The Night Listener and Others (33 page)

“I want to get a tattoo of an open eye, like the Pinkerton Detective Agency has saying they never sleep, and like is on the dollar bill, but my parents say that I have to be on my own before I get one. Thank you for such terrific stories.

“Jim Shepard

“134 N. Lincoln Street

“Omaha, Nebraska.”

We can always use more detectives, Jim, so good luck to you! With you on the job, maybe those villains who get away at the end of every story will be captured. But your parents are right about that tattoo, and you may change your mind when you are older.

From “Ask Adventure,”
Adventure
, February 10, 1925:

Good Book on Taxidermy

Always a handy thing to have around:

Question
:—”I would like to know the title of a good book on taxidermy, with particular attention to tanning and preserving skins.”—B. D. WHITWORTH, Chicago, Ill.

Answer
, by Mr. Belford:—A fine overall book on taxidermy, with a thorough chapter on tanning all types of animal skins and hides, is C. K. and C. A. Reed’s
Guide to Taxidermy
, available at bookstores or directly from Mr. Chas. K. Reed, Worcester, Mass.

From “The Camp-Fire,”
Adventure
, September, 1934:

“The Camp-Fire” is usually filled with stories about our adventurer-writers, as it has been since its inception, but every now and again, we get some communications from some long-term readers who are pretty adventurous themselves. Such a reader is B. D. Whitworth, whom we hear from every year or so. Mr. Whitworth is a hunter-adventurer who roams these great forty-eight states bagging big game, such as elk, mountain goat, and deer. He wrote us first in 1925 when he bagged his first trophy animal in the state of Washington, and later in 1926 (North Dakota), 1928 (Montana), 1929 (Wyoming), and 1931 (Idaho). Just this year he reports bringing down another prize in Colorado. Mr. Whitworth tells us that he never returns to any previous hunting sites, because of the many new and exciting vistas the country presents. The fortunate Mr. Whitworth is a traveling man whose business takes him all over, so that wherever he hangs his hat is home. He also reports that he has started to write fiction, and we hope that when he has something to offer, he will send it to
Adventure
for our consideration…

From “The Madman Who Collected Women” by D. B. Worth,
Terror Tales
, January 1935:

…“Joan!” Dan cried, straining against his bonds, and just starting to feel them give way under his tight muscles.

“Yes, Mr. Beecher,” cackled Dr. Schwarzenwald as he tossed the sheet aside. Next to him, the naked girl, her nubile body spread-eagled on the operating table, writhed in terror. The wires that held her cut into her pale flesh, and trickles of blood ran down her shapely arms.

“Don’t worry, dear!” Dan called to his fiancée. “We’ll get out of this!”

“
Nein, schweinhund!
“ Dr. Schwarzenwald said, and the gibbering dwarf at his side capered up and down, his beady, piggish eyes drinking in the sight of the unclad beauty just an arm’s reach away. “For once that Gunther and I have done our work with our instruments of art…” He held up what looked to Dan’s horrified gaze like a scalpel. “… your lovely Joan Simpson will be added to my collection, and what remains of her—and
you
—will be dissolved in the acid pit!”

Dr. Schwarzenwald flung back a trap door on the floor. Though Dan couldn’t see into it, he could see the noxious green fumes rising from it, and knew that it would devour his body in seconds.

“And
then
,” the crazed Prussian continued, “the
wunderschon
Miss Simpson will be with me forever, as are these other beauties!
Gunther!
“

The barked command sent the hideous dwarf scampering to a long curtain at the end of the room. He whipped it open, and behind it Dan saw a sight that set Joan screaming in horror and made his own heart pound like a piston in his manly chest.

A dozen glass cases held the skins of as many young women. They were each draped over a wire framework, roughly human-shaped. It was as though the women had been flayed in one piece, their flesh then preserved and put on display. Long hair hung from the tops of the heads, and Dan could see fingernails still attached to the dangling strips of skin that were the unfortunate victims’ fingers.

“You,
Fraulein
Simpson, will now join my parade of beauties!” the madman crowed in dark triumph. “But for the best result, the procedure must be done while you still live! Gunther!”

Dr. Schwarzenwald bent with his scalpel over the girl’s heaving chest, and the dwarf bounded to his side, placing his hands over Joan’s lily-white breasts, as though to stretch the skin taut over her heart for the doctor’s blade.

The perverse sight was all that Dan needed. In a frenzy of rage he burst apart the frayed leather strap that held his wrists, and in another second he had freed his legs as well. He raised his eyes to see the dwarf Gunther bolting toward him on his bandy legs, a huge knife raised over his head.

Dan quickly sidestepped and tripped the dwarf so that he fell headlong onto the stone floor, dropping his knife. Then Dan picked up the little man and threw the squirming bundle of muscle and bone directly at his master, Dr. Schwarzenwald.

The dwarf struck the madman in the chest, knocking him backward so that his feet went over the edge of the acid pit. In another second both the repugnant servant and his maniac master had fallen into the pit. Their screams lasted only seconds, but they were the second most welcome sounds Dan Beecher had ever heard.

The most welcome was heard a few seconds later, after he had freed Joan from the wires that had held her, wrapped her gleaming nudity in a sheet, and was holding her trembling body against his own. “Oh, Dan,” she breathed, “I’m so glad it’s all over. I…I love you, my darling…”

They were words that he knew he would hear again and again, every day of his life, now that their horrible nightmare was finally over.

From “The Friendliest Corner,”
Street & Smith Love Story
, April 20, 1935:
Perhaps someone can help this gentleman.

DEAR MISS MORRIS: I know that your department usually helps people find friends and pen pals they don’t normally know, but in this case I hope you will make an exception. I am looking for an eighteen-year-old young lady named Ruth Lundy of Sterling, Colorado. She has been missing for nearly eight months, and her parents are naturally very worried about her. If any of your readers are familiar with Miss Lundy, would they be kind enough to write to me at the Pierce Detective Agency, Denver, Colorado. Thank you.

J. W. SHEPARD

From
Best Detective Magazine
, July 1935:

CRIME SPOTS MAPPED

A series of murders of young women have taken place in the northwestern part of the country over the past ten years, forming a triangle between Washington, North Dakota, and Colorado, where the body of Miss Ruth Lundy was recently discovered in a shallow grave a hundred miles northeast of Denver. The five bodies that have been found to the present time were all mutilated in the same way, leading police to believe the same person was responsible for all five killings. Police believe they will find the killer soon.

From “The Reader Writes,”
Terror Tales
, August 1935:
Reader Wants More “Worth-y” Stories

“I think that D. B. Worth’s ‘The Madman Who Collected Women’ in your January issue was one of the best stories you’ve ever published, right up there with corkers by Hugh B. Cave and Arthur J. Burks. But I’ve been waiting for months for another Worth yarn, and there’s nary a one to be seen. Whatever happened to this great author?”

A Reader in Denver

Dear Reader,

We’ve been trying to find Mr. Worth ourselves to beg some more terror tales from his pen, but he seems to have vanished. If anyone knows him, please tell him our editorial doors are open wide to his kind of shocker!

The Editor

From “Ask Adventure,”
Adventure
, November, 1935:
A good practical question for sportsmen from a long-time reader.

Request:—I do a great deal of hunting, and have recently been troubled by predators digging up the flayed carcasses of my kills after I have skinned them and taken my trophies. I don’t wish to leave the carcasses to be discovered by others, but since I do not eat wild game, I would prefer to leave the remains in the wild, rather than pack them out. How deep should one bury animal carcasses to ensure that they will not be dug up by predators?

B. D. Whitworth, Casper, Wy.

Reply by Mr. Ernest W. Shaw:—It is always advisable to bury carcasses at a minimum depth of three feet in regular soil, and at a depth of four feet when the soil is sandier. For further assurance, place a fallen tree limb or rocks over the area as well, to further discourage digging. With these precautions, the sportsman’s leavings should remain undisturbed.
From “Lost Trails,”
Adventure
, March, 1936:

WHITWORTH, B. D. Looking for my old chum, who has been “bumming” through the northwest for the past ten years or so. Any information of his whereabouts would certainly be appreciated. Address—J. W. SHEPARD, 428 W. 6th St., Denver, Colorado.

From “MISSING,”
Detective Story Magazine
, October, 1936:

SHEPARD, JAMES W.—Formerly of Denver, Colorado. Thirty years old. Five feet nine inches tall, dark hair, gray eyes. May have been in the company of B. D. Whitworth. Kindly advise Grover F. Pierce, 310 S. Harlan Street, Denver, Colorado.

From “Around the Blotters,”
Inside Detective
, July, 1954:

Denver, Colo.:

Authorities were horrified to find ten masks made out of dried human flesh in the cheap cardboard suitcase of a drifter. The man burned to death in his bed in a Denver transient hotel, apparently after having fallen asleep while smoking.

The body was rendered unrecognizable by the fire. The only identification found was a nearly twenty-year-old private investigator ID in the name of James W. Shepard, who vanished in 1936. Police are assuming that, in the absence of any other information, the body is that of former investigator Shepard.

“I don’t know what this Shepard was up to,” said Denver Police Lieutenant Randall Spotwood, “but you don’t carry around dead people’s faces just because you picked them up somewhere.”

Police further informed
Inside Detective
that they believe nine of the ten victims are women, and that the single male victim had a bullet hole in the back of the head. Also found in Shepard’s suitcase were a small stack of old magazines and a two-inch square piece of dried human skin tattooed with the image of an open eye.

Investigation into the positive identification of the corpse, as well as that of the ten victims, will continue.

“And So Will I Remember You…”

I don’t recall when I bought the book. It must have been on my shelf for years before I read it and found the inscriptions. How I ever came to have a copy of
The Peep of Day; or, a Series of the
Earliest Religious Instruction the Infant Mind is Capable of Receiving
, I’ll never know. I had to have picked it up from Kerry Baker, the book dealer, since it had his code in it: “$1—” with “xx” below it, showing that he’d paid nothing for it, probably having gotten it in a box lot at an auction. I suppose I bought it on a whim, due to its cheapness and age.

It sat unnoticed in the lawyer’s bookcases in my bedroom for twenty years, until the evening I lay in bed reading Todd Pruzan’s piece in
The New Yorker
about Mrs. Favel Lee Mortimer, the author. Perhaps I should say
authoress
, since that stuffy, tight-laced woman would no doubt have referred thus to herself. She was among the most Victorian of British Victorian writers, was the redoubtable Mrs. Mortimer, slinging moralistic platitudes and nationalistic chauvinism about like some precursor to the Evangelical one-minders who’ve cast a similar blight on the current cultural landscape.

The simultaneously amusing and nasty thing about Mrs. Mortimer was that she wrote for children. Her withered literary soul found fertile ground among her parental collaborators, who foisted upon their hapless offspring such titles as
The Countries of Europe Described, Reading without Tears
, and the aforementioned
The Peep of Day
. When I read her various descriptions of those unfortunate enough to live outside of England— “.…t would almost make you sick to go to church in Iceland” is one of her kinder judgments—I knew I had found a true monster of popular literature, and was assured of it when I unearthed my own copy of
The Peep of Day
.

I have a memory for books, if for nothing else, and although Mrs. Mortimer’s name meant nothing to me, the book’s title did. I set down the magazine on the nightstand, muttered a brief explanation to my wife Linda, and starting rummaging through the bookcase on the other side of the bedroom. After several minutes I came up with the sad little volume. Its cover was worn, the cheap pseudo-cloth covering the heavy paper boards was chipped, and the dark threads and white binding cloth of the spine lay exposed like muscle and nerves under skin.

I climbed back into bed and found that the edition was published by The American Tract Society, always a promising sign, and gave no author’s name. “Anna B. Huber’s book 1860” was written on the front flyleaf in an ink that time had browned. I turned to the text, hoping for outrage, and was not disappointed.

The first chapter, entitled “The Body,” describes the same in simple and non-technical terms:

God has covered your bones with flesh. Your flesh is soft and warm…I hope that your body will not get hurt…

If it were to fall into a fire, it would be burned up. If hot water were to fall upon it, it would be scalded. If it were to fall into deep water, and not be taken out very soon, it would be drowned. If a great knife were run though your body, the blood would come out. If a great box were to fall on your head, your head would be crushed. If you were to fall out the window, your neck would be broken. If you were to not eat any food for a few days, your little body would be very sick, your breath would stop, and you would grow cold, and you would soon be dead.