ADVENTURE TALES (SPRING 2007 / Vol. 1, No. 4)
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2007 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
Publisher: Wildside Press, LLC
Editor: John Gregory Betancourt
Associate Editors: Darrell Schweitzer
Assistant Editor: P.D. Cacek
*****
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THE BLOTTER, by the Editor
As I reported in the second issue of Adventure Tales, Rich Harvey’s annual pulp convention, PulpAdventurecon, is my favorite convention. (I don’t get out much, but I make a point of attending this one every year.) The one-day event is primarily a dealers’ room (this year it overflowed into two rooms) where attendees wander around, shopping for pulp magazines, books, and other vintage collectibles while chatting. Wildside Press usually has a dealer’s table, and this year I brought my older son, Ian (age 12). My wife predicted that he would be bored, but she was 100% wrong—he loved every aspect of the show. He decided to collect memorabilia featuring The Shadow, and although the original pulp magazines were out of his price range, he managed to pick up two posters, a bunch of toys from the Alec Baldwin movie, and several sets of Old Time Radio records with adventures of The Shadow (Orson Welles is his favorite Shadow), Mandrake the Magician, and several others.
The men at the next table did give Ian quite a few bargains. They were selling off a large collection of Shadow, Phantom, and other pulp hero merchandise which their father had accumulated. But that only fed my son’s sense of excitement. Now that he’s thoroughly hooked, I don’t think Ian will miss another PulpAdventurecon, either.
Even though Rich Harvey reported a slight dip in attendance, I think con-goers are getting younger rather than older. I saw quite a few fans in their 20s and 30s. It bodes well for the future.
For info on PulpAdventurecon, visit Rich Harvey’s web site,
We have another great theme issue this time: stories from authors who appeared in the classic Weird Tales magazine (but not stories from Weird Tales)!
Our lineup this time starts with Seabury Quinn. Quinn was the most prolific author in the history of Weird Tales, famous for his Jules de Grandin psychic detective yarns as well as many stand-alones. But he also wrote prolifically in other genres. Here we have a mystery with more than a few weird overtones.
Edwin Baird is represented with two stories. Not only was Baird a Chicago writer, but the very first editor of WT. He was the one who introduced the world to weird fiction and poetry from H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, and hundreds of others.
E. Hoffmann Price claimed the distinction of being the only person who met both H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard…and was an accomplished pulp writer on his own for many decades. His story, “Every Man a King,” comes from one of the “spicy” pulps, Speed Adventure, (as Spicy Adventure was renamed late in its life).
John D. Swain’s “The Mad Detective” is one of his non-fantasies, in this case a gripping mystery.
And last but not least, here is Robert E. Howard’s thrill-packed novelet of Eastern intrigue, “Son of the White Wolf.” Enjoy!
John Gregory Betancourt
THE MONKEY GOD, by Seabury Quinn
Professor Harvey Forrester was having a beastly time. He had confided as much to himself more than once in the past twenty-four hours, and each passing minute confirmed the truth of it.
The Professor did not dance, and the younger members of the company fox-trotted from breakfast to luncheon, from luncheon to dinner and from dinner to bedtime. The Professor did not care for music, except classical compositions or the simple folk songs of primitive peoples, and the Milsted house was filled with the cacophonies of jazz from radio and phonograph all day and three-quarters of the night. The Professor despised bridge as a moronic substitute for intelligent conversation, and the older members of the company played for a cent a point from dinner till midnight with the avidity of professional gamblers.
The Professor was having a beastly time.
But old Horatio Milsted, in honor of whose son the house party was given, possessed one of the finest collections of oriental curios in the country, wherefore Forrester had accepted the invitation tendered him and Rosalie Osterhaut, his ward; for he greatly desired to examine a certain statuette of Hanuman, the Monkey God, which was the supreme jewel in the collection that Milsted had inherited from a sea-roving (and none too scrupulous) grandsire.
Two days—forty-eight interminable hours of fox trotting, syncopated music and card-ruffling—the Professor had endured, and as yet had not caught sight of the little monkey god’s effigy. Each time he broached the subject to Milsted his host put him off with some excuse. The house party would break up the following morning, and meantime the Professor cooled his back against the wall of the Milsted drawing room while his anger rose hot and seething within him.
“Oh, Professor Forrester,” whispered Arabella Milsted, the host’s unmarried sister, in the irritatingly high, thin voice possessed by so many short, fat women, “you look so romantically aloof standing there all by yourself. Tell me, don’t you ever unbend, even for a teeny, tinsy moment?” She looked archly at him above the serrated edge of her black fan and simpered with bovine coquettishness.
“Do you know,” she went on in a more confidential whisper, her little, pale-blue eyes growing circular with sudden seriousness, “I have a presentiment—a premonition—that something terrible is going to happen?”
“Umpf?” growled Forrester noncommittally, gazing first at the obese damsel, then across the crowded dance floor in an effort to descry an exit. “Umpf!”
“Yes —” Miss Milsted, who would never again see forty, but dressed in a manner becoming to twenty, and talked chiefly in Italics, replied—“oh, yes; I’m very psychic, you know. Poor dear Mamma used to say —”
Poor dear Mamma’s profound observations will never be known to posterity, for at that moment Horatio Milsted, looking anything but the urbane host, strode into the drawing room and commanded sharply, “Shut off that infernal music!”
“Hear, hear!” murmured the Professor under his breath.
Young Carmody, a vapid-faced youth in too-fashionably cut dinner clothes, who stood nearest the radio, turned the rheostat, and the lively dance tune expired with a dismal squawk.
“Someone has been tampering with my collection,” Milsted announced in a hard, metallic voice. “Some infernal thief has stolen a priceless relic—the statue of Hanuman. Now, I don’t make any accusations; but I
want that curio back. I think I know the thief, and while I’d be justified in turning him over to the police, I’ll give him a chance to return my property without a scandal—if he will. The museum is just beyond the library. I want everyone here—everyone—to step into the library, then go, one at a time, into the museum. There’s only one door, and the windows are barred, so the thief can’t get away. Each of you will be allowed thirty seconds—by himself—in the museum. There’ll be a handkerchief on the table, and if I don’t find the statuette under that handkerchief when the last of you has passed through the museum, why —” he swept the company with another frigid stare—“I shall have to ask you all to wait while I send for the sheriff. Is that clear?”
A wondering, frightened murmur of assent ran round the brightly lighted room, and the host turned on his heel as he shot out, “This way, if you please.”
Rosalie, the Professor’s ward, glanced backward at her guardian as she accompanied her dancing partner and two other couples into the library, and the look in her wide, topaz eyes was a troubled one. She had lived with the Professor nearly a year, now, and knew him as only a woman can know the man she idolizes. The straight-backed little scientist was the soul of honor and propriety, but so immersed in his beloved study of anthropology that theft or murder would scarcely deter him from the acquisition of a relic of scientific value. “What if he should—” she shook her narrow shoulders as one who puts away an unpleasant thought, and stepped across the library threshold.
“I know something terrible will happen,” Miss Milsted wailed softly in the Professor’s ear.
“Nonsense, Madam; control yourself!” Forrester replied sharply, his narrow nostrils quivering with excitement.
The north wind, sweeping furiously across the rolling Maryland hills, hurled a barrage of sleet and snow against the windows, a man coughed with the abrupt sharpness of nervousness, and a woman tittered with embarrassment. The logs in the hall fireplace snapped and crackled; otherwise the house was as silent as a Quaker meeting before the Spirit moves. Two minutes dragged slowly by while the party in the drawing room watched the library door with bated breath. What drama was being enacted behind those unresponsive panels?
“Oh, I know—” the Milsted person began her dismal prophecy once more, then checked her speech with a little squeak like that of an unsuspecting mouse suddenly snared in a trap. Dying with a short flare, like a shred of dried grass touched with a match, the electric lights winked out, and, save for the reflection of the blazing logs in the hall fireplace, the house was hooded in darkness.
“Oh, I knew it—” Miss Milsted asserted, but Professor Forrester strode impatiently across the polished floor toward the closed door of the library.
“Control yourself, Madam,” he snapped. “The wires have been short-circuited by the storm. Here, somebody, bring some candles!” It was characteristic of him that he should assume command in the emergency. The man who had braved sandstorms in the Sahara, glaciers in the Himalayas and natives of Somaliland while tracing the footprints of early civilizations was not to be daunted by imperfect electric power systems. “Fetch some candles,” he repeated sharply; “we can’t—”
Voices rose in angry discord behind the library door. A man’s shout, a woman’s scream, Milsted’s half-uttered curse mingled in sudden, sharp babel, then bang! the wicked, whip-like snap of a pistol shot punctuated the hubbub.
The Professor was first to reach the library. He darted through the door, swinging it shut behind him, stilled the renewed voices with a single, sharp command, and struck a match, kneeling over a long, inert object stretched before the grate of glowing coke beneath the mantelpiece.
“Oh, I know something terrible is going to happen! I know it—” Miss Milsted screamed, clawing futilely at the coat-sleeve of the nearest man.
“Madam, be still!” the Professor’s voice, dry and sharp with suppressed excitement, cut through the gloom as he re-entered the drawing room. “Be quiet; nothing terrible is going to happen. It’s already happened. Mr. Milsted is dead.”
“Dead!” the dreadful word flew from lip to lip about the circle of frightened guests. And, as if the tragic announcement were the cue to a theatrical electrician, the dimmed lights of the big country house suddenly sprang into brightness once more, shedding their sharp, yellow rays on the group of pale, terrified faces and bringing the rouge on lips and cheeks into ghastly prominence as frightened women turned hysterically to equally frightened men for comfort and protection.
“How—” began young Carmody, but the Professor cut him short.
“Call the nearest post of state troopers,” he ordered curtly. “Then get in touch with the sheriff and the county coroner. Everyone stay where he is, please; the authorities will tell us when we may leave.
“Now”—Forrester closed the door against the chattering throng in the drawing room and faced the six people in the library—“just what happened?”
“We had just come in, Uncle Harvey,” Rosalie answered, speaking with slow care, for in times of excitement her English, still only a half-familiar tongue, completely deserted her; “we had just come in here, and Mr. Milsted was deciding which one of us should go into the museum first, when the lights went out. Somehow, just at the same time, that window there”—she pointed to a casement between two ceiling-high bookcases—“blew open, and, it seemed to me, I saw a head at the opening. I’m not sure about that, though. Mr. Carpenter here started across the room to close the window, and I think someone else did, too, though I don’t know who it was, and Mr. Milsted began to swear and ran toward me, then there was a flash and a report, and—”
“And he shot himself,” young Mr. Carpenter supplied, interrupting the girl’s story. “I don’t know why he did it, but we all saw the flash and heard him cry out with a sort of choke, and saw him fall. There was light enough from the fire for us to see that much.”
“But it looked to me as though he were shooting toward the window, not at himself,” Rosalie protested. “I’m sure the flash was directed away from him.”
“Then how do you account for—that?” Carpenter asked almost roughly, pointing dramatically to the figure lying face downward on the handsome Persian rug.
Mr. Milsted lay prone as he had fallen, one arm oddly twisted beneath him, the other extended full length beyond his head, the stock of a German Army automatic grasped convulsively in his hand. His right cheek rested against the nap of the rug, and the Professor, bending down to look into his face, observed a small, round hole, about the caliber of a lead pencil, some two inches or so above the eyebrows and almost in the center of the forehead. The rim of the wound was a little discolored, as though from a bruise, and the center was slightly depressed, forming a shallow cup or crater, while a mass of thick, clotted matter, grayish white mixed with blood, showed within the tiny, deadly circle. One or two drops of blood—no more—had trickled from the wound and lay upon the carpet.
“Um?” Forrester rose slowly from his contemplation and pinched his narrow chin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “How do you account for it? That’s the question.” Thrusting his hand into his jacket pocket, he drew out a short-stemmed briar pipe, stuffed it to overflowing with long cut tobacco and began puffing furiously. “I don’t think we’ll accomplish much huddled in here,” he suggested. “Suppose you join the others. The officers should be here any moment, now.”
As the door closed behind the others, Professor Forrester wheeled and stepped quickly into the museum. It was a small, square room entered by a single door of heavy, iron-bound oak, and lighted by a single small, heavily barred window. About its sides were ranged the tall glass-fronted specimen cases, all strongly fastened with Yale locks, while a small, compact safe and two tall, sheet-steel cabinets stood against the wall directly beneath the window. In the center, under the ceiling electrolier, was a table of polished mahogany on which lay a handkerchief covering two small objects. The Professor lifted the cloth, disclosing a small
brass inkwell and stamp box.
“Milsted certainly intended giving the guilty man every chance,” he commented softly to himself. “No one coming in here could say whether the handkerchief had covered two or three things before, and the fact that the cloth was already resting on two other things would partially disguise the fact that the idol had been returned. Yes, he was pretty decent about it, poor chap.”
Replacing the square linen, he stared speculatively about the room. “Now, let’s see,” he murmured. “The Hanuman statue couldn’t have been much bigger than this inkwell or stamp box, smaller, perhaps. Anyone could have carried it easily in his pocket. H’m; very interesting.”
Strolling over to the safe, he bent forward and examined it, even testing its lock tentatively, first taking the precaution to cover the knob with his handkerchief, lest his fingerprints show on the polished metal. The lock was fastened, and he next turned his attention to the upright metal cabinets. They were nearly six feet high by eighteen inches wide and about two feet deep. One was filled with a miscellaneous assortment of papers, old letters and kindred junk, while the other was empty, even its shelves having been removed, leaving a space available for storage about as large as the interior of an upended mummy case.
Again the Professor stooped, examining the cabinet’s interior carefully. “Umpf,” he inquired of the empty room, “what’s this?” On the smoothly painted floor of the case were four crescent-shaped ridges of sand and fine gravel, paired off in two sets of two each, their concave sides facing, and about seven inches distant from each other. Taking an envelope from his pocket the Professor carefully scooped part of the sand into it, then closed the cabinet door and returned to the library.
Approaching the window, which had blown open as the lights went out, he examined its white-enameled sill closely, collected a few grains of sand from it, and bent down to observe the wall and baseboard immediately under it.
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