The Howling Man

by Beaumont, Charles

  (Hamling had worked under editor Raymond A. Palmer at Ziff-Davis Publishing in Chicago during the '40's, winding up as managing editor of the pulp science fiction magazines Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures in 1948. When Z-D decided to move the operation to New York in 1950, both Palmer and Ham ling chose to stay in Evanston. Palmer started Other Worlds and Imagination, digest-sized genre magazines, and Ham ling got a job with von Rosen.

  (In 1951, Ray Palmer fronted Hamling financially and Bill bought Imagination, later adding Imaginative Tales and, in 1955, branching out of the sf digest idiom to start a semi-slick men's magazine, Rogue. Which circles us back out of the digression to the element of Hamling's stint at von Rosen's magazine factory that resulted in Beaumont working for us at Rogue.)

  In the accounting department at von Rosen's happy little nudery, was a guy who had been fired from Esquire (which also, at that time, had its office in Chicago.) His name was Hugh Hefner, and his aspirations were only slightly higher than those of his coworker, William L. Ham ling . . . though his taste and inventiveness were infinitely greater. Hamling and Hefner were friendly acquaintances. Not buddies, but chummy enough that when Ham ling saw Hefner start Playboy on his kitchen table (with a capital investment of $600 of his own money and loans from friends that brought the seed total to between $7000-$8000) and quickly achieve high-profile success, his own sense of home-grown American venality was piqued.

  By 1953, when Hefner started Playboy and began gathering around him the core talents who would form the basis of the magazine's non-public popularity--Beaumont, Matheson, Herbert Gold, Ken Purdy, and others--Ham ling had become financially solvent with the sf magazines, and he burned with envy at the way in which that no-name guy from von Rosen's accounting department had passed him at a dead run. Playing his acquaintance with Hefner to get basic start-up information, Hamling began Rogue, ripping off as many aspects of the original as he could on a lower budget. The paper wasn't slick, the photos weren't in color, the nudes weren't as stunning, but it was the second men's magazine (excluding Modern Man, which was mostly nudes, with prose that might have included some fiction and contemporary articles, but if it did, I can't remember any.) And in 1955 when Rogue debuted, the market was so new that there was plenty of room for a Playboy competitor, despite its ragtag look.

  But Ham ling had a plethora of blind spots. The most interesting, of concern to us here, was that though he envied Hefner to a degree that consumed him, he also admired him and sought to emulate Hefner's every move. By 1959, when Hamling hired me straight out of my honorable discharge to edit Rogue, he had decided to go whole hog and turn Rogue into a full slick magazine. So he needed professional talent--both as editorial staff and as contributors--to supplement his own iron will at the conceptual stages. After Frank Robinson and I came on board, Ham ling set about (from the vantage point behind that blind spot) co-opting everyone of talent who worked for Hefner, on the theory that they must be the best - . . after all, wasn't Hefner publishing them? Don't ask.

  The problem for Bill was that most of those people were under exclusive contract to Hefner, with restrictions against their publishing anywhere else in competing markets that were Draconian. (Once, a model who had appeared in Playboy had the bad fortune to allow a photo set of leftovers appear in Rogue. The woman's personal services contract with HMH was voided and she lost thousands of dollars' worth of personal appearance gigs, not to mention the succoring warmth of the Playboy Mansion.)

  But Bill was determined. The two most prominent contributors to Playboy whose acquisition obsessed Ham ling, were artist Ron Bradford and writer Charles Beaumont. So Bill made the acquaintance of Chuck, and made him money offers Chuck couldn't refuse, and before I arrived at Rogue Chuck was already doing profiles of show biz personalities and sports car pieces under the house pseudonyms "Michael Phillips" and "Robert Courtney." (These names were used by others, as well. My own "The Case for Our College Bohemians"--about which the less said, the better--was published in the August 1 959 Rogue bylined "Robert Courtney.")

  But on the day that Chuck delivered into my hands the manuscript of "The Howling Man," which Hefner had rejected for heaven-only-knows-what-reason, I realized instantly that we had been proffered a small literary miracle, and that a house pseudonym would not suffice. Another "Courtney" or "Phillips" piece meant nothing. But if we could create a separate nom-de-plume persona for Beaumont's fiction, we might be able to raise out of the mire of non-entities a penname creation that might have as much serious literary coin as Beaumont himself

  The Evan Hunter/Ed McBain Theory.

  Bill Hamling, of course, thought "The Howling Man" was much too dangerous a Piece for us to publish. Frank Robinson and I beat him mercilessly, day after day, until he finally capitulated; and I set about preparing a showcase for the work that would set it off for special attention.

  First, I achieved one of Bill's dreams by getting to artist Ron Bradford, who had been doing the most memorable feature art for Hefner. Through the then-art director, Richard A. Thompson, who knew Bradford in the Chicago art community, I met and cajoled Ron by using the one tool I knew was perfect: I let him read "The Howling Man."

  Bradford was as knocked out by the story as Frank and I had been, and he agreed to do the art. I invented the name "Corey Summerwell" for Bradford and he created a style of collage entirely different from what he was doing for Playboy so Hefner would not be able to make the connection. Ironically, a second piece of Bradford art, for a story titled "Manny" by Raymond Passacantando, got into print a month before the Summerwell painting for 'The Howling Man" in the November 1959 Rogue.

  All that remained was to invent a pseudonym for Beaumont. We wanted it to be a subterfuge, but we also wanted those who were on to such things to know who was behind the pen-name. I invented C.B. Lovehill. The C and the B are obvious; beau I twisted out the French to get love, though idiomatically it was a stretch; and mont became hill. On the meet the authors page that issue (called "Rogue Notes'), my attempts to keep Beaumont out of trouble with Hefner by making no allusions to the pseudonym, were defeated by Hamling who, with typical disregard for anyone else's personal danger, rewrote my copy and damned surely indicated Lovehill was Beaumont to all but the dopiest reader. I was furious with Hamling, as was Beaumont, but life with Hamling in it was like having a nagging summer flu that simply will not go away; and finally, we just had to accept it.

  The story was published, it drew huge amounts of laudatory mail, and Chuck went on to do (if memory serves) another half dozen stories for me, stories like "Dead, You Know" and "Genevieve, My Genevieve."

  Funnily, in the same "Rogue Notes" where Chuck was betrayed, we ran a photo of "Lovehill." It is a snapshot of Frank Robinson in his summer straw hat, talking on the phone with his back to the camera. (In another issue, "Courtney" is seen in photo closeup. He looks a lot like Ellison.)

  The story that lies at the heart of all this history has gone on to be recognized as a modern fantasy classic. Chuck scripted it for the original Twilight Zone and its television incarnation plays and replays endlessly in syndication; and each time it airs we realize anew how deft, how sinister, how universal in its message it is.

  But beyond the simple plot structure and horrendous implications of characterization, "The Howling Man" recommends itself, and the wonders of Beaumont's muse, because it is the rare fiction that we cannot forget. It touches places in the soul that resonate purely, almost thirty years after it first appeared, as strongly as in 1959. It is, for me, not merely a point of pride to be able to say that I was privileged to publish the work of one of the best writers this country ever produced, but it is a way of saying thank you to a man who was my friend and who influenced not only my own writing but my life in ways he would recognize were he still with us.

  Yet on this 20th anniversary of Chuck's passing (as I write this introduction to what I think is his finest short story), it takes on considerable import for anyone who looks toward the icons for the tap roots
of contemporary American fiction.

  Charles Beaumont was one in a million, and perhaps rereading "The Howling Man" will remind the other 999,999 that what they do, when they do it with honor and high craft, has been profoundly influenced by what Chuck taught us in the pages of magazines now three decades gone.

  * * *

  THE HOWLING MAN

  * * *

  The Germany of that time was a land of valleys and mountains and swift dark rivers, a green and fertile land where everything grew tall and straight out of the earth. There was no other country like it. Stepping across the border from Belgium, where the rain-caped, mustached guards saluted, grinning, like operetta soldiers, you entered a different world entirely. Here the grass became as rich and smooth as velvet; deep, thick woods appeared; the air itself, which had been heavy with the French perfume of wines and sauces, changed: the clean, fresh smell of lakes and pines and boulders came into your lungs. You stood a moment, then, at the border, watching the circling hawks above and wondering, a little fearfully, how such a thing could happen. In less than a minute you had passed from a musty, ancient room, through an invisible door, into a kingdom of winds and light. Unbelievable! But there, at your heels, clearly in view, is Belgium, like all the rest of Europe, a faded tapestry from some forgotten mansion.

  In that time, before I had heard of St. Wulfran's, of the wretch who clawed the stones of a locked cell, wailing in the midnight hours, or of the daft Brothers and their mad Abbot, I had strong legs and a mind on its last search, and I preferred to be alone. A while and I'll come back to this spot. We will ride and feel the sickness, fall, and hover on the edge of death, together. But I am not a writer, only one who loves wild, unhousebroken words; I must have a real beginning.

  Paris beckoned in my youth. I heeded, for the reason most young men just out of college heed, although they would never admit it: to lie with mysterious beautiful women. A solid, traditional upbringing among the corseted ruins of Boston had succeeded, as such upbringings generally do, in honing the urge to a keen edge. My nightly dreams of beaded bagnios and dusky writhing houris, skilled beyond imagining, reached, finally, the unbearable stage beyond which lies either madness or respectibility. Fancying neither, I managed to convince my parents that a year abroad would add exactly the right amount of seasoning to my maturity, like a dash of curry in an otherwise bland, if not altogether tasteless, chowder. I'm afraid that Father caught the hot glint in my eye, but he was kind. Describing, in detail, and with immense effect, the hideous consequences of profligacy, telling of men he knew who'd gone to Europe, innocently, and fallen into dissolutions so profound they'd not been heard of since, he begged me at all times to remember that I was an Ellington and turned roe loose. Paris, of course, was enchanting and terrifying, as a jungle must be to a zoo-born monkey. Out of respect to the honored dead, and Dad, I did a quick trot through the Tuileries, the Louvre, and down the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe; then, with the fall of night, I cannoned off to Montmartre and the Rue Pigalle, embarking on the Grand Adventure. Synoptically, it did not prove to be so grand as I'd imagined; nor was it, after the fourth week, so terribly adventurous. Still: important to what followed, for what followed doubtless wouldn't have but for the sweet complaisant girls.

  Boston's Straights and Narrows don't, I fear, prepare one--except psychologically--for the Wild Life. My health broke in due course and, as my thirst had been well and truly slaked, I was not awfully discontent to sink back into the contemplative cocoon to which I was, apparently, more suited. Abed for a month I lay, in celibate silence and almost total inactivity. Then, no doubt as a final gesture of rebellion, I got my idea--got? or had my concentrated sins received it, like a signal from a failing tower?--and I made my strange, un-Ellingtonian decision. I would explore Europe. But not as tourist, safe and fat in his fat, safe bus, insulated against the beauty and the ugliness of changing cultures by a pane of glass and a room at the Englishspeaking hotel. No. I would go like an unprotected wind, a seven-league-booted leaf, a nestless bird, and I would see this dark strange land with the vision of a boy on the last legs of his dreams. I would go by bicycle, poor and lonely and questing--as poor and lonely and questing, anyway, as one can be with a hundred thousand in the bank and a partnership in Ellington, Carruthers & Blake waiting.

  So it was. New England blood and muscles wilted on that first day's pumping, but New England spirit toughened as the miles dropped back. Like an ant crawling over a once lovely, now decayed and somewhat seedy Duchess, I rode over the body of Europe. I dined at restaurants where boar's heads hung, all vicious-tusked and blind; I slept at country inns and breathed the musty age, and sometimes girls came to the door and knocked and asked if I had everything I needed ("Well ...") and they were better than the girls in Paris, though I can't imagine why. No matter. Out of France I pedaled, into Belgium, out, and to the place of cows and forest, mountains, brooks and laughing people: Germany. (I've rhapsodized on purpose for I feel it's quite important to remember how completely Paradisical the land was then, at that time.)

  I looked odd, standing there. The border guard asked what was loose with me, I answered Nothing--grateful for the German, and the French, Miss Finch had drummed into me--and set off along the smallest, darkest path. I serpentined through forests, cities, towns, villages, and always I followed its least likely appendages. Unreasonably, I pedaled as if toward a destination: into the Moselle Valley country, up into the desolate hills of emerald.

  By a ferry, fallen to desuetude, the reptile drew me through a bosky wood. The trees closed in at once. I drank the fragrant air and pumped and kept on pumping, but a heat began to grow inside my body. My head began to ache. I felt weak. Two more miles and I was obliged to stop, for perspiration filmed my skin. You know the signs of pneumonia: a sapping of the strength, a trembling, flashes of heat and of cold; visions. I lay in the bed of damp leaves for a time. At last a village came to view. A thirteenth-century village, gray and narrow-streeted, cobbled to the hidden store fronts. A number of old people in peasant costumes looked up as I bumped along and I recall one ancient tallow-colored fellow--nothing more. Only the weakness, like acid, burning off my nerves and muscles. And an intervening blackness to pillow my fall.

  I awoke to the smells of urine and hay. The fever had passed, but my arms and legs lay heavy as logs, my head throbbed horribly, and there was an empty shoveledout hole inside my stomach somewhere. For a while I did not move or open my eyes. Breathing was a major effort. But consciousness came, eventually.

  I was in a tiny room. The walls and ceiling were of rough gray stone, the single glassless window was arch-shaped, the floor was uncombed dirt. My bed was not a bed at all but a blanket thrown across a disorderly pile of crinkly straw. Beside me, a crude table; upon it, a pitcher; beneath it, a bucket. Next to the table, a stool. And seated there, asleep, his tonsured head adangle from an Everest of robe, a monk.

  I must have groaned, for the shorn pate bobbed up precipitately. Two silver trails gleamed down the corners of the suddenly exposed mouth, which drooped into a frown. The slumbrous eyes blinked.

  "It is God's infinite mercy," sighed the gnomelike little man. "You have recovered."

  "Not as yet," I told him. Unsuccessfully, I tried to remember what had happened; then I asked questions.

  "I am Brother Christophorus. This is the Abbey of St. Wulfran's. The Burgemeister of Schwartzhof, Herr Barth, brought you to us nine days ago. Father Jerome said that you would die and he sent me to watch, for I have never seen a man die, and Father Jerome holds that it is beneficial for a Brother to have seen a man die. But now I suppose that you will not die." He shook his head ruefully.

  "Your disappointment," I said, "cuts me to the quick. However, don't abandon hope. The way I feel now, it's touch and go."

  "No," said Brother Christophorus sadly. "You will get well. It will take time. But you will get well."

  "Such ingratitude, and after all you've done. How can I express my apologies?"


  He blinked again. With the innocence of a child, he said, "I beg your pardon?"

  "Nothing." I grumbled about blankets, a fire, some food to eat, and then slipped back into the well of sleep. A fever dream of forests full of giant two-headed beasts came, then the sound of screaming.

  I awoke. The scream shrilled on--Klaxon-loud, high, cutting, like a cry for help.

  "What is that sound?" I asked.

  The monk smiled. "Sound? I hear no sound," he said.

  It stopped. I nodded. "Dreaming. Probably I'll hear a good deal more before I'm through. I shouldn't have left Paris in such poor condition."

  "No," he said. "You shouldn't have left Paris."

  Kindly now, resigned to my recovery, Brother Christophorus became attentive to a fault. Nurselike, he spooned thick soups into me, applied compresses, chanted soothing prayers, and emptied the bucket out the window. Time passed slowly. As I fought the sickness, the dreams grew less vivid--but the nightly cries did not diminish. They were as full of terror and loneliness as before, strong, real in my ears. I tried to shut them out, but they would not be shut out. Still, how could they be strong and real except in my vanishing delirium? Brother Christophorus did not hear them. I watched him closely when the sunlight faded to the gray of dusk and the screams began, but he was deaf to them--if they existed. If they existed!

  "Be still, my son. It is the fever that makes you hear these noises. That is quite natural. Is that not quite natural? Sleep."

  "But the fever is gone! I'm sitting up now. Listen! Do you mean to tell me you don't hear that?"

  "I hear only you, my son."

  The screams, that fourteenth night, continued until dawn. They were totally unlike any sounds in my experience. Impossible to believe they could be uttered and sustained by a human, yet they did not seem to be animal. I listened, there in the gloom, my hands balled into fists, and knew, suddenly, that one of two things must be true. Either someone or something was making these ghastly sounds, and Brother Christophorus was lying, or--I was going mad. Hearing-voices mad, climbing-walls and frothing mad. I'd have to find the answer: that I knew. And by myself.