Read Manly Wade Wellman - Judge Pursuivant 01 Online
Authors: The Hairy Ones Shall Dance (v1.1)
Manly Wade Wellman - Judge Pursuivant 01
The Hairy
Ones Shall Dance
Manly Wade
Wellman
Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986) wrote more than
seventy-five books and over two hundred short stories, many of which were
published in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and '40s. He twice won the World
Fantasy Award and some of the writer's best short fiction is collected in Who
Fears the Devil? (
filmed
in 1972), Worse Things
Waiting, Lonely Vigils am/The Valley So Low.
The classic werewolf rwvella which follows was
originally published over three issues of Weird Tales in January, February and
March 1938 under the pseudonym "Gans T. Field". One of the Virgil
Finlay illustrations for the serial depicted Wellman (as Finlay imagined him)
throwing a punch at the werewolf The author didn't think it was a very good
likeness, but then he and the artist had never met. Finlay gave the drawing to
Wellman who, years later, passed it on to his friend Karl Edward Wagner.
"The Hairy Ones Shall Dance" once
again follows the exploits of occult investigator Judge Keith Hilary
Pursuivant, whose adventures have previously appeared in both The Mammoth Book
of Terror and The Mammoth Book of Vampires . . .
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
Few words are best, as Sir Philip Sidney once
wrote in challenging an enemy. The present account will be accepted as a
challenge by the vast army of skeptics of which I once made one. Therefore I
write it brief and bald. If my story seems unsteady in
spots,
that
is because the hand that writes it still quivers from my recent
ordeal.
Shifting the metaphor from duello to mihtary
engagement, this is but the first gun of the bombardment. Even now sworn
statements are being prepared by all others who survived the strange and, in
some degree, unthinkable adventure I am recounting. After that, every great
psychic investigator in the country, as well as some from Europ>e, will
begin researches. I wish that my friends and brother-magicians, Houdini and
Thurston, had lived to bear a hand in them.
I must apologize for the strong admixture of
the personal element in my narrative. Some may feel that I err against good
taste. My humble argument is that I was not merely an observer, but an actor,
albeit a clumsy one, throughout the drama.
As to the setting forth of matters which many
will call impossible, let me smile in advance. Things happen and have always
happened, that defy the narrow science of test-tube and formula. I can only say
again that I am writing the truth, and that my statement will be supported by
my companions in the adventure.
Talbot Wills
November 15, 1937
I
"Why must the burden of proof rest with
the spirits?"
"You don't believe in psychic
phenomena," said Doctor Otto Zoberg yet again, "
because
you won't.''
This with studied kindness,
sitting in the most comfortable chair of my hotel room.
I, at
thirty-four, silently hoped I would have his health and charm at fifty-four -
he was so rugged for all his lean length, so well groomed for all his tweeds
and beard and joined eyebrows, so articulate for
all his
accent. Doctor Zoberg quite apparently liked and admired me, and I felt guilty
once more that I did not entirely return the compliment.
"I know that you are a stage magician,"
he began afresh.
"I was once," I amended, a little
sulkily. My early career had brought me considerable money and notice, but
after the novelty of show business was worn off I had never rejoiced in it.
Talboto the Mysterious - it had been impressive, but tawdry. Better to be
Talbot Wills, lecturer and investigator in the held of exposing fraudulent
mediums.
For six years I had known Doctor Otto Zoberg,
the champion of spiritism and mediumism, as rival and companion. We had first
met in debate under the auspices of the Society for Psychical Research in
London. I, young enough for enthusiasm but also for carelessness, had been
badly out-thought and out-talked. But afterward, Doctor Zoberg had praised my
arguments and my dehvery, and had graciously taken me out to a late supper. The
following day, there arrived from him a present of helpful books and magazines.
Our next platform duel found me in a position to get a little of my own back;
and he, afterward, laughingly congratulated me on turning to account the
material he had sent me. After that, we were public foemen and personal inseparables.
Just now we were touring the United States, debating, giving exhibitions,
visiting mediums. The night's program, before a Washington audience liberally
laced with high officials, had ended in what we agreed was a draw; and here we
were, squabbling good-naturedly afterward.
"Please, Doctor," I begged, offering
him a cigarette, "save your charges of stubbornness for the theater."
He waved my case aside and bit the end from a
villainous black cheroot. "I wouldn't say it, here or in pubhc, if it weren't
true, Talbot. Yet you sneer even at telepathy, and only half believe in mental
suggestion. Ach, you are worse than Houdini."
"Houdini was absolutely sincere," I
almost blazed, for I had known and worshipped that brilliant and kindly prince
of conjurers and fraud-finders.
"AHH, to be sure, to be sure,"
nodded Zoberg over his blazing match. "I did not say he was not. Yet, he
refused proof- the proof that he himself embodied. Houdini was a great mystic,
a medium. His power for miracles he did not know himself"
I had heard that before, from Conan Doyle as
well as Zoberg, but I made no comment. Zoberg continued:
"Perhaps Houdini was afraid - if anything
could frighten so brave and wise a man it would assuredly come from within. And
so he would not even listen to argument." He turned suddenly somber.
"Perhaps he knew best, Wills. But he was stubborn, and so are you."
"I don't think you can say that of
me," I objected once more. The cheroot was alight now, and I kindled a
cigarette to combat in some degree the gun-powdery fumes.
Teeth gleamed amiably through the beard, and
Zoberg nodded again, in frank delight this time. "Oh, we have hopes of
you, Wills, where we gave up Houdini."
He had never said that before, not so plainly
at any rate. I smiled back. "I've always been willing to be shown. Give me
a fool-proof, fake-proof, supernormal phenomenon, Doctor; let me convince
myself; then I'll come gladly into the spiritist camp."
"Ahh, so you always say!" he
exploded, but without genuine wrath. "Why must the burden of proof rest
with the spirits? How can you prove that they do not live and move and act?
Study what Eddington has to say about that."
"For five years," I reminded him,
"I have offered a prize of five thousand dollars to any medium whose
spirit miracles I could not duplicate by honest sleight-of-hand."
He gestured with slim fingers, as though to
push the words back into me. "That proves absolutely nothing, Wills. For
all your skill, do you think that sleight-of-hand can be the only way? Is it
even the best way?"
"I've unmasked famous mediums for years,
at the rate of one a month," I flung back.
"Unmasked
them as the clumsiest of fakes."
"Because some are dishonest, are all
dishonest?" he appealed. "What specific thing would convince you, my
friend?"
I thought for a moment, gazing at him through
the billows of smoke. Not a gray hair to him - and I, twenty years his junior,
had six or eight at either temple. I went on to admire and even to envy that
pointed trowel of beard, the sort of thing that I, a magician, might have
cultivated once. Then I made my answer.
"I'd ask for
a
materialization
.
Doctor.
An ectoplasmic
apparition, visible and solid to touch - in an empty room with no curtains or
closets, all entrances sealed by myself, the medium and witnesses
shackled." He started to open his mouth, but I hurried to prevent him.
"I know what you'll say - that I've seen a number of impressive
ectoplasms. So I have, perhaps, but not one was scientifically and dispassionately
controlled. No, Doctor, if I'm to be convinced, I must make the conditions and
set the stage myself"
"And if the materialization was a
complete success?"
"Then it would prove the claim to me - to
the world. Materializations are the most important question in the whole
field."
He looked long at me, narrowing his shrewd
eyes beneath the dark single bar of his brows.
"Wills,"
he said at length, "I hoped you would ask something like this."
"You did?"
"Ah.
Because - first,
can you spare a day or so?"
I replied guardedly, "I can, I believe.
We have two weeks or more before the New Orleans date." I computed
rapidly. "Yes, that's December 8. What have you got up your sleeve,
Doctor?"
He grinned once more, with a great display of
gleaming white teeth, and Bung out his long arms. "My sleeves, you will
observe, are empty!" he cried. "No trickery. But within five hours of
where we sit - five hours by fast automobile - is a little town. And in that
town there is a little medium. No, Wills, you have never seen or heard of her.
It is only
myself
who found her by chance, who studied
her long and prayerfully. Come with me. Wills - she will teach you how little
you know and how much you can learn!"
