Other reviews:1
Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 42-43 (Beccon Publications, 2002)
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 140-142, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991)
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Editors, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Kay Tarrant
Fiction:
Wet Magic • novella by Henry Kuttner ∗∗∗+
Thieves’ House • novelette by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗+
The Angelic Angleworm • novelette by Fredric Brown ∗
The Ultimate Wish • short story by E. Mayne Hull ∗∗∗+
No Graven Image • novelette by Cleve Cartmill ∗
Guardian • short story by Cleve Cartmill [as by Michael Corbin] ∗
The Hat Trick • short story by Fredric Brown [as by Felix Graham] ∗∗
The Witch • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗+
Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by W. A. Kolliker (x9), Frank Kramer (x3), Manuel Isip (x8), Edd Cartier (x2), Paul Orban (x2)
Of Things Beyond • editorial
The Ka of Kor-Sethon • poem by Hannes Bok
—And Having Writ— • letters
On Books of Magic • essay by L. Sprague de Camp [as by J. Wellington Wells]
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This issue of the magazine has a distinctly Sword & Sorcery feel to start, courtesy of the first two stories, Wet Magic by Henry Kuttner, and Thieves’ House by Fritz Leiber, the fifth of his ‘Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’ stories to see print in Unknown.
Kuttner’s Wet Magic is an Arthurian fantasy that starts with an AEF pilot called Arthur Woodley getting shot down by a pair of Stukas in Wales2 and bailing out into a swirling grey fog. When he later looks for shelter he checks the hollow at the base of a tree for bears (!) and gets kicked twice by something unseen. He moves away.
Later, while Woodley is resting, he wakes when someone kisses him, and opens his eyes to see a young, dark-haired woman who wears a gold band in her hair, and a full length robe. After some back and forth we discover her name is Vivienne, that people cannot normally see her as she is invisible, and that, according to her, “he smells of Merlin”. She adds that she lives under the lake in Morgan’s (the Queen of Air and Darkness’s) castle, and that she will be his if he passes the testing. When Vivienne gets airborne to fly to the lake, Woodley trips, bangs his head, and passes out.
After this slightly clunky setup the rest of the story takes place underwater in Morgan’s castle. Woodley wakes to find a translucent green woman (a naiad) attending to him. She explains where he is and that he will have to pass a test set by Morgan that evening.
Before Woodley can find out more, an angry knight called Sir Bohart interrupts them, and challenges Woodley to a sword fight (he is jealous that Woodley has Vivienne’s affection). Vivienne arrives and banishes Sir Bohart from the room.
Vivienne explains Woodley’s situation:
The girl laughed softly. “You have no gills. Morgan’s magic works more subtly. You have been—altered—so that you can live under water. The element is as air to you. It is the same enchantment Morgan put upon this castle when she sank it in the lake, after Camelot fell and the long night came upon Britain. An old enchantment—she put it upon Lyonesse once, and lived there for a while.”
“And I thought all that was just legend,” Woodley muttered.
“How little you mortals know! And yet it is true—in some strange paradoxical way. Morgan told me once, but I did not understand. Well, you can ask her tonight, after the testing.”
“Oh—the testing. I’m not too happy about that. What is it, anyway?”
Vivienne looked at him with some surprise. “An ancient chivalric custom. Before any man can dwell here, he must prove himself worthy by doing some deed of valor. Sir Bohart had to slay a Worm—a dragon, you know—but his magic cuirass helped him there. He’s quite invulnerable while he wears it.”
“Just what is this testing?”
“It is different for each knight. Morgan has made some being, with her sorcery, and placed it behind the Shaking Rock. Ere sundown, you must go and kill the creature, whatever it is. I would I knew what manner of thing lairs there, but I do not, nor would Morgan let me tell you if I knew.”
Woodley blinked. “Uh . . . suppose I don’t want to take the test?”
“You must, or Morgan will slay you. But surely you are not afeared, my lord!”
“Of course not,” he said hastily. “Just tell me a little more, will you? Are we really living under water?”
Vivienne sighed, pressed Woodley down to a sitting position on the bed, and relaxed comfortably in his lap. “Kiss me,” she said. “There! Now— well, after the Grail was lost and the table broken, magic went out of Britain. There was no room for the fairy folk. Some died, some went away, some hid, here and there. There are secrets beneath the hills of Britain, my Arthur. So Morgan, with her powers, made herself invisible and intangible, and sank her castle here under the lake, in the wild mountains of Wales. Her servants are not human, of course. I had done Morgan a service once, and she was grateful. So when I saw the land sinking into savagery, I asked to go with her to this safe place. I brought Bohart with me and Morgan took Merlin’s old master, Bleys the Druid. Since then nothing has changed. Humans cannot feel or see us—or you either, now that you have been enchanted. p. 13-14
After Vivienne leaves he quizzes the naiad about what is behind the rock, and learns it is an undine, a tendrilled beast. Woodley goes to see the Druid Bleys for advice. . . .
At this point the story becomes a faster paced and more enjoyable tale (even with some more world-building) of Woodley’s underwater adventures. He goes on a tour of the castle with Bleys the Druid and they end up on a balcony overlooking the castle’s dragon (it keeps the fish out). Bleys falls asleep, and then Woodley is knocked over the balcony (Sir Bohart again) and finds himself outside the castle. He tries to make his escape to the surface but cannot breathe in air: a result of the “wet magic”. At this point, Woodley realises he will have to undertake the test and sets about outsmarting the various factions in the castle to do so. The rest of the story involves (spoiler) an unlikely alliance between Woodley and Sir Bohart, Vivienne’s discovery of his plan to escape the castle, Merlin the wizard hiding in his tree, the reappearance of King Arthur, and a final confrontation with Morgan.
This is lively, clever and amusing tale that uniquely exploits the Arthurian myths. It is also written in better prose than you normally get from Kuttner (which makes one wonder if C. L. Moore had a hand in it—perhaps the fate of every good story the man wrote). One of the other things I liked about it is that it keeps Morgan, and the threat of being forced to “play chess” with her—a terminal event—offstage most of the time. When (spoiler) Sir Bohart eventually falls foul of this game there is a skilful piece of writing that leaves the results to the reader’s imagination:
Slowly Woodley rose and began to descend the slope of the lake bottom. A green twilight surrounded him.
Then he saw—something—slowly stirring at his feet.
For a moment Woodley’s shocked eyes could not quite comprehend what he saw. He gave a little choking gasp of nausea. It was not the actual appearance of the—thing—so much as the unmistakable fact that it had once been Sir Bohart.
And it still lived, after a fashion.
Morgan’s chess game was finished.
Woodley shut his eyes, squeezing the lids tight together, as he fought down the sickness of his human flesh, revolting from that which Morgan had done. Through the dark came a voice.
“She plays at chess with Bleys now,” it said.
Woodley tried to speak, but could not. That which should have had no voice went on thickly:
“She dared not slay him before, since he held Excalibur for Arthur. But the hour for Arthur’s coming has passed, she said to me before I died, and she has no more fear.”
The thing did not speak again, for it had disintegrated. p. 31
Recommended.
Thieves’ House by Fritz Leiber is perhaps not quite as good as the Kuttner but it is structurally superior: the writer uses his stage experience to construct a story that is essentially a selection of key scenes tied together with a minimum of connecting material.
The first of these scenes has three thieves, two men and a woman, discussing the recruitment of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser to steal the bejewelled skull and hands of a long dead master thief. After the robbery Fissif, one of the thieves, is to double cross the pair.
The story then cuts to after the event:
The ten remaining days of the Month of the Serpent had passed, and the first fifteen days of the Month of the Owl, since those three had conferred. And the fifteenth day had darkened into night. Chill fog, like a shroud, hugged ancient stony Lankhmar, chief city of an ancient barbaric world. This night the fog had come earlier than usual, flowing down the twisting streets and mazy alleyways. And it was getting thicker. p. 35
Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are pursuing the double-crossing Fissif to the Thieves’ House. The pair fight their way in past concealed traps and assassins, and arrive to see a red-haired woman (one of the three from the initial meeting) disappear with the skull and hands. The current master thief sits motionless in the corner, strangled.
The pair pursue the woman but, when she blocks her escape route, they hide in an alcove and listen to the thieves convene a court to try Fissif, who they think has double-crossed them. Later, when one of the latter reports to the new master thief that the pair have not left by any of the exits, the thieves realise that Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are still in the house. The pair spring out from their hiding place to take advantage of the surprise, and there is a fight and pursuit.
During this Fafhrd gets separated from the Grey Mouser, and finds himself in a dark underground chamber. Voices speak to him, and he realises they come from the skeletons of long dead thieves. They are affronted by the theft of the master thief’s remains, and tell him that he is to return the skull and hands to them or he will die. Before he can do anything Fafhrd is captured by his pursuers. The Grey Mouser meantime escapes and later gets a ransom note for Fafhrd.
The rest of the story (spoiler) details how the Mouser achieves Fafhrd’s release: he cross-dresses as an old witch, recovers of the bones from the redhead’s house, and uses a convenient connecting passage to the Thieves’ House (she was the master thief’s mistress). Meanwhile, Fafhrd tells his story to the thieves as time runs out. The Mouser uses the skull for a spot of mummery, and there is a final fight scene where the skeletons take their revenge against the current crop of thieves. . . .
This is an atmospheric and entertaining sword and sorcery tale.
The Angelic Angleworm by Fredric Brown starts with a short scene that describes the main character Charlie Willis getting up in the morning to go fishing with a friend called Pete. The first fantastic element appears when he is digging for worms while waiting for the latter to turn up:
He took his jackknife out and knelt down beside the flower bed. Ran the blade a couple of inches in the ground and turned over a clod of it. Yes, there were worms all right. There was a nice big juicy one that ought to be tempting to any fish.
Charlie reached out to pick it up.
And that was when it happened.
His fingertips came together, but there wasn’t a worm between them, because something had happened to the worm. When he’d reached out for it, it had been a quite ordinary-looking angleworm. A three-inch juicy, slippery, wriggling angleworm. It most definitely had not had a pair of wings. Nor a—
It was quite impossible, of course, and he was dreaming or seeing things, but there it was.
Fluttering upward in a graceful slow spiral that seemed utterly effortless. Flying past Charlie’s face with wings that were shimmery-white, and not at all like butterfly wings or bird wings, but like—
Up and up it circled, now above Charlie’s head, now level with the roof of the house, then a mere white—somehow a shining white—speck against the gray sky. And after it was out of sight, Charlie’s eyes still looked upward. p. 50
In between scenes that take place at Charlie’s job at a printers, or involve his girlfriend Jane and their upcoming marriage, the story subsequently details other fantastic events in Charlie’s life: he challenges a brutal teamster who is mistreating a horse, passes out, and finds himself in hospital with sunburn; at a museum exhibition he sees a teal duck flapping around in a hermetically sealed cabinet until it finally expires; on the golf course he sees a lei (wreath) where he thought his golf ball should be; when he goes into the jewellers to pick up a wedding ring he smells ether and passes out.
Later, he works out that the events occur every fifty-one hours and ten minutes and, after another event, he works out the connection. He positions himself at the town line in a place called Haveen for the next episode and, when this occurs, he (spoiler) finds himself in Heaven talking to the Chief Compositor. We learn that the problem has been a technical error in the typesetting machine that writes Charlie’s life: he got an angelworm and not an angleworm, heat instead of hate, lei instead of a lie, teal instead of a tael, etc. This also explains him going to Haveen to enter heaven. The problem is sorted and his life revised: he is happy to miss the wedding ceremony but wants to go back in time for his wedding night.
This is a clever gimmick but it is one that the reader has little chance of guessing, and any writer would struggle to turn it into a decent story. The tale (tael?) is also dreadfully padded—at half its length it might have stood a chance.
The unexpected treat of the issue (I was not impressed by two of her earlier collaborations) is The Ultimate Wish by E. Mayne Hull. Initially this does not get off to a promising start with its unpleasantly stereotypical portrayal of Lola Pimmons, a hunchback who, it is implied, is as twisted on the inside as she is on the outside. Further, her work colleagues are unpleasant and cruel people. Then, as the latter are talking about her:
There was a green flash in the air, and a small creature stood before her. Two red horns grew out of the forehead of its semihuman green face; the thing snapped at her.
“Don’t get scared. I told you the first time that I could never appear twice in the same shape to a human being. And don’t worry about these others. Time stops for you when I come. They can’t hear or see us talking.”
Lola’s spasm of fear dwindled. The funny part was that she was not afraid of the creature. It had been the same that morning, when it had first appeared, as she finished dressing—she had actually managed to suppress the scream that formed in her throat.
She licked her lips now with a smacking sound of purest animal elation; behind that joy was a swift kaleidoscopic mind picture of all the frustration wishes that had ever distorted her daydreams and nightmares. She said:
“No, I haven’t decided yet; and I’m not going to rush it. I want the best wish there is, and you said that I had till six o’clock.” p. 72
The rest of the tale tells of the further appearances of the demon (in a different guise each time) and Lola’s detailed questioning about what her various possible wishes will result in. The demon explains the hidden downsides each time, and has this to say about her potential wish for the love of her employer, a good-looking man of thirty-five:
“Ah, I see you’ve made your wish.”
“I want to know first how you’d do it.”
The crone leered: “You’re a sharp one, eh? Well, all right. What do you want? Love or marriage?”
Lola tightened her lips, narrowed her eyes, snapped: “Don’t try to kid me. I want enough love for marriage.”
“Nope. That’s two wishes. One’s spiritual. The other’s physical.”
The old one wrinkled her long, hideous nose, added:
“I guess the likes of you won’t be wanting the first.”
“What do you mean?” Lola said, stung. Her eyes flashed a darker blue, with abrupt, easy hatred.
“The kind of love you can get,” said the old wretch coolly, “doesn’t pay dividends.”
Lola was thoughtful. Her round, her too-round face twisted with a sullen moue. “What kind of love can I get?” she demanded.
“Better than the kind you give, my dear,” smirked the other. Her voice softened, glowed a picture into words: “He’ll start feeling sorry for you. Bring you an occasional box of chocolates, talk to you oftener; it’ll be a sort of pity love,” she finished.
Lola waited, then as the other made no attempt to go on, she said, amazed: “Is that all?”
The black eyes snapped; the old woman said: “I can only work with the material you offer. I might manage a kiss for you every Christmas.”
Lola squirmed with a curious, unsightly movement of her body. She was not aware of the graceless action, and she would have been amazed if someone had told her that the maneuver was a physical expression of the thought that had come into her mind.
“Suppose I wanted to be his mistress?”
The moment she had spoken, she shivered.
She hadn’t intended to put it so baldly. For the barest instant she had the feeling that her soul had come out of her body with the words, and it was lying in the waste-paper basket beside her, a dirty, crumpled thing, for all to see and shudder at.
The grisly feeling passed, as the old woman chuckled slyly, and, seeming to understand what had passed through her mind, said: “Don’t worry, my dear, we have no secrets from each other.”
All reticence gone, Lola sat with open-mouthed eagerness. “Well?” she urged.
“An accident would do the trick,” was the chilling answer. “Both his legs amputated, his face torn and scarred for life. Afterward, he’d feel that you were the best he could do.”
“Ugh!” said Lola, and looked sick in her unbeautiful way. “What do you think I am?”
“My dear,” crooned the old woman, “I know what you are. Let’s not go into that.” p. 73
The story cycles through this scenario a few times, during which the demon repeatedly tells Lola there is one ultimate wish he can grant that will give her the contentment she desires, but he cannot tell her what the wish involves. . . .
The ending is, perhaps, obvious (spoiler: she is hit by a truck).
I think people’s responses to this story will be split. Some will find this an unpalatably grim—even brutal—story that treats its unfortunate heroine badly (part of my reaction to the piece). Hard not to when there are passages like this:
Across the street from the restaurant, Lola stopped abruptly before the gleaming window; and her eyes, weakly blue behind the owlish spectacles, peered with abrupt covetousness at a slinky black gown that draped a lean Judy against a background of fine furniture.
For a long, trembling moment, it was enough that the gown itself was a sheeny, lovely creation that she could own at the snap of a finger; and then, as the sun burst from a bed of clouds above, its brilliance emphasizing the shadows inside the window, and starkly reflecting the slight, crooked image of her body—she shuddered.
“Beauty,” she thought with a pang that stabbed along her nerves. “If I had beauty—” p. 75
If you can overlook a badly used protagonist, and an ending that perhaps comes off the boil a little, it is an impressive and relentless little piece that is a bracing antidote to more run-of-the-mill ‘Wish’ stories.
This is probably the best story in the issue, and one I’d have in my “Best of the Year”.
No Graven Image by Cleve Cartmill uses the old superstition that every time a camera takes a photo of someone they lose a piece of their soul. This phenomenon has finally caught up with movie star Norman Courtney, who is catatonic in hospital. The three characters who come to his rescue are Al, his agent/manager, Lily Kung, a Chinese woman who is a script girl cum Asian sorceress, and Pat, Al’s fiancée.
By the quarter way point I was beginning to get a little impatient with the lack of progress (the piece has the usual Cartmill padding, with lots of running around and dialogue). However, it picks up in the central section, which involves among other things: a ghoul called Dr Barq in charge of the hospital treating Courtney; Lily creating a zombie doll of a producer they want to force into helping them retrieve a number of film masters; the threesome’s attempt to rescue Courtney from the hospital armed with the local market’s supply of garlic; etc.
None of this really makes much sense to be honest, but Cartmill manages to keep the plates spinning entertainingly for a while—until the end that is, when they all fall to the floor (Lily uses her birth charm and some Chinese symbols on a car tyre to vanquish Dr Barq the ghoul: I’m not entirely sure why they didn’t do this to start with).
By the way, Lily is, for the period, an atypically strong, capable character, so I’m not quite sure why Cartmill has her breaking into “coolie chatter” every now and then:
So we bought practically all the garlic in Hollywood.
The Hollyfax Market: arc lamps on the sidewalk, stabbing a veil of fog; hillbilly entertainers, stabbing your eardrums with sharp blades of nasal harmony.
“We want some garlic,” I told the Japanese vegetable man.
He spread a smile between his ears. “Garric, how much, prease?”
“All you’ve got.”
“Ah? Have too much. Busher basket full. How much you want?”
“The whole works.”
“Ah, so? Will never use, misser. Too much.”
“Wassa malla you?” Lily snarled. “You savvy Inglis? Gollic you got, gollic we buy. You savvy? You bring, chop chop!”
As he scurried away, I said, “Cut out that coolie chatter. You speak better English than I do.”
“I think it’s cute,” Pat said.
“That’s just the trouble. She’s got a Ph. D in languages, and uses the sloppiest English in town. Cute!”
“Hush yo’ mouf,” Lily said fiercely. “Time’s a-wastin’. p. 92
Guardian, also by Cleve Cartmill, is a pseudonymous effort. To begin with I thought it was by Frederic Brown:
INTEROFFICE COMMUNICATION
.
To—Secretary, Recording Office
From No.—1,234,567,890,123
Rank—Guardian Angel
Subject—Resignation
Remarks—See Below
.
I should have followed my hunch and gone into the Harp & Halo Corps when I re-enlisted this time. But some of the other Guardians said this was a fairly soft touch, this watching over a man till the Sands & Time department sends out his Day-is-done order.
Well, the job is about what I expected, and I handled my first assignment discreetly. Look at my card; you’ll see.
So I can’t see any reason for my suspension—“pending an investigation.” And the semiofficial suggestion that I resign and be forgiven smells like office politics to me.
Every time you turn your back around here, you’re likely to get a flaming sword between your shoulder blades. I’m not going to resign, even if I get Hell for it. p. 102
Although this sets up the story as a light piece it gets darker by the minute. The plot is that Bonnie Camber, the above guardian angel’s ward, is running for election as the DA against the incumbent, and Bonnie has evidence of his corruption. The plan is to reveal this two days before the election.
However, things start going badly for Bonnie. He is visited by the DA’s thugs and given a systematic and brutal (and fully described) beating to try to force him to hand over the evidence. The next day he meets Ellen, his campaign manager Harry’s fiancé, and discovers the DA has bought Harry off. Next, Ellen and Bonnie discuss their feelings for each other (there is a bit of a love triangle thing going on between the three). Bonnie says that he is too old for her and that she will be better off with Harry. He asks Ellen to tell Harry that he won’t be publishing the evidence.
Bonnie then hires a car and goes to the house of one of the thugs who beat him up, and knocks him out. He intends to give the thug a serious revenge beating but concludes there is no point, and leaves.
The rest of the story (spoiler) has a despondent Bonnie going to a bar, and later drinking himself to death in a hotel room. The guardian angel’s only intervention, and the one that got him in trouble, is to stop Bonnie being killed in a car accident involving Ellen driving his car. Ironically, she is on the way to tell him Harry has changed his mind.
This is essentially an unpleasant, nihilistic piece bookended with some standard ‘Guardian Angel’ patter. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s not.
The Hat Trick by Fredric Brown is a brief and slight story, but it has a central scene that is well done: two couples are together in one of the women’s homes with the two men needling each other over card tricks. During this one of them goads the other into producing something from a top hat:
He left the top hat right on the table, but he reached out a hand toward it, uncertainly at first. There was a squealing sound from inside the hat, and Walter plunged his hand down in quickly and brought it up holding something by the scruff of the neck.
Mae screamed and then put the back of her hand over her mouth and her eyes were like white saucers. Elsie keeled over quietly on the studio couch in a dead faint; and Bob stood there with his cane-yardstick in midair and his face frozen.
The thing squealed again as Walter lifted it a little higher out of the hat. It looked like a monstrous, hideous black rat. But it was bigger than a rat should be, too big even to have come out of the hat. Its eyes glowed like red light bulbs and it was champing horribly its long scimitar-shaped white teeth, clicking them together with its mouth going several inches open each time and closing like a trap. It wriggled to get the scruff of its neck free of Walter’s trembling hand; its clawed forefeet flailed the air. It looked vicious beyond belief.
It squealed incessantly, frightfully, and it smelled with a rank fetid odor as though it had lived in graves and eaten of their contents.
Then, as suddenly as he had pulled his hand out of the hat, Walter pushed it down in again, and the thing down with it. The squealing stopped and Walter took his hand out of the hat. He stood there, shaking, his face pale. He got a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped sweat off his forehead. His voice sounded strange: “I should never have done it.” He ran for the door, opened it, and they heard him stumbling down the stairs. p. 112
The coda suggests (spoiler) that Walt may be an extra-terrestrial.
The Witch by A. E. van Vogt3 is a story about Marson, the headmaster of a school, and the unwelcome lodger that he and his wife have inherited, his great-grandmother Mother Quigley.
The story starts with Marson watching the old woman sitting outside in the sun, near the couple’s house beside the sea. He glances away for a moment, and by the time he looks back, she has vanished. Quigley cannot work out how she got past him and back to the house without him seeing her. Matters become even more peculiar when he goes back to the house and his wife tells him she was inside the whole time.
This unsettles Marson more than it normally would as he has also received a letter from a distant village stating that Mother Quigley died and was buried last year. He wonders who the woman staying with them really is.
When the point of view then switches to the old woman we learn that she is planning to leave her old body and transfer to Joanna’s young one. While she is sitting in the lounge thinking about this she screams when she realises that the Marsons have not closed the blinds: she has a terrible fear of the night (and, we find out later, the sea). Marson’s resentment towards the old woman—there are undertones of unwanted elder relatives here—comes out into the open when he later challenges her about the letter he received. She tells a story about how she impersonated the dead woman to take her money.
That afternoon, and in response to Marston’s awkward questions, Mother Quigley decides to make sure that she can quickly possess Joanna when the time arrives (there is a full moon due in a few days). However, Marson catches her trying to force feed a green powder to Joanna while the latter is having an afternoon nap. There follows a fantastical scene when Marson grabs the old woman:
And then, Marson was on top of her. That loathsome mindwind was blowing stronger, colder; and in him was an utter, deadly conviction that demonic muscles would resist his strength to the limit. For a moment, that certainly prevailed even over reality.
For there was nothing.
Thin, bony arms yielded instantly to his devastatingly hard thrust; a body that was like old, rotten paper crumbled to the floor from his murderous rush.
For the barest moment, the incredibly easy victory gave Marson pause. But no astonishment could genuinely restrain the violence of his purpose or cancel that unnatural sense of unhuman things; no totality of doubt at this instant could begin to counterbalance his fury at what he had seen.
The old woman lay at his feet in a shapeless, curled-up blob. With a pitiless ferocity, a savage intent beyond any emotion he had ever known, Marson snatched her from the floor. Light as long-decayed wood, she came up in his fingers, a dangling, inhuman, black-clothed thing. He shook it, as he would have shaken a monster; and it was then, when his destroying purpose was a very blaze of unreasoning intensity that the incredible thing happened.
Images of the old woman flooded the room. Seven old women, all in a row, complete in every detail, from black, sacklike dress to semi-bald head, raced for the door. Three exact duplicates of the old woman were clawing frantically at the nearest window. The eleventh replica was on her knees desperately trying to squeeze under the bed.
With an astounded gasp, brain whirling madly, Marson dropped the thing in his hands. It fell squalling, and abruptly the eleven images of the old woman vanished like figments out of a nightmare. p. 122
After a further period of self-doubt, Marson goes on a trip to the Mother Quigley’s previous home village to disinter the coffin; he also asks a teacher colleague to do an analysis of the green powder. After Marston returns (spoiler) from an empty grave, he is told the results of the tests:
“Grainger identified it as a species of seaweed, known as Hydrodendon Barelia.”
“Any special effects if taken into the human system?” Marson was all casualness.
“No-o! It’s not dangerous, if that’s what you mean. Naturally, I tried it on the dog, meaning myself, and it’s rather unpleasant, not exactly bitter but sharp.”
Marson was silent. He wondered whether he ought to feel disappointed or relieved. Or what? Kemp was speaking again:
“I looked up its history, and, surprisingly, it has quite a history. You know how in Europe they make you study a lot of stuff about the old alchemists and all that kind of stuff, to give you an historical grounding.”
“Yes?”
Kemp laughed. “You haven’t got a witch around your place by any chance?”
“Eh!” The exclamation almost burned Marson’s lips. He fought hard to hide the tremendousness of that shock.
Kemp laughed again. “According to ‘Die Geschichte der Zauberinnen’ by the Austrian, Karl Gloeck, Hydrodendon Barelia is the modern name for the sinister witch’s weed of antiquity. I’m not talking about the special witches of our Christian lore, with their childish attributes, but the old tribe of devil’s creatures that came out of prehistory, regular full-blooded sea witches. It seems when each successive body gets old, they choose a young woman’s body, attune themselves to it by living with the victim, and take possession any time after midnight of the first full moon period following the 21st of June. Witch’s weed is supposed to make the entry easier. Gloeck says . . . why, what’s the matter, sir? p. 125-126
Marston later decides that he cannot just kick Mother Quigley out of his house and put her in an old folk’s home as that will leave the real problem unresolved, so he decides on a more permanent solution. This plays out in a tense and creepy finale.
This is an entertaining and engrossing novelette, and if this is what van Vogt was capable of in the fantasy field it is a pity he didn’t produce more stories of this type.
The Interior artwork for this issue is quite surprising. Normally I’d be berating Kolliker (who provides illustrations for the Kuttner and Cartmill stories) and praising Edd Cartier, but Kolliker produces the best illustrations in this magazine and Cartier the worst. One wonders if Kolliker read all the criticism in the letter columns of Astounding and resolved to do better.
Manuel Isip’s illustrations for Cartmill’s second story Guardian are better than the ones for the other two stories he illustrates: he uses a multiple line style of shading that gives them a certain something. The other illustrations by Frank Kramer and Orban are also-rans.
Of Things Beyond is a short but interesting editorial about how different times and places develop different mythologies and myth-beings:
The myth-people live on chance and luck, good or ill. When it was purely a question of luck whether a crop grew or died, the brownies and the fairies lived. When it becomes a matter of lead arsenate and pyrethrum dust against the insects, and soil analysis to determine the best type of crop and most suitable type of fertilizer—
Of all the cultures man has evolved, only one has not developed its own generation of myth beings. The steel-and-stone cities of today alone of all man’s housings offer shelter to no pixies. p. 6
The Ka of Kor-Sethon by Hannes Bok is an okay poem about a spirit, a ka, trapped in an Egyptian tomb.
—And Having Writ— is a short letter column this time around that has positive mentions for Hannes Bok’s novel The Sleeping Sorceress, and Alfred Bester’s Hell is Forever. It also has this from Mary McGregor, the wife of Astounding and Unknown regular Malcolm Jameson:
Dear Mr. Campbell:
The last thing in my mind is to start a feud with Malcolm Jameson, but it goes against the grain to pick up the magazine containing my very first brainchild to see the light of print and find him hogging the spotlight on the cover and pretending it was his own.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I admire his work extravagantly, and needless to say like him, too. Otherwise I wouldn’t have lived with him all these years, raised his kids and kept his house and traipsed all over the seven seas trying to keep up with him, but it seems to me he has glory enough without cutting in on my poor maiden effort. Or was it your own fault? Did you think that “Mrs.” on the return address was a misprint or something?
They say you can’t unscramble eggs, so I don’t know what you are going to do about it now that it has happened, but I know darn well I don’t want my first and maybe only story to go down the chute as just another Jameson yarn. Outside of that, I think Unknown is a pretty good magazine. This story is more autobiographical than you think. The only place I could find to rent in Washington, when my husband went off to sea in the last war, was a haunted house in Georgetown. I don’t recommend ’em except in emergencies.
—Mary MacGregor (Jameson).
Campbell replies “We wuz wrong—and she wuz robbed!”.
On Books of Magic by L. Sprague de Camp is an interesting and informative review of Witchcraft by Charles Williams (Faber & Faber, 1941), a history book on the subject of witchcraft and the witchcraft trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Another good issue, the third one in a row. ●
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1. Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 42-43 (Beccon Publications, 2002), says that “the reader [is] once again transported into the world of Arthurian legend courtesy of Henry Kuttner’s Wet Magic”, and that the “story is smoothly written but, as with some others, blends an uneasy mixture of whimsy, horror and adventure.” There is “no such problem” with Fritz Leiber’s story.
As for the other two novelettes, Frederic Brown’s The Angelic Angleworm is a “light-hearted tale” but one which ultimately turns out to have a “shaggy dog” ending. No Graven Image by Cleve Cartmill is “original and entertaining”.
Smith notes that Edna Mayne Hull (A. E. van Vogt’s wife) makes her first contribution to Unknown with The Ultimate Wish. There is no comment about the quality of this story or the others, bar The Hat Trick by Fredric Brown, which was not “Brown at his best but is an early example of his speciality: ultra short fiction”.
The artwork was “passable with M. Isip up to standard, one Cartier drawing and Kolliker and Kramer slightly better than usual”.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 140-142, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991) says that the first half of Kuttner’s Wet Magic “has several good slapstick scenes. Then the story takes a none-to-successful serious turn, when a wizard proposes that maybe Woodley was fated to end up where he is because he is the latter-day incarnation of King Arthur. The ending sputters inconclusively.”
He goes on to add that “Kuttner’s use of the “laws of compensation and revision” to describe how it’s possible for a person’s actions in the present to affect the past is reminiscent of the laws of “similarity and contagion” in the Harold Shea stories.”
As to the other novelettes, he notes that the Grey Mouser’s cross dressing scene in Leiber’s Thieves’ House “is one of the first flashes of the humor that was to become a trademark of this series.” Brown’s The Angelic Angleworm “proceeds to a witty conclusion”, whereas Cartmill’s No Graven Image “thoroughly exhausts the originality of its idea very early.” He adds that “the characterization is surprisingly poor for Cartmill”.
Dziemianowicz thought that Hull’s The Ultimate Wish was “an unusually cruel story”. Cartmill’s Guardian has a “portrayal of guardian angels as invisible G-men [that] is original and effective”.
Finally, he says this of A. E. van Vogt’s The Witch: “At Campbell’s request, van Vogt built a story around a character who resembled Granny in Slan. [. . .] This story tries to be as complex as The Ghost [Unknown, August 1942] but the ending is nowhere near as good.” He adds that the story was televised on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.
2. The Stuka was a dive-bomber and not a fighter, so it is highly unlikely that a pair of them would be dog-fighting over Wales (if they had the range to get there from France). Further, the World War 2 Database site says in its timeline, “20 Aug 1940: Luftwaffe leadership ordered that no more Ju 87 Stuka aircraft were to be sent into action over Britain, after suffering unsustainable loss rates; almost 60 were shot down in the past 11 days.”
There have been no wild bears in Wales since the (at the latest) the early Middle Ages, according to this BBC webpage.
I am surprised that neither Kuttner nor Campbell caught these errors.
3. As noted above, van Vogt got the idea for The Witch from Campbell. He had this to say in his 1980 interview with Robert Weinberg:
Campbell offered me an occasional idea. But the fact is that it takes me a long time to organize someone else’s story thought into my own system. He suggested the concept of a wizened old witch, which I eventually evolved into “The Witch” for Unknown Worlds. What I principally utilized Campbell for was information. When I was writing “The Storm” I wrote him and asked him if there was a possibility that some equivalent of a storm could exist in space. He wrote R.S. Richardson, and the result was what appears in the story. Campbell wrote me long letters loaded with information whenever I queried him, or if he had some thought stimulated by a story of mine.
The rest of the interview is at Sevagram, a website dedicated to A. E. van Vogt. ●
