"The Hoofed Thing" aka "Usurp the Night" by Robert E. Howard

 

originally published Weirdbook #3, 1970

Michael Strang lives in an unnamed suburb and has a fiance named Marjory.  It seems Marjory's a bit upset right now because her fat Maltese cat Bozo has disappeared.  And so have a bunch of other cats in the neighborhood lately.  So Michael decides to play Good Boyfriend and goes out looking for Bozo, albeit without much hope or seeming enthusiasm.

He decides to make his first stop at the home of his relatively new neighbor, a dude named John Stark whom Michael has never met or even seen.  It seems Stark is recluse and potentially a creep.  And his house is pretty run down.  But what the hell?  Stark turns out to be a creepy-looking old coot with a beak nose and a club foot.  He doesn't know anything about the cat but invites Michael in for a drink anyway.  It seems Stark is one pretty interesting guy and he shares Strang's interest in anthropology, a subject he knows a lot about.

Well, Bozo never does turn up but Michael gets Marjory a bulldog "with the face of a gargoyle" to make up for it.  She names it Bozo, though it seems to me Michael might be more deserving of such an appellation than the dog.  Meanwhile Michael takes to hanging out at Stark's place cuz Stark knows all kindsa stuff about all kindsa things.  The only disconcerting note is that there's something going on upstairs at his place.  It sounds like some kind of animal is scrabbling around up there.  Something with hooves!  At first it sounds tiny, but over time it seems to sound as if it were getting bigger...

Things are getting funky around town though.  First it was the cats disappearing, then dogs.  Someone tries to snatch Bozo from his kennel in Marjory's family backyard, but the dog-napper is interrupted and gets away.  A few days later Michael has to rescue Stark for a tree, where Bozo has chased him and is menacing him.  He doesn't make the connection. 

Then kids start disappearing.  Then a couple teens having a "petting party" at the local lover's lane see someone carry off the body of a dead derelict.

Stark calls Michael up and asks him to come help him get a cabinet unstuck.  While he's working on the cabinet, he sees Stark apparently sneaking up on him with a huge mallet.  Caught, Stark makes an excuse ("thought you might need this").  Michael completes his task and gets the hell out of there. He goes home and decides to chill out with some light reading.  His choice for same is the German edition of Unaussprechlichen Kulten  ... um, yeah.

Anyway, after waking up all shook up from some Von Junzt-inspired nightmares he decides to call up Marjory and is told by her mom that M is supposed to be out on a date - with him!  "He" had called earlier and asker her to meet him at John Stark's place.  Finally putting two and two and four and a thousand together (he finally recalls that when Stark was creeping up on him with that mallet, he was fully mobile instead of his usual club-footed limp), he knows he must act!  He grabs a sword off his wall which has been in the Strang family for generations and once belonged to a mighty hero ancestor, because after all this is a Howard story, and heads off for Stark's.

Well down at Stark's he finds Bozo all beaten up but still brave, and Marjory all tied up. Stark nowhere to be found and that hoof-sounding thing is really making a racket upstairs.  Michael ungags Marjory who says they need to get the hell out of there like now BUT WAIT! First she has to tell Michael the whole story of what happened - for thirteen paragraphs!! So much for getting the hell out of there!  Anyway it seems Stark called her up, faking Michael's voice, asked to her to meet him at Stark's place, clobbered and tied her up and gagged her, and then proceeded to explain his whole evil plan in an epic monologue of comic-book villainy, complete with an "I might as well tell you everything since you're about to die anyway" bit.

So it seems Starky was experimenting with the usual black sorcery crapaloola that these types always get themselves into in Cthu stories, and he summoned something a "naked squalling thing" (Stark likes that phrase so much he uses it twice) from Out There, into this world.  And kept it as a pet upstairs. And it kept growing!   But he had to feed it - first cats, then dogs, then kids, then derelicts, and it just wanted more, more, more.  And since Horrible Monster from the Outer Darkness Chow hadn't been invented yet, he had to get meals for it or it was gonna eat him!  Plus it was controlling his mind now, anyway, so he hoped Marjory wouldn't take it personal that she was gonna be a monster's din-din.  

Anyway, the monster was making such a fuss upstairs Stark decides to go up to it and tell it was going to be fed soon, and then Marjory heard a horrible scream from upstairs and Stark never came back down.  And now can they get the hell out of these (she asks having just wasted thirteen paragraphs repeating every word Stark said during his Snidely Whiplash act).  

But NO!  Declares Michael, bravely puffing out his chest.  He MUST destroy the creature upstairs!  For the sake of the children!  So stride upstairs he does, chest out, sword in hand, Marjory sobbing "No Michael! No!" in the background.

Upstairs he hacks his way into the room and confronts the beastie, a bunch of tentacles with hooves - oh and little bits of Stark laying around the room, such as his head.  Michael does what any proper Howard hero would do and hacks the beastie to pieces, only to note that those pieces are turning into pools of black shining goop and then absorbing the Stark leftovers into bigger pools of black shining goop.  So he flees back downstairs, pursued by black shining goop, scoops up Bozo and Marjory, stops to set the house on fire and then stands outside with his girl and her dog, watching the place burn down.

Oh holy fuck.

You know the thing was I was actually enjoying this junk up until Michael ungags Marjorie and she starts into her ludicrous monologue.  It's cliched and obvious sure, but solidly written and though I knew right how the story would go, I was engaged enough to be interested in how it would get there.  I also dug the fact that the story was not a Lovecraft re-hash.  It was all mostly ordinary people in an ordinary Amurrican suburb, and could almost have been one of Richard Matheson's 50's "weirdness arrives in middle America" tales.  Editor Robert M. Price claims "we would not stray too far if we were to call it Howard's version of "The Dunwich Horror", but Price is a fucking idiot.  It's clearly influenced by "TDH", among other things.  

And then all of a sudden it turns into practically a parody of bad pulp writing, and of Howard's own tropes.  Stark's gut spilling and Michael's sudden burst of square-jawed heroism are flat-out hilarious. 

So, the makings of a decent Weird Tales tale ruined by some absurdly bad writing - Howard was capable of much better.

"The Door To the Word" by Robert E. Howard and Joseph S. Pulver

originally published Nameless Cults, Chaosium, 2001

Expanded from 'The Door to the Garden', Fantasy Crosswinds #2, 1977.

John O'Dare lived the "savage" life of an adventurer, then settled down and became a writer of adventure novels.  Good-selling ones, too, it seems.  Now he's sitting in an easy chair in his home, enjoying the good life, a good book, and staring at the big-ass ring he inherited from his ancestor, Lord Donal O'Dare, witha big-ass stone and weird writing no one can decipher or identify.

His reverie is interrupted when he starts to have an acid flashback - except acid hadn't been invented yet so WTF.  After several hallucinogenic moments a skinny guy in a tunic and sandals suddenly climbs through his window.  Then apologizes for climbing through the wrong window.  O'Dare figures this guy is an escaped lunatic, but he soon finds out his visitor is named Xatha.  And he comes from somewhere else.  Like way else.  

It seems Xatha was farting around in some gorgeous garden at "the rim of the world" that is entered by portals or gates.  Everything was going just ducky until he got attacked by a bat-winged hamburger snatcher he calls "Begog".  He escaped through one of the gates, into our world, but Begog clawd him and sure enough, he's got the wounds to prove it.  Oh and by the way that's his ring, thank you very much!  At that moment, Begog himself shows up, so O'Dare and Xatha flee through another portal and end up back in Xatha's homeland.  (Here Pulver picks up the story).

Xatha's homeland is straight out of Lord Dunsany which means its pretty, verdant, wondrous, lovely, charming blah blah blah in a pile of superlative adjectives (don't get me wrong, I like Dunsany).  

Xatha takes him to his home city and introduces him to local hot chick Elethia, The Esteemed Father - their Grand Pooba, and his own pops, Zaga - who's way more manly than Xatha.  T.E.F. explains that Begog and his armies of orc-y things have been assailing them for centuries, due to screw-ups their ancestors made.  Oh and yes, it eas Donal O'Dare who crossed the worlds and took the ring off of them.  The gem in the ring (and other pieces of jewelry) are what keep Begog at bay.  But they're running low on juice and need to be recharged.  They're suddenly attacked by baddies but O'Dare, Xatha and Zaga chop them all up into hamburger. Off they go to recharge the gems. Riding on the back of pretty dragons.

All goes well till they reach their destination of Ssian-ho, another city, which they find has been reduced to rubble, and Xatha's brother killed in the conflict.  They're attacked again, and start piling up bodies of baddies until Begog hisself shows up.  It looks like curtains for our heroes until an orb of light suddenly shows up and makes Begog vanish.

Back home, Elethia, now enaged to O'Dare, elects to go with him and Xatha to find more gems.  They find them, but are attacked again by Begog, who knocks O'Dare into a portal and back to Earth.  Where people think he's nuts.  But he's gonna get back there.  And he has a plan...

Well this one at least is different, insofar as Pulver takes it in directions I can't even imagine Howard going.  I mean Dunsanian fruit salad just wasn't R.E.H.'s style.

In any other respects this is routine Burroughs+Dunsany+Lovecraft stuff.  Begog is kinda cool though.

"The Black Bear Bites" by Robert E. Howard

originally published From Beyond the Dark Gateway, April 1974 

Black John O'Donnell lies in hiding outside the mysterious house of Yotai Yun, on the outskirts of Hankow.  He's there to avenge a friend - Bill Lannon - who earlier infiltrated the house, looking into the sinister deeds of a sinister cult bent on world domination.  Lannon turned up dead soon after, and it wasn't a pretty death.  A fellow westerner, Eric Brand, had laughed at Lannon's plan.  It hadn't ended so funny.

O'Donnell gets in, clobbers some guards, finds they'e got a regular armory going, finds out he's been detected, listens in as Yotai Yun executes his most loyal servant and dumps him in the river, then listens in as Yotai Yun and The Black Lama, a mysterious hooded figure, blab about their big plan to conquer the world.  And about infiltrating a cult of Yog-Sothoth.

O'Donnell is found out and has to fight his way out, shooting Yotai and The Black Lama in the process.  It ain't looking good for him though, as he's outnumbered by Yotai's men.  But the authorities arrive just in time, and it turns out The Black Lama is Eric Brand!

This is basically an adventure tale with some Cthulhuvian in-jokes tossed in.  Not much to see here though the first part with O'Donnell hiding and spying is actually suspenseful and fun.

"The Abbey" by Robert E. Howard and C.J. Henderson

originally published Fantasy Crossroads 4/5, 1975

Our narrator, John O'Donnell, is wandering British woods when he comes across the "ruins" of what appears to be an ancient Saxon-built abbey, with a pool in front.  I say "ruins" because the place seems to be in fine shape.  Inside on a table he finds a letter written "in a feminine hand" - whatever that is!  Anyway, the letter is an earlier visitor's account of finding the abbey (except on their trip, the place was in ruins...) and getting bitten by a large toad-thingie that jumped out of the pool.  And afterwards the letter-writer's being plagued by weird dreams and croaking sounds.  Oh and there's a sketch of scourge on the margins of the letter.  Weird!

That's the extent of Howard's actual fragment.  From there, Henderson takes over.

O'Donnell is surprised by the entrance of skinny old priest, who chats with him amiably but obtusely and seems to know way too much about him.  When the priest's convo gets too weird, O'Donnell behaves as a proper R.E.H. hero should do - pulls a gun and shoots him.  To no noticeable effect!  The plugged priest pulls off his robe, revealing a pair of great wings.  O'Donnell shoots him some more and then stomps him to death, then runs out to the pool (noticing that the abbey is now a ruin again) and demands that whatever is in the pool come out and face him like a man!  Or a toad-thing!  Or whatever!

He starts throwing big rocks and stones into the water, exhausting himself.  That's when the sabre-toothed toad - as big as a boar! - comes out of the water and goes for him.  Poor O'Donnell is doomed!

Just then a bare foot from nowhere emerges and crushes the toad!  (Can I be forgiven for thinking this sounds a bit like the intro to Monty Python?) It turns out its the ghost/spirit of the young woman who wrote the letter.  She's been trapped there ever since.  And now O'Donnell has freed her.  P.S. she's naked and doesn't seem to mind.

Now - this part throws me ... did I miss something?  Because if her foot was big enough to completely crush something the size of a boar, she must've been pretty damn big!  But nowhere is this mentioned.  Did Henderson forget to mention it?  Did O'Donnell?  Am I just stupid?

Anyhoo, this is nothing to write home about.  I do find Howard's portion interesting, and find myself thinking that it would have made a decent opening to a short story or even a novella - the toad attack being the first bizarre incident of many more to come.