Böcker av Grant Stockbridge

What chance had Richard Wentworth-alone-of crushing Red Feather, an amazing murder mogul who drafted legions of innocent New Yorkers into his vile service by the infliction of unbearable, scientifically applied pain? Read, in this strong, book length novel, about the Spider's weird, pulse-quickening battle with the Torture Trust!

Over New York had swept the Master's dread Black Police-wiping out the last organized resistance to their ruthless Underworld rule of the Empire State! Only Richard Wentworth, his forces scattered, could hope to succeed where thousands had failed-and, attired in the Spider's somber garb, strike one last desperate blow at the master-murderer who had sacked a state to make a fortune out of dead men's bones!

A blood-red mailed fist crashed into the shadowy dens of New York's underworld, dangling the promise of vast loot for alliance, and a threat of stark horror for betrayal. The answer came swiftly in an orgy of killing and rapine-the Red Hand ruled all crimeland! Richard Wentworth, hastening to set the Spider's might against the new terror, was trapped in a murder net with Nita van Sloan, branded a policeman's slayer in the Red Hand's grip! Only the Spider could hope to win through this criminal army to the devil-brain behind that fist. And the Spider must battle alone, against time-and a foe who coldly put a price on wholesale, ruthless slaughter!

It was a scarlet scorpion that reached Richard Wentworth, warning him that the Far East had crept forth from its Chinatown lair to raid New York! Victims were dying with a blood orchid in their hearts, and the Dragon screamed! With the police helpless, and Manhattan paralyzed, only Wentworth, in the Spider's somber guise, could hope to battle this Prince of Darkness who was looting a metropolis to found his evil Empire!

Sere, ghastly, the Severed Hand brought its grisly warning to New York. Its citizens must pay the extortioner's price or die, their living bodies slowly, agonizingly transformed into rigid mummies! The police were helpless, and only Richard Wentworth, in the Spider's weird garb, could wage battle-against the master murder-chemist who killed to corral a fortune!

"Your souls are mine-when I speak, you will obey!" From the bowels of the shaking earth itself rose the satanic ultimatum that threatened to send America's greatest city up in flames! For the hordes of Hades, ruled by a devilish dictator, had turned New York into an Underground Kingdom of Crime, and helpless thousands died, strangling, when Hell's emperor loosed his slaying devil-dust! Reeking of sulphur and brimstone, it floated over Manhattan, leaving death in its wake. Only one man-Richard Wentworth, as the Spider-could hope to battle this Mephistopheles of Murder-who had blasted a city and whose satanic laughter was the signal that loosed the kill-maddened Legions of Lucifer!

Sinisterly beckoning, the long bony finger signaled Manhattan to its mass death-slaying hundreds of helpless victims who dared sink into a sleep from which there could be no awakening this side of hell! While the Underworld's lawless hordes looted, only Richard Wentworth, as the Spider, dared fight, die and fight again for a fear-crazed people against a murder-Morpheus whose human quarry drowsed into death-and whose grim weapon was a Slaying Sandman sworn to turn New York into a Slumberland of Slaughter!

No criminal dared testify against another, while the Whisper was crime-emperor of New York-and the forces of the law were powerless against the ravages of the Underworld! For when the Whisper's eerie warning fell over Manhattan men died, slashed to bloody bits by a weapon that was invisible but killed horribly! In that awe-struck city of riotous crime, where a murmuring voice brought instantaneous death, Richard Wentworth, in the Spider's strange garb, took up a doomed people's cause-fighting a Whispering Fury that loosed its thunderbolts in a tornado's teeth and slew foully to pile up a fortune in streamlined corpses!

Down from the bleak Kentucky hills swept the stark-naked mob of murder-maddened Blancos-sacking and slaying as they came! Neither steel nor bullet could stem that terror-tide of man-made albino monsters, whipped to a frenzy of lust by their criminal chief. Eastward they crept until New York, itself, was at their mercy, and human victims, bloodied and outraged, lay in their path. Once again Richard Wentworth, in the Spider's disguise of doom, fought alone to wipe out crime's crowning horror and save mankind from death!

Like an eerie devil-dawn, that green death-ray spread its lethal shadow over New York-burning to smoking crisps the helpless hundreds who dared its path. For the Eye of Flame had loosed his fire-fiends upon America's proudest city, and, as prisons poured forth their criminals, and the underworld came into its terrible own, no man could hope to combat that ray of death. Single-handed, Richard Wentworth, in the Spider's gruesome garb, dared the Flame-fighting for an entire people's safety against a monster who had learned to make millions out of human misery and the charred cinders that had once been men!

Before the horrified eyes of the Senate's jammed galleries, that revered Senator died by his own hand. And Richard Wentworth, who had reached Washington in response to the newspaper agony column's personal, "In the name of democratic humanity, come to Washington before September 9..." knew that this marked only the beginning of a yogi-ridden dictator's reign. Behind that welter of machine guns and storm troops moved the Cobra, striking at the nation's very chief-and the Spider was face to face with the strangest battle ever fought by man!

Ruthless, invulnerable, that Scarred Hand reached out to destroy the entire law machine of New York-blasting into merciless oblivion those juries which dared convict even a single criminal. In that twilight of terror, when empty cells yawned for the felons who never arrived, and helpless Justice hid her bloodied head-no one but Richard Wentworth could combat this invisible Juggernaut which had paralyzed five mighty boroughs. Once more, in the Spider's weird vestments, Wentworth sets out-this time to annihilate a brain so evil that it is encased in two heads!

By what strange twist of Fate did the fearful menace which was to shadow every man and woman in New York City first rear its venomous head in the distant Caribbean? When terror suddenly boarded a little tramp steamer and left crimson havoc littering its narrow decks a spluttering wireless flashed the doom of every living thing aboard. Within a week, the same ghastly fate struck a gigantic new ocean liner, its luxurious cabins occupied by the elite and powerful of a dozen different nations! Death-swift and terrible-rode the ocean lanes. And the Spider-taken for once off guard-was supposedly dying in a hospital room on the very day when that terror from the seas first showed itself in all its terror above the city skyline. How can the Spider, fighting death himself, help the nation he loves in her hour of greatest need?

When the Underworld united in one compact army of crime, the Spider-his prestige gone-faced the most vicious collection of criminals and degenerate killers ever assembled under one dark banner of bloody social war! How can Richard Wentworth, robbed of Kirkpatrick and Nita, renew the Spider-fear which alone can bring him victory from a menace that is making casualty columns of our daily papers and filling our institutions with driveling victims of the new madness?

How fight a menace which strikes without warning-which disintegrates flesh and blood and stone to mere chemical atoms! Men fled in blind panic from the merest rumor of a new attack, and even the Spider-dodging the death blasts-can find at first no weapon with which to combat this new and devastating evil which obliterates its victims in the fraction of time between two heart-beats!

Hideous maniacal laughter shattered the dark silence of ghostly tenements. Sleepy-eyed men and women, stumbling through the dim halls of the building, found a sight that chilled their souls with terror. On a blank wall, spikes driven through her, hands and feet, blood coursing down her arms and breasts in tiny rivulets, a beautiful young woman was hanging, crucified, dying. Still another victim of the Torture Trust! And while panic spreads, while hundreds die victims of the Killers, the Spider is blinded, his faithful servants imprisoned, his friends dishonored! How can Richard Wentworth, desperate and alone, combat the powerful, well-organized Murder Syndicate whose gun hirelings hunt him down like a vicious mad dog?

The Flaming Shadows fell upon the city, shrouding whole neighborhoods in a fiery gloom-wherein walked screaming death and merciless destruction... Go with the Spider as he battles, single-handedly, the Flaming Shadows-to save the very people who pray for his destruction!

Thundering far beneath Manhattan's thronging streets came the Death Express-a crack New York Central train bearing a gruesome cargo of lifeless men, women and children-their bodies stripped of valuables, naked and mutilated! A grim warning of the terror-reign that threatened America-at the hands of Twentieth Century land-pirates, whose weapon was neither gun nor sword, but the stunning, body-shivering force which lies in electricity! Can the Spider, using mortal weapons, fight the numbing power of the thunderbolt-and survive?

Fear stalked the corridors and offices on Capitol Hill, for it was from the ranks of the mighty-the rulers and lawmakers of America-that the Silver Assassins sought their victims! Singly, in pairs and in numbered groups they died, laying down their lives for their country-while panic spread, and the Spider, alone aware of the terrific catastrophe which impended, fought through black, bodiless shadows to reach and destroy the menace which festered underground!

Never before had any criminal dared give open challenge to the Spider! Never before had Richard Wentworth faced a foe who welcomed personal combat with the grim avenger whom all others feared... And while they fought-the Spider and the Fly-a new and fearless criminal army was forming; men and women were dying by the scores; and the youth of a nation was flocking to the dark banner of that gentlemanly killer whose battle cry was "Kill the Spider-and the world is ours!"

Never before in history had anything quite so horrible as the Mad Horde been loosed upon a terrified humanity! In rural towns and through the thronging streets of great cities the death-bringers stalked, spreading the slow madness of which they themselves must soon die! The Spider, dismayed and horrified as never before in his long career, is forced at last into risking the life of the girl he loves-so that a million others may live!

America faces certain doom as its citizens fall in screaming thousands before the noxious death vapors loosed upon them by the Green Hand. How can the Spider, harried and threatened by a hundred new and deadly perils, check the rising power of the next Dictator-and lay bare the scheming, criminal mind which seeks to enslave the nation?

Like the consuming flames of a prairie fire the dread news spread: "The Spider has gone mad! He will massacre us all!" But Richard Wentworth, never more sane, was even then gambling life itself in one desperate effort to save the city which cursed his name-from the awful ravages of man-spread plague!