Night Creatures Read online

  NIGHT CREATURES

  Seabury Quinn

  NIGHT CREATURES

  ISBN: 9781553102205 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553102212 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  For Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  First electronic edition 2012

  This edition © Ash-Tree Press 2003, 2012

  Stories © Seabury Quinn, Jr.

  Introduction & Selection

  © Peter Ruber & Joseph Wrzos

  Cover art © Keith Minnion

  Cover design © Jason Van Hollander

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  By Peter Ruber and Joseph Wrzos

  The Golden Spider

  The Gentle Werewolf

  Mortmain

  Uncanonized

  The Thing in the Fog

  Two Shall Be Born

  Glamour

  Masked Ball

  Is the Devil a Gentleman?

  There Are Such Things

  The Phantom Farm House

  Sources

  NIGHT CREATURES

  Introduction

  MENTION THE NAME OF SEABURY QUINN to any old-time funeral director and the eyes of recognition instantly light up. Mention it to serious collectors of horror and weird fiction, and you’ll be told that he was one of the greatest and most prolific contributors to Weird Tales, the ‘Unique Magazine’. Both of which reactions might also lead you to think that, in one form or another, Seabury Quinn dealt with death and the macabre all of his life. An assumption, to some extent, you’d be quite right in making, as the uncanny tales in this latest Quinn collection so eerily demonstrate.

  Seabury Grandin Quinn, born in 1889—on New Year’s Day, in Washington, D.C.—did not start out to become a writer. He wanted to be a soldier; but his parents hoped he would become a clergyman, like his father, so he compromised and obtained a law degree from Washington’s National University Law School. But just as he was about to commence practice, World War I broke out, and he immediately joined the Army. Upon his discharge after the war he became a legal advisor for a law firm and was handed his first and last case. It was a criminal matter involving mortuary jurisprudence, a field about which he knew nothing. However, after studying various law books and legal decisions, he became fascinated by the subject and began a course of self-study that eventually led him—times were hard for lawyers, too, just then—to become a legal advisor and contributor to The Casket, a trade journal for morticians. Although today no one may remember the outcome of Quinn’s only legal case, it certainly helped to launch him, even if only indirectly, on a prolific writing career—one that would be strongly influenced by his exposure to the world of coffins and corpses, graphic descriptions of which play so prominent a part in many of his tales of terror.

  Early in life, when he was still an impressionable teenager, an uncle introduced Quinn to Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel, Dracula (1897), which was then one of the most popular horror thrillers of the day. In the years that followed, he avidly read his way through entire libraries of horror and weird fiction, as well as books on the occult, mysticism, witchcraft, ancient religious customs from around the world, werewolf legends, vampirism, Satanism, and snake-cult worship, in the process acquiring an immense historical knowledge of how belief in the supernatural had become part of man’s sociological fabric.1 So much so, in fact, that from 1925 onwards, when Quinn created his now famous occult detective, Jules de Grandin (the surname was taken from the author’s own middle name), it became a guessing game among fellow writers and readers of Weird Tales as to just what monster of the month the classic pulp’s most popular contributor would come up with next.

  Nevertheless, popular as Quinn was with Weird Tales readers for his de Grandin and other stories, the pulps paid so little in the ’20s and ’30s that he had to supplement his income elsewhere.

  As a result, and in addition to writing for these low-paying markets, he also pursued freelance journalism for various funeral industry magazines, and in 1925 moved his family to New York City to take over as editor of Casket & Sunnyside, one of the leading morticians’ trade publications at that time. For a number of years he also taught mortuary jurisprudence at New York’s Renouard School of Embalming, and even wrote one of the first textbooks on the subject. But in 1935—at the height of the Depression—Quinn was fired by the magazine because he refused to take a cut in salary from $3000 to $2000 per year, even though the lesser amount would still have been good money in those days. By then, his salary combined with his earning from pulp writing had enabled him to lead a fairly comfortable life.

  Quinn managed to survive by becoming contributing editor to De-Ce-Co Magazine (published in Boston by Dodge Chemical Co., an embalming fluid manufacturer), which ran more than six hundred of Quinn’s articles, editorials, and fictional dramatizations of court decisions involving unusual crimes centering on obscure points of mortuary law. And even though Quinn retired as editor twenty years before his death in 1969, De-Ce-Co continues to reprint his editorials today, a lasting tribute to the author’s posthumous expertise on the subject.

  In 1942, at the beginning of World War II, because of his legal and journalistic experience, Quinn was recruited by Military Intelligence to work at Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, D.C. It was his job to edit and sanitize secret military communications before they were released to various government agencies and to the newspapers. Busy as he must have been, the record shows that he still managed to do a little pulp writing on the side—for, during the war years, more than a dozen Quinn stories appeared in Weird Tales, not to mention other markets. One of the best of them, ‘Is the Devil a Gentleman?’ (1942)—included in this collection—concerns the hanging of a New England witch granted the power to exercise compassion from beyond the grave.

  After the war, Quinn picked up where he left off, as a journalist and occasional legal consultant. More significantly, however, during this period, although he would produce a few more de Grandin stories for Weird Tales, he would also publish some of his best non-de Grandins, most notably the hauntingly wistful ‘Masked Ball’ (1947), in which—demonstrating still-undiminished powers of invention—the experienced pulpster deftly portrays the ‘dead’ as being fearful of the living.

  Five years later, however—almost as if fate were stalking him—when the Korean conflict erupted in 1950, Military Intelligence called Quinn back to active duty for a third time, keeping him at his post during the ensuing Cold War years. Nevertheless, even during this period, he still managed to write a handful of stories for Weird Tales, not all of them, however, up to the high-water mark reached in his prime. Finally, time beginning to take its toll, a series of minor strokes in the 1960s impaired his vision and forced him to retire from his job with the military for good.

  Quinn will no doubt be best remembered for his very best pulp writi
ng, especially for the superb fantasies gathered in this special, representative collection of his—for the most part—never, or rarely, reprinted work. All of them were first published over a period of some twenty-five years in Weird Tales, for which Quinn wrote 159 stories and articles, making him by far Weird Tales’ most prolific contributor. Only August Derleth, with 139 stories (a handful of them collaborations), ever came close to matching Quinn’s prodigious output for the same magazine.

  During his lengthy career as a pulp ‘writer’ (a term he preferred to that of ‘author’), Quinn did not write exclusively for Weird Tales—nor did he limit himself to writing just horror stories. He also churned out—between 1919 and 1952—reams of detective, oriental, fantasy, and jungle-adventure stories, along with a few Westerns. And, despite the sheer volume of his production, he was clearly quite successful at marketing it: for on one occasion, years after his creative tide had subsided, when Derleth asked him for an unpublished story for an upcoming anthology he was assembling, Quinn replied that he went through his file cabinet and was sorry to report that every one of the 550 stories he had written had been sold.

  Just where and when the majority of these non-Weird Tales stories were published we may never know. Many of the old pulp magazines have faded into dust, and the more obscure titles have never been completely indexed. In addition, Quinn himself didn’t help matters by failing to leave behind any records for his many magazine sales. In fact, several years before his death, he destroyed all of his correspondence because he ‘didn’t feel it was important’, and sold off his sizable book collection. All that remained, according to his son, Seabury Quinn, Jr., was a file cabinet of manuscripts that Quinn’s second wife took with her to Boston after his death, a possible treasure trove never seen again. As a matter of fact, no one has either seen or heard from Margaret Child Quinn herself in nearly a quarter of a century.

  Fortunately, not all of Seabury Quinn’s prodigious output lies ‘lost’ in the moldering pulps. For during his lifetime, a few representative samples of his best work were reprinted in hardcover, primarily through the efforts of August Derleth. After reading each other’s work in Weird Tales for nearly twenty years, Quinn and Derleth finally began corresponding in the early 1940s.

  In 1939, Derleth—in collaboration with fellow Weird Tales writer Donald Wandrei—had founded Arkham House for the express purpose of collecting in book form all of the writings of his mentor and friend, H. P. Lovecraft, widely acknowledged as the successor to Edgar Allan Poe.

  Derleth had heard that Quinn knew Greye La Spina, another of the Weird Tales school of pulp writers, and asked for her address, so that he could make arrangements for Arkham House to reprint some of her work. As it turned out, Derleth not only published La Spina, but also did two Quinn books as well: Roads, a delightful fantasy about the creation of the Christmas legend, which (illustrated by Virgil Finlay) appeared in 1948, followed by The Phantom Fighter, a 1965 collection of ten Jules de Grandin stories, slightly modernized by the author for book publication.

  Unfortunately, Quinn just missed seeing publication of a third hardcover edition of his work, Is the Devil a Gentleman? (Mirage Press, 1970), the contents of which he had hand-picked as his favorite stories—none of which, it should be noted, featured Jules de Grandin, a possibly significant omission, the implication being that Quinn might have regarded his ‘little Frenchman’s’ huge popularity with Weird Tales readers (who couldn’t get enough of de Grandin) in much the same way that Arthur Conan Doyle was said to have resented Sherlock Holmes ultimately eclipsing the reputation of his other ‘more serious’ writing.

  Nevertheless, whatever Quinn may have felt about de Grandin, his plucky little phantom-fighter refused to die with the pulps. By the middle ’70s, much to the delight of his legions of admirers, he was back, in a Paperback Library set of six volumes (including The Devil’s Bride, the only de Grandin novel), which contains approximately a third of the ninety-three de Grandin stories. And, although it would take another quarter century, the irrepressible psychic sleuth has once again escaped pulp oblivion: for in 2001—encouraged by its success with Weird Crimes & Servants of Satan, issued three years previously—The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box (Shelburne, Ontario, Canada) brought out The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin. A lavishly produced major reprinting of the ‘entire’ Weird Tales de Grandin series, these three hefty volumes, printed on acid-free book paper, will no doubt help to keep the canonical works in print long after every surviving copy of the ‘Unique Magazine’ itself has turned to dust.

  Also included in The Compleat Adventures is The Devil’s Bride,2 a full-length Jules de Grandin story, and the only Quinn novel to see print during his lifetime. However, at the time of his death, he did leave behind the manuscript of a second, unpublished novel, Alien Flesh, expanded from an earlier short story.3 Completed sometime back in the late ’40s, for a publisher who went by the wayside, the manuscript of Alien Flesh gathered dust in the author’s files for years. A decade later the same publisher recovered and expressed renewed interest in the book, but by that time Quinn had changed his mind, saying it was too dated. His widow, however, disagreed, and seven years after Quinn’s death she consented to its publication. Reading Alien Death (Philadelphia: Oswald Train, 1977) today, one can see the merit of both positions. But despite its being somewhat episodic and overextended, the story is still richly rewarding reading, both for its Oriental opulence of style and its astonishing insights—even for modern times—into the fundamental divide between the male and female psyches.

  As a writer, Quinn excelled in creating strange and original stories of necromancers, werewolves, vampires, devils and witches, and other night creatures (such as those in this collection). Although, in less capable hands, such themes can become repetitious and predictable, Quinn’s vast knowledge of esoteric legends and myths, and his uncanny storytelling ability, have kept his tales fresh decades after they were written. He did not write horror just for its shock value, although many of his most successful stories still deliver an undeniable jolt even today. Instead, he dug deeper than most of his fellow Weird Tales writers, in his best stories probing for both the ‘mind’ and ‘heart’ of the ‘monsters’ stalking his nightmare tales. And, even more striking for us today, he had a rare gift, the ability to create ‘night creatures’ possessed of a surprising compassion, one that keeps them memorable for us long after story’s end. This can be seen in tales like ‘The Gentle Werewolf’ (1940), where a true lover’s kiss proves stronger than the curse of lycanthropy, and in ‘Two Shall Be Born’ (1941), in which an ex-con is rehabilitated by the ageless love of a thousand-year-old woman—and these are only two of the poignant horrors in Night Creatures that you will remember for a long time.

  Peter Ruber

  Oakdale, NY

  Joseph Wrzos

  Saddle River, NJ

  January 2002

  The Golden Spider

  I

  How Knots Grow in a Soul

  FOURCHETTE SAT SPINNING in the sun before the cabin door. It was a poor house, built of mud and wattles, with gaps and cracks in its walls through which winter winds and summer tempests came at will, but it was hers and Jacques’; at night the firelight heartened it, and there were dusky corners where her dreams could find a lodgment.

  Fourchette was happy. Contentment shone in her eyes like a candle’s glow reflected through a screen, and her little triangular face framed in its shock of saffron-yellow hair was like a flower set upon a tall slim stalk; for her kirtle of coarse linen was bright green, and fitted her slim-waisted, narrow-hipped young body as a wheat-husk fits the grain. Under her left arm the distaff rested, the spindle-stone twirled merrily beneath the agile practised fingers of her right hand as she paid the combed fleece from its skein and twisted it into an ever-lengthening cord of crewel. From where she sat she could look clear across their little croft and over to the wide domains of the seigneur where, beyond the patch of forest land where spotted deer could so
metimes be seen in the shadows, her Jacques was laboring in the field to pay their quit-rent to the lord.

  Her Jacques! A serf and villein in the lord’s field and the castle base court, by her side he was a king. For him she saved the best their meager board afforded, the crustiest of the bread, the richest, fullest piece of honeycomb, the breast of fowl when they ate meat on holidays and high feast days. They had been wed almost a twelvemonth, she and Jacques, and before their wedding they had passed almost five years in courtship, working, saving, scrimping to amass the necessary silver angel with which to buy their right to marry free from the lord’s bride-bed privilege; now they were on their way to being solid farmerers. They were not rich enough to keep a cow, but already they had several sheep, and three lambs graced their flock. A she-goat with a little scampering kid and a bold, strutting cock who led a harem of six speckled hens, together with a hive of bees, completed their livestock, and close beside the dooryard was a little patch of pasture land and a field of ripening wheat. They had been bold to plant a crop so long in growing, for who could say what moment raiders would come riding down among them, trampling down their growing grain and robbing them of any chance of garnering it? Yet le bon Dieu had been good to them, their corn was ripening in the sun, their flocks were multiplying, their quit-rent would surely be paid. Next year, perhaps, they could afford a bench and some stools, and after that a cow, or even two, take up another hide of land; then, if the sweet Lord willed it so, there would be children, pretty daughters and strong sons to make their little house into a home and strengthen their declining years.

  The clatter of shod hooves against the stony roadway leading to the height on which the feudal castle stood broke through the snatch of song she hummed. Gay in velvet doublets and high boots of Spanish leather, with their long sword-scabbards clinking on the rowels at their heels they came, and Fourchette’s blue eyes brightened. What woman since the world began has ever seen the glittering array of martial panoply without a quickening of the pulses? She recognized most of the company, Sir Giulio du Lac, bronze-bearded, copper-haired, and smiling, a gentle chevalier who sat above the salt at the seigneur’s table; Messire Osmond and Messire Pindare, esquires almost ready to receive the accolade and golden spurs of knighthood; Marcellin and Hyachinthe and Fabien, adolescent pages nearing squirehood, forward, brash, and pugnacious as young cockerels whose spurs had just begun to sprout. Besides them were several other gentle lads and young men, all brave in forest-green and gold embroidery, and laughing hugely at some merry quip which one of them had made.