Silly, isn’t it, Wally, that you’re being driven to this by something that can’t really be there, something that exists only because it’s thought of? You’re mad, Wally. Mad. Or are you?— isn’t thought as real a thing as anything? What are you but thought harnessed to a chunk of clay? What are they but thought, unharnessed?
Yell for help, Wally. There must be help somewhere. Yell, not with your throat and lips because they aren’t yours right now, but with your mind! Yell for help where it will do good, over there. Somebody to stop Darveth. Somebody that would be on your side.
YES! That’s it! YELL!
How he got home, afterward and an hour later, Wally never quite remembered. Only that the sky was black with night and studded with stars, not a scarlet sky of holocaust. He scarcely felt the burns on his thumb and forefinger where the match had burned down and burned out against his skin. .
His landlady was in her rocking chair on the cool porch. She said, “Home so early, Wally?”
“Early?”
“Why, yes. Didn’t you say this morning that you had a date with that girl of yours? I thought you ate downtown and went right to her house from the plant.”
Wally, panic-stricken in remembering, was running to the telephone. A frantic moment and then he heard her voice.
“Wally, what happened? I’ve been waiting since—”
“Sorry, Dot—had to work late and couldn’t phone. Can I come around now, and will you marry me?”
“Will I—What did you say, Wally?”
“Honey, it’s all right now. Will you marry me?”
“Why—You come on over and I’ll tell you, Wally. But what do you mean, it’s all right now?”
“It’s…I’ll be right over, and tell you.”
But reason reasserted itself in the six blocks he had to walk, and of course he didn’t tell her what had happened. He thought up a story that would cover what he’d said—and one that she’d believe. Of such stuff are good husbands made, and Wally Smith was ready to make a good one if he got his chance. And he did.
“Papa.”
“Hush, child.”
“But why, papa? And what are you doing under the bed?”
“Shhh. Oh, all right, but talk softly. He’s still around somewhere, I think.”
“Who, papa?”
“The new one. The one that— Grief, child, did you sleep through all the rumpus last night? The biggest fight here in seventeen centuries!”
“Gee, papa! Who licked who?”
“The new one. He kicked Darveth so far he hasn’t got back yet, and then a bunch of Darveth’s friends ganged up on him and he knocked hell out of them. Now he’s walking around out there and—”
“Looking for somebody else to beat up, papa?”
“Well, I don’t know. He hasn’t started a fight with anybody yet except the ones that’ started after him, except Darveth. I guess he took on Darveth because this human being Darveth was working on must have called him.”
“But why are you hiding, papa?”
“Because— Well, kid, I’m a fire elemental, of course, and he may think I’m a friend of Darveth’s, and I’m not taking any chances till things quiet down. See? Golly, there must be a flock of people up there on this guy’s side and believing in him to make him as strong as that. What he did to Darveth—”
“What’s his name, papa? And is he a myth or a legend or what?”
“Don’t know, kid. Me, I’m going to let somebody else ask him first.”
“I’m going to look out through the curtain, papa. I’ll keep my glow down to a glimmer.”
“Hey, come— Oh, all right, but be careful. Is he in sight?”
“Yes; I guess it’s him. He doesn’t look dangerous, but—”
“But don’t take any chances, kid. I’m not even going near the window to look out; I’m brighter than you and he’d see me. Say, I didn’t get much of a look last night in the dark. What does he look like by day?”
“Not dangerous, papa. He’s got a white goatee and he’s tall and thinnish, and he’s got red-and-white-striped pants stuffed into boots. And a stovepipe hat; it’s blue and got white stars on it. Red, white and blue. Does that mean anything, papa?”
“From what happened last night, kid, it must. Me, I’m staying under the bed until somebody else asks him what his name is!”
PART TWO
Mystery Stories
Introduction
The pulps, those gaudy-covered, cheap-paper, jack-of-all-fiction magazines that flourished during the first half of this century, provided a training ground for dozens of writers who eventually went on to bigger and better literary endeavors. William E. Barrett, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Horace McCoy, and Tennessee Williams wrote for them. So did Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Max Brand, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Zane Grey, Robert Heinlein, John Jakes, Louis L’Amour. And so did John Dickson Carr, Raymond Chandler, Erie Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald, Rex Stout, Cornell Woolrich—and Fredric Brown.
Brown was working as a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal when he sold his first pulp story, “The Moon for a Nickel,” to Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine in 1938. This first taste of success was all the impetus he needed; before long he was selling regularly to a wide variety of pulp markets—crime stories to Clues, Detective Fiction Weekly, Detective Tales, Dime Mystery, Phantom Detective, Popular Detective, The Shadow, Strange Detective Mysteries, Ten Detective Aces, Thrilling Mystery; science fiction and fantasy stories in Astounding, Captain Future, Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Unknown, Weird Tales; even a couple of westerns to Western Short Stories. By 1948, his success in the pulp marketplace—coupled with the novels he had begun to publish in 1947 with The Fabulous Clipjoint, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar as Best First Novel of that year—allowed him to devote his full time to writing.
He continued to sell to the pulps until their paperback original-and TV-induced demise in the early 50s—in all, publishing more than 150 stories in that voracious medium. Although fantasy and science fiction were his professed first love, the bulk of his output was in the mystery and detective field: upward of 100 stories. Some three-score of these were reprinted in his two hardcover mystery collections, Mostly Murder (1953) and The Shaggy Dog and Other Murders (1963). Several others—novelettes and novellas, for the most part—were later expanded or combined into novels. For instance, “The Santa Claus Murders” (Detective Story, October 1942) became Murder Can Be Fun (1948); “The Gibbering Night” (Detective Tales, July 1944) and “The Jabberwocky Murders” (Thrilling Mystery, Summer 1944) were combined into Night of the Jabberwock (1950); “Compliments of a Fiend” (Thrilling Detective, July 1945) was developed into 1949’s The Bloody Moonlight (not into the 1950 novel also called Compliments of a Fiend, as some people suppose); and “Obit for Obie” (Mystery Book, October 1946) became The Deep End (1952).