1
Satan's Incubator
Randolph Craig
CHAPTER ONE
City of the Damned
WHEN Dr. Skull came back to his office that morning, the dust was unusually thick on his desk. He looked about him with oddly young brown eyes. The bust of Galen on his bookshelf, the books themselves... No, Mrs. Timiny had not been in to clean, which was strange, for she had not missed a morning before in six years. Absently, then, Dr. Skull employed the black sleeve of his neat and ancient coat to rub the city grime from his desk top.
The old man frowned. He had seen much dust that morning during his calls, dust that lay unheeded in houses where misery had ended all thought of daily chores. He thought too, while his back straightened as against some invisible burden, that thus it must have been at the destruction of other cities, with the dust at last burying outraged ruins from the eyes of the future.
And now there was dust in his own office... Suddenly he wheeled about, at the whoosh of a falling weight hurtling through the half-open door. A cry died in the doctor's throat--for the thing that lay inside his threshold had once been a little boy.
He was Michael Timiny, one of the doctor's great army of godsons. Four years ago, Skull had brought him into the world--and now, with a great icy blast of outraged sorrow, the doctor knew he would see little Michael out of the world. One of the child's eyes was a gaping red hole; the left arm, clawed and tooth-marked, hung limp and gory at his side, and in at least one spot, through that torn little linen suit, Skull could see how the vitals had broken out o