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.
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