THE MAN WHO COULDN’T DIE by HUGH B. CAVE

IN MEMORIAM: As this issue was about to go to press, we received news of the passing of Hugh B. Cave. He was a great writer and a wonderful person. He will be missed by all who new him. We are all grateful to have been able to work with him to create this special issue of Adventure Tales honoring him and his work.

THE route by which Mr. Weldon Witherby arrived at Fortune Island is, to say the least, rather obscure.

He began, apparently, in Rangoon, where in some minor political post he was viewed with at least a measure of respect. What happened to him there—a woman, perhaps, or a letter from home, or the shattering of his aspirations by some bit of official chicanery—need not have been a tremendous thing. Some men are so constituted that a mere shift in the direction of a light breeze will bowl them over.

At any rate, he left Rangoon quite suddenly and appeared some months later in Darvel Bay, which is Borneo, calling himself Whitby—until an exchange of solemn letters between government officials turned the black light of his past upon him and sent him on his way again.

He paused in Balikpapan, but rebelled at the taste of petroleum in his evening gin. He bobbed up in Celebes, across the Straat Makassar, to make his way afoot from Manado to Baoe-baoe—a remarkable achievement for one without a guilder in his pocket or even a decent pocket to put one in. And then, like a lemming plunging headlong into the sea, he vanished.

Many hungerings later, this sad little man turned up in Dili, dead drunk and three-quarters starved. At that stage of his journey his pace had slowed to something less than a crawl and the digressions were many.

A year or so later he arrived at Fortune Island aboard a very ancient coastal steamer, in the capacity of assistant to the Chinese proprietor of its ‘tween-decks trading store. And he was put ashore because he was ill.

Now you know as much about Weldon Witherby’s search for oblivion, and the reason for it, as is known anywhere, and a good deal more than did the four inhabitants of Fortune Island when he arrived in their midst. As a matter of fact, the four were not even aware that their number had been augmented until the steamer which dumped him had departed. For though Fortune is tiny, it happens also to be a mountain-top jutting fanglike from the sea, and at the time of Witherby’s coming the four occupants were industriously digging on the far side of the mountain.

They were scratching, stubbornly and angrily, for treasure.

If the truth be known, Witherby had been put ashore on Fortune to die, to save his captain the inconvenience of a burial at sea. He was sick enough to die, and by all logic he should have. But he didn’t.

Having slept out the worst of his sickness on the beach, he waked as from the dead to wonder where he was, and at three o’clock of a bright, moon-silvered morning, philosophically rose and walked. He walked until he found a softer bed under the fang of the mountain, and slept again. At dawn he emerged to blink at the sea.

The island looked as though it was uninhabited. Likely it was waterless and all but barren of things to eat. No ship would stop unsignaled, and—this being a region frequented by only the most bohemian of vessels—none was likely to investigate even if signaled. So, decided Witherby, he was marooned.

This settled, he hitched up his trousers and went looking for food. He had long since ceased to be surprised by the things Fate did to him.

HE WAS discovered an hour later when one of the four inhabitants of Fortune, a black-bearded fellow named LeClair, saw him shuffling along the beach. The figure Witherby cut was not impressive. His feet were bare. Tattered khaki trousers and a frayed rag of undershirt were all the clothes he owned.

LeClair watched him for a time in amazement; then the black-bearded fellow hurried to his companions to tell the startling news. They were breakfasting, and the tidings came like a spear hurled into their midst.

“A white man, here?” echoed Morton, spitting out a mouthful of scalding tea. “You gone crazy, Frenchy?”

“It iss the heat and too much of this damn digging,” declared Selinger, rocking back on his buttocks. “I haf said all along we should take a rest.”

“Rest, be damned,” muttered the one called Java Jones, rising high and thin to stand egg-bald in the sunlight. “I’ll do my resting at Batavia, thanks, at the Hotel des Indes. Come now, Frenchy, out with it! What’re you trying to tell us?”

So LeClair told it again and invited them to go with him.

When Mr. Witherby first saw them he was seated on the beach with a bit of volcanic rock in his fist, leisurely cracking open the last of a handful of clams and mussels. He was not unhappy. He felt better than he had for days. The presence of four white men on his uninhabited island puzzled him, though, and when they lined up before him he greeted them with only a cautious nod.

“Who might you be?” demanded Morton ominously. “And how’d you manage to get here to this Godforsaken spot?”

Witherby explained as best he could.

LeClair eyed him with suspicion. “What d’ye want here?”

“Why, nothing,” said Witherby.

“You haf nudding and you want nudding, eh?” said Selinger. “How do you expec’ to live, I should like to know, without food or water?”

“Oh, I’ll try to get along.”

“He’s balmy,” declared Java Jones. “Let him be. Or toss him to the squid and be done with him.”

But Selinger, who had suffered more than the others from the toil and heat of the past weeks, thrust himself forward and planted himself before little Mr. Witherby with arms akimbo and a malignant smile upon his blistered lips. “We haf food and drink’ enough to gif you some,” said he, “but you will haf to earn it, my friend. You will haf to work!”

Morton did not like that. “Now wait a minute, Dutch. We can’t have no stranger nosin’ around—”

“He can dig, no? He does not haf to know what we dig for. And he can cook, maybe, and keep clean the camp.” Selinger turned to LeClair and Java Jones for their approval, and found them nodding. Again he faced the little man on the rock.

“Well, Mister Widderby, what haf you to say?”

Mr. Witherby looked at them. All four, he observed, were cut from the same cloth, and a coarser weave would be hard to find. Moreover, he knew two of them by reputation, and what he knew was not encouraging.

The bald one, Java Jones, was owner and captain of a decrepit schooner, Lily by name, which had uglied the waters of every port from Serang to Samarai. By profession he was a hunter of treasure—all sorts of treasure, from the money-belt on a wreck-imprisoned corpse six fathoms deep to a wench who might fetch a price from the proprietor of some waterfront institution of pleasure.

If Jones’ ship had brought them, one thing was certain: These four were on Fortune Island to harvest wealth of some sort.

Mr. Witherby knew Selinger, too, though the Dutchman would have been surprised if so informed. They had met one steaming day in Fakfak, which is a town where two whites, meeting, might be expected to display at least the mutual interest of shipwrecked sailors bumping heads in mid-Pacific. But in Fakfak Mr. Witherby had been penniless and Selinger up to his thick red neck in a scheme to acquire pearls without paying for them—and so the Dutchman’s reply to the little man’s pitiful plea for assistance had been a rude caress with the back of his hand.

As for LeClair and the one called Morton, Witherby did not know them, even by repute. But if their lots were cast with those of the two he did know, it was safe to assume they were blackguards also.

But could he afford to reject their offer? Supposing he did. For a time, no doubt, he might keep himself alive with shellfish and maintain a moist tongue with almost-fresh water from holes scooped in the sand. But not for long. And these four, if they possessed a camp and provisions, must also own the means of quitting the island when their work was finished.

Mr. Witherby did not relish the prospect of dying alone on a sunbaked needle of rock in the middle of a lonely sea. He chose the lesser evil. “Very well,” he decided, “I’ll work for my keep.”

And thus for Weldon Witherby began an interlude of trial and tribulation unparalleled by anything he had previously lived through.

II

IT WAS apparent from the first that he was not to be accepted by the others as an equal, or even as a fellow human being. He had contracted to pay for his keep with labor, and labor they demanded of him from sun-up until the last bit of driftwood turned to ash in the evening fire.

He cooked for them and was cursed when the meals were not to their taste. He fashioned a broom and daily swept the camp. He managed to make a mansion of sorts out of what had been a pigsty, yet they complained of the time it took him.

He foraged for fresh delicacies to lighten their diet. Turtle-eggs he brought them, and fish and clams. And one day he returned in triumph from the hunt, with lobsters enough to go the rounds. But his own food, fresh or otherwise, was more often than not snatched and divided among his employers, while they derided him for his lack of industry.

“Y’r lazy, that’s what you are!” accused LeClair. “Sneaky lazy, always slippin’ off to busy y’rself with easy jobs. We ought to cut y’r rations, y’ miserable monkey!”

“Dig!” said Java Jones bitterly. “That’s why you were hired—to dig! And you do less of it than any of us!” Actually, he dug more than any of them, for when they pressed a shovel into his hands he could rest only at the risk of having a chunk of rock or bit of driftwood hurled at his head. He dug hour after hour, day after day, his hands gloved with blisters and head throbbing in the blowtorch blast of the sun.

And for what? Why, for a treasure that would not be his if he found it.

Two weeks of his servitude had passed before he learned what he dug for. Not that he lacked a normal curiosity; but the Fates had long since taught him the value of a still tongue, and so he waited patiently for his questions to be answered without his asking them.

Selinger answered them in an outburst of rage one day.

“I t’ink we are crazy!” shouted the Dutchman. “For a month now we dig, dig, dig, all over the damn island, and how do we know for sure that this drunken fellow from the Gulbrason was giving us the truth? How do we know this iss the right island?”

“Stow it,” grumbled Java Jones. “Dig, dig, dig—”

“Shut up!”

But Selinger had spoken, and Mr. Witherby had all the information he needed. He knew about the Gulbrason. Who didn’t? Her disappearance, months before, had been discussed in half the points through which he had wandered.

She had been a coaster, this Gulbrason, engaged like the rest of her humble breed in transporting commonplace cargoes and occasional passengers from one miserable port of call to another. But on this last spectacular voyage of hers she had carried, in addition to her captain and crew of four, only one man and a trunk.

The passenger’s name had been McKillop, it was said, and he was a Scot, and he had come out of the black heart of Papua near Daru with diamonds. Many curious eyes had seen the diamonds with which he paid the Gulbrason’s captain to transport him through the Arafura to Timor.

But no one had ever again seen the Gulbrason.

Mr. Witherby, on his leisurely journey into oblivion, had heard no end of speculation concerning the fate of the Gulbrason and her treasure. That she had poked her ancient nose into the year’s worst storm was fairly certain, considering her date of departure from Daru and her probable route. That she had foundered with all on board was considered likely. Now, however, it was apparent that all of her crew had not perished. One, at least, had survived. And somewhere along the way Selinger or LeClair or Morton or Java Jones, or all of them together, had heard a tale to send them treasure-hunting.

MR. WITHERBY wondered idly what had happened. Perhaps the Gulbrason had gone down near Fortune Island, or been smashed to bits against it. Some surviving member of her crew might have dragged her treasure ashore and buried it. As for the fellow’s ultimate departure from Fortune, that was not too difficult to reconstruct. He had built a raft, probably, of the ship’s wreckage, and salvaged provisions enough to keep him alive on the journey.

Presumably the treasure would be safe, hidden in Fortune’s lonely sands, until he chose to return for it. He need only keep his mouth shut.

But he had neglected to shut his mouth tight enough.

Mr. Witherby wondered one other thing: Where was the ship which had brought Java Jones and his three loot-seekers to Fortune? He got the answer to that a few days later, when still another of the quartet—this time Morton—flew into a rage.

“WHY don’t the Lily come back?” bellowed Morton, turning from a long and sullen inspection of the sea. “With her here, at least we’d have fresh drinkin’ water and food that’s fit to eat! Who told ‘em to stay away this long, anyway?”

“I did,” said Java Jones. “And I’d a reason for it.”

“What reason?”

“Well, several, you might say. First off, that fool from the Gulbrason no doubt blabbed to others beside us, and while maybe they wouldn’t know Fortune Island from his description of it, they just might come close. With the Lily anchored here, we’d as well put up a signboard to welcome ‘em. And second,” said Jones over the curl of his lower lip, “I’d a hunch you’d want to quit if the diamonds didn’t pop right up and kiss you. So I made certain you’d stick it out a while.”

It made no difference to Witherby. He cooked and swept and dug. The sun broiled him, the shovel rubbed his hands raw, the hot sand baked his blistered feet. An ache, an agony, grew inside him, consuming him. He was nearing the end of his long, dreary march to oblivion. Even LeClair’s monkey commanded more respect than he, was given more to eat. They used him, of course, as an escape valve for their own pent-up resentments, because it was a good deal safer to cuff Witherby than to snarl at one another. Seeing his exhaustion, they made him work the harder. Knowing him to be hungry, they whittled down his rations, then laughed at him when, to keep alive, he crept from the camp evenings and crawled about the island in search of purslane and gnetum seeds and other scraggly growing things to munch raw when the cramps bent him.

On these pitiful scrabblings for food, LeClair’s monkey usually accompanied him. Why? They had something in common, perhaps. Witherby was at rope’s end. His utter abjectness may have awakened in the monkey a feeling of kinship, for the monk was a grotesque little beast, moldy as an old hair sofa, scarred from quivering nose to twitching tail-tip by the missiles it had failed to duck during its precarious life among humans.

The monkey had no name, and for a long time Witherby sought to invent one. “We might call you Willy,” he would say, limping along the shore in the moonlight with the monk perched on his shoulder and squeezing its hot little head against his pallid cheek. “I had a friend in Gorontalo once by that name, and we’d a gay time together until the constabulary nabbed him for stealing. Or Davy, now—how would that be? There was a lad name of Davy in Koepang who saw me through a sickness…”

But no name out of the past quite seemed to suit, and so he took to calling the monk “Little One.” And many a night they sat somewhere on the black spine of rock that was Fortune Island, watching the wink of phosphorus on the empty sea while swapping monkey-squeaks and man-musings in their solitude.

Mr. Weldon Witherby, once of Rangoon, had arrived at last on the bottom rung of the ladder. He could go no lower. He was sick, friendless, and penniless. His status in life had become that of a galley-slave who, when no longer useful, would certainly be dropped over the side. And his sole companion was a monkey.

That he and the monk were still alive when the Lily returned to Fortune was something of a miracle, for she took her own good time, and during the last week before her return neither slave nor monkey was offered a share of the dwindling food supply. The digging had been abandoned by then. The four treasure-seekers asked only one thing more of Fortune: to be quit of the place.

THE Lily brought to Fortune two items of consequence: a falling barometer and a woman. The first was no surprise to the island’s inhabitants. All that day their bleak prison had lain like a charred cinder in a fiery furnace, the still air so hot it scorched the lungs; yet the merciless sun was not red but a muddy saffron, the sky not blue but the exact shade of the revolver-barrel protruding from LeClair’s belt. That a storm was due they were unhappily aware. The Lily’s glass merely made it official.

As for the woman, she was a bit of extra business picked up by the Lily’s crew as casually as other men might pluck a coin from the dust while strolling. Witherby saw her when she was brought ashore in triumph by Markey, the mate, who had captained the vessel.

“She’ll fetch a fancy price at China John’s,” said Markey, leering. “Snatched her when she came aboard to peddle, we did. And she took some snatchin’, I can tell you!”

The girl spat at him.

She was nineteen or twenty, Witherby guessed, but of course her age was of little value in judging her; in the islands it’s how you live, not how long, that matters. From the looks of her she had fought them every foot of the voyage.

Under the grime, though, and the rag of flowered cotton that covered her, she was remarkable for her beauty. A half-caste, she was, certainly: the end product, perhaps, of a chance meeting between some vagrant white, like Witherby, and an island wench. But half-caste or no, she had the look in her eye of one who would battle the devil himself for her rights. And Mr. Witherby, having visited the place known as China John’s, pitied her from the bottom of his heart.

“What’s your name?” Java Jones asked as she stood glowering at them.

“It’s a queer one,” said the leering Markey, “so we’d best give her a new one. How would ‘Sally’ do!”

“No,” said LeClair. “It’s time there was a mam’selle in that place. Call her ‘Jeanette.’“

So they made a game of naming her, while the girl faced them with lips squeezed tight and eyes flashing defiance. Until, surprisingly, Mr. Witherby interrupted.

Said Witherby thoughtfully, “Omnia ad Dei gloriam.”

They blinked at him. “What kind of talk is that?” demanded Jones.

“Only Latin,” Witherby murmured. “I once knew it rather well. It means, of course, ‘All things to the glory of God.’ Because she is beautiful. Surely you can see that!”

“Omnia Dei—give us it again, Worthless.”

“Omnia ad Dei gloriam,” repeated Witherby slowly, his solemn gaze on the girl.

“Gloriam,” echoed Java Jones. “That’s all right, that is. Gloriam. It’s a good name.” He stepped toward her, nodding. “And now that you got a name, sister, it’s time you learned pretty manners to go with it, say I. Because in the morning we clear out of this rotten hole, and I’ve my heart set on a pleasant voyage home.”

As he reached for her and grasped her wrist, she whirled on him, and white teeth flashed to his arm. With a yelp of pain, Java Jones took back his hand as though it had touched the sun. Then, bellowing, he swung a fist.

Mr. Witherby, wincing, went quickly away. He was still absent some two hours later when the storm broke.

III

THEY had expected the storm, but it took them by surprise, all the same. That was because the usual preamble was missing. No whispered warnings danced ahead of this upheaval; the first challenge was a full-voiced bellow. One moment air and sea were still as a stopped clock; then the black cask of the sky burst its seams and loosed on them a deluge, the wind sprang screaming from a hidden lair, and the sea rose up, thundering, to batter the island to which they clung. And these things occurred not one after another, in rational progression, but all in the mocking wink of a monstrous eye.

In an instant the camp at the base of Fortune’s rocky fang was gone, wrenched from its moorings as if the manila lines that held it had been no stronger than the strands of a spider’s web. The wind sucked it up with a noisy gulp and they saw it no more. In a moment more, they themselves were crawling like flies on the face of the mountain, or creeping crablike along its battered base, seeking shelter where they could find it, each man for himself. For even the Lily was gone then, scudding like a frightened wraith over the boiling sea.

LeClair was first to go. Terror sent him on hands and knees over slippery rocks to a niche in the mountain base that promised shelter, but into his refuge poured a sea that drowned him. The gay waves rolled him into the open again, made sport of him, and left him face down on the beach.

Then Morton. He sought the heights, but the wind plucked him from his climb and, like a seaman torn screaming from the main skysail-yard of a stricken ship, he plummeted to his finish. The others, Selinger and Java John, Markey and the girl Gloriam and the Lily’s crew fled this way and that, screaming or cursing or sobbing out their terrors.

And what of Mr. Witherby? That unhappy soul, when the typhoon arrived at Fortune, was seated with LeClair’s monkey on a sheltered bit of beach some distance from the camp, pondering, as might be expected, man’s inhumanity to man. The storm upon him, he merely clutched the monkey closer and sat where he was—until the sea discovered his retreat and hissed in to drive him out.

He went then along the shore, grimly battling the wind for possession of the whimpering ball of hair that clung to him for protection. He was frightened, but where could a man go in such a place? Not up, or the howling wind-demons would flay the flesh from his bones. Not into the rock itself, or the sea would follow and drown him. So, then, the problem was simplified. If he found a sheltered spot, he would duck into it. If not, he would keep on walking.

HE CAME presently to the remains of Morton, flattened at the base of the cliff, and transferred from the dead man’s pocket to his own a half-eaten square of chocolate. And then he discovered LeClair, on the beach where the waves had tossed him, and acquired some cigarettes and a revolver—both wet but potentially usable. And then Witherby saw the boat.

Precisely what little Mr. Witherby hoped to do in such a storm with a small boat and a pair of oars is not known. Perhaps he thought to row himself and his monkey out to the Lily and cut her loose, on the chance of finding a way out of his servitude. He knew the Lily was unmanned, and at that time he was unaware she had been swept away. At any rate, he saw the boat and ran to it; he tucked the monkey into it, and, with strength he had not known he possessed, he contrived to launch the craft, during a sudden lull in the storm’s fury.

She was a cork, that boat. She defied the mountainous waves to upset her. With Witherby tugging at the oars, she bore her two forlorn passengers, man and monkey, inch by straining inch past the foaming rocks at the island’s tip and into the clear.

But then the storm returned with renewed vigor, and Witherby perceived the futility of his efforts. He stopped rowing. With the monkey in his arms he huddled in the bottom of the boat and let the typhoon take him. Drowning, after all, was more pleasant to contemplate than a return to his previous status of slave.

Drowning, however, was not to be his lot. The green waves bowled him along through the remainder of that devilish day, into the nightmare night that followed. His boat climbed their swollen sides with the tenacity of a crag-rat, plummeted from their crests with the grace of a plunging gull.

THEN the night was over, and the storm with it, and Witherby looked out on a watery world colored red by a friendly sun. “Little One,” he said in wonderment, “look at us. We’re alive!” Little One’s reply was an ecstatic squeal.

But Witherby was too wise in the ways of Fate to be long fooled.

“Alive,” he amended, “but for how long? Who’s to lead us out of here?” There they were, in a boat on an empty ocean. The wind had passed. The sea was calming after its orgiastic excesses. But the calm was more frightening than the tumult.

During the awful hours of storm there had been hope of ultimate salvation behind the terrors of each passing moment. The boat, after all, was being blown somewhere and might in the end fetch up against land. Now peace had fallen from heaven, but in peace lay peril. For Mr. Witherby and Little One had only half a bar of chocolate to see them through the torments of hunger. Of water they had none at all. They would perish unless they reached land in a day or two.

Where was land? Witherby had not the faintest notion. How far they had been blown from Fortune Island, or in what direction, he knew not. The climbing sun told him where east lay—but he had no way of knowing what lay eastward. The world about him was all water, metal-bright, blinding, and boundless. And as the hours passed, the sun grew hot.

Witherby took up the oars and began to row. Presently he gave up. What was the use of rowing?

“Little One,” he said flatly, “we’re done for, I’m afraid. There’s not a thing we can do but sit and wait.”

And so began for Weldon Witherby the last and most wretched lap of the downhill journey which had begun for him in Rangoon. Fortune Island had not, after all, been the bottom rung of the ladder. Fate had tucked another one under him, giving him, you might say, the full treatment.

He was to be broiled alive. His departure from earth was to be no mere plunge over the finish line, but spectacular as a session at the Inquisition. Fate had the tools for it—a white-hot ball of sun, a dead-calm sea, and a shadeless boat. Witherby contributed his empty belly and a parched tongue. And for good measure there was Little One, who suffered as Witherby suffered and made the hours hideous with his whining.

That day ended somehow, and during the night, when it was cooler, Witherby sat at the oars again. His efforts scarcely moved the boat, but he pulled steadily, and between the dismal creaks of the oarlocks he talked to the monkey to keep it quiet. He told Little One of his aimless wanderings along the great dark wailing-wall of the southern islands, and of the ignominies he had endured along the way. No bitterness embellished the tale; Witherby simply strung the facts together in their proper sequence, bead fashion, and dangled the necklace before the monkey in hope of amusing it for a time. He told of the cuffings he had received in Madjene and the bootings in Boetoeng, of losing his last guilder in Boeroe and eating dead fish on the beach at Ambon. He told of sickness and taunts, of hunger, of being stripped naked and tossed into gutters by irate purveyors of drinks who resented his wheedling; and of the cafe proprietor who had draped a live krait about his neck, while he was drunk, to amuse the customers. But in fairness to Fate, Witherby told also of the times along the way when, incredibly, he had stubbed his toe on luck of a better sort—as, for example, his finding of an unopened fifth of Scotch whisky on the shore near Fakfak, and his lavish two-weeks’ stay in the home of a Mrs. Buxton, at Moresby, who had mistaken him for someone she once knew. “And what,” Witherby asked of the monkey finally, “does it all add up to, would you say? Why, it’s silly, that’s all. What’s a man to do if the Fates insist on dancing him up and down on a string in such fashion? What’s a man meant for, d’you suppose?”

“I’LL tell you,” said Witherby, becoming philosophical as he tugged that strange boat over that strange moonlit sea, on and on toward nothing and nowhere. “A man’s got to take it as he finds it, and keep as steady on his feet as he’s able. Because the fact is, my friend, we’re put here for a purpose we know nothing about until it’s accomplished—if we know it then—and there’s nothing we can do to alter the plan one jot.

“Take that fellow Enrikson that I’ve told you about—the one whose cutter went down in the Solomons. He was put here to fill the empty cookpot of some starving aborigine, and for no other reason. But did he know it? Not until they popped him into boiling water, he didn’t. Or consider my friend Davy, in Koepang, who nursed me through a sickness and got sick himself and died. He was put here to keep me going, no doubt, though God knows why.

“And what are we here for? Who knows? Maybe we won’t ever find out, though at the moment it looks as if both of us were meant to feed the sharks. If true, we’ve been brought a long way, I’d say, to do a paltry little. Or don’t you know we’ve been followed by sharks for the past hour, Little One?”

Thus he philosophized, while rowing or while resting between spells of tugging at the oars. It was a harmless diversion. As for its worth to the shriveled-up ball of matted fur that sat by his feet, whining up at him, that was questionable. The monk was hungry and thirsty, and talk was a poor substitute for food and drink.

Then came the morning and the searing sun again. And more sharks. He watched them, swimming alongside in the sunlight, and shuddered. They were so efficient, those sharks, so gruesomely sure of themselves. He hated and feared them, and the thought of being destined to fill the stomach of one, or chewed up into small bloody bits and shared among the lot of them, made his own stomach twist with revulsion.

With only a vague notion, yet, of the terrors that lay ahead, Witherby pulled from his pocket the revolver he had taken from LeClair’s corpse, and examined it.

It had been thoroughly drenched and the cylinder was sticky with salt. And, obviously, LeClair had been careless about keeping it loaded, for Witherby’s exploring thumb discovered only one cartridge. One bullet against so many sharks? He sighed and put the weapon back into his pocket.

So that day passed, like the previous one, the sea a boundless waste of gleaming metal made white hot by the relentless sun, the boat moving only when Witherby seized the oars and moved it, which was seldom. And with hunger gnawing like a monstrous rat at his vitals, and thirst squatting like a hot cinder in his mouth, the man abandoned even his attempts to converse with the monkey. It was the end and he knew it. And what could he do about it? Why, nothing.

Well, he could do something, perhaps. Through the hideous hours of hunger and thirst, his stiff fingers fumbled with the revolver, again and again extracting the lone cartridge and replacing it. He could not throw himself overboard to put an end to the awful suffering, for with the sharks lying there in wait, such a move would be equivalent to casting himself alive into a gigantic meat-grinder. But with LeClair’s gun, if the thing would still function, he might cheat some of the agonies.

All through that day and through the long night that followed, while lying racked with pain in the bottom of the boat, little Mr. Witherby pondered the problem and worked toward a decision. And listened, with a heart full of pity, to the whimperings of his small companion.

The night passed. The sun rose from a glittering sea. Witherby put forth all his strength and struggled to his knees to look about. But nothing had changed. The sea was still shoreless and the sharks still waited.

For the last time, Witherby tucked the cartridge back into the cylinder of LeClair’s revolver. He popped the muzzle of the gun into his mouth and clamped his cracked lips upon it. And then, remembering, he turned to say farewell to the monkey which for so long had been his sole companion in misery.

What he saw stopped him. The monk had crept from its tiny patch of shade under the stern seat to a point some eighteen inches from Witherby’s feet, and was struggling to reach him. It no longer whimpered; it was no longer able to. All the agonies of thirst and hunger and shriveling heat that Witherby felt within his own frail body were mirrored in the poor glazed eyes that so beseechingly stared up at him.

He couldn’t leave the monkey like that. It wasn’t decent.

He put the revolver down and leaned forward to gather the creature into his lap. He stroked it. “I know,” he said. “I know how you feel. I’d put you out of it if I could, believe me. But look. Look at them. Sharks! A dozen, at least, just waiting and waiting. If I put you overboard—even held your head under, to end the misery—they’d get you before you drowned. And I can’t shoot you. You see that, don’t you? There’s only the one bullet.”

The monkey clung to him, and the glazed eyes begged up at him.

“But then I’d have to lie here and die slow,” said Witherby, and if there had been moisture enough left in him for tears, he would have wept. “I’d have to lie here hour after hour, waiting. Is that fair? I found the gun, you know—not you.”

The monkey only wriggled closer against him.

Witherby sat in the broiling sun and racked his sick brain for some solution. He might throttle the poor beast or dash its head against the boat. But the thought turned his stomach. No, there was only one way out.

He lifted the quivering little animal from his lap and held it gently in the yellow glitter of the sun. With trembling hand he pressed the hot muzzle of the gun against its head and squeezed the trigger. The gun functioned. Little One’s sufferings were done with. Witherby laid the corpse under the stern seat and dropped the useless gun overside. And down he flopped again to let the heat, the hunger and the terrible thirst have their way with him.

Late that afternoon he became delirious and would have cast himself overboard, sharks or no sharks, had he had the strength to rise. But he was too weak.

Toward evening, as the sun sank and a breeze stole wraithlike over the dead sea, he lost consciousness.

IV

WHAT happened to Mr. Witherby during the following eight hours has since been discussed in practically every bar from one end of the South Seas’ wailing-wall to the other, by all sorts of people. Some of them consider it incredible, and seek to prove the point with elaborate diagrams of ocean currents, prevailing winds, tides, and what not. Others, on better terms with the fickle Fates who rule that region, are likely to remind you of the scores of even less believable occurrences recorded in the South Seas since Mendana first set foot in the Solomons.

At any rate, the boat in which Witherby lay unconscious was borne over the sea by bits and fragments of wind until it fetched up at an island. And what island? Why, the same jagged fang of black rock from which it had begun its eventful journey hours and hours before.

From Fortune, Witherby had fled, and to Fortune the Fates returned him, though he himself knew nothing of the return voyage, or of his safe arrival, until awakened from his long sleep by the ministering hands of an angel.

Opening his eyes, he looked upward into the angel’s face and begged for water. But she had already poured water between his blackened lips, and he was only repeating a cry of despair spoken the past many hours in his delirium. And as the cooling water trickled down his throat, he recognized his benefactor.

“Why—why, you’re Gloriam!” he whispered.

“If you want to call me that, I suppose you’ve a right to,” she said. “It’s the name you gave me yourself.”

“Then I’m back where I started from!”

“You’re on Fortune Island, if that’s what you mean,” said she.

“But—where are the others?”

“Dead. Every last one of them. And you’ll be, too, if we’re not careful. Come now”—and she bent over him again with a jagged tin can in her hand, and spooned some of its contents to his mouth—”eat this, Mr. Witherby.”

Witherby ate and, incredibly, he recovered. Or perhaps not so incredibly, for in his long, slow journey to oblivion this strange little man had been knocked down so many times the business of getting up again was more or less a habit with him.

He gazed now into the girl’s face and said wonderingly, reverently, “You are beautiful. Oh, but you are!” And then with a sigh of contentment, he slept.

The following day she showed him what the typhoon had done to Fortune. Or, more properly, what it had done to Fortune’s inhabitants.

“They made the mistake of trying to run away,” she said, shuddering. “Bullies always do when they’re frightened, don’t they? And, of course, that was the worst thing to do here. The Frenchman was drowned and one of them fell from the side of the mountain.”

“And then the Dutchman, Selinger, found a hole in the rocks where he might have been safe, but Java Jones found him in it and tried to drag him out—there was room for only one of them. They fought like mad dogs for possession of the hole until a great wave settled the dispute by destroying them both.”

“And the one called Markey, who brought you to this place,” said Witherby. “What of him?”

“He tried to swim out to the ship, he and the others who were left. But there was no ship.”

“Yet you survived! You—only a girl! How can that be?”

“Why, I sat. I sat and prayed to be saved. But”—and she smiled at him—”we’ll die anyway, both of us, in the end. There’s only a little water left, and you’ve eaten the last of the food. We won’t last long.”

“Wasn’t there food in the camp?”

“Most of it the sea took. I found the water in a whisky bottle half buried in the sand, where one of the men must have dropped it.”

“Well,” said Witherby, “let’s look.” But she was right. Nothing remained of the provisions Java Jones and his crew had brought ashore from the Lily only a few hours before the storm’s coming. The island was bare. Still, it was no barer than Witherby had thought it to be that dismal day, weeks before, when he had been put ashore to perish. And he had not planned then to die of thirst and hunger—at least not quickly. So he set out to find what was needed, leaving his companion to scoop a hole in the sand under Fortune’s black overhang.

When he returned from the hunt an hour or so later, the girl had struck water. Not sweet water, but good enough to drink. And at her feet Witherby proudly laid an assortment of edibles—clams and sea-slugs, a wriggling squid, purslane and gnetum seeds and a snail or two. And he looked at her and grinned. He, Witherby, Fate’s whipping-boy for so long, actually grinned.

“Why, we’ve everything!” he said. “We’ve the world at our feet, and each other too!”

Thus began their exile.

IT LASTED three weeks, for Witherby was not again eager to brave the sea without first taking all possible precautions. His biggest problem was a sail for the boat. To make one he had only poor materials—his trousers and rag of undershirt, plus his companion’s flimsy cotton dress and scraps of clothing squeamishly stripped from those victims of the storm who still remained on the island. Little enough to tame an ocean wind!

But with what he had, he worked diligently, sewing the bits of cloth together with a fishbone needle and threads drawn from the fabrics themselves. And while he worked, Gloriam worked with him.

Those were idyllic days. The sun gilded Fortune’s jagged peak; a gentle breeze brought scents of spice and frangipani from greener islands below the western horizon. When the work on the boat palled, Witherby and his fair companion foraged for food together, or swam, naked as babes, in the sparkling surf. Or sat and talked. When darkness dropped over their Eden, they talked sometimes for hours on end—Witherby of his varied adventures, she of hers, each with the frankness of poor, harried souls whose cards had been dealt mostly from the bottom of the deck. Only once before, when becalmed with LeClair’s monkey, had Witherby reached that far back into the dark pockets of his memory; and he told her of that, too. Most surprising of all, he told of the gun and the bullet.

She only nodded. But if she had been beautiful before, when dragged ashore by Markey for Java Jones’ inspection, she was beautiful now in another way. She was different, and what made her different was the wonder in her eyes as she gazed at this man who wept like a child at having slain a monkey. She had known many men in her time. In fact, she said as much, with a shrug that dismissed them as quickly as they came to mind. But never had she known a man like Witherby.

And never had Witherby known anyone quite like her.

The sail was finished. Into the little boat went every edible thing Witherby could find on Fortune—every root and nut, every scrap of bark or scraggly weed from which could be gnawed nourishment. Stored with them were the gleanings of the sea: sun-dried fish, mostly, with fresher tidbits for the first day or so. And then he dug anew for water, selecting a spot of shade high up on the beach near where Java Jones’ camp had stood.

SHE stood beside him as he dug, to fill the whisky bottle and half a score other containers—shells, most of them—which she had painstakingly collected for the journey. And as he worked, she watched with a wistful smile on the soft curve of her lips, and a gaze that kept slipping off to explore the sunlit beach and high rocks where he and she had spent so much of their time together.

She was startled when, of a sudden, he stopped digging and shouted, “Look! I’ve found something!”

He dug again, his hands tossing up clouds of sand. The hole deepened and he reached deep into it. Then at her feet he dropped a chest, or trunk, wound round with ropes.

“It’s what they were looking for!” he said. “We’ve found it. We’ve found the treasure!”

And so he had—for when his fumbling hands worked loose the ropes and raised the lid, there lay the possessions of the man named McKillop, his books and maps and clothes, and the diamonds he had brought out of the black heart of Papua months before. Java Jones and his hungry crew had heard the story aright from the Gulbrason’s survivor.

Witherby spread the loot before him on the sand, and the girl Gloriam inspected it with him. And presently, sadly, she said to him, “You’re rich now, aren’t you?”

“Why, yes. I suppose I am.”

“It’s what you wanted—what you’ve sought all your life.”

Witherby looked up at her and frowned. “No, I wouldn’t say that. I’ve wanted something—but it wasn’t wealth, I’m sure.” He shook his head. “No, it wasn’t wealth. But we’ll take it, now that we’ve found it. We’d be fools not to.”

He was stronger than he had been. Strong enough now to lift the chest in his arms and carry it to the boat without staggering. And as if to prove that wealth held no great interest for him, he returned at once to finish digging for water, and dug without rest until he found it.

“There,” he said, filling the last of the containers. “Now we can go.”

Thus they departed. The idyll was over, their stay on Fortune finished. A fragrant breeze filled their brave little sail, and the black fang of that isle of destiny slipped slowly behind. They turned for a last look—babes in the wood, departing their hiding place and venturing again into the forest. And both were frightened.

“Where,” asked Gloriam, “are we going?”

“Why, I’m taking you home, of course.”

“I have no home.”

Witherby stared at her. “Then where shall I take you?”

“Why, wherever you’re going.”

“But I haven’t given a thought to where I’m going. I really haven’t.” Shaken, he leaned toward her, afraid of his hopes, yet finding in her eyes the courage to let them live. “Where—where ought I to go?”

“Why, anywhere,” she said. “So long as we go together.”

And so they did. Everyone knows that now: how Witherby and the girl named Gloriam trudged up the road in Daru one golden morning dressed in what might have been clothing but more closely resembled the shredded sail of a Bajao outrigger—Witherby striding along proudly with a chest of sorts balanced on one sturdy shoulder, and the girl smiling at his side with her hand clasped in his. Everyone knows they were made man and wife that day before the sun set, and were on their way again next morning as happy as children.

Where they went from Daru is none of your business or mine, either, for they had new names then, to go with their new clothes, and plans, too, for leaving the past behind them. There are legends enough, Lord knows, in those parts, without prying. And truths enough to explain anything.

IT’S been said, for instance, that any man who turns to the wailing-wall of the South Seas in search of—well, in search of anything—will sooner or later discover what Fate wants of him. Maybe a king’s ransom awaits him; if so, he’ll find it. Or a place of honor in some cannibal’s cookpot—he’ll find that, too. Or perhaps he was only meant to arrive at a certain place at an appointed time, to take his place for one brief moment in a game the gods are playing.

Witherby did that, all right. And if the gods seem to have taken their own good time about getting him there, remember that no man can play a part properly without first serving his apprenticeship.

An ordinary man, you’ll admit, would have shot himself—not spent his last bullet on a dying monkey.

ADVENTURE TALES INTERVIEWS HUGH B. CAVE

Hugh B. Cave surely needs little in the way of introduction to any fan of pulp fiction. Under his own name and pseudonyms such as “Justin Case” he wrote more than a thousand stories for magazines, before turning his attention to books. We were pleased when he accepted our invitation to be the Featured Author in the first issue of Adventure Tales, and he consented to this interview.

Adventure Tales: How and when did you enter the pulp field as a writer?

Hugh B. Cave: While still a student at Brookline, Massachusetts High School, I sold poetry and crossword puzzles to Boston newspapers and other publications, stories to Sunday School magazines, and did cartoons for the Boston YMCA News. One such poem, called “Men,” originally published in Sunset Magazine on the West Coast, was set to music by Carlyle Davis, sung by him in Carnegie Hall, and published by the Oliver Ditson Company.

After high school I worked for a Boston publishing company for a year or so. One book of poetry that I had a hand in designing was by W. Adolph Roberts, editor of a pulp magazine called Brief Stories . He suggested I try a short story for Brief Stories , and the suggestion resulted in “Island Ordeal,” my first pulp sale, which was published in July, 1929, when I had just turned 19.

There were more than a hundred pulp magazines being published at that time—so-called because they were printed on rough wood-pulp paper. I eventually sold a total of some 800 to 95 of them, then moved on into the higher-paying slick-paper magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post (to which I sold 46 stories), Good Housekeeping (41), American, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Collier’s, Liberty, Esquire , etc. etc. Three hundred fifty stories in all. And my next two books, due out this year, will be Number 49 and Number 50 on my list of books published. Five of these are World War II books written as a correspondent. Two are books on Haiti and Jamaica. Twenty are novels. The others are hardcover collections of my pulp and slick-paper magazine stories. Some of these books and many of my shorter works have been reprinted in foreign countries. About a dozen of my books have been reprinted by John Betancourt’s Wildside Press.

And along the way, two books have been written about me. These are Pulp Man’s Odyssey: The Hugh B. Cave Story by Audrey Parente, published by Starmont House in 1988, and a brand new one, Cave of a Thousand Tales by Milt Thomas, due out this year, 2004, from Arkham House.

AT: Of all those stories, do you have any favorites?

Hugh B. Cave: Two favorites come to mind quickly. The first is a very short story called Two Were Left , which was originally published in American Magazine in June, 1942. It’s about an Eskimo boy and his beloved sled dog who are marooned on a drifting ice floe and, when hungry enough, one of them will have to eat the other to survive. The story has been reprinted more than one hundred times in school books and anthologies.

The other is one of many tales I have written about Haiti after having lived there for five winters. I note there is a question about Haiti coming up in this interview, so I won’t go into my adventures there now, but this story, called The Mission , first appeared in the old Saturday Evening Post of March 14, 1959 and was reprinted in The Best Post Stories of that year, in the first issue of the new Saturday Evening Post , and in seven foreign magazines. Just recently, when Haiti was in turmoil over its president, a group that wanted the world to have a better opinion of that country requeted permission to feature the story on a web-site. It’s about a six-year-old country girl who, after the tragic death of her mother in a landslide, walks miles to Port-au-Prince, the capital, to find her “famous artist” father who actually existed only in her mother’s imagination. After the Post printed it, Doubleday did it as a handsome gift book, calling it “a little classic of the spirit.”

The Post, by the way, reported that this story had received more reader mail than any story ever published in the magazine. Part of the story’s success was due, I’m sure, to the portrait of little Yolande by artist Peter Stevens, which was featured in the Doubleday book also.

AT: For the collector, would you care to talk about some of your pseudonyms and their histories?

Hugh B. Cave: My brother Geoffrey Cave, four years older than I, was editor of his school paper when he attended a high school in Boston, Mass. But he didn’t plan to make writing his career. Instead, he went on to business school and became an accountant.

Still, Geoff tried his hand at writing some pulp stories, using the name Geoffrey Vace, and sold some to Farnsworth Wright, famous editor of Weird Tales , for such magazines as Oriental Stories and Magic Carpet . So for a while, whenever I had two stories in any issue of any pulp, I would use his writing name, Geoffrey Vace, on one of them to win him more exposure.

In 1998 Tom Roberts, publisher of Black Dog Books, put out a neat booklet that he called The Death-Head’s March and Others: The Geoffrey Vace Collection , by Geoffrey Cave and Hugh B. Cave.” But Geoff didn’t continue as a writer, the way I did. He gave it up to be an accountant.

Another pseudonym I used—and used much more often—was Justin Case. This was a name I developed for the Spicy pulps—Spicy Mystery, Spicy Detective and Spicy Adventure —because they paid me as high as six cents a word but I was aiming at the slicks and didn’t want to use my real name. (I wonder if any real people named Case ever named a son Justin!) Black Dog reprinted some Justin Case tales as well, calling the booklets Dark Door of Doom and White Star of Egypt after two of the stories in them. And in 1997 Tattered Pages Press of Chicago published a handsome paperback collection of my Justin Case tales featuring a character I called “The Eel,” calling it Escapades of The Eel .

And, finally, even in the slicks I occasionally needed to use a pen-name, in which case I called myself H.C. Barnett, Barnett being my mother’s maiden name and my actual middle name. I can’t think off-hand of any others I used, but there probably were one or two more.

AT: How has your interest in Haiti and voodoo influenced your work?

Hugh B. Cave: Let’s begin with why I went to Haiti in the first place. At age 25 I married Margaret Long, a physical education teacher in the Providence, R.I. school system. We had two sons, Kenneth and Donald. When Ken was 10 and Don 5, the older boy began having some strange nightmares, and their doctor recommended we get him out of cold New England for the winter. As it happened, I knew a man who was teaching English in Haiti and asked him if he could find a house for us to rent. He found one in Petionville, and our Haitian adventure began. The boys attended an English-speaking school run by the U.S. Embassy. I began exploring the country and writing about it.

And then voodoo. We were told about a voodoo maman named Lorgina in Port-au-Prince, the capital, who was highly regarded. We obtained permission to attend one of her services, but, when we got there, found her ill with a badly swollen, painful leg. My wife, remember, was a phys. ed. teacher. “Go find me some olive oil and I’ll try to massage the pain away,” she told me.

Well, I drove all over Port-au-Prince in the middle of the night and finally found some in a little all-night eatery. Meg massaged the mambo’s pain away. And Lorgina was so grateful she said, “Anything you want from me, just ask. Anything!”

What we wanted—what I wanted, anyway—was to learn about the real voodoo so I could write about it. We spent five winters there in Haiti, and I am happy to say that the same cook, same housekeeper, and same yard boy worked for us the whole time, and our boys did well in school. I came up with some short stories for various magazines and then wrote a book called Haiti: Highroad to Adventu re about which noted author Kenneth Roberts wrote to the publisher: “If there was anything printed about Haiti that I didn’t read (when I was writing Lydia Bailey ) either in French or English or in diaries, I couldn’t find out about it; and Cave’s Haiti seems to me to stand head and shoulders above all of them in its vivid depiction of the land and the people. If you want a quote, I suggest ‘The most perfect depiction of present-day Haiti, the land and the people, ever drawn.’“

Then I wrote a novel, The Cross on the Drum, about the conflict between a voodoo houngan and a protestant minister (which ended with the two of them calling each other “my brother”) and it was a Doubleday Dollar Book Club selection and a Literary Guild bonus book. And I wrote many magazine short stories about Haiti which have been reprinted in a collection of my West Indies tales called The Witching Lands .

AT: Despite your success in the slick magazines, you kept coming back to fantasy and horror themes in your work. I note that many of your later novels are, in fact, horror. What’s the appeal of dark fantasy for you?

Hugh B. Cave: Well now, I have a hunch it all began when I was a kid singing in the men’s-&-boys’ choir at a church in Boston. We choir kids attended a camp for two weeks every summer near Cape Cod, as I may have mentioned before, and every night around a campfire our choir-master read us creepy stories by Poe and other such writers. I got to be very fond of them and still am. Most horror stories, it seems to me, have a touch of fantasy, and fantasy gives a writer space to expand in. I’ve done many other kinds of stories and books, but feel so “at ease” in the fantasy-horror field that I keep coming back to it.

AT: You mentioned that the “Spicy” magazines paid 6 cents a word for fiction. Wasn’t that a lot of money for a pulp magazine? How did the other pulps compare?

Hugh B. Cave: My record-books show that most pulp magazines paid from 1 to 3 cents a word. I don’t know what the “Spicies” paid other writers, but my Justin Case stories got a lot of covers and apparently were popular with the readers. Some have been reprinted in book form, as I mentioned before. I don’t know what the “Spicies” paid other writers. My old records give only the title of each story sold and when it was published. Other pulps, such as Short Stories, Adventure, Dime Mystery , and Dime Detective , paid me more than a cent a word, I seem to remember, but I can’t think of any that paid me what the “Spicies” did.

AT: When you were writing your pulp stories, what were your working hours? What was a typical day like for a writer in, say, 1935?

Hugh B. Cave: Before I married (which I did in 1935), I worked long hours at those old-style typewriters. (I remember having one whose carriage I had to lift up to see what it had typed from underneath!). Then along came electric machines and computers. When a story I’m working on grabs my interest really hard, I’m likely to work all day at it and sometimes even half the night. It has always been that way for me, even in my pulp-writing days. Now I have slowed down a bit. After all, I’m 93 as I write this. But if a great story idea comes my way, I’m still likely to work long and hard at it, and I still enjoy doing so.

AT: Is there a question you haven’t been asked in interviews before, that you would like to answer?

Hugh B. Cave: Well now, no interviewer has ever asked, “Do you ever wish you had been something other than a writer?” If anyone ever does ask that, my answer will be a resounding “No!” because it has been a fulfilling and fascinating life.

After all, I started at age 16 or thereabouts and am still writing at 93. Amen.

AT: Thank you very much for your time!

THE PULP REPRINTS OF HUGH B. CAVE by Michael Chomko

Hugh Barnett Cave was born in 1910 and seemingly began writing as soon as he could lift pencil to paper. While still in high school he was a published author, having sold a few stories to Sunday School papers and poetry to newspapers. Not long after obtaining his first and only job with a Boston vanity publisher, Cave made his first sale to the pulps. “Island Ordeal” was published in the July 1929 issue of Brief Stories . It was quickly followed by others sold to a variety of magazines. Action Stories, Short Stories, Astounding Stories, Wide World Adventures, Outlaws of the West , and High Spot Magazine all published stories by Cave during the next year. He was soon able to give up his day job and survive as a full-time author. By 1933, he had established markets with many of the leading publishers of the pulp industry, including Popular Publications and Street & Smith. According to his records, Cave published about eight hundred stories in the pulps, the bulk of them appearing prior to 1942. By then he was writing predominantly for the book trade and “slick” magazines, selling stories to such mainstream publications as Colliers, Country Gentleman, Good Housekeeping, Liberty, Redbook , and The Saturday Evening Post .

Although other prolific pulpsters such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lester Dent, Frederick Faust, Walter B. Gibson, and Robert E. Howard had found their way back into print by the late sixties, it was not until 1977 that the pulp work of Hugh Cave would begin to reappear. It was then that the late author and editor, Karl Edward Wagner, hoping to preserve the work of writers he felt had been unjustly neglected, released Murgunstrumm and Others . This long out-of-print collection, published by Wagner’s Carcosa House and illustrated by the great Lee Brown Coye, went on to win a 1978 World Fantasy Award. It’s best described using the language found on the inside flap of its dust jacket: Murgunstrumm and Others abounds with haunted houses, ravenous vampires, slobbering monsters, fiends human and inhuman, nights dark and stormy, corpses fresh and rotting. These stories exemplify the gothic horror thrillers of the 1930s—no-holds-barred lurid chillers of violent action and screamin-the-night terror … savored best on a stormy, lonely, night.

Largely drawn from the pages of Strange Tales, Spicy Mystery Stories (where Cave’s tales originally appeared under the pseudonym Justin Case), and Weird Tales, Murgunstrumm and Others has been reissued by Wildside Press in both hardcover and trade paperback.

Although Wagner’s collection helped to reestablish Hugh Cave as an author of dark fantasy—his short novel, The Mountains of Madness , was released earlier this year in a limited, signed edition by Cemetery Dance Publications—it would be another ten years before the next collection of Cave’s pulp work would see the light of day. Spicy Detective Encores No. 2, one of a series of six tiny volumes, each about the size of a “Big-Little Book,” reprinted three of Cave’s “Eel” stories. Cave had introduced this character in the June 1936 issue of Culture Publications’ Spicy Adventure Stories . Urged by his editors at Culture to supply them with more tales of the “Eel,” Cave went on to produce about twenty stories featuring the character, all of them credited to Justin Case.

Published by Winds of the World Press in card-stock covers, Spicy Detective Encores No. 2 is a collectible rarely seen on today’s used book market. However, the three stories it reprinted are available in a more recent and extensive collection of “Eel” yarns. Escapades of the Eel , published in 1997 by Tattered Pages Press of Chicago, assembled fifteen of the best stories featuring the “gentleman correspondent” of Spicy Adventure Stories and private dick of Spicy Detective and Spicy Mystery Stories . Told in the first person using the tongue-in-cheek style of the spicy pulps, the “Eel” stories range from the wilds of Borneo to the urban jungles of Depression-age and World War II-era America.

In 1988, the next Cave collection saw the light of day—The Corpse Maker . Assembled by Sheldon Jaffery for the now-defunct Starmont House, it was a short, paperbound collection of seven stories drawn largely from the pages of such weird-menace pulps as Dime Mystery Magazine and Terror Tales . Jaffery’s collection reproduces its stories directly from the pages of the pulps and features personable, yet informative introductions to each story. The title yarn was originally published in the second of the “weird-menace” issues of Dime Mystery , the magazine that introduced the genre to pulp readers. Like Spicy Detective Encores No. 2, The Corpse Maker is now a difficult book to find.

Nearly another decade passed before the Hugh Cave floodgates opened. It began with a collection that Carcosa House had intended to be the sequel to Murgunstrumm and Others . Fortunately, in 1995, following their success with collections of pulp fiction by Robert Bloch, Carl Jacobi, and Donald Wandrei, Minnesota-based Fedogan & Bremer rode to the rescue and released the long-delayed collection of Cave’s best tales of weird menace, Death Stalks the Night . Featuring seventeen tales from shudder pulps like Dime Mystery, Horror Stories , and New Mystery Adventures, Death Stalks the Night like its predecessor, Murgunstrumm , was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award.

According to editor Karl Edward Wagner, weird-menace stories “were calculatedly gothic and grisly … (with) no pretensions of art—just go for the throat … (and) the wildest and weirdest menacer of them all was Hugh B. Cave…. Cave’s weird-menace stories still have the power to chill and thrill…. This really is a curl-up on a dark and stormy night book.” And you know, he was right!

In 1997, Fedogan & Bremer dipped again into the shudder pulps to harvest ten more stories by “the wildest and weirdest menacer of them all.” Compiled by the author himself, The Door Below featured stories selected from throughout the author’s career. Alongside such pulp stories as “Servant of Satan” and “The Thing from the Swamp,” were tales written during the last three decades of the twentieth century, fiction “written most often for magazines published by people who fondly remembered the pulps and sought to keep those memories alive by recreating them.” Thus, although “From the Lower Deep” and “Damsels for the Damned” could very well have been titles for stories featured in Strange Tales and Spicy Mystery Stories , both yarns missed those magazines by half a century.

Two paperbound collections from Tattered Pages Press—the previously discussed Escapades of the Eel and a companion volume entitled The Dagger of Tsiang and Other Tales of Adventure —joined The Door Below to make 1997 a banner year for Cave reprints. Assembled by Doug Ellis from the pages of Short Stories, Top-Notch Magazine , and other periodicals of the early thirties, The Dagger of Tsiang collects eleven “colorful tales of Tsiang House, a British outpost deep in the jungles of Borneo … adventure at its finest, written by a master of the craft.” Both of the Tattered Pages books are entertaining packages, assembled and published by a small press devoted to reproducing some of the best stories of the pulp era.

Another small press was next to reprint the work of the man sometimes known as Justin Case. In 1998, Black Dog Books, headed by artist, designer, and pulp fan Tom Roberts, published the first of its five Cave collections—The Death-Head’s March and Others . Subtitled The Geoffrey Vace Collection , three of the four stories included were written by Cave’s older brother, Geoffrey. Along the lines of Talbot Mundy’s tales of India, the Vace stories were originally published in Oriental Stories and Magic Carpet Magazine , the adventure-oriented companions to Weird Tales . The fourth story of the collection, “Step Softly, Sahib!” was written by Hugh Cave, using his brother’s pseudonym. “I did my best to keep that Nom-de-plume alive for him with stories in many different pulps … always hoping he would one day return to his typewriter.”

Other Cave collections from Black Dog Books include White Star of Egypt , which reprints a pair of tales from Spicy Adventure Stories ; The Desert Host , the sole “sword-and-sorcery” story that Cave contributed to the pulps, written for Magic Carpet ; Dark Doors of Doom , a trio of weird-menace yarns from the pages of the spicy pulps, all originally credited to Justin Case; and The Stinging ‘Nting and Other Stories , four adventure yarns first published in 1931 in two pulps rarely seen today—Far East Adventure Stories and Man Stories . Black Dog’s Cave collections are digest-sized books with card-stock covers, available from the publisher for between five and nine dollars.

Although Hugh B. Cave is predominantly regarded today as a writer of dark fantasy, a large portion of his pulp era work was created for the mystery genre. At least one quarter of his pulp production was aimed at the rough-paper detective market. Beginning in 2000, modern readers were reintroduced to this versatile author’s crime fiction through three reprint collections issued by the small presses.

Fedogan & Bremer celebrated the author’s ninetieth birthday with the republication of Cave’s nine “Peter Kane” stories, originally written for Popular Publication’s Dime Detective . According to Don Hutchison’s introduction to the volume, “Kane … was introduced as (the) ‘ace shamus of the Beacon Agency, chronic drunk, two-fisted, hard-headed private dick with nothing to live for except the next drink’ … a man who can down three liquid meals a day, get hit on the head more often than is really healthy, and still land on his feet right side up.”

While the first half-dozen Kane stories, originally published in 1934 and 1935, owe a large debt to the weird-menace field for which Cave had then been laboring for several years, the final three tales set a more comic tone and feature rather puzzling plots.

Dime Detective was also home to another Cave hero, truant officer Nick Coffey. The protagonist of three stories contributed to the Popular magazine in 1940, Officer Coffey was a favorite of Dime Detective ’s editor Ken White as well as Cave’s agent, Lurton “Count” Blassingame. The stories concern good kids, driven into trouble via circumstances beyond their control. In 2000, Subterranean Press reissued two of the three Coffey stories in a chapbook limited to 250 numbered and 26 lettered copies, all signed by the author. The Sidecar Preservation Society issued the third Coffey story separately in 2001 as a fund-raising effort.

Black Mask was the premier detective magazine of the pulp era, the periodical where the hard-boiled detective story took root and evolved. Home to such greats of the mystery genre as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner, Black Mask would also publish ten of Cave’s tales of detection, contributed to the magazine from 1934 through 1941. Ranging from the tough-guy cop of “Too Many Women,” to the greeting card executive who investigates crimes as a hobby in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” to his last story for the magazine, the Hitchcockian “Stranger in Town,” Crippen & Landru’s Long Live the Dead amply demonstrates Cave’s versatility as an author.

Although Black Mask and Dime Detective Magazine were probably the best of the many detective pulps that were published during the pulp era, it was for Detective Fiction Weekly that Cave wrote most of his crime fiction. From 1936 through 1941, he contributed sixty-three tales of mystery and detection to the Munsey magazine. Crippen & Landru’s Come Into My Parlor collects nearly a dozen of these stories, which, according to the author, were “among the best of the pulp stories I wrote.”

“What I had, in many of my tales for Detective Fiction Weekly, were folks like you and you and you, who never wore a policeman’s uniform or were licensed to be crime fighters. These characters were just everyday people who became involved in crime-fighting more or less by ‘accident.’ And when I began writing that kind of story, with a hero who was not a professional crime-fighter, but just an ordinary Joe like most of us, the editor of Detective Fiction Weekly liked them and so did the readers.”

Both Crippen & Landru volumes were published in two states—a trade paperbound edition and a limited clothbound edition, signed and numbered by the author. Included with the latter was a separate pamphlet, reprinting an additional Cave pulp story not found in the paperbound edition of that particular book.

With over eight-hundred stories moldering away in the crumbling pages of seventy-year-old magazines never meant for permanence, these seventeen collections reprinting over 130 stories have only scratched the surface of Cave’s prodigious output. Hopefully, the appearance of Cave of a Thousand Tales , a biography of the author written by Milt Thomas and released by Arkham House in June of this year, will provide the impetus for further collections of this wonderful craftsman of the pulp era.1 After all, the Arizona Kid, Wildcat and Range Wolf, and Senor Bravo are all still having “Trouble Tamin’ Tumbleweed” in the pages of Western Story Magazine and Wild West Weekly .

1 Starmont House published a short biography of Hugh Cave, Pulp Man’s Odyssey , written by Audrey Parente, in 1988. It was followed in 1994 by Cave’s autobiographical Magazines I Remember, based on his long correspondence with fellow author Carl Jacobi and published by Tattered Pages Press.

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