Flynn raised a glass to his idol.
“What’s it all for, Jack?” he asked. “All this mess, this nightmare, this fantasy, this horror? Is it just for play, just a game? To be packed up and put away by some snot-nosed kid who’s lost interest?”
He slammed his glass down.
“I don’t want it like that. I want Hamlet and Sherlock Holmes and Don Juan and Robin Hood and Custer. I want us to be heroes, to save something worth saving, to respect maidenly virtues and reflect manly ones. We shouldn’t just be pathetic, whore-mongering drunks, Jack.”
Barrymore was nodding.
There was no life in him. At least, none of his own. It was the Jewel of Seven Stars, animate. Geneviève took my arm, and gripped like a vice.
“To the glorious damnéd,” Flynn toasted, tossing his glass away, wreaking hell with the continuity.
Barrymore’s starched shirt was open and his chest was bulging. A cinder glowed inside his translucent flesh, outlining the black bars of his ribs.
“If Flynn takes the jewel, he’ll be John Barrymore all over again,” Geneviève said. “Personal triumph and degradation. But only personal. It will be shielded from the world. Rather, the world will be shielded from it.”
“But it’ll kill him,” I suggested.
Geneviève nodded.
“Everybody dies,” she said.
“Except you.”
In a tiny, long-ago frightened little girl’s voice, she repeated, “Except me.”
Streaks of sunlight were filtering through the unshuttered glass roof of the stage. I wondered if Geneviève Dieudonné would shrivel at dawn, like the salt-stuffed zombie in my office.
A shot sounded.
Geneviève yelped. She looked down at a scarlet patch on her silver chest. Blood spread and her eyes were wide with surprise.
“Except me,” she said, crumpling.
I turned, my gun out.
Bennett Mountmain strolled onto the stage.
He wore a stinking cat’s skin on his forehead and upper face, like a caul, eyeholes ripped in the blood-matted fur.
“Silver bullet,” he explained.
Geneviève moaned and held her wound. She seemed for the first time helpless. She was muttering in French.
Mountmain walked past me, with contempt.
Flynn stood up and barred his way, shielding Barrymore.
“You again,” he snarled. “The treasure-hunter. You’ll have to fight your way past my cold steel to snatch Cap’n Blood’s doubloons for your coffers.”
Wearily, Mountmain held up his gun.
“Go ahead, varlet, and shoot,” said Flynn. His face was red and sunken, but he was twice the hero he seemed on the screen. He appeared to grow, to have some of the ruby glow, and he threw open his mouth and laughed at Mountmain.
The Black Magician fired, and his gun exploded in his hand.
Flynn’s laughter grew, filling the stage, setting ceiling fans whirling. There was a demonic overtone to it. He stood with his legs apart, hands on hips, eyes shining.
Barrymore tipped forward, and a large stone fell out of his chest onto the prop table.
The light of Seven Stars lit up the Casablanca set.
Mountmain was on the floor, rolling in agony, weeping tears of bloody frustration. Geneviève was trying to sit up and say something. I knelt by her, to see what could be done.
There was blood on her back too. The bullet had shot right through her. The holes in her were mending over and coming apart again as I looked. Her blonde hair was white. Her face was a paper mask.
“Take the jewel,” she said. “Save Flynn.”
I crossed the room.
Flynn looked at me. He was unsure. He had recognised Mountmain for what he was. But not me.
“Pure and parfait knight,” he said.
That was just embarrassing.
He stepped aside. I picked up the Jewel of Seven Stars. Tiny points shone inside it. I expected it to be warm and yielding, but it was cold and hard. I wanted to throw it into the sea.
“You’ve found it,” a British voice said. “Good man.”
Winthrop had left his scrying caul outside, but his forehead was still smeared. As he wiped the last of the blood away, I remembered the cat he had been cradling in Coldwater Canyon.
“Edwin,” Geneviève said, weakly, shocked. “You haven’t …”
“Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” he said, unapologetically. “You don’t approve, of course. Catriona wouldn’t either. But you’ll thank me for it in the long run. May I?”
He held out his hand. I looked at the jewel. I wanted to be rid of it. Flynn was still there. I sensed an attraction from the gem to the star. The sun was not yet up. I could plunge the stone into Flynn’s chest and hide it for another generation. At the cost of a man’s life.
Who’s to say Errol Flynn wouldn’t ruin himself without supernatural intervention? Plenty have.
Mountmain yelled hatred and defiance and frustration. He was bleeding to death.
Winthrop’s hand was still extended. It was my decision.
People were pouring onto the stage. Winthrop’s colleagues, cops, studio guards, Warners staff, uniformed soldiers, uniformed Nazis. I saw Peter Lorre, and other famous faces. Everybody was in this movie.
“Catch,” I said, tossing the jewel up like a bridal bouquet.
Mountmain stood up, extending his ruined hand. Judge Pursuivant landed on him, crushing him to the floor.
Winthrop made a cricketer’s catch.
“Owzat,” he said.
Geneviève sighed through pain. I think she had stopped bleeding.
Someone asked in a loud Hungarian voice what the dead body of John Barrymore was doing on his set. Lorre breathed soothing sentiments, and a couple of grips removed the untenanted vessel from the site. Flynn, now merely drunk, further infuriated the director with cheery idiocies. That part of the story was swept aside. Hollywood hi-jinks. They happen all the time.
*
It came down to Winthrop, Geneviève and the jewel. And me.
“We must be wise, Edwin,” Geneviève said.
The Britisher nodded.
“We have a great responsibility. I swear we shall not misuse it.”
“We may not have the chance to decide. You can feel it, can’t you? As if it were alive?”
“Yes, Gené.”
Mountmain was dead, his spine snapped by Pursuivant. It had all come back on him, the black magic. Just as Geneviève had said it would.
Winthrop seemed sobered, shaken even. He couldn’t get the last of the cat-blood off his face. He had done his duty, but now he was asking himself questions.
I hated that. I knew I’d be doing the same thing.
A soldier was beside Winthrop, with a lead box.
“Sir,” he prompted.
Winthrop dropped the Jewel of Seven Stars into the box, and the soldier hesitated, eyes held by the red light, before clamping shut the lid. He marched off, other soldiers trotting at his heels, drawing Pursuivant and the others.
Winthrop helped Geneviève onto a stretcher. She was fading, bare arms wrinkling like a mummy’s, face sinking grayly onto her skull.
“What wash that?” someone asked me. “The red shtone in the boxsh?”
I turned towards the star of Casablanca, a man satisfyingly shorter and older than me.
“That,” I said, “was the stuff that dreams are made of.”
John Thunstone
ROUSE HIM NOT
by MANLY WADE WELLMAN
Manhattan playboy and dilettante John Thunstone is almost too big to be reassuring, and most of his clothes have to be tailored especially for him. His hands and his eyes are sensitive, his big nose has been twice broken, and his black hair and moustache show a little streaking of grey.
A serious student of the occult and a two-fisted brawler ready to take on any enemy, he is armed with potent charms and a silver swordcane as he stalks supernatural perils through the exc
lusive night clubs of New York or in backwater towns lost in the countryside—seeking out deadly sorcery wherever he discovers it.
John Thunstone first appeared in 1943, after Farnsworth Wright retired as the editor of Weird Tales and was succeeded by Dorothy McIlwraith. She and her associate, Lamont Buchanan, sat down with Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986) for several careful discussions about how the character might look and act.
The result of these meetings was the publication of ‘The Third Cry of Legba’ in the November 1943 edition of Weird Tales. Over the next eight years, fourteen more stories appeared in the famous pulp magazine, concluding with ‘The Last Grave of Lill Warren’ in the May 1951 issue.
Several of the Thunstone stories pitted the investigator against a wizard named Rowley Thorne, who the author admitted he had based on the real-life occultist Aleister Crowley, as well as a fearful race of beings called The Shonokins.
All these stories were collected in Lonely Vigils (1981), and Wellman subsequently revived the character for two novels, transplanting Thunstone to the author’s beloved England for What Dreams May Come (1983), and once again pitting the psychic adventurer against his sworn enemy Rowley Thorne in The School of Darkness (1985). All the John Thunstone short stories (plus those featuring his fellow phantom-fighter Lee Cobbett) were collected by editor John Pelan in The Third Cry to Legba and Other Invocations (2000), the first volume in the “Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman”.
The following tale was originally published in the special Occult Detectives issue of Kadath (July, 1982), and it was later adapted by Michel Parry for a 1988 episode of the TV series Monsters, starring Alex Cord as John Thunstone.
THE SIDE ROAD in from the paved highway was heavily graveled but not tightly packed except for two ruts. John Thunstone’s black sedan crept between trees that wove their branches together overhead. Gloom lay in the woods to right and left. Once or twice he thought he heard a rustle of movement there. Maybe half a mile on, he came to the house.
It was narrow and two-storied, of vertical planks stained a soft brown. A tan pickup truck was parked at a front corner. Thunstone got out of the sedan. He was big and powerfully built, with gray streaks in his well-combed dark hair and trim mustache. He wore a blue summer suit. In one broad hand he carried a stick of spotted wood with a bent handle and a silver band, but he did not lean on it. Walking the flagged path to the front steps, he studied the house. Two rooms and a kitchen below, he guessed, another room and probably a bath above.
A slender girl in green slacks and a paint-daubed white blouse came to the open door. “Yes, sir?” she half-challenged.
He lifted a hand as though to tip the hat he did not wear. “Good afternoon. My name is John Thunstone. A researcher into old folk beliefs. I came because, yonder at the county seat, they told me an interesting story about this place.”
“Interesting story?” She came out on the stoop. Thunstone thought she was eighteen or nineteen, small but healthy, with a cascade of chestnut hair. Her long face was pretty. In one hand she held a kitchen knife, in the other a half-peeled potato. “Interesting story?” she said again.
“About a circle in your yard,” said Thunstone. “With no grass on its circumference. It’s mentioned briefly in an old folklore treatise, and I heard about it at your courthouse today.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “Here comes Bill—my husband. Maybe he can tell you.”
A young man carrying a big pair of iron pincers came around the corner of the house. He was middle-sized and sinewy, in dungarees and checked shirt, with a denim apron. He had heavy hair and close-clipped beard and a blotch of soot on his nose. No older than, say, twenty-two. This couple, reflected Thunstone, had married early.
“Yes, sir?” said the young man.
“This is Mr. Thunstone, Bill,” said the girl. “Oh, I didn’t say who we were. This is my husband Bill Bracy, and my name’s Prue.”
“How do you do?” said Thunstone, but Bill Bracy was staring.
“I’ve seen your picture in the papers,” he said. “Read about your researches into the supernatural.”
“I do such things,” nodded Thunstone. “At your county seat, I looked up the old Colonial records of the trial of Crett Marrowby, for sorcery.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bill Bracy. “We’ve heard of that, too.”
“Mr. Packer, the clerk of the court, mentioned this house of yours,” went on Thunstone. “He called it the Trumbull house. And said that there’s a circular patch in the yard, and some old people connect it with the Marrowby case.”
He looked around him, as though in quest of the circular patch.
“That’s around in the backyard,” said Prue Bracy. “We’ve only lived here a few months. When we bought from the Trumbulls, they said we’d do well to leave the thing alone.”
“Might I see it?” asked Thunstone.
“I’ll show it to you,” said Bill Bracy. “Prue, could you maybe fix us some drinks? Come this way, sir.”
He and Thunstone rounded the corner of the house and went into the backyard. That was an open stretch of coarse grass, with woods beyond.
“There it is,” and Bracy pointed with his tongs.
Almost at the center of the grassy stretch lay a moist roundness, greener than the grass. Thunstone walked toward it. The circle seemed nine or ten feet across. It was bordered with a hard, base ring of pale brown earth. Thunstone paced all around, moving lightly for so large a man. The inner expanse looked somewhat like a great pot of wet spinach. It seemed to stir slightly as he studied it. It seethed. He reached out with the tip of his spotted stick.
“Don’t,” warned Bracy, but Thunstone had driven the stick into the mass.
For a moment, something seemed to fasten upon the stick, to drag powerfully upon it. Thunstone strongly dragged it clear and lifted it. Where it had touched the dampness showed a momentary churning whirl. He heard, or imagined, a droning hum.
“I did that when we first came here,” Bill Bracy said, a tremble in his voice. “I put a hoe in there, and the hoe popped out of my hand and was swallowed up before I looked.”
“It didn’t get my cane.” He looked at Bracy. “Why did it take your hoe?”
“I’ve wondered myself. I haven’t fooled with it again.” Bracy’s bearded face was grave. “I should explain, Prue and I came here from New York, because the house was so cheap. She paints—she’s going to do a mural at the new post office in town—and I make metal things, copper and pewter, and sell them here and there. Mr. and Mrs. Trumbull wanted to get rid of the house, so we got it for almost nothing. They told us what I told you, leave that sinkhole thing alone. ‘Do that,’ Mr. Trumbull said, ‘and it will leave you alone.’”
“But you lost a hoe in it,” Thunstone reminded.
“Yes, sir,” Bracy nodded heavily. “And when it came to evening that day, we heard noises. Sort of a growling noise, over and over. I wanted to go out and check, but Prue wouldn’t let me. She was frightened, she prayed. And that’s the last time we’ve meddled in it, and how about a drink now?”
“In a moment.”
Thunstone studied the outer ring intently. It was of bald, hard earth, like baked pottery. Again he measured the distance across with his eye. Rings of that dimension had been common in old witchcraft cases, he reflected; they were about the size to hold a coven of thirteen sorcerers standing together, perhaps dancing together. Circles were always mysterious things, whether they were old or new. He turned back to Bracy.
“I’ll be glad for that drink you mentioned,” he said.
They returned to the house and entered a small, pleasant front room. There were chairs and a table and a sofa draped in a handsome Indian blanket. A small fireplace was set in a corner. Prue Bracy was making highballs at the table. They sat down and drank.
“I explained to Mr. Thunstone how we were advised to leave that thing alone,” said Bracy.
“I’m not sure it should be left alone,” said Thunstone, sipping. “Let
me tell you some things I found out earlier today, when I was at the courthouse.”
He referred to a sheaf of notes to read some of his conversation with the clerk Packer. He quoted what brief record the ancient county ledgers had of the execution, long ago, of Crett Marrowby. At that time in Colonial history, George II’s act of 1735 obtained to repeal the death penalty for witchcraft; but for a mass of odd charges Marrowby had been put in jail for a year, with a public appearance in the pillory every three months. His execution had been simply for the murder of a minister of the local church, the Reverend Mr. Herbert Walford.
“And it was ordered that he be buried outside the churchyard,” Thunstone finished.
“Confession or not, they thought he was evil,” suggested Bill Bracy. “Is that all you have on the case?”
“So far, it is,” replied Thunstone. “Yet I hope for more. Mr. Packer spoke of an old resident named Ritson—”
“That one!” broke in Bill Bracy, not very politely. “He’s one of those crusty old characters that got weaned on a pickle. We met him when we first came here, tried to make friends, and he just turned the acid on us.”
“I’ll try to neutralize his acid,” said Thunstone, and rose. “I’ll go now, but I have a cheeky favor to ask. I want to come back here tonight and stay.”
Prue blinked at him, very prettily. “Why,” she said, “we don’t have a spare room, but there’s this sofa if you don’t have a place to stay.”
“I’m checked into the Sullivan Motel in town, but right here is where I want to be tonight,” said Thunstone. “The sofa will do splendidly for me.” He went to the door. “Thank you both. Will you let me fetch us something for supper? I’ll shop around in town.”
*
He went to the soft-lighted grill-room of the Sullivan Motel, for there, Packer had told him, old Mr. Ritson habitually sat and scowled into a drink.
Sure enough, there at the bar sat a gray man, old and hunched, harshly gaunt where Thunstone was blocky. It must be Ritson. He was dressed in shabby black, like an undertaker’s assistant. His lead-pale hair bushed around his ears. His nose and chin were as sharp as daggers. Thunstone sat down on the stool next to him. From the bartender he ordered a double bourbon and water. Then he turned to the old man.
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