"You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are harmless! But the servants are gone, aren't they? You tried to stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I've got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so loud?... Don't know, eh! You'll know soon enough. Look at me—listen to what I say—do you suppose there are really any such things as time and magnitude. Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter. I tell you, I have struck depths that your little brain can't picture. I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down demons from the stars.... I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.... Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me now—the things that devour and dissolve—but I know how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the servants.... Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move, I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still—saved you to see more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don't worry, they won't hurt you. They didn't hurt the servants—it was the seeing that made the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards are—very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you—but I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are not curious? I always knew you were no scientist. Trembling, eh. Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have discovered. Why don't you move, then? Tired? Well, don't worry, my friend, for they are coming.... Look, look, curse you, look ... it's just over your left shoulder...."
What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from the newspaper accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast house and found us there—Tillinghast dead and me unconscious. They arrested me because the revolver was in my hand, but released me in three hours, after they found that it was apoplexy which had finished Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been directed at the noxious machine which now lay hopelessly shattered on the laboratory floor. I did not tell very much of what I had seen, for I feared the coroner would be skeptical; but from the evasive outline I did give, the doctor told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotised by the vindictive and homicidal madman.
I wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves if I could dismiss what I now have to think of the air and the sky about and above me. I never feel alone or comfortable, and a hideous sense of pursuit sometimes comes chillingly on me when I am weary. What prevents me from believing the doctor is this one simple fact—that the police never found the bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.
WEIRD WHISPERINGS
by Schwartz & Weisinger
Otis Adelbert Kline died from an operation two years ago!... That is, the doctors declared that he was dead.... Fortunately, an adrenalin injection saved him.... Seabury Quinn's next Jules de Grandin novelette will attempt to justify incest between brother and sister.... Quinn, who gets most of his plots while shaving, is also working on a book-length novel, "a sort of lost world affair".... When A. Merritt finished reading "Thirsty Blades" by Kline and Price, he said, "I wish I had written that story".... Ten Story Book edited by Harry Stephen Keeler, once put out an all weird issue.... Robert E. Howard occasionally does boxing yarns for Sport Stories.
Farnsworth Wright says the best stories he's printed in Weird Tales are (not in the order listed): "The Stranger from Kurdistan" by Price, "The Phantom Farmhouse" by Quinn, "The Outsider" by Lovecraft, "The Werewolf of Ponkert" by Munn, "The Shadow Kingdom" by Howard, "The Canal" by Worrell, "The Wind that Tramps the World" by Owen.... Eli Colter's full name is Elizabeth Colter.... Victor Rousseau's is Victor Rousseau Emanuel.... Murray Leinster's is Will Fitzgerald Jenkins.... Ralph Milne Farley's is Roger Sherman Hoar.... Farnsworth Wright has had several stories and poems published under the nom-de-plume of Francis Hard.... Desmond Hall, associate editor of Astounding Stories, admits having had a story published in Weird Tales under a pseudonym, but won't divulge which one.
"The Vengeance of Fi Fong," another tale of brain transplantation by Bassett Morgan, will soon appear in Weird Tales.... Also scheduled for early appearances are "Old Sledge" by Paul Ernst and "Distortion out of Space" by Francis Flagg.... Otis Adelbert Kline's Weird Tales story of some years back, "The Bird People," was based on the Amazing Stories Cover Contest.... Jack Williamson wrote "Born of the Sun" after an argument with Edmond Hamilton, in which the former has maintained that no idea was too impossible to make convincing in a story.... Arthur J. Burks began his career in Weird Tales under the name of Estil Critchie because, he explains, "I was ashamed of being associated with the stigma of being known as a writer".... An interview with Burks, by your scribes, appeared in the April issue of Author & Composer.
E. Hoffmann Price has moved to Oklahoma where he is using his executive ability and mechanical skill as partner in a garage business.... He will soon take to the road in his 1928 Ford Juggernaut and will visit Robert E. Howard in Cross Plains, Texas, and Clark Ashton Smith in Auburn, California.... Farnsworth Wright once gave an account of his pet peeve: "My pet peeve is stories that get the character in a very interesting dilemma and lead the reader to expect an ingenious solution of the story only to have the story end with the statement, 'then he woke up and found it was a dream.' Readers have a right to expect the author will offer an interesting denouement, but instead he says 'April Fool'."