Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 3 (1925-03).djvu/138

SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING
CHAPTERS

Professor Kurt Maquarri, a hunchback son who has been disinherited by his father, the great scientist Maquarri, has discovered a new element, called zodium, which gives him power over the human will. His nephew, Dr. Philip Olivier, the psychanalyst, has inherited the elder Maquarri's papers and the notebooks containing his scientific secrets.

The hunchback has given his stepdaughter, Joan Suffern, a ring, which, unknown to her, contains zodium. He has demonstrated his hypnotic control over Joan by sending out electronic force through his wishing machine, and she is therehy subject to his will so long as she wears the zodium ring. He sends her to Dr. Olivier to kill him by pressing the zodium ring against his neck. Dr. Olivier falls in love with her, but she, in obedience to the wishes of the hunchback at the wishing machine, presses the ring against his neck; a tiny needle darts from it and pours zodium poison into the young doctor's system; and Joan takes the papers and returns in a hypnotic trance to her stepfather, leaving Dr. Olivier apparently dead on the floor of his laboratory.

Dr. Olivier's life is saved by an antidote devised by himself during his own experiments along the same lines as those of Dr. Maquarri. The hunchback, his stepdaughter and his servant Felix, to whom Professor Maquarri has promised Joan, take ship for Joan's native island of Montserrat, where her uncle, Lord Hubert Charing, is about to build a million dollar museum out of a treasure fund obtained by his ancestors from the pirate Blackbeard. The hunchback, through the wishing machine and a zodium-handled magnifying glass that he gives to Lord Hubert, gets him to reveal the hiding place of the treasure. He plans to obtain this, and murder him as he has murdered Joan's mother, by zodium poisoning, which leaves no trace.

10

It was three weeks since Dr. Philip Olivier had met with the strange accident in his laboratory, and he was not yet himself, but he had insisted on picking up the threads of his work. There were still several grams of zodium in the Crookes tube on his table, and he wished to examine it. In the long torment of his enforced rest in bed, Dr. Olivier had exhausted his theories concerning Joan and the attempted murder. His heart was heavy, and old habit alone made him go once more to the laboratory table that had formerly centered his interest.

Now, as he held the tube in his hand and studied its contents, a strange nebulous vision came to him. It was Joan he saw—Joan whom he could never dismiss from his mind or heart—but he saw her as he had never known her in reality: a struggling, eager Joan, fighting some strange{{right|137