Terrors (9 page)

“Thanks, Joe.”

McCracken’s voice was half an octave higher than Van Horn’s, his delivery friendlier and less portentous than the chief newsman’s.

“There’s still no explanation
of our sudden cold spell, and no indication when it’s going to end. Today’s high temperature was thirty-six degrees. Expected low tonight in the high teens or low twenties. There’s a steady snowfall taking place, with expected accumulations of ten to twelve inches. Tomorrow is expected to be just like today.”

McCracken paused for a beat, then ended with his customary tagline, “Here’s wishing
you clear skies and pleasant breezes, Seacoast City, and we’ll see you tomorrow, sure as the sun comes up!”

Mention of the death of the unidentified man found by the children ice skating on the frozen Saturn River, and that of the unfortunate Mary Esther Jamison in her elevator car in the Mercury-Baltic Building, would shortly disappear from the city’s newspapers and radio reports. Word was about
to go out from City Hall to the media moguls of the metropolis. In the name of maintaining public order and avoiding panic, the mysterious deaths were about to be hushed up.

But word of the third mysterious death would not be so easily suppressed. The victim this time was none other than Ellen Hansen van Burckhart, heiress to the van Burckhart department store chain. Her body was discovered by
her maid, Betty Wilson. Mrs. van Burckhart was ninety-four years of age at the time of her death. Her husband, the founder and builder of the van Burckhart chain, had left his entire fortune to her, much to the displeasure of assorted children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and assorted relatives and hangers-on. Mrs. van Burckhart had further disappointed these heirs by outliving her husband
by more than four decades.

In view of the millionairess’ advanced age and fragile health, the maid had not been excessively shocked by her discovery. She
had brought her employer’s breakfast of tea and toast with just a touch of strawberry jam, to Mrs. van Burckhart’s bedroom. Such was the millionairess’ preference, and had been for many years. Betty Wilson had placed the folding tray across
her employer’s lap before she noticed Mrs. van Burckhart’s extreme pallor. Next, she noticed that Mrs. van Burckhart was so cold that moisture from the air around her was beginning to condense. When Betty Wilson touched her employer’s hand and realized how cold and rigid it was, the truth became obvious.

Not so obvious, and in fact unnoticed by Betty Wilson, was the stream of tiny white specks
moving away from the body and toward the slightly open window. Mrs. van Burckhart had been committed to the cultivation of fresh air, even in Seacoast City’s freakishly winter-like summer.

In luxurious penthouses and cramped tenement dwellings throughout Seacoast City, in the suburban homes of industrialists and the tidy cottages of working families, in a hundred thousand dwellings or more, radios
were tuned to WSCR. Seacoast Citizens high and humble leaned over their radios, hoping for word of the end of the unprecedented cold.

They were prepared to hear a jingle, an announcer, even a playlet designed to part them from their dimes and dollars in exchange for the latest model automobile, the newest and most improved toothpaste or soap powder, the energizing breakfast cereal or the druggist’s
nostrum that would fill their lives with excitement and their families with joy.

They heard neither news of relief from the cold nor messages urging them to empty their pockets or their purses. Instead they heard a hard clicking followed by a discordant screech and finally the tones of a cold, harsh male voice.

“This is Lord Gorgon, chief servant of the Scorpion Queen, speaking. Prepare yourselves,
Seacoast Citizens, to hear the terms of The Scorpion Queen. Her demands are simple. In exchange for meeting them, the snow will cease to fall on your buildings and your thoroughfares. The ice will melt from your river, your harbor, the lakes in your parks.”

There was a pause. In living rooms across the city men and women, puzzled, frightened, looked at one another questioningly.

“What has happened
to Seacoast City is a warning to the rest of the
nation. The oligarchs in Washington have interfered in the affairs of Europe for too long. They have sent food and munitions to the weak, corrupt nations of that continent in a vain attempt to halt the liberating armies of the glorious leader. Unless this unwarranted meddling stops at once, every port in the United States will be frozen as Seacoast
City has been. There is no need to reply to this message. The Scorpion Queen and her ally in Europe will observe the ports of America. Should this nation fail to comply, it will die in a new ice age!”

Who was speaking? What had happened? Engineers in the WSCR control booth studied their dials, trained men tending the station’s transmitters conferred frantically with their superiors, trying to
unravel the new state of affairs.

The station’s signal had been hijacked.

Frantic messages exchanged with the staffs of the Seacoast City’s other radio stations—WGVG, WHIQ, WISP, WBLU—revealed that those stations, too, had been hijacked. The clickings, the screech, the mysterious message that had gone out over the airwaves from WSCR had been carried by every station in the city.

In the Mayor’s
office in Seacoast City Hall, a meeting was taking place. The Mayor and the city’s Chief of Police were conferring as to steps to be taken.

In an outer office, a male aide to the Mayor and a female secretary were seated, their heads close together, a small radio on the secretary’s desk tuned to the stylings of Wally Carson, the nation’s latest romantic crooner. Accompanied by an army of violins
and an ocean of harps the crooner was pledging his undying love to the object of his affection. The Mayor’s male aide and female secretary were holding hands across her desktop and gazing passionately into each other’s eyes when the crooner was interrupted by a hard clicking and a discordant screech.

The cold male voice began to speak.

Moments later the male aide and the female secretary rushed
into the Mayor’s office. The Mayor and the Chief of Police leaped to their feet and followed the Mayor’s employees to the outer office in time to hear the concluding ultimatum.

Again, there was a clicking. Again there was a screech. Then the crooning of Wally Carson resumed as if nothing untoward had taken place. The musical program had been from a remote hookup at the Treble Clef, Seacoast City’s
favorite supper club. The city’s upper crust and its daring youth were heeding the advice of the city’s leaders and
keeping up their usual way of life. The well-dressed young men and attractive young women sharing the victuals and the music at the Treble Clef never realized what had happened.

But Mayor Howard Harkness and Chief Alf O’Brien knew.

“I suspected as much, Chief. This isn’t just freakish
weather. I should have known that somebody was behind it.”

The chief of police reached into a uniform pocket and extracted a roll of multicolored disks. He popped a couple into his mouth and chewed. “Sorry, Mr. Mayor. Ulcer’s acting up.”

“No surprise there, Chief. I haven’t been sleeping too well, myself. To each man his ailments, eh?”

Chief O’Brien grunted his agreement.

“I’ve never heard
of these two, Mr. Mayor. Lord Gorgon, The Scorpion Queen—sounds like a couple of kids playing make-believe, playing dress-up for a Halloween party.”

The mayor nodded. His iron-gray hair was rumpled, his usually handsome features blotchy and his eyes red from lack of sleep.

“I’ve heard of them, Chief. I know them all too well.”

“Well, don’t you think I ought to know, then?” Chief O’Brien pushed
himself up from the leather chair opposite the mayor’s desk. “If these scoundrels have the power to change the weather—if they can turn summer into winter—they’re a menace to society. We’ve got to act against them, Mr. Mayor!”

Mayor Harkness rubbed his temples wearily.

“No question about that, Chief.”

“I think you’d better tell me what’s going on, Mr. Mayor. It’s unconscionable that the chief
of police of Seacoast City has never heard of these people, and that the mayor knows all about them and hasn’t told the chief. In fact, if I don’t have your confidence, sir, enough to be told about such a threat to the city, I wonder why you haven’t asked for my resignation. If you want it, Mr. Mayor, it will be on your desk just as fast as I can scratch pen across paper!”

If Lord Gorgon’s message,
broadcast over each of Seacoast City’s radio stations, had not been enough, the threat to that metropolis was made manifest the next morning.

The Seacoast City Superbas had been scheduled to play host to the Green Valley Hawks, but in view of Seacoast City’s abnormal weather, the game had been moved to the warmer confines of Green Valley. The entire Superba team, plus its trainer, batboys, coaches,
and Manager Mack
Houlihan, had piled onto a chartered bus. The bus, its feeble heaters strained to the limit and its heavy tires fitted with chains, had set out through the city’s streets, headed for the Vespucci Bridge and the highway to Green Valley.

Only one member of the organization had missed the bus. This was backup catcher Barney Shea, a onetime big leaguer who continued to play the game
in the forlorn hope of making it back to the bigs despite his weak throwing arm and his total inability to hit a curve-ball. Barney’s wife had given birth to their fifth daughter at half-past three that morning. Barney had stayed at her side as long as he could, then set out to join his teammates.

When he realized that he had missed the team bus by the narrowest of margins, he commandeered a
taxicab and had the driver pursue the bus. They had nearly caught the bigger vehicle when the bus veered off the roadway just before reaching the Vespucci Bridge and plunged, nose-first, to the ice-covered Saturn River.

The taxi driver pulled over. He and Barney jumped from the cab and raced to the river bank. The front end of the bus had smashed through the ice covering the river and the bus
was slowly sinking through the opening. Barney was able to wrench open the bus’s emergency door and clamber in, only to find his teammates dead white and ice cold. As he stood, horrified, he felt the strong hands of the cab driver seize him by collar and elbow and drag him from the doomed bus seconds before it sank through the ice.

Neither Barney nor his rescuer noticed the stream of tiny white
specks that flowed from the open emergency door and across the cracked ice.

By the time derricks pulled the bus from the icy water, there were no survivors. The cadavers were transported to the City Morgue, with all-too-familiar results.

Meanwhile, in a penthouse suite atop the Central Railroad Tower, a usually graceful figure bent over a dizzying array of electrical devices. Needles swung on
meters. Bright points skittered erratically across the faces of vacuum tubes that resembled miniature motion picture screens. A typewriter seemed to operate itself, clattering out columns of figures. To the casual observer, it might have been powered by a ghost, but in fact it was connected by a heavy cable to one of the most advanced scientific analyzers ever built by human hands.

The figure
bent over these devices was clad in a white scientist’s
tunic. Her dark countenance and glossy hair stood in shocking contrast to her clothing.

She looked away from a panel of meters, studied the columns of figures produced by the typewriter, and turned toward a large-scale grid-map of Seacoast City. In the center of the map, the gridwork of city streets and tall buildings was interrupted by
the world-famous Molly Pitcher Park and its shimmering Poseidon Pond. In happier times, lovers paddled boats on the surface of the Pond while artists stood at their easels, striving to capture the beauty of this man-made speck of paradise. Now the Pond was frozen and children skated on its smooth surface.

The white-coated figure placed a pair of sensitive earphones over her head. She stared at
the map, moving her head ever so slightly to the left or the right, up or down. What she had discovered seemed unbelievable, but she knew it was true.

The mysterious signal from Lord Gorgon and his superior, The Scorpion Queen, seemed to be coming from Poseidon Pond. More precisely, as the white-clad scientist’s devices showed, it was coming from directly beneath the Pond.

The white-clad scientist
returned to her former position. She flicked a series of switches, then turned a carefully calibrated control. A peculiar light played upon her, or perhaps the suggestion of a light. It might have been a deep orange in tint, or then again it might have been something at the violet end of spectrum, something that teased the optic nerve, hinting at shades and images better left unimagined.

One
of the vacuum tubes before the scientist came to life. Within it could be seen the face of a woman. Her skin was deathly white, her lips a dark crimson. Her eyes had just the slightest suggestion of the Orient in their shape; their color was that of fine emeralds. She wore a shimmering, high-necked garment, decorated with sinuous embroidery. But most striking was her hair, which seemed to waver and
writhe with a life all its own, suggestive of Medusa, the snake-headed sorceress of myth.

“Nzambi,” the figure hissed, “I have heard of you and your work. I have seen your image in news reports. What is it that you wish?”

“You are The Scorpion Queen?” the white-coated woman asked.

“I am. And I am busy. State your business, Nzambi.”

“You are the cause of the cold wave. You and your henchman,
Lord Gorgon. You have demanded that your terms be met, but you have
not stated your demands. Do so now.”

The snake-haired figure laughed derisively. “There are no terms, Nzambi. I was merely toying with those fools in City Hall, and with the rest of Seacoast City. I could ask for millions of dollars. What good would money do me? I have all I need and I can get more whenever I need it.”

“Then
what do you want?”

“Oh, you fool. Don’t you read the morning newspapers? Don’t you listen to the radio, or see the newsreels at any movie theater? A terrible war is coming, one that will make the World War of the past pale by comparison. In fact, the war has already started on other continents. It will come to America, you can rest assured. And when it does, this weak and pleasure-sodden country
will be unready for it. What I have done to Seacoast City is just a test. Soon the other metropolises of his country will suffer the same fate. Imagine frozen harbors in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Detroit, every major port in this country, frozen solid.”