Alfred Hitchcock [Don Ward] – Bar The Doors

[dem bones]

'Alfred Hitchcock' [Don Ward] – Bar The Doors (1972; this is the cover of the 3rd edition, 1977: originally Dell, 1948)

Alfred Hitchcock – Introduction: Speaking of Terror

H. G. Wells – Pollock And The Porrah Man
McKnight Malmar – The Storm
Alexander Woollcott – Moonlight Sonata
DuBose Heyward – The Half-Pint Flask
Peter Fleming – The Kill
F. Marion Crawford – The Upper Berth
Alfred Noyes – Midnight Express
Ambrose Bierce – The Damned Thing
August Derleth – The Metronome
Martin Armstrong – The Pipe-Smoker
Samuel Hopkins Adams – The Corpse At The Table
Wilbur Daniel Steele – The Woman At Seven Brothers
Margaret Irwin – The Book

Blurb:
Don’t anybody move ….

Here, selected by the master, are thirteen superlative tales designed to keep you frozen to your seat and written by the world’s most ingenious creators of the weird, the shocking, and the fantastic.

The master says:

“Wouldn’t it be as well, my friends, to bar the doors before you commence to read this assortment of chills and shivers.”

The Dell original included an additional novella, D. K. Broster's Couching at the Door.

Samuel Hopkins Adams - The Corpse at the Table: (Saturday Review of Literature, Aug. 1942). Lost and starving in the Adirondacks, surveyors Estelow and Carney take shelter in an abandoned shack. Carney, stricken with fever, knows his days are numbered. "Don't bury me until you're sure I'm dead. It might only be a coma. Don't bury me alive." Estelow abides by his friend's request, waits until rigor mortis has set in before clearing away snow to bury him deep in the soil. When he awakens the next day, Carney's corpse is back propped up at the table ....

F. Marion Crawford – The Upper Berth: (Sir Henry Norman [ed.], The Broken Shaft: Unwin's Annual, 1886). Brisbane, whose business requires that he make frequent trips across the Atlantic, explains why he refuses to travel aboard the Kamtschatka, no matter that cabin 105 has finally been nailed shut. On a recent voyage, Brisbane had refused to move to safer quarters after his roommate inexplicably bolted from his bed, raced along the corridor and leapt overboard to his doom, the fourth such suicide in as many crossings. It seems whatever frightened them out of their wits gains access through a porthole which defies all effort to keep it shut. Brisbane and the Captain keep watch through the night. The reeks of stagnant seawater alerts them that it approaches ....

August Derleth – The Metronome: (Christine Campbell Thompson [ed.], Terror By Night, 1934: Weird Tales, Feb. 1935). A grim little tale about a drowned child who would not stay dead. Folk are all sympathy for Mrs. Farwell following the death of her stepson. No-one suspects she was happy to watch little Jimmy drown. Now she no longer has to listen to the boy chanting nonsense to its maddening click, she can appreciate his prized silver metronome as an attractive ornament. Arguably the one lightweight among the selection.

[dem bones]

"I died with my purpose unachieved. Continue, thou, the never-ending studies."

Frank R. Paul, Pollock and the Porrah Man, Amazing Stories, Feb. 1928.

H. G. Wells - Pollock and the Porrah Man: (New Budget, 23 May 1895). "You're one of those infernal fools who think a black man isn’t a human being."

Pollock, in disgrace back home in England, now sets to acquiring new enemies at Sulyma, Sierra Leone, by vandalising native idols and interfering in a powerful witch-doctor's dispute with a woman. Thereafter, all manner of "accidents" befall Pollock and there is no question who arranged them.

It does not do to make an enemy of a Porrah man.

"I’ve heard deir idea is to scare and worry a man wid deir spells, and narrow misses, and rheumatic pains, and bad dreams, and all dat, until he’s sick of life. Of course, it’s all talk, you know. You mustn’t worry about it . . . But I wonder what he’ll be up to next."

The white man can't be having this and bribes a Mende to decapitate the magic man. So begins the remorseless persecution by indestructible upside down head.

McKnight Malmar - The Storm: (Good Housekeeping, Feb. 1944). As the roads flood in torrential rain, a relieved Janet Willsom arrives home early from a visit to her sister, only to find husband Ben absent and the flowers untended. Poor Ben - how he overworks to keep her in comfort! I hope he'll not be long. It's no night to be outside. Another crash of thunder. A face leering through the window! No, she's imagining things again. The storm has unsettled her.

Janet steps down to the pitch dark cellar to fetch firewood ...

Margaret Irwin - The Book: (The London Mercury, Sept. 1930): A Latin grimoire among the late Dean's collection contaminates an entire library with evil, the mind of Mr. Henry Corbett likewise. Since he took to translating the work, Mr. Corbett has enjoyed outrageous success on the stock market. Now the book demands something in return.

[dem bones]

Lynd Ward, The Half-Pint Flask in Alexander Laing [ed's] The Haunted Omnibus, 1937.

DuBose Heyward - The Half-Pint Flask: (The Bookman, May 1927). "A simple folk. I rather envy them starting out at zero as it were, with everything to learn from our amazing civilisation."
"Zero, hell! They created a Congo art before our ancestors drugged and robbed their first Indian!"

Barksdale, smug, know-all academic, visits a South Carolina plantation to experience the ways of "Negroid Primitives." His second big mistake is to steal an antique flask from among the memorials left at a child's grave. The Gullah's summon the spirit Plat-eye, which takes the form of Barksdale's unrequited love, luring him deep in the woods to die raving.

Peter Fleming - The Kill: (Dashiell Hammett [ed.], Creeps by Night, 1931). Two strangers share a railway waiting room. The younger man, Paul, is in a talkative mood, having just visited his reclusive uncle, Lord Fleer, who has reinstated the youth as heir now his Belgian refugee servant-companion, Miss Germaine Vom, is dead. Two days ago, Miss Vom was slaughtered by the same beast responsible for ripping out the throats of several sheep over recent weeks. His Lordship is troubled that the curse of a scorned mistress — a Welsh servant who died giving birth to his illegitimate son — has come to pass, and a werewolf now prowls the Fleer estate. The silent older man listens to Paul's preposterous story with interest ...

Martin Armstrong - The Pipe-Smoker: (Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1932). Lost in a rainstorm, a traveller calls at the nearest house. The owner, an aged recluse in clerical garb, welcomes him in. It will be nice to have someone to talk to! The old man asks if his guest believes confession is good for the soul, as he's been haunted since he murdered his predecessor, the Rev. James Baxter. He requests the traveller sit before the five-lighted window where Baxter died. At a certain hour of the day something strange happens in the fifth glass panel ....