He replaced in the man's pockets everything except the letter, ran back to his snow shoes. He toed into them and mushed on with frantic haste.
He knew from this attack that he could not be far from a certain camp which was, to any casual eye, the grouped cabins of honest lumbermen. He knew that two miles northwest of
that camp would be the cabin in which Professor Henry Cather was held prisoner.
Cresting the lazy roll of a hill, he paused and peered ahead through the blackness of the night polka-dotted with snow. A small wind creaked cold tree branches, brought him a whiff of woodsmoke. Yellow windows showed warmly through thick beeches.
Wentworth retreated swiftly from the ridge, made a wide circle about the camp, tugged out his compass and struck out northeast, moving with undiminished speed. His mouth was grim. If only Professor Cather were still alive . . . but the man's letter, a piteous and fearful cry for help, had been long in reaching him.
Wentworth carried an indelible mental picture of the letter in Professor Cather's queer, crabbed hand. It had been written with invisible ink across an innocent-appearing order for chemicals sent to Professor Brownlee, Wentworth's intimate friend. Brownlee, puzzled to know why his friend should have ordered chemicals through him, had presented the order to Wentworth. And Wentworth's swift mind had seized on the answer. Followed a series of tests, and finally the writing hidden beneath that apparently innocuous order had come through.
Professor Cather's letter— it should have been written in letters of blood— had been startling:/ have made a discovery that will make its possessor ruler ofthe world! This is no exaggeration, but a cold, scientific fact.
/ wish /had died before / discovered it.
A group of men engaged me, through one named George Scott, to do some secret work on synthetic perfumes. I thought it strange when they stipulated the work must be done in an isolated laboratory far north in the Michigan woods. But, as you know, I've long wanted to do that kind of work, and I jumped at the chance.
I worked for several weeks before I found out the nature of the thing these men wanted done. Then, by torture, they forced me to do their will. I am a prisoner in a cabin about twenty miles northeast of Wacomchic, Michigan.
There is a camp on the Wacomchic River which is apparently made up of lumbermen, but actually is filled with criminals of the most ruthless type. My cabin is two miles northeast of that camp.
In God's name, rescue me, before I am forced to loose this horrible destroyer I have discovered upon the world. I have longed to kill myself before this should be forced upon me, but...The letter had ended abruptly, as if the professor had been interrupted in his message of terrible portent. A discovery that would make its possessor ruler of the world.... horrible destroyer.... A band of criminals of the most ruthless type!
No wonder Wentworth had raced half across the continent in a frantic effort to save Professor Cather— and to wrest his dread secret from the criminal hands which might loose his destroyer upon the world!
CHAPTER TWO The Professor's Secret
WENTWORTH'S swinging progress through the deepening snow was made at a killing pace. Only a m
His keen eyes, sharply gray beneath the shaggy false brows, swept the woods ahead. He should be close now to Professor Cather's cabin. Probably it was on the crest of the next hill, there where the hemlocks showed black against the sky. But there were no lights to indicate its exact position. Wentworth leaned back on the heels of his snow-shoes, skated down the hill. He hurdled a frozen stream whose black waters gurgled beneath the ice, battled through thick beeches on its brink, and made his way doggedly up a steep grade. He peered ahead anxiously, moon and snow glisten providing a ghostly light.
Just below the crest of the hill the dense growth of trees stopped abruptly. Moonlight streamed into the clearing beyond and, as Wentworth raced onward, breath streaming from his nostrils; he made out the glint of windows and a low log cabin, black against the snow.
Eager as he was to reach the building, he stopped and reconnoitered. About him nothing moved. The silence was absolute. He pushed on slowly, halted in the shadows of the trees and scrutinized the cabin, then made a swift but careful circuit of the clearing.
The new fallen snow showed no trace of human passage. The whiteness before the door was unbroken. Wentworth's thinned lips grew hard. If Cather still were here, he had not left the cabin for hours.
Wentworth slid his shoulders from the straps of his pack, toed out of his snowshoes and, a flitting shadow among shadows, crept toward the rear of the cabin. There was a lean-to there. Its slanting roof would cover firewood and supplies. Wentworth touched its rough surface, found a small opening between logs. He stooped and peered inside. All was darkness.
He drew out his pencil light and stabbed a small knifelike ray into the black interior. Stacked wood, supplies hung upon pegs, a door that swung agape into the room beyond. The light swept on, discovered in the main part of the cabin a small rusted stove, a long bench with a glittering array of test tubes and bottles.
This, then, was Professor Cather's cabin. But within it was no sound, no breath of life.
Wentworth's eyes were bitter. He switched off the light, circled rapidly to the door, pounded on it. The wind moaned about the eaves. A loose slab on the roof rattled. The hunger howl of a wolf rose from a nearby thicket. Within, all was silence.
Wentworth reached out his mittened hand and caught the latchstring. Then he paused, and a thin smile twisted his mouth. He stepped behind the protection of the thick log wall, pulled the latch and kicked the door inward, jerking his foot instantly to safety.
The door banged inward. But no gun crashed out; no leaden death charge spat from the darkness. Instead, there came a fragile tinkling as of thin glass breaking.
Wentworth ran from that door as from the gibbering specter of death itself!
THE wind was from behind the cabin, and Wentworth's flight was a swift curve to windward.
On the side of the cabin, at a distance of fifty feet, he halted. Groping through the snow, he found a broken tree branch. He hurled it through the cabin window, crashing it inward. He circled behind the cabin to its other side and did the same. Then he returned, sat upon his pack and waited.
Call his swift flight a hunch; call it intuition. Either would be right— for these are both the swift subconscious alignment of thoughts too rapid for deliberate mental processes. Wentworth had cultivated such thought flashes. His mind was capable of incredibly quick decisions, and action flowed from them almost before the thought was conceived. Such was Wentworth's weapon against the UnderworId, his split-second speed of thought, his ability to think ahead of his enemies, to foresee their plots and forestall them.
And that power had served him well once more. Professor Cather, a specialist in gaseous chemistry, had been abducted and forced to work upon some secret process. Wentworth, fearing a trap, had heard glass tinkle. These facts had instantly marshaled themselves, and he had fled up wind. Now he waited.
Above him the hemlocks moaned with the wind. It swept through those broken cabin windows, through the
wide open entrance. As Wentworth watched, a cloud of greenish vapor poked tenuous fingers out through the door. They thickened rapidly, became heavy. They spread, denser than smoke, and writhed close to the surface of the snow. The vapor became a vast, snake-like cloud that filled the small clearing and filtered in among the trees.
Wentworth came slowly to his feet, hands clenched into fists at his side. That gas was like some monster of another, hideous world, a monster creeping out to harry and destroy. There was something horrible about the mere sight of its viscous coils.
He knew that only his swift, instantaneous flight had saved him.
It was an hour later, an hour of impatient waiting, of striding up and down in the black forest to fight the teeth of the cold, before Wentworth dared to enter the cabin. And even then he went cautiously, breathing lightly, sniffing for any vagrant traces of the gas that might lurk there. But the cabin was fresh and sharp as the wind that swept through the forest.
WENTWORTH returned for his pack, stuffed cloth into the broken window panes, closed the door and built a fire in the stove. He lighted a lantern and turned it low.
Then, in a bunk against the wall, he rigged a dummy. One window he covered entirely. In the other he left some of the glass fragments exposed. Through it, the dummy would be visible. Then Wentworth threw down a blanket against the wall, where it could not be seen from the window, and stretched out at full length.
He knew the assassin he had slain would not have worked alone. Nor would men with so horrible, so powerful and valuable a secret as this gas be satisfied to trust the cabin trap to remove an interloper. They would want to make sure, especially— Wentworth's mouth corners lifted wryly— especially if they found their dead comrade, with the Spider's dread seal, red as blood, upon his forehead.
Wentworth feared that the Professor, his usefulness ended, had been done away with. And the thought of that cold-blooded murder set the fires of a slow wrath burning within him. Who these criminals were, or what their purpose, the Spider did not know. But the Spider would learn.
He knew now only that the gas was poisonous and that it had vast power of expansion. But he respected Professor Cather, and if the Professor said his new discovery was so powerful that its possessor could conquer the world, there was full justification for that claim.
Wentworth could visualize the vast menace that such a gas could become in the hands of an unscrupulous organization, could guess at the horror, the death and the suffering it could cause.
His own course now lay clear before him. He could not invade the camp behind him singlehanded to search for the leader. He must capture whatever member of the gang came to make sure of his death. And he must learn through him the Professor's fate and the purpose of his organization.
For a long while Wentworth lay upon the blanket, waiting. Sleep gnawed at him. The vast symphony of the murmuring wind lulled his senses. The fatigue of the day's trek through the forest weighted his eyelids. And at long last, wearily, they closed::::
It was perhaps five minutes later that a new sound pierced the muted music of the wind. It was the squeaking whisper of boots upon the snow, stealthy footsteps that advanced slowly toward the cabin and its sleeping occupant.
Wentworth did not stir beneath the blanket. He lay as motionless as that dummy he had rigged upon the bunk. The footsteps halted, and a dark blur showed against the window pane, rose slowly until a man's gleaming eyes peered into the room.
FOR a full minute the man stared into the room, then, deliberately, he began to thrust inward the cloth that had been stuffed into the broken pane. It fell soundlessly to the floor and behind it, a cold wind filtered into the room. The air accomplished what the footsteps had not. It aroused Wentworth. But he did not sit up suddenly, did not move at all. He merely opened his eyes and, peering at the window, understood.
Now he moved quietly, rose to his feet. Even as he stood erect, a bare hairy hand thrust through the broken window. Between thumb and forefinger it held gingerly a small capsule, and Wentworth knew instantly what threatened. This was more of that horrible potent gas Professor Cather had invented. If those fingers opened, if that capsule broke, Wentworth was doomed! Even his speed could not get him across the room and out into the open before its swift- spreading death overtook him.
