Girse was staring at him with frenzy and horror in his cruel little eyes. The breath was tearing from his corded throat as though each would be his last.
"Master!" he gasped imploringly. "Doctor Satan! Stop"
The skin on his face and hands, dry and feverish-looking, suddenly began to crack.
"Stop the burning!" he pleaded in a shrill scream.
But Doctor Satan could only clench his hands and curse, raspingly, impotently. He had never dreamed of such a possibility, was utterly unprepared for it.
Girse shrieked again, and fell to the floor. Then his screams stopped. He was dead. But his body moved on, jerking and twisting as a tight-rolled bit of paper twists and jerks in consuming fire. . . .
"Keane!" whispered Doctor Satan, staring at the floor where a discolored spot was all that remained of his follower. His eyes were frightful. "By the devil, my master, he'll pay for that a thousand times over!"
4. The Screaming Three
At half-past twelve that night a solitary figure walked along the north side of the National State Building. The north side was the one the Lucian Photographic Supplies shop faced on; the side street. It was deserted save for the lone man.
The man slowed his pace as he saw a shining object hanging from the building wall about waist-high, a few yards ahead of him. He clenched his hands, then took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.
The man was Walter P. Kessler. And the flourish of the white handkerchief in the dimness of the street was a signal.
Across the street, four floors up in a warehouse, a man with a private detective's badge in his pocket put a pair of binoculars to his eyes. He watched Kessler, saw the shining object he was approaching, and nodded.
Kessler drew from his pocket an unaddressed envelope. In it were ten checks made out to the Lucifex Insurance Company. He grasped the receptacle for the checks in his left hand.
The receptacle was a cleverly molded skull, of silver, about two-thirds life size. There was a hole in the top of it. Kessler thrust the envelope securely into the hole.
The skull began to rise up the building wall, toward some unguessable spot in the tremendous cliff formed by seventy-nine stories of cut stone. Across the street the man with the binoculars managed at last to spot the thin wire from which the silver skull was suspended. He followed it up with his gaze.
It came from a window almost at the top of the building. The man grasped a phone at his elbow.
He did not dial operator. The phone had a direct line to the building across the way. He simply picked up the receiver and said softly: "Seventy-second floor, eighteenth window from the east wall. Hop it!"
In the National State Building a man at an improvised switchboard on the ground floor turned to another. "Seventy-second floor, eighteenth window from the east. Get everybody."
The second man ran toward the night elevator. He went from floor to floor. At each floor he opened the door and signaled. And on each floor two men, who had been watching the corridors along the north side, ran silently toward the other local elevators, which had shaft doors on every floor all the way up to the top. At the same time a third man, at the stairs, drew his gun as he prepared to guard more carefully yet the staircase,
