Spider (44 page)

"You cannot help me," the thing said, after it had answered all the questions. There was the ghost of manhood in those harsh tones. "I prefer—to die."

"Now, now, Mr. White. . . ." Steele protested, half-heartedly. Hell, why shouldn't the thing prefer to die! Who was he to interrupt that choice? "If you'll just trust us, we'll do so much for you. . . . We'll make you well again!"

The man said, "Fool." That was all, and the nurse led him away.

Steele stared after him, trembling. He was unaware of another patient in front of him, a patient whose mind had gone, who struggled wordlessly, and had to be held by two strong young men.

"Fool." What had that meant? It had been so concise, so unemotional. . . . Steele saw another doctor at his elbow. There were a lot of them standing around.

"Here," he shouted at his fellow-practitioner. "You take the cases. I've got to see somebody."

It wasn't quite suspicion—it was more like a passionate disquietude. So much suffering, so much madness. . . . Fool, the monster had called him, after saying also, I prefer to die.

That living, suffering organism who had once known a man named White—he'd sounded so like an educated man. A little like Steele's usual well-mannered patients. There might be something, maybe neuro-vascular tests that could relieve him. Perhaps it had been done already, but Steele knew a million men could take the same experiment and only one of them read anything like a correct diagnosis out of it.

He'd have to check with Borden on that! Borden would have to give him that much of a free hand. It might be simple; there might be a simple magic solution that would make the world right again, that would send Tony Steele back to his fine offices on West End Avenue, where he could believe again in the innate cheeriness of things.

Monster and nurse were vanishing down the corridor. He knew they were going to the treatment rooms on the floor above. Borden was in charge of all that—Borden was there, too.

Steele went down the corridor after them, but he took a different elevator. Somehow, he didn't want to face White again. . . .

Borden was sitting in that important-looking office, giving directions to tired and respectful-looking doctors. Steele considered that he hadn't been paid a cent, and so owed no respect to anyone.

"Give me a laboratory," he demanded of Borden without prelude.

Borden's eyes assumed a surprised expression. No one else spoke. "Why should I?" Borden inquired.

Steele, a nerve specialist, attacked the problem from that angle almost out of habit. "It's their whole systems," he explained. "I'm sure of it. There isn't a breakdown in any one place—it's the whole system getting wrong stimuli, as nerves transmitting wrong stimuli to the body cells. Almost as though they were reacting to a different environment—as different, say, as though they'd all been transplanted to the moon."

"Pardon me if I seem skeptical," Borden remarked wearily, "but I've been approaching the problem from so practical an angle myself, that I haven't much patience with theories. Medicine is medicine— it's complicated, detailed, difficult. . . . And you don't get cures by saying your patients have been transplanted to the moon."

"I didn't say that," Steele answered hotly.

Borden shrugged. "Very well. You're needed downstairs, but if it's going to make you any happier, you can have your laboratory. I'd suggest, however, that you first take a good look into the ward, unless it's against your theories to clutter your mind with factual details about the people you're supposed to cure."

The two older doctors in Borden's office snickered, and the three younger ones looked sympathetically crushed. Steele felt the hot flush under his cheeks, checked an impulse to tell Borden to go to hell. The old coot was getting so darned officious lately. . . .

"I'll take a look," he said, mustering some kind of calm into his tone. Borden pointed to the large door on his left.

"Right down that corridor," Borden directed. "If you have the heart to waste time on theories after you see those people, you're a harder man than I think."

But he wasn't hard! Tony Steele only wished he were. He was sorry now, that he made the gesture of going into the ward. As he walked down the short corridor between Borden's office and the ward, he had an overwhelming sense of repugnance. He knew they were sick, not ghastly, only sick. . . . But he could smell them even before he entered the ward. . . .

As he stepped across the threshold, an eerie howl, like the baying of a dog, sent the short hair bristling up his spine. Then the howl turned into a chorus, and Steele turned, would have fled, but a shapeless and gelid
force
grasped him, pulled him back into the room.

The monsters—what did they want with him?

As they circled about, pawing and clutching at him, he screamed that he was a doctor, that he had come on a routine examination.

The last thing he heard, before the blood roaring in his ears drowned out all external sound, was the wild unearthly laughter that greeted his protest. He realized that he was being held as a rabbit is held by a pack of dogs . . . that naked teeth were ripping the covering of his flesh . . . searching for veins and arteries. . . .

Weakly, he could see his own blood dribbling richly over their enormous chins, the stuff of his life. He could feel the seeping of cold air into his emptying arteries. . . .

And then he saw the monster called White standing a little way apart, arms folded over his chest.

It seemed in a dream of drumming revulsion that White's lips moved, repeating the word, "Fool." And now Steele knew what he had meant when he said, "I prefer to die."

Borden—Borden had sent him here. Borden must have known, and wanted him out of the way, after he proposed a cure!

If he could only make them understand, these people! Understand that he was worth more to them alive. . . .

The last thing he saw was White walking toward him, but he never knew whether White reached him or not. . . .

Chapter Eight
When Hell Locked Its Gates

AS JEFFREY FAIRCHILD drove up out of the tunnel under the river, he looked again at the sky. Suddenly, he stiffened at the wheel. The purple beacon atop the Victory Building went out even as he looked at it. It was out for a full minute, while Jeffrey's roadster wormed its way through the nearly empty Manhattan streets—and then it flashed on again.

But now it was a different light. That illusion of topless height had gone; the beacon's tip lost itself visibly into darkness. The glow was steadier, without that eerie sparkle which had given it a queer light of its own.

Jeffrey could have sworn that now the beacon was dead and cold as it had not been before . . . Perhaps, he hazarded, there was an investigation going on as a result of his warning broadcast. He stamped on the gas pedal, and raced northward.

An ambulance siren's scream warned him of his recklessness. As he slowed down, he heard others—ambulances, police cars, private automobiles whose drivers seemed to jam one hand to their horns, as they bore down, all toward the same point—the Victory Building in Columbus Circle.

Jeffrey traveled with them, and it was soon unmistakable what grim cavalcade he had joined.

The monsters were answering a summons that had been tacit in the strange broadcast from Station WVI. In terrifying quantities, they had come from their secret places, with their twisted and hideous bodies, with unimaginable things reflected in their wide unblinking eyes. . . .

And then Jeffrey saw the windows, knew why they came. For even behind drawn curtains, a splash of purple threaded out from various lofty angles of the Victory Building's interior—that was the life-light for creatures of sentient death, the ultra-violet salvation of the dreadful and pitiful malformed things that breathed and moved. He parked his car, and pressed into the crowd.

Near the doorway, the pack thickened oppressively. From the harried policemen who were keeping the thing from becoming a stampede, he knew the authorities were in on this, at least to the extent of cooperating. How much more did they really know. . . . How far did they really trust that surprise broadcast from the new station?

Soon Jeffrey would know . . . a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, and someone said, "Jeffrey Fairchild!" in a voice almost too weary for surprise

Jeff looked up into the haggard face of Captain Manning, a grey-haired and soldierly police officer, in uniform. "Hello, Captain," Jeffrey said quietly. "You're just the man I want to see."

Captain Manning said, "Is it important, Mr. Fairchild? If it's not, I've got my hands full enough. . . ."

"Damned important," said Jeffrey grimly. "I want to search the Victory Building, and I want you to come with me."

"It's been done," said Manning tersely. He added, in a lower voice, "You shouldn't be here, Mr. Fairchild. The Commissioner's in there now, talking to the head of this medical committee, whatever its name is. I think they're talking about you. You'll probably never hear of it—it's so cockeyed, but if you want to wait at the entrance and talk to the Commissioner when he comes out. . . ."

Jeffrey was known throughout the force as one of the Commissioner's oldest friends, and though he would never have used that influence to deter the humblest rookie cop from his duties, his word carried weight with the entire department. "Suppose you tell me what it's all about," he suggested. "Why are they talking about me, and who's the head of the Committee, as it calls itself?"

Manning swore, then answered, "Some of these docs are damfools when they get away from medicine. Fellow named Borden—a big doctor, they say—is boss in there. He's been talking high, wide and handsome, about what the department ought to do to you for the Mid-City Hospital fire."

Jeffrey gasped, and Manning continued, "Of course, there's nothing for you to worry about. We'll settle that headache before it gets to you."

Jeffrey's lowered eyelids almost concealed the hard thoughtfulness of his gaze. Borden! Borden, whom the monsters in his own basement had accused of almost unbelievable malpractice . . . Borden, whom he himself had elevated to a position of trust and importance in that ruined hospital . . . Borden, head of this mysterious Committee . . . the streets were violet with filtered light, but the lights in Jeffrey's brain were red.

He thanked Manning, and pushed back toward the entrance. If he could make Tom Wiley, the Commissioner, understand what was going on . . . the Mid-City Hospital had been Jeffrey's, and at the core of Borden's guilty soul, there must be a desperate, snakelike urge to accuse before he was accused himself.

Borden couldn't be dismissed as a medical man gone haywire out of his own sphere.

There was a man behind Borden—maybe a devil, the monsters had told Jeff. And that could only be the Octopus himself! Everything Borden said or did would be calculated to dupe organized medicine and organized justice until it was too late to retrench, until New York was delivered over to the enemy. . . .

But it wasn't yet too late. It couldn't be. There'd been no report to the public of an official investigation, and Jeff could reach Tom Wiley before one was made. . . .

But what if Tom Wiley never came out of that building? No—the man he had to reach was Borden! And the report that must be made was the revelation promised by the Skull Killer!

Jeffrey found himself in the great entrance hall of the Victory Building. He had seen other skyscrapers when they were new, he had seen the Queen Mary when that giant floating palace had first docked in New York; he was accustomed to the city's newest and finest hotels. But he had never—not in all his life—seen an interior like that great hall.

It was lofty, nearly five stories high, with starkly subdued indirect lighting that gave the impression of unfathomable violet depths and heights. Each wall panel held its mural—and so cleverly had the murals been designed, that the figures represented there also gave that topless, boundless impression. Jeffrey realized that the representations were simple, most of them merely huge, realistic, portraits or impressions, of contemporary scenes from the city. Yet somehow, they seemed to be the work of an artist with torture in his eyes. . . .

Then it came to him. They were exactly like the thing the city was fast turning into! An eerie and uncertain place, with limitless possibilities of stark tragedy, of malformed beings with crippled, tortured souls!

Jeffrey shuddered, and made for an elevator. The crowd that had been so dense in the street outside had ample room in the hall. . . . Here, even those incredibly warped figures seemed dwarfed to inconspicuousness by the chamber's shadowed proportions.

"I want to see Dr. Borden," Jeffrey told the uniformed elevator man, whose hard eyes measured him.

A denial seemed to hover on the other's lips.

Jeffrey said, "I'm Mr. Fairchild—Jeffrey Fairchild."

If Manning's warning hadn't been unfounded, and if the things he himself suspected of Borden were true, that name should have an effect on a henchman of Borden's—and it did. The hard look in the elevator man's eyes was replaced by a queer purposefulness. "Fortyfifth floor, sir," he muttered.

Jeffrey entered the car. He noticed that he was the only occupant of the elevator, which made no stops between the first floor and the forty-fifth.

In the gleamingly sterile corridor of the forty-fifth floor, a woman in white sat at a desk. The place looked exactly like a hospital, Jeffrey thought. This must be the headquarters of the Citizens' Emergency Medical Committee. But a queer sort of hospital, for no sound echoed through the long corridors, there were no red-cheeked young girls in blue-and-white uniforms wheeling trays and smiling at internes. About it all was that ominous sterility which seemed to

extend farther than germ life.

"I'd like to see Dr. Borden," Jeffrey told the woman at the desk.

Mechanically, she inquired, "Who's calling, please?"

"Jeffrey Fairchild."

The woman's eyes stared up at him. "Straight down that corridor, then turn to your left."