The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

by Paul Malmont

  “You have to go?” Hubbard asked him.

  “Yep.” He shook their hands. “Gonna take my boy up to the top of the Empire State Building to see where King Kong fell. Then I’ve got to get cracking on a new story. I’m feeling mighty inspired; the presses never stop and I’m already behind.” Walter Gibson grinned at his friends. “These things don’t write themselves, you know.”

  Epilogue

  THE PULP Era ended.

  The big presses finally stopped running, turned off by wartime paper shortages while the mags themselves were physically torn from the newsstands by Mayor La Guardia’s garbage enforcers. The controversy metastasized from New York, and decency and morality oozed across the nation like black tar and old blood. Attentions and imaginations drifted elsewhere, to war, to comics and movies. And then only attentions were left to drift to television. The pulps, the pages where American myths had been born, were gone.

  But some shadows of the era live on.

  Why tell my story now? Survival. Emperors, like heroes, villains, people, myths, and even eras, can be forgotten. Obscurity is the true death of them, of us all. Does it matter whether my story is true or not? Not if in the end it means I won’t be forgotten. The Pulp Era is dead. Long live the Pulp Era.

  The people. They matter almost as much as I do.

  Lester and Norma Dent returned to La Plata, where Lester continued to write Doc Savage and Avenger novels for many years. He and Norma started a thriving business in aerial photography and ran a small fleet of planes. It took him eleven more years before he was published in the glossies. In the intervening years he bought a big car with DOC 1 on the license place and patrolled his town with a big dog at his side. Their dreams for a child of their own were never to be fulfilled.

  China was devastated by the war against the Japanese, although the alliance of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao held together for the duration. In the end Mao was able to seize control of China. Zhang Xueling, while hailed as a hero by the Communist Party, was forced to spend the rest of his life in exile in Hawaii, considered too much of a threat to the movement that his actions had inadvertently saved.

  Dutch Schultz’s treasure has never been recovered. Today it would probably be worth as much as fifty million dollars. Neither has the gold of the HMS Hussar been recovered from the bottom of the East River. Its value today could be as much as a billion dollars. Both are a gift from me to you. But be aware that the weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay.

  Mock Duck died in 1943 of natural causes. So the stories say.

  For years, until the tunnels were finally sealed up for good, people who were superstitious spoke of the demon who prowled under the cobblestones of Chinatown. Such people cut a wide berth around sewer grates, manhole covers, and cellar doors, while those few who weren’t superstitious heard only the unsettling nighttime keenings and scrabblings of lost cats and large rats echoing up from beneath the streets. Today only a few can even remember the tales of the demon, or describe his horrible laughter.

  Robert Heinlein ran in, but lost, that election. So he became a writer too. Politics’ loss is literature’s gain. In the end he may have been the best writer of the lot, and he was the first science fiction writer to regularly write for the slicks and to make the bestseller lists.

  Howard Lovecraft was far more widely read after his final death. Fans of his formed a small press to distribute his books, which have been in circulation ever since. The creatures which haunted his imagination continue to bubble up into the imaginations of others, like a virus of mythology.

  Ron Hubbard did Lovecraft’s postmortem career one better. He died a few years ago but somehow manages to keep writing bestsellers. He created more than a mythology; he created a philosophy which became a religion. I truly salute his initiative in this effort.

  Neither Orson Welles nor anyone else has ever made a good movie out of The Shadow or Doc Savage. And no one ever will.

  My last faithful friend and companion, Walter Gibson, wrote over three hundred Shadow novels, and as if that weren’t enough his contributions to the art and science of magic have placed all magicians of subsequent generations in his debt. He married Litzka, who was the great love of his life, after a suitable period in which she mourned the loss of Maurice Raymond (whom she had always loved and whom she tended until the end). They lived and wrote together about magic until the end of Gibson’s life. She was the first woman inducted into the Magic Hall of Fame by the Society of American Magicians. They loved each other dearly.

  I may have driven Gibson mad from time to time, but don’t all the best faithful companions do that? And I was faithful to him. I do believe he returned the favor to me, as you have now seen. His mouth formed the words around my breath. I have been mute for so long without him. But now there is you.

  How do I alone know the path of the tunnels, through all the dark places, to doors which lead to the right endings? And how am I able to see into the hearts of all my agents and know, finally, what stories, real or otherwise, lurk there? You have read my tale. You know.

  You are my agent, my new faithful friend and companion.

  Listen and you will hear me laughing and you will know I am coming.

  I will always be right behind you.

  Especially at night, when you will not be able to see me in the darkness.

  You will hear me laughing not because you are evil and not because we are about to die but because I have you now, my dear reader, and because sometimes I just have to laugh.

  THE END

  Acknowledgments

  IN ADDITION to the voluminous works of Maxwell Grant and Kenneth Robeson, three books have fueled my imagination for over twenty-five years: Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, by Philip José Farmer; The Duende History of The Shadow Magazine, by Will Murray; and The Shadow Scrapbook, by Walter B. Gibson himself. Other works that helped me tell this tale include Pulp Art, by Robert Lesser; Spider Robinson’s introduction to For Us, the Living, by Robert A. Heinlein; The Immortal Storm, by Sam Moskowitz; Man of Magic and Mystery: A Guide to the Work of Walter B. Gibson, by J. Randolph Cox; Walter B. Gibson and The Shadow, by Thomas J. Shimeld; Lester Dent: The Man, His Craft and His Market, by M. Martin McCarey-Laird; I. Asimov and In Memory Yet Green, by Isaac Asimov; The Futurians, by Damon Knight; Lost Gold & Buried Treasure, by Kevin D. Randle; L. Ron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman?, by Bent Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard Jr.; Bigger Than Life, by Marilyn Cannaday; Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s, by Robert Kenneth Jones; The Great Pulp Heroes, by Don Hutchison; The Hatchet Men, by Richard H. Dillon; The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, by John Clute and Peter Nicholls; The Encyclopedia of American Crime, by Carl Sifakis; Tea That Burns: A Family Memoir of Chinatown, by Bruce Edward Hall; Bare Faced Messiah, by Russell Miller; H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography, by L. Sprague de Camp; the Mock Duck/Blood of the Rooster series by Jay Maeder for the New York Daily News; and Fortean Times Magazine. I made many online trips to Syracuse University Library’s Street & Smith’s Preservation and Access Project, to ThePulp. Net, HMSHussar.com, Wikipedia.org, Zoetrope.com, Writers.net, and to the site by Ah Xiang, UglyChinese.org.

  Thank you to Tony Spina of Tannen’s Magic for playing Walter Gibson for me once, for the gift of Norgil, and for telling me a few stories about the man you once described to me as your “best friend.” Thank you also to Forrest J. Ackerman, for opening the Ackermansion and telling me some stories. My gratitude also to Robert Lesser, Mark Halegua and the Gotham Pulp Collectors Club, Tom Johnson, the Popular Publications archive at the New York Public Library, and Robert Weinberg. Of friends I must first mention the beautiful minds of Tracy Fullerton and Anton Salaks for their insights. Jennifer Levesque, thanks for opening the door. From one draft to another, Sam Hutchins, James Graham, Richard Siegmeister, Peter Bock, and Barry Crooks were the best of supportive friends, and Jerry Quartley always brought great wine. Thanks also to Chris Wickland, Charles Ardai, Albino Marsetti, and Judith Zissman for t
heir encouragement. For early advice I turned to the generosity of Heather Swain and Kevin Smokler. I would also like to express my appreciation to the talented people it is my pleasure to work with every day at R/GA—Bob Greenberg, John Antinori, Nicole Victor, Chapin Clark, Ted Metcalfe, Ken Hamm, and Mae Flordeliza—for their forbearance.

  Susan Golomb, my agent, I cannot say thank you enough to express how much I really mean it. Thanks also to your loyal and trusted sidekicks, especially Jon Mozes, but Kim Goldstein and Casey Panell as well. Geoff Kloske, my editor, thanks for joining me in the adventure and pointing out the perils and pitfalls. A heartfelt thank you goes to David Rosenthal. And to Jackie Seow, thanks for the great cover. Also at Simon & Schuster my deepest appreciation goes to Victoria Meyer, Elizabeth Hayes, Tracy Guest, Kathleen Maloy, and Laura Perciasepe for all their hard work. And a special thank-you to Marysue Rucci.

  Ed and Giulia Herbst, thanks for all the support and meatballs. Jason and Andrea, love always. Mom, thanks for the late-bloomer gene that finally bloomed. And Dad, in 1976 when I was ten, you introduced me to the Doc Savage and the Shadow you knew back in 1936 when you were ten. It was great to catch up with them again. Thanks.

  About the Author

  Paul Malmont works in advertising. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two boys. This is his first book.