The City Condemned To Hell by Randolph Craig -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER ONE - When the Beast Hungers THE young nurse nodded downward at the mummy-like thing on the cot in Ward Seven. "She's been trying to move, Doctor," she said. "Are you sure you need the stimulants?" Dr. Skull nodded absently. His keen brown eyes, the liveliest thing in his gentle old face, were appraising the swathed figure of Mrs. Purvins, and there was an ancient satisfaction in them, ancient as medicine itself. He remembered the day, almost a month ago, when a frightened woman stripped herself in his office, and whispered, "Is it cancer, Doctor. Will I die soon?" She had been ghastly, that woman, with the hard black growth ridging her body like the tentacles of a deep sea monster. Ghastly even to the case-hardened eye of the surgeon. There had been something about the growth that suggested more than medical abnormality, something uniform and patterned, as though a deliberate perverted will had planned it so. "Only the skin," Skull had told her. "It's operable. There's a good chance. You're young---you have a young woman's heart, a young woman's capacity for recovery..." She had been brave, that frightened little Mrs. Purvins. And so she had taken the chance, a greater chance than her surgeon cared to tell her, and for weeks she had lain in a ward cot at the Mid-City Hospital, too sick to speak, swathed like a mummy, but blessedly, beautifully alive! Alive, and with the malignant growth ripped out root and branch. Yet her greatest battle was just beginning. With justifiable triumph Dr. Skull began to snip at the white bandages and behind curtains veiling the procedure from other occupants of Ward Seven, his surgeon's handiwork came to light. To no one but a doctor or a nurse, used to the ravages of suffering, would Mrs. Purvins have seemed anything but a horribly scarred and suppurating grotesque imposed upon a human form. But to the two who watched her, she was neither unbeautiful nor disheartening. "It's a marvelous job, Doctor," the nurse said fervently. "Such a clean incision...I don't think there's another surgeon in the world who could have accomplished anything with her. And a man with your skill, giving all his time to charity cases...Sometimes I just don't understand it." It was more than either skill or charity that the case of Mrs. Purvins had called for, but the nurse didn't know that. And even now, Dr. Skull, his brown eyes fixed almost unbelievingly on Mrs. Purvins, wondered if he had succeeded. For she had been more than a charity patient with cancer. Her poor scarred body had been the battleground between Dr. Skull and whatever it was that had been foisted on her--those marks that were like nothing so much as the puckered souvenirs of some cruelly hungry orifice, sucking at her skin! A battleground for salvation against a fate medically uncharted--Dr. Skull stared into his patient's eyes, and her own eyes stared back unblinkingly. Suddenly he realized that those large grey eyes, which had gazed on Ward Seven through slits in the bandages for days, had not blinked before, either...No, he could not remember seeing her eyelids move! His brows drew together thoughtfully. No, not since the operation! THE raw sutures would heal in time, he knew. The body would be smooth again, and skin--grafting could take care of the scars that might be left on her face. But--those markings! And those eyes! He made a hurried examination, and a ghastly suspicion crossed his mind. "Nurse," he said brusquely, "please leave me alone with the patient for a few moments." Alone with Mrs. Purvins, Dr. Skull repeated his examination more carefully--but his hands still shook as though with ague, and his lined old face was drawn and pale. The sick woman seemed barely aware of the hands which felt for her pulse, strove to locate her heartbeat--she did not even try to talk, and her fixed, staring grey eyes had somehow an eerie, glistening witlessness. Dr. Skull took a blood sample, called the nurse back in, and went to the laboratories on the third floor. It was incredible, this thing that had apparently happened to Mrs. Purvins; yes, utterly, fantastically unbelievable...But still it made his palms wet and his heart race! Under the white light of the laboratory lamp he tested the blood sample. The thin fluid did not clot, didn't even smell like blood... And then he steeled himself to the ultimate chemical analysis. He felt his pulse pound in his veins as once more he repeated the test, to make sure. There could be no mistake! The blood was of the temperature and approximate consistency of sea-water! A telephone sounded in the laboratory anteroom. Someone murmured, "For you, Dr. Skull." It was the nurse from Ward Seven. "Dr. Skull," she said tensely, "your patient, Doctor--I started to take her pulse, and--and she hasn't any..." Softly, Dr. Skull put the phone back on its receiver. No pulse...? He had found worse than that. Mrs. Purvins hadn't a heartbeat, either. And yet, when he had taken the bandages off, she had given every outward indication that the operation had been a success. Sea-water! He opened a drawer marked with his own name, rummaged in it for the newspaper clipping which had first interested him in Mrs. Purvins: "Delirious Woman Picked Up Near East River," the headline read... They had found her, battered and half--crazed, the victim of an inexplicable assault that left her almost drained of blood. And she had moaned, repeatedly something about an octopus... Dr. Skull frowned. There are no octopi in the East River--nor anywhere in that part of the Atlantic coastal waters, for that matter. And from his later conversations with Mrs. Purvins, after the first scars of that attack had healed, leaving in their wake a still more inexplicable cancerous growth, he was sure that her attacker had been no monster of the deep, but rather some equally monstrous human being. Yet the sea was the cradle of all life, for before living organisms had made their slow progress onto land, eons ago, unicellular creatures had taken their nourishment and vitality from the water of primordial oceans. And all life still--even man himself--must carry the chemical composition of ocean water within itself. All living protoplasm cells on land are bathed in blood, which has the same elements as sea-water. The lower forms of life are still bound to ocean. But blood and sea-water, as media of life, are separated by a million years of evolution--and it was those millions of years that had slipped from the heritage of Mrs. Purvins! Either the phenomenon was inherent in those strange puckered markings which had been unlike ordinary cancer--or else, he--Dr. Skull--had created an atavism! Dr. Skull rushed back to Ward Seven. Surgery couldn't--but it must have been his own surgery, his clean simple excision of a cancerous growth. Yet what strange, eerie quirk of the laws of chance had upset in this woman a balance older than the oldest mountain ranges? He brushed past the curtains which still veiled Mrs. Purvins from the rest of Ward Seven. And then he paused, some deep-seated instinct muffled the cry in his throat... Mrs. Purvins' mouth was fastened like a suction pump on the nurse's bosom, and in the staring grey eyes there was stark, maddened hunger! DR. SKULL seized his patient's shoulders, his muscular fingers pulled against that sucking, intractable force even as he gasped at the hideous strength of those hungry lips...Then, with a soft whoosh, he pulled her clear. The nurse dropped like a dead weight, with a three-inch circle of raw muscle bleeding over her heart, and even more terrifying in its implications, he saw the shredded, torn remnants of part of her uniform on the floor! The Thing that had been his patient turned its shining unhuman eyes on the doctor. Suddenly it reared--not on its legs, but with a swift upward surge that seemed to involve every molecule of matter in its body. He felt the white surgeon's jacket torn from him as though it were cheesecloth, and suddenly he understood why the nurse had been unable to give alarm when she had been attacked. The Thing's clammy hand slapped against his mouth, jammed into his throat, nearly suffocating him, while, with the swiftness of a striking snake, that terrible mouth fastened on his shoulder, its suction rending his skin, tearing with intolerable pain at the muscular flesh beneath. He lunged desperately with arms and legs--felt himself free, and gasped for air. He cried out then, trying to call for help as his staring eyes saw his erstwhile patient rear up at the window, and with a peculiarly undulating movement slip outside. He staggered after it, his fingers clutching the sill as the Thing descended the fire-escape with unbelievable rapidity...And then he saw something else that momentarily caused him to forget his pain, and his horror. As the Thing passed the third floor, a shakily prehensile arm whirled a net from the window, trapped the creature that had been Mrs. Purvins, and pulled her back inside the hospital. And that, he knew, was one of the windows opening from the maternity ward! He heard himself shouting orders to the internes who were streaming into the curtained enclosure. The room was swaying crazily about him, but someone had to look after the young nurse who was lying unconscious on the floor. And someone had to capture the monster that a short while ago had been his patient, Mrs. Purvins; someone had to capture and kill the monstrous thing that had trapped her. One of the internes was applying a hasty dressing to his shoulder wound when Dr. Borden, head of the h...
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