The Severed Hand had brought its grisly warning to New York - its citizens must pay the extortioner's price or die! Nor would theirs be a swift, merciful demise. Their living bodies would be transformed, slowly, agonizingly - inch by inch - into rigid mummies! With the police helpless before the challenge of this new Underworld master, Richard Wentworth, as the Spider, took up Manhattan's desperate cause. Fighting in the dark, against an almost phantom foe, he knew he must work fast. For the Spider, no course was open save to wrench from the pit of hell itself the killer-chemist who had undertaken to make a fortune out of a secret that went back to the musty tombs in the beginning of Time! The Withering Death is torn from the pages of the December, 1938 issue of The Spider magazine.