Weird Tales/Volume 36/Issue 2/The Eyrie

by with letters from Manly Wade Wellman, Virginia Combs, Edward Goodell and Russell E. Nihlean

The Eyrie

Witchcraft and the Merry Monarch

Most of us have had, at one time or another, a sneaking suspicion that history had dealt harshly with King Charles II of England. But is it possible that Black Magic and the Powers of Darkness, also, gave a raw deal to that pleasant gentleman who "never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one"?

Read Mr. Wellman's interesting sidelight on his story, The Liers in Wait, and decide for yourself!

Briefly and bluntly, I admit that The Liers in Wait might well have happened just as I have set it down.

We know, from standard history, that Charles II fled forlornly after his defeat at Worcester in 1651, and that even in the first hours of his flight the rumor went up that witchcraft had been used against him. As my story asks rhetorically, where and when else have Scots troops refused to fight? And why should rain have fallen only on the wood where Charles hid, and nowhere else? How about Cromwell's exact seven years of unrestrained temporal power?

Charles II was a secret man. We are not sure of even his religious faith, if he had any. He never made public his own narrative of that wonderful escape in disguise, though some of his helpers and companions wrote fascinatingly about it. We do know that he was alone for a full day in Spring Coppice, and that anything might have happened there. Assuredly he acted in later life like a pleasure-loving but thoughtful man who had known a strange shock in his youth. And in those days England was full of witches—everywhere.

Many scholars, even modern scholars, believe that Cromwell's regime had the support of black magic. The erudite Father Montague Summers opines that "beyond any shadow of doubt, Oliver Cromwell was a Satanist, intimately leagued with the powers of darkness to whom he sold his soul for temporal success." James Grant, in his monumental work on demonology of all nations, quotes Cromwell's lieutenant, Colonel Lindsay, as saying that the commander of the Parliamentarians spoke with the devil in his presence, and made the aforesaid seven-year contract, I could cite others.

Much as I admire Summers and Grant, I take leave to differ with their view of Cromwell. He was fierce and harsh and greedy for dictatorial power—but he would not have parlied even with Satan. More reasonable, I argue, is the thought that among his followers (as everywhere in that time and place) were traffickers with wizards.

The spells and conjurations of my three witches I quote almost exactly from a curious and probably dangerous volume of such things, attributed to Albertus Magnus and annotated here and there in a mordantly knowing longhand. For the style of the narrative I have studied again the Restoration writers—notably Bunyan, Evelyn, Pepys and Wycherly.

Back of it all is sympathy, if not admiration, for Charles II, who was most consistently well-meaning. Probably he was a practical liability to his age, and Cromwell a practical asset; yet how pleasant we find Charles, and how forbidding Old Noll! If this be Jacobitism, make the most of it!

Manly Wade Wellman

 

The Other Worlds

For all of you who enjoy adventures into the worlds beyond (and it goes without saying that, as a reader of WEIRD TALES, you are a connoisseur of the uncanny)—there's a swell book called The Other Worlds (Wilfred Funk, $2.50); it's an anthology of outside-this-life fiction edited by Phil Stong, one of America's more successful writers, an expert on the unknown, and a front rank critic of weird fiction.

The Other Worlds carries the "twenty-five most outstanding modern stories of free imagination of the past decade" . . . the "best since Frankenstein and Dracula."

And fully half of these stories—carefully picked from a sifting of 20,000 published and unpublished yarns—have been taken from WEIRD TALES; many from recent issues, others from the WEIRD TALES of long ago.

The book is divided into three sections: "Strange Ideas" "Fresh Variants," and "Horrors." The "Strange Ideas" are short story notions which, Mr. Stong says, appealed to him because he had never heard of them before.

"Fresh Variants" is of much the same genre, except that the ideas of origin are of earlier use, though pleasantly and ingeniously diverted into new channels and conclusions.

"Horrors" is the most conventional. The language of this type of tale, the compiler feels, should be simple and unpretentious. Concerning such hair raisers, Mr. Stong writes: "The ghost story per se is not necessarily a horror story, because a great many or nearly all of them can be read without any psychic discomfort. The final desideratum of the horror story is that this feeling should be translated to the hair on the back of the neck—that is, physically experienced. This feat is accomplished about once in a literary coon's age, so that it is not strange that in the following collection only one has this effect on me. I shall not name it; but I think the reader will discover it." We think we know which one Mr. Stong means. When you read the book, we'd be interested to hear what story you believe it is.

Ghost stories, weird stories and horror stories, he says, are three differently feathered birds—and while the horror story is almost invariably weird, the ghost and weird tales are seldom horrible.

There are, you will be glad to hear, no stories about Mars or monkeymen. Instead, the book contains horror tales that would reduce the temperature of a smelting plant—and humorous fantasies to balance off the "grims" with "grins" that are really laugh making. And although every story is convincing while it is read, you will not find any tale here that is even remotely possible. For, as Phil Stong says, ". . . . this crop is not marred by any appeals to reason. If you dig up a god in your garden who assures you that your worst lies are not only true but always have-been, don't bother Einstein; come and see me."

Or better still—if you are always seeking an answer to questions that are unanswerable—stay with us as a permanent reader of WEIRD TALES.

Writing l.g. After Your Name

Another recent book, which we arc sure will appeal to WEIRD TALES readers, is a very modern story of lycanthropy. This is Franklin Gregory's The White Wolf (Random House, New York, $2). The story is set in that part of Pennsylvania where he who rides may see many hex signs on the barns, and where the horned finger sign for warding off the evil eye is universally recognized; so a modern werewolf fantasy fits uncommonly well into that background.

Opening in Philadelphia, a lovely young socialite develops such amazing symptoms that her father begins to think she has inherited some strange powers from her remote ancestors. Studies of family records indeed show the mystic symbols l.g. after some of their names—and this can only mean loup garou. How this appalling heritage is brought home to a group of intelligent modern skeptics—a group which includes news reporters, press photographers and a consulting psychiatrist, not to mention the earnest young gentleman farmer who is the girl's fiance—offers good opportunity for an adept working out of a genuinely weird plot. Incidentally, we had the opportunity of reading this story in manuscript—and felt it would have been an ideal serial for WEIRD TALES had space permitted. As it is, we can very enthusiastically recommend the book to the fans; for the author is the worthy follower of a great tradition.

Up the Garden Path?

From Crandon, Wisconsin, Virginia Combs writes:

I have just read the last issue of WEIRD TALES and enjoyed it immensely, as usual. Where are you, Mr. Biggs belonged in an StF mag, but it was a good story just the same. I do have a kick about Birthmark. Nonsense. The minute I read it I said to myself, "Mr. Quinn is leading us up the garden." If Mrs. Watrous had been carried off by the gorilla only one week before she was delivered, there was no possibility of the child having a physical mark as a result of her mother's fright. She might have had monkey-like tendencies, such as surprising agility of the feet to grasp and hold things, and an ungirlish ability to climb trees, but that is all. I am no doctor, but a child, even premature, as Fedoda doubtless was, cannot assume a physical appearance foreign to the species homo in one week. The foetus must have been fully developed, for Fedocia lived and was healthy although born only one week after her mother's fright. Do you suppose that some chemical reaction of fear in the mother's blood dissolved a pair of human feet on an unborn infant and replaced them with those of a gorilla? Nonsense Mr. Quinn. If you had said that Fedocia was born five months later, such a birthmark might have been possible, if you believe in such things, and I have seen enough in my short span to know that not all things are guessed at in our philosophy.

On the other hand, I thought the nature of the birthmark in taste with the events that lead up to it. The gorilla did not harm Mrs. Watrous, only frightened her, therefore Fedocia's beauty remained unmarred. Only her feet showed that tragic influence.

Ye Anciente Booke of Runes

Edward Goodell writes from Kansas City, Kansas:

I wish to thank you for printing my letter in full in the last issue of WEIRD TALES; I have received some very nice letters from people all over the country.

I am inclosing an actual spell in poem form from the book of Runes that I mentioned in my former letter to you (the one that was published). It has been translated from the Old English script that it was originally written in. I have had to add a modern word, or series of words, here and there to keep it in rhyme, as the original is. I have called it The Witch's Curse, though it is really the spell to kill a rival.

THE WITCH'S CURSE

A pentagon drawn in chicken's blood,
Lighted by lamps of a grave's dank mud,
Now I weave my spell my vengeance to wreak,
On her whose beauty my lover would seek,
I'll curse her with toil, I'll curse her with trouble,
Ah! The cauldron begins to bubble.

First a snake, a toad, a bat,
And now a lump of corpse's fat,
Now the eye of a Gypsy newly dead,
Oh! To see her writhe in her bed.

Next an owl's claw, and a walnut hull,
And then the moss from a dead man's skull,
Now the head of an eel, a scorpion's sting,
That to her will agony bring,
Last a handful of maggots, and carrion flies,
With these I curse her shining eyes.

Now I take up a mannikin made of church candles stole,
Soon Satan my master will have her pale soul.
How I rock with laughter, and cackle in glee,
As I think of the horrors that's coming to she.
Now I dress the thing up in her kerchief so white,
That I filched from her room in the dead of the night,
Now a lock of her hair she never missed,
As in her dreams my lover she kissed.

Holding the image of her a-cursed,
Into the knees the needles go first,
Now into the arms and the eyes staring small,
I know as I do this she swooning will fall,
At last now a pin pushed into the head,
I now am avenged. For the girl, she is dead.

We're all out of issues for May and Sept., 1940; so we'd be very glad to hear from readers who have copies of these issues which they wish to sell—or who would like to trade them in for newer issues, or any back numbers that they may have missed and would like to read.

If you're interested, please get in touch with the Subscription Department, WEIRD TALES, 9 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N. Y.

A Dreamer and His Dream

In tune with Edmond Hamilton's novelette of dreams and dreamers, is this interesting, very revealing letter to Seabury Quinn from Russell E. Nihlean, of Chicago, Illinois. For Mr. Nihlean, like Henry Stevens in the fantasy Dreamer's Worlds, has a dream which is as real, as true to life as life itself. Here, then, is his story, a story which—because he feels, as we do, that it will prove of real and genuine interest to every reader of the magazine—he has kindly consented to let us publish in the Eyrie:

Dear Mr. Quinn:

Fourteen years have passed since I read the first of your writings, and I still buy WEIRD TALES, eager to devour your next tale.

Often I have wished that I might know you, and find out what sort of a man wrote these stories, but I feared that if I did write to you in my youth, you would toss the article aside with a smile, thinking that "here was just another young admirer." So I have waited fourteen or fifteen years to write, and I am now thirty-three.

Of late you have buried the good Doctor Trowbridge, and the Good Jules, to tell of other tales. Of these, the last two were best. And choosing between them, I think your Song Without Words (July, 1941, issue) was the better. I say this because the story struck a resounding cord within me.

You see, like Chester Gunnerson in this story, I also am handicapped. I have been a victim of Infantile Paralysis since I was thirteen months old. I get around with the aid of a crutch and cane, and am able to earn my own living. I have worked at everything from newspaper reporting to selling automobiles. I have been on WPA and on Relief. And have come up with a grin on my puss, ready to start anew. I hate a whiner. I think that the world don't owe anybody a damn thing but a man has a right to take from the world if he can.

I, like Chester Gunnerson, have loved women and they have laughed at me when my back was turned, as they did him, for a filthy cripple. And it has hurt me as it hurt him. That is why I could not help but to extend to him my fullest sympathy.

In your tale a ghost brings solace to Chester Gunnerson. When I am wounded to the quick, a dream brings rest to me. It has been so ever since I was a child of about five.

Listen. In the dream I seem to be in an ancient land of hot sands and palm trees. There is a broad brown river, and a ship of many oars and a striped sail. I am aboard this boat clad in a white purple trimmed toga. With me is a woman. The woman is young and beautiful. Beautiful with jet black hair, azure blue eyes, a sweet prideful mouth. The hair is straight and falls square cut across a wide brow over thick eyebrows that almost meet. The nose is short and straight. Proud is this woman's carriage and she wears the diadem of Ancient Egypt At least that is what I found it to be when I discovered it in my history.

In my dreams she and I seem to be made for each other. And when I was a little boy suffering overly much in the ten years I spent in the hospital, she was always there to comfort me.

When I came to man's estate I became involved in several unfortunate affairs of the heart. After each one, in my dreams, she would comfort me again. And last year, when I had a major operation, I lost all desire to live before I went under ether. SHE sent me back to the land of the living, saying that although she had waited a lifetime for me, my time was "Not yet, not yet!"

Now this tale of mine might sound like a bit of your own fiction, but I swear that it is true, Mr. Quinn, and I'm telling it to you because I have a feeling that you, perhaps, would understand it. Can you? Oh, yes, I forgot to say that the lady's name seems to be Iona. That is all I can tell you of my strange dream. I hope you don't get the idea that I'm wacky.

However, I feel that because I know you in a distant, friendly way, you will give me your diagnosis of it.

In the meantime, let me again congratulate you on your Song Without Words. I'll remember it a long time.

Now please excuse it because I close so abruptly. The whistle snorted 11 p.m. and I have to be off to bed. That is, if I want to work tomorrow. I am a map tracer in government service, and Uncle Sammy likes well-rested employees. So until I hear from you,

I am sincerely,⁠
RUSSELL E. NIHLEAN