The Legion of Evil by Warden Ledge

This story was first published in 1933, then remained out of print for forty-three years until its appearance in Hugh Lamb’s Return From the Grave.  And that’s a real shame. Lamb doesn’t mention where he found this story but a little web-surfing got a result at the wonderfully retro Gruesome Cargoes, where it’s revealed that this one first appeared in Don’t Turn On The Light, the ninth volume in Christine Campbell Thompson’s famous Not At Night series. Furthermore, the administrator of Gruesome Cargoes (and the even more astonishing Vault of Evil) has listed this story as one of his ten favourites from the Not At Night series. 

Christine Campbell Thomson
Editor of the famous 
Not At Night series
of horror anthologies.

The story is slight, but boy is it written with energy! Old Madge is suspected of witchcraft and evicted from her hovel in the woods, but soon after this, Jack Bairdsley and his brother Paul are walking through the frost-white woods to establish a right of way, when:

‘Down the centre of the ride, a small white object was rapidly approaching. About twenty to thirty yards ahead of the two men was the junction of the foot-path that led to the old woman’s abode – an evil tumble-down cottage. At this junction, the creature, for such it was, stopped.

‘It was a stoat in its winter disguise – a veritable ermine.’

Before long old Madge is wreaking bloody havok as a pack of stoats attack the stables then the farm.

‘Within, the scene was appalling. Three horses were down and still; from the remaining two, whose necks were covered in living fur, came feeble squeals and kicks as they, too, lay in their stalls.’
If you’ve had enough of bluff heroic types battling to overcome evil, you’ll love the end of this one.

Regretfully, this is the only story I can find from this author.

My thanks as always go to the energy and enthusiasm - and horrific taste - of the administrator of Vault of Evil and Gruesome Cargoes for his research and apparently tireless posting.

          

Death in the Well by Frederick Cowles

Something horrible follows Professor Rutter home one night, but fortunately student John Evans is there to save him from harm.  Rutter, known for his peculiar interests in obscure and arcane subjects, tells Evans that the thing was an elemental being, and promptly offers the student a job as his assistant. 

Frederick Cowles

Rutter believes he has located the infamous ‘Pearl of Zello’, a fabulous jewel said to reward its keeper with unearthly – possibly Satanic - power.  The Pearl’s last known owner was a twelfth century monk, who was beheaded because suspected of trafficking with the Devil. Since then the ghost of a headless monk has haunted the grounds of a Tyrolean castle in the area of a well where Professor Rutter now believes the unholy jewel is hidden.

Of the many horror novels and short stories that I’ve read over the years, I think this is the first to feature the ghost of a headless monk! More an object of amusement than horror now, a comedy cliché, finding a Headless Monk feels a bit like setting out in pursuit of the Abominable Snowman, then realising you’ve netted a pantomime horse.

It should be added here that at his best Frederick Cowles could write a brilliant story; for instance the very memorable Punch and Judy which appeared in another of Hugh Lamb's anthologies, The Star Book of Horror vol. 1.

As it is, Death in the Well is enjoyable enough, with more than one horror awaiting the Professor and his assistant at the bottom of the well. 

File under entertaining hokum. 

There is a very informative page about Frederick Cowles by the late - and legendary - Rbadac, here: Rbadac on Frederick Cowles at the Weird Review

The Basilisk by R Murray Gilchrist

By J W Waterhouse

In her excellent anthology I Shudder at your Touch, Michele Slung wrote: “This lush piece of nineteenth century prose has an almost operatic quality” as Marina and her lover set out to follow a path into the marsh where she will confront the basilisk, whose stare, during her youth, has turned her to stone so that she cannot return love. Now she will undo the spell, it is a simple matter of buying and selling; and she is prepared to pay any price.

Slung continues: “But at the same time that the language infuses our senses with its eerie vegetable torpor, it seems to hide beneath a nearly overpowering Gothic richness layers of even more suggestive meaning. There is little dialogue, but of what there is, note how many of the phrases vibrate with memorably weird, tantalizing eroticism.”

Deep in the forest, the two come to a great pool:

 “...almost a lake, that was covered with lavender scum, where stood an isolated grove of wasted elms. As Marina beheld this, her pace slackened, and she paused in momentary indecision; but at my first word of pleading that she should go no further, she went on, dragging her silken mud-bespattered skirts. We climbed the slippery shores of the island (for island it was, being raised much above the level of the marsh), and Marina led the way over lush grass to an open glade. A great marble tank lay there, supported on two thick pillars. Decayed boughs rested on the crust of the stagnancy within, and frogs, bloated and almost blue, rolled off at our approach. To the left stood the columns of a temple, a round, domed building, with a closed door of bronze. Wild vines had grown athwart the portal; rank, clinging herbs had sprung from the overteeming soil; astrological figures were chiselled on the broad stairs.”  

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by J W Waterhouse

This is like almost every pre-Raphaelite painting you have ever seen, suffocatingly intense and atmospheric. Marvellous. 

This story can also be found in the R Murray Gilchrist collection A Night On The Moor and Other Tales of Dread published by Wordsworth Editions (2006), and The Basilisk and Other Tales of Dread from Ash-Tree Press (2003). 

The Crimson Weaver by R Murray Gilchrist

The Crimson Weaver first appeared in Aubrey Beardsley's The Yellow Book Quarterly (Volume VI, July 1895). A servant and his master have wandered from their path and find themselves in the Domain of the Crimson Weaver.

Warned by an old woman that they are entering a land ruled by a fiend, the master insists that he is strong enough to pass through. That night, the servant has strange dreams, and when he wakes finds his master is missing.

 “The mists gathered together and passed sunward in one long many-coloured veil. When the last shred had been drawn into the great light, I gazed along the avenue, and saw the topmost bartizan of the Crimson Weaver’s palace.” 

He sets out for the palace, and when he gets there: “On the terrace strange beasts – dogs and pigs with human limbs – tore ravenously at something that lay beside the balustrade. At sight of me they paused and lifted their snouts and bayed.”

The Crimson Weaver comes to meet the servant and tells him that his master no longer has any memory of him; she has drugged him and now he lies asleep. Too late he realises that the Weaver wears men’s lives, drawing them from their bodies and weaving them on her loom, and now there will be no escape for either of them.

The story may be found here The Crimson Weaver at Project Gutenberg

The Tower of Moab by L A Lewis

Abel Grimmer (1570-1619)
Building of the Tower of Babel

A salesman is traveling in an industrial region dominated by a strange yellow tower. The tower is not the well-preserved ruin that at first he takes it for. After buying some drinks in a bar he learns that it's less than a century old, begun by a religious cult who presumably intended, like the builders of The Tower of Babel, building their way into heaven. Their project was finally abandoned when the money ran out. When the salesman’s next client proves a disappointment, the years of drudgery and disillusion at last seem to come to a head. He takes a rented room where he can drink without interruption and writes a letter of resignation before rising into a ‘Nirvana of concentrated, objective thought.’ He’s quite comfortably pickled by the time he notices the Tower of Moab rising distantly beyond the houses opposite.

The description of the Tower inevitably places this story in a literary landscape vaguely similar to those by Lovecraft, Robert W Chambers or Machen, though Lewis is as original as any of those writers.

Leaving the room to examine the tower at close quarters, the man discovers that its walls are decorated with carvings depicting Biblical scenes executed on a huge scale. ‘One gets something of [the] feeling from the prints of an old family Bible in which the air is full of the most substantial-looking winged angels and there is a pit full of demons in the foreground. I think that young children, being shown such things, go about thereafter expecting to meet them.’

Successful story telling often relies greatly on anticipation, and – given the passage quoted above and the intoxicated narrator’s almost-constant view of the tower from his window – it is hardly surprising that he soon begins to have visions of unearthly creatures.

The builders of The Tower of Moab might not have succeeded in their goal of building a tower to reach heaven. But there are those dwelling beyond the skies who now find the Tower provides them with a convenient means of egress to lower regions.

Editor Hugh Lamb writes that this is ‘…probably the strangest story you’ll read for a very long time.’ He adds ‘I certainly regard it as one of the unrecognized classics of English macabre fiction.’ I agree.

From Tales Of The Grotesque (1934)

Some Words With a Mummy by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s nerves are playing him up so he takes to bed early with a headache, but when the note arrives, he dresses and hurries to Ponnonner’s house where an eager company is assembled for the unwrapping of an Egyptian Mummy.  

Soon it becomes apparent that this occasion is to be notable for much more than the mere unswathing of a dead Egyptian when someone suggests applying electricity to the corpse.

The result is that the Mummy returns to life.

Mummies of more recent stories, once returned to life, usually embark on a wild orgy of violence, frequently kidnapping some hapless female on the way.

Poe’s Mummy is of more civilized stuff and, once recovered from the indignity of having a live wire inserted between its toes, soon settles to discussing politics and engineering with the company. Long before this, most readers will have concluded that Poe was writing with tongue firmly lodged in cheek.

  

Hugh Lamb notes that although most of Poe’s stories have been repeatedly anthologized  this one had not seen print for twenty-five years until he included it in his anthology Return from the Dead in 1976.  Not for the first time I've been surprised by the readability of Poe’s fiction which usually bears comparison with much more contemporary stuff. 

Waxworks by W L George

Henry has forgotten to book seats at the music hall so in an attempt to pacify his disappointed wife suggests they visit a nearby wax museum.  There is no one to take their admission fee but they go in anyway. The inevitable chamber of horrors with its vignettes of serial killers and their victims is impressively executed, but it doesn’t appeal to Ivy. ‘It was not only the sight of the blood coagulated on the white hair, it was something else, something unnameable. The art of the sculptor had gone too far; here was mere and abominable reality.’

The plot is too familiar to bear further elaboration and for sheer first-reading fright A M Burrage’s Waxwork is the definitive version. But W L George’s story contains some powerful descriptive writing which makes it well-worth reading.

From the posthumously published collection by Walter Lionel George (1882 – 1926), Selected Stories (1927); reprinted in Hugh Lamb’s Return From The Grave.

'Blue Eyes' by Maurice Level

Despite the coldness of the day and against the advice of the house-surgeon, ‘Blue Eyes’ vacates the hospital bed where she has been recovering to put flowers on the grave of her lover on All Saints Day. It is almost a year since he died, and in answer to the house-surgeon’s question she explains that her lover was executed for murder. If she doesn’t put flowers on his grave, no one else will.

As she nears the cemetery she passes the flower-sellers, but she has no money and her heart almost breaks as she thinks of the bare mound of his grave. But there is always a way for a girl to make money on these streets.

Elegantly and sparely written, the narrative avoids obvious traps like a careful walker avoiding puddles, to conclude on a note of ghastly irony. Hugh Lamb describes this as ‘one of the finest examples ever of the French speciality, the conte cruel.’

From Maurice Level's collection Crises (1920); reprinted in Hugh Lamb's Return From The Dead (1976)

Snow Time by Oswell Blakeston

Photo of Oswell Blakeston
by Howard Coster

half-plate film negative, 1930s

Transferred from Central Office of Information, 1974

Peter is a sickly child who lives in Switzerland for his health. He misses England and wishes he had some friends here; but his mother tells him there are no suitable companions in the village. Nurse looks after him, and his mother is here, but he never sees his father. If there is one thing Peter hates to eat, it’s sago, “those awful, slimy eggs”. Unable to finish his sago desert, Peter hides it away in a box in his dressing-table.

Mistaking his flushed appearance for fever, nurse confines him to bed, where uneasy dreams assail him. Then it seems that the dreams are gone, as if there was something else here so horrible that even the dreams are frightened away.

A disturbing portrait of an unhappy childhood, illustrated with what strike me as unerringly accurate observations as glimpsed through a child’s eye.