The E. Hoffmann Price Spice Adventure MEGAPACK ™

by Price, E. Hoffmann

  But he was not destined for a military career. He became a professional astrologer, a Theosophist, a practicing Buddhist, and, in an era in which this was particularly unusual, a close associate of Asian communities in California to the extent that he had a Chinese name, Tao Fa, and used to sign letters with his printed “chop” of Chinese characters—for him, not an affectation.

  He was a world-traveler, a connoisseur of fine wines and rare carpets, and not adverse to doing real research when the occasion warranted. In order to write detective stories, he made friends with police inspectors, coroners, and sheriffs. Even when writing for the lowliest and trashiest of pulps, he did his best. He wrote in the introduction to Far Lands, Other Days:

  When the “spicies” appeared, my agent figured that my taste for lewd nude women might earn us a few bucks from immoral, if not immortal prose. Though the Spicy mags were trivial tripe and trash, I took each story seriously. Despite the limitations of the formula, all the built-in juvenility and silliness, I researched and wrote as honestly as I could. Spicy-Adventure Stories was a proving ground. The $50 sales paid for groceries. Each was a step toward becoming a regular writer, appearing in real magazines.

  * * * *

  The magazines Spicy Mystery Stories, Spicy Detective Stories, Spicy-Adventure, and Spicy Western, all put out by the perhaps ironically named Culture Publications in the 1930s, were known idiomatically as “the hots” in those days. You took them home in a plain brown wrapper. You really didn’t want your mother, children, or respectable wife to find you reading them. The ladies in such stories lost their clothes with surprising frequency. Covers and story situations involved lots of bondage, torture, and violence, much of it a tease. Close analysis of the texts will reveal what parts of the female anatomy had to be described in each story with prescribed euphemisms and what parts could not be described at all. The illustrations, even in a medium noted for luridness, are astonishingly explicit, pushing the boundaries of what could be sent through the mails or displayed in public to the absolute limit at the time—and indeed these magazines were often sold under the counter.

  E. Hoffmann Price became a regular contributor to the Spicy magazines. Most collectors today accumulate these very rare and expensive magazines to look at the pictures, or as museum curiosities, but if they actually read any of the stories, most likely they are the ones by Price or Hugh B. Cave, who wrote under the ironic pseudonym of “Justin Case.” Price published a few stories as “Hamlin Daly,” but otherwise put his own name on his Spicy work. He regarded them as honest apprentice work, nothing to be ashamed of.

  He later did achieve his ambition of breaking into “real” magazines. He completely mastered the pulp medium and published in Argosy, Adventure, Golden Fleece, and others which required good writing and authentic detail. One month he was able to look at a newsstand and see his name on thirty different magazines. He continued to write for the pulps until they collapsed in the early 1950s, then went on to other pursuits for a time (astrology, Oriental studies) before returning to writing in the late 1970s with two novels of Chinese magic, The Devil Wives of Li-Fong and The Jade Enchantress, plus a western, four science-fiction novels, and a variety of shorter works. He also wrote vivid memoirs of his days as a pulp writer, which proved very popular. He was, after all, the only colleague who ever met Robert E. Howard and the only one who ever collaborated with H.P. Lovecraft not as an apprentice, but as an equal. These were collected in an excellent Arkham House volume, The Book of the Dead, in 2002. Price remained a dedicated writer to the end of his very long life, literally dying on the job, in front of his keyboard.

  Here are pulp stories at their pulpiest from a master of the form. Enjoy!

  SATAN’S DAUGHTER

  It was Lilith the wife of Adam…

  Not a drop of her blood was human,

  But she was made like a sweet soft woman.”

  —Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  When Morton Reed, unaided except for a leather-faced, white-bearded Arab servant, began to dig in an unpromising spot half a dozen miles from Koyunjik, his fellow archaeologists devoted their spare moments to helpful mockery; but they remained to marvel when Reed uncovered a buried city where every tradition claimed there should be nothing of the kind.

  And inevitably the big American universities chiseled in on the discovery; which perhaps was no great imposition, as Reed’s only resources were his lean, bronzed hands and enthusiasm that gleamed from his deep-set, dark eyes to relieve the grimness of his gaunt, angular face. One man can’t excavate an entire city.

  * * * *

  Standing on the crest of a mound near the now crowded excavations, Reed watched a hundred sweating natives dragging a monstrous winged and human-headed bull from the oblivion of forty centuries. He smiled ironically, nestled in the crook of his arm a small parcel wrapped in a grimy turban cloth, spat contemptuously, and turned his back on the diggers.

  “Let them have that rubbish,” he muttered, striding toward his shabby tent at the further crest of the mound. “I’ve got mine.”

  A necromancer is one whose magic art makes the dead speak. An archaeologist is one whose spade uncovers forgotten centuries. Sometimes the distinction between the two becomes dismayingly thin.

  Once in his tent, Reed examined his prize. It was a green basalt image of a woman standing on the back of a lion. She wore a tall tiara, and her delicately aquiline Semitic features were sweetened by the shadow of a smile that lurked at the corners of her sensuous mouth. That vague, disquieting smile made Reed feel as though he had exhumed some living thing.

  Her body was a suave succession of curves, and about her waist was a broad girdle from which trailed carved pendants reaching well past her hips.

  On the foot of the pedestal was a cuneiform inscription; but a wrathful muttering from the rear distracted Reed’s pondering on the text.

  “I betake me to Allah for refuge against Satan,” growled old Habeeb, Reed’s Arab servant. He fingered the blue amulet that he had worn suspended about his neck ever since they had begun excavating.

  Reed recognized the symptoms of superstitious terror.

  “What’s the trouble now?” he brusquely demanded.

  “Throw the accursed thing away, sahib,” muttered the Arab. “That is the image of Bint el Hareth.”

  That meant, literally, Daughter of Satan—El Hareth was the name by which the angels called their renegade brother.

  “Cousin of a jackass,” retorted Reed in Arabic, “that is only the lady they used to call Anaitis, a couple of thousand years before Mohammad made the world safe for the one true God.”

  But old Habeeb muttered and cursed as he collected dry camel dung for the evening’s fire.

  Master and servant ate in silence.

  Habeeb was thinking of Bint el Hareth, the queen of demons, who rode by moonlight attended by myriads of seductive, night-prowling lilin, whose whisperings lure solitary travelers into the trackless desert to their doom. Reed was equally perturbed, but for another reason: he would have to guard his treasure day and night, lest the otherwise faithful and devoted Arab destroy it.

  * * * *

  As soon as he had swallowed the last savory morsel of pilau, Reed stretched his weary length on the thick-napped Mosul rug spread on the dirt floor of his tent. He watched Habeeb descending the slope toward the campfires of the archaeologists’ native workmen. From afar came the mutter of a drum, and the monotonous reiteration of the old song about what happens to the wandering dervish when he met the sultan’s forty daughters…

  But that, reflected Reed as he again regarded his green basalt treasure, would be nothing to a meeting with the model who centuries ago had posed for this image of Bint el Hareth—

  Then he cursed that chanting in the distance. They had changed to a new song. One that Reed had never before heard in all his wanderi
ngs. A sensuous, seductive rhythm, for all the crudity of the hoarse voices that blended to produce it. Reed caught himself nodding to that disturbing cadence. It reminded him of silk and white flesh and all that an archaeologist abandons—

  It seemed finally as though something age-old and evil and alluring had begun to whisper to him in the undertones of that barbarous melody.

  Then, suddenly, he realized that he was listening to music that could come from no group of Arab laborers. He sensed that he was no longer alone.

  The full moon was rising over the low-lying knolls beyond the Tigris. Something was advancing through the moon glamor toward the entrance of his tent. A woman wearing a tall, glistening tiara. Her shapely body was a succession of fluent, rippling curves that smiled through a gown that left him wondering whether its fragile fabric could endure even a breath of evening breeze.

  A native girl. Her flesh was a warm, rosy amber, and he caught the glint of moonlight in her incredibly large, dark eyes. They were dark and somber, and the fascinating sweetness of her face was subdued by the wistful, almost melancholy mouth.

  Reed’s eyes strayed down the gracious lines of her throat, and the firm, full blossoming breasts and inward sweep of her waist. He caught his breath, and for an instant cold thrills overwhelmed the warmth that had surged through his veins.

  Beneath the gossamer that rippled with the sway of her hips was a broad silver girdle agleam with uncounted sapphires that glittered frostily in the moonlight. He heard the soft tinkle of the jeweled pendants that reached half way to her knees. For an instant it seemed that the basalt image had come to life!

  Then Reed assured himself that she must have been prowling in the excavations by moonlight and had discovered a tiara and a jeweled girdle worn uncounted centuries ago by some perfumed favorite of a Babylonian king. She had found the treasure, and was displaying it to the best advantage in order to strike a bargain.

  If she removed that silver girdle…

  And then fresh wonder again subdued the desire that her shapely smiling curves had aroused. Her lovely face was a duplicate of the green basalt features of Bint el Hareth!

  Utterly impossible—but there she was, standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the moon.

  “I knew I could finally find you,” she was saying in Arabic, “if I waited until the moon rose.”

  * * * *

  The night had become a witch-glamor that chilled and at the same time inflamed Reed’s blood; then he told himself that it was after all not so strange that a village girl should strikingly resemble the green basalt statuette in face and figure. She was substantial, and the moonlight did not sift through her body, but only through the tenuous gauze that enveloped her.

  “I have been waiting for you, Malika,” Reed replied. “For a long time.”

  Digging for long buried ruins is lonely work, and even scholars have their human moments. This girl was one for whom any man might have waited. She was glamor that walked by night.

  Her slender fingers loosened the tent’s lashings, and as the flap slid down into place, she deftly knotted the cord again.

  Reed struck light to the gasoline lantern hanging on the tent pole. As he turned back toward his rug, the girl was at his side. He felt the warmth of her body, and the soft promising pressure of her gracious curves. The scent of her dark hair dizzied him, and the glow in her eyes told him that she had not come to trade in stolen antiques.

  “Gorgeous,” muttered Reed, seating himself on the rug and, catching her hand, he pulled her down beside him.

  She shook her head, and her smile was a sweetness in the desert as she murmured, “No…I am Bint el Hareth.”

  The Daughter of Satan—a perturbing play on words. But her presence was warm and dizzying, and by the glow of the gasoline lantern none of her loveliness was hidden except by the broad jeweled silver girdle and its tinkling pendants. Even her feet were bare—tiny feet, nails tinted with henna.

  Her arms moved like amber serpents as she set aside her tall silver tiara. Her hair cascaded in shimmering ripples down about her shoulders hiding her breasts, and reaching toward her silver girdle…

  * * * *

  The far-off mutter of Arab drums was now drowned by the pounding of Reed’s heart. He caught her in his arms, and as he found her lips, his fingers slipped between the scented strands of her streaming hair, and caressed the veiled amber curves of her yielding body.

  Lovely as her shapely form had been to the eye, it was incredibly more wondrous to the touch…satin smooth, firm, yet yielding…a succession of soft mysteries that sent fire rushing through his veins.

  Her arms twined about him as her lips surrendered to his caress, at first tentative and quivering, then maddeningly possessive.

  A strange, endless kiss—such is what the Arab story-tellers in the bazaars of Cairo described. More than contact. It was a mutual enlacement and union of lip and tongue.

  Her ecstatic shudder, and the sighing exhalation of breath as she finally drew away, goaded Reed to flaming frenzy. But somehow, without ever wholly breaking from his embrace, her lithe body evaded complete surrender. She was eager and glowing, yet evasive…

  “Not now,” she whispered as his hands vainly clawed the heavy silver girdle about her waist. “Later. This is only a meeting and a promise. Don’t try. That girdle is locked on. You can’t remove it. Not tonight.…”

  Reed had heard of jealous husbands and of fathers who applied such devices to keep feminine frailty from going too far in unguarded moments.

  She sensed his next thought even before he could speak it.

  “Neither a file nor a locksmith could help us,” she whispered. Then, shaking her lovely head and smiling sadly, she added, “A jealous king was once in love with me. He was old and grizzled and knew that I would outlive him—”

  “Who?” Reed wrathfully cut in.

  “Naram Sin of Agade,” she whispered, pillowing her head on his shoulder.

  Naram Sin had been dead for more centuries than Reed had years!

  Then she continued, “If you want me, we will meet in Kurdistan. I am here on stolen time. But later—when the signs of heaven permit—it will be otherwise. Study the inscription on the base of that statuette. Learn the ritual to chant when the planets rise to their appointed places. Then I will materialize from moon glamor and star dust. But think well, Morton Reed…before you summon me in Kurdistan, first look at what remains of my long forgotten lovers…see what Naram Sin, King of Agade, paid for my kisses…”

  Her voice subsided to a sighing murmur. She was kissing Reed’s throat. The maddening touch of her lips suddenly became an excruciating pain. He gasped and thrust her aside.

  Blood trickled down his chest. Her thirsty lips were redder now.

  Bint el Hareth was more than a play on words. She was a night-wandering female demon!

  His color receded, but before he could break from her embrace, she caught his hand.

  “That is the law. And if you are ever to meet me in my house in Kurdistan—if you are ever to unlock the silver girdle—”

  Her finger tips indicated the soft curve just below her collar bone.

  Reed knew what she meant, but he hesitated.

  “It won’t hurt,” she whispered. “And the smallest drop will be enough…”

  The evening was already a madness. Reed bent down and brushed aside the heavy blue-black veil of hair. His teeth sank into the flesh he had so fiercely kissed. He felt the moisture of blood; but as it touched his tongue, there was a savage roaring in his ears, and his entire body seemed enveloped in a shroud of consuming flame. His knees sagged, and intolerable dizziness sent him plunging headlong through a paradoxical blend of incredible brightness and impenetrable gloom. He was falling…falling…dropping everlastingly through space…

  When his
descent finally ended, he was still conscious, yet immeasurably dazed…

  * * * *

  His fingers were digging into the nap of a Persian rug. Bit by bit the blacknesses faded. He was in his tent, under the white glare of a gasoline lamp.

  He was alone. His lips tingled, and there was a stinging at the base of his throat. Then he remembered and tentatively touched the bite.

  His hand came back unstained; but clinging to his finger was a long, wavy strand of blue-black hair.

  And that seemed to prove that she had been more than moon-glamor and desert wizardry.

  He seized the lantern and bounded to the door of the tent. And when old Habeeb returned from the camp of the Arab laborers, Reed was still circling the tent, seeking footprints that would indicate the direction she had taken.

  The search was vain. The old Arab muttered under his breath as he watched. He seemed to realize that his master was seeking something that would not have left any trace.

  For a long time Habeeb eyed the green basalt statue of a woman standing on a lion. He sniffed the lingering fragrance in the tent.

  “Bint el Hareth was walking by moonlight! I betake me to Allah for refuge against—”

  “Shut up!” snapped Reed. “Or you’ll be taking refuge from my boot! Tell me about this Bint el Hareth.”

  “She is a peril that walks by night,” Habeeb explained. “She sends fools—begging your honor’s pardon—out into the desert to find the key to her silver girdle. And they do not come back.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m going to find her.”

  “Don’t worry, sahib,” was the old Arab’s ominous answer. “She will find you. But it is possible that you may yet escape.”

  “Dammit! I don’t want to escape. I want to find her.”