Tales of the Shadowmen 4: Lords of Terror Read online

  Volume 4: Lords of Terror

  edited by

  Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier

  stories by

  Matthew Baugh, Bill Cunningham,

  Win Scott Eckert, Micah Harris,

  Travis Hiltz, Rick Lai, Roman Leary,

  Jean-Marc Lofficier, Randy Lofficier,

  Xavier Mauméjean, Jess Nevins,

  Kim Newman, John Peel,

  Steven A. Roman, John Shirley

  and Brian Stableford

  cover by

  Ladrönn

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Table of Contents

  Fathers of the Shadowmen 4

  Matthew Baugh: Captain Future and the Lunar Peril 9

  Bill Cunningham: Fool Me Once... 30

  Win Scott Eckert: The Atomos Affair 50

  Micah Harris: The Anti-Pope of Avignon 54

  Travis Hiltz: Three Men, A Martian and A Baby 83

  Rick Lai: Corridors of Deceit 91

  Roman Leary: The Evils Against Which We Strive 124

  Jean-Marc Lofficier: Madame Atomos’ Christmas 144

  Randy Lofficier: The Reluctant Princess 147

  Xavier Mauméjean: A Wooster Christmas 151

  Jess Nevins: Red in Tooth and Claw 178

  Kim Newman: The Mark of Kane 195

  John Peel: Twenty Thousand Years Under the Sea 242

  Steven A. Roman: Night’s Children 258

  John Shirley: Cyrano and the Two Plumes 285

  Brian Stableford: The Return of Frankenstein 307

  Credits 412

  Fathers of the Shadowmen

  There are 12 of them, just like the Apostles. And one of them turned bad as well. How is that for analogies?

  The time has come, in our fourth anthology of stories paying homage to the creations of the great French writers of popular literature, to acknowledge our debt to those who, often before their English or American counterparts, paved the way for the crimefighters, the detectives, the journalists, the magicians, the scientists (mad or otherwise), the monsters and all the superheroes and supervillains of pulp fiction.

  1. Eugène Sue (1804-1857). Sue represents the transition between Gothic literature, which was very popular in France at the onset of the 19th century, and modern popular fiction. His bestselling The Mysteries de Paris (1842) still contained the traditional elements of Gothic, such as tearful orphans, cackling villains, handsome heroes and mysterious inheritances waiting to be stolen, but gone were the haunted castles, the windswept moors and the evil monks; they were replaced, instead, by an uncompromisingly sordid description of contemporary Paris. Sue’s breakthough is the avenging Prince Rodolphe, the Bruce Wayne of his day, minus the bat symbol: a wealthy dandy by day, a merciless avenger by night. His foes, the crimelord known as the Schoolmaster and his cackling crone, The Owl, are pure evil. In The Wandering Jew (1844), Sue topped himself with the scheming, ruthless, charismatic Jesuit Father Rodin, whose plans to rule the world were eventually swiped by lesser writers to serve as the thrice-removed inspiration for the abominable Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  2. Paul Féval (1816-1887). Féval is the man with the golden pen, the one who created all the modern archetypes. His White Wolf (1843) was a Briton Zorro hiding under a wolf mask and his Rio Santo (1844) anticipated Monte-Cristo by a full year. His gallery of heroes included the warrior-monk Malo de Treguern (1852), Paris Morgue supervisor Severin (1856), the prodigious swordsman Lagardère (1858), the Scotland Yard detective (the first time the word was ever used) Gregory Temple (1862), the superheroic Wandering Jew and his ethereal daughter (1863), the Buffy-like Ann Radcliffe and her merry band of feareless vampire killers (1867), the street urchin Pistolet, who grew up to head the Sûreté (1868), the investigative magistrate Remy d’Arx (1869) and more. His villains were even more formidable: Dowager Le Brec, a witch who married the Devil (1852), the vampiric Countess Addhema (1856) and Baron Iscariot (1867), the shape-shifting brothers Ténèbre (1860), John Devil, the uncatchable hero-villain of a thousand faces who dreamed of reshaping the world (1862), and lording over them all, the virtually immortal Colonel Bozzo, leader of the Black Coats, the greatest criminal conspiracy ever spawned on Earth (1844-1875).

  3. Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870). Féval may have broken new ground, but ultimately, it is Dumas who reaped all the glory. In the space of three years, 1844 to 1846, he penned two unforgettable classics: The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo, plus the lesser-known Joseph Balsamo, a proto-Illuminati novel which proved very influential. He also gave us Lord Ruthven (1851), the nefarious Monsieur Jackal (1854), and the lycanthropic Wolf Leader (1857). Dumas didn’t just invent history; he made it more real than real: at the Château d’If in Marseilles, tourists still visit the cell of Edmond Dantès.

  4. Pierre-Alexis Ponson du Terrail (1829-1871). His evolving creation of the indomitable Rocambole (1857-1871) carried on where Féval had left off with Pistolet, and became the template for a legion of future charismatic, adventuring do-gooders who are on the wrong side of the law. He left us the word rocambolesque, still used today to describe any feat of derring-do.

  5. Emile Gaboriau (1832-1874). Once Féval’s secretary, Gaboriau, too, carried on his former employer’s work with the creation of Sûreté detective Monsieur Lecoq and his armchair sleuth friend, Père Tabaret (1866), heralding the advent of the modern detective novel and ancestors of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. A lesser-known character of his was private detective Victor Chupin, who has appeared in our anthology.

  6. Jules Verne (1828-1905). There is little that can be said about Verne that hasn’t been written a million times before, but we shall single him out here for his creation of three immortal characters of popular fiction: the fearless space explorer Michel Ardan, who went where no man (with the possible exception of Cyrano de Bergerac!) had gone before (1865), and two renegade scientist adventurers, Captain Nemo (1870) and Robur the Conqueror (1876).

  7. Gustave Le Rouge (1867-1938). Le Rouge took Verne’s characters and injected them with madness and superhuman emotions. His best-known novels featured a secret society of American billionaires bent on destroying Europe through the use of the first robots and psychic powers (1899), Mars ruled by a Giant Brain (1908) and, his crowning achievement, mad Dr. Cornelius Kramm, leader of the world-spanning Red Hand, who could reshape men like clay (1912).

  8. Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941). Leblanc took Rocambole and real-life anarchist Marius Jacob and came up with Arsène Lupin (1905), a thief and a gentleman, gifted with the intellectual prowess of his perennial rival, Sherlock Holmes. Like Sir Arthur Conan Dyle, no matter how hard he tried, Leblanc could thereafter never escape from his creation.

  9. Gaston Leroux (1868-1927). Had Leroux, a journalist, only created Erik, the Phantom of the Opera (1910), his fame would live forever. But with the character of Joseph Rouletabille (1908), his young alter ego, Leroux broadened the range of detective novels, from locked room mysteries to spy fiction. Lest we forget, he also created the ape-man Balaoo (1911), the convict Cheri-Bibi (1913) and the cyborg Benedict Masson whose brain lived on inside the robotic Gabriel (1923).

  10. Maurice Renard (1875-1939). Influenced by H.G. Wells, Renard had his mad scientist, Dr. Lerne, graft men onto machines (1908); then introduced us to the notion of superintelligences from outer space abducting men like fish (1912) and created a modern myth, that of the transplanted hands of a killer, in The Hands of Orlac (1920).

  11. Pierre Souvestre (1874-1914). With his writing partner, Marcel Allain (1885-1970), Souvestre co-created the sociopathic Fantômas (1911). More sadistic than John Devil, more psy
chotic than Lupin, Fantômas is the first “heroic” fictional serial killer of the 20th century.

  12. Jean de La Hire (1878-1956). Walking in the footsteps of both Verne and Le Rouge, La Hire created the first, true superhero, Leo Saint-Clair, the Nyctalope (1911). Leo went on to embody the best and the worst of Colonial France, until he, like his creator, succumbed to the temptation of collaboration with the occupying Nazis and, ultimately, vanished in the fog of war.

  These, then, are the fathers of the Shadowmen whom we celebrate for a fourth time in this volume. Join us now and meet the villainous cast who grace these pages, spreading evil from the underworld of London to the seedy taverns of Mars, from the banks of the Seine to New York’s Hell Kitchen: Fantômas, Countess Cagliostro, Victor Frankenstein, Irma Vep, Count Orlock, Erik, Madame Atomos, the Black Coats, Charles Foster Kane, Captain Nemo, Cthulhu... Dare meet–the Lords of Terror!

  Jean-Marc Lofficier

  René Barjavel (1911-1985) is rightly considered to be one of France’s greatest modern science fiction writers. Some of his classic novels include Ravage (1943; transl. as Ashes, Ashes), about a world suddenly deprived of electricity, Le Voyageur Imprudent (1943; transl. as Future Times Three), a seminal time travel story, and La Nuit des Temps (1968; transl., as The Ice People), the moving tale of the downfall of the civilization that preceded ours. Matthew Baugh chose to use Barjavel’s melancholy protagonist of Future Times Three and propel him in a rollercoaster of a tale taking place in the planetary romances of Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett and Catherine L. Moore, while at the same time, paying homage to a story published in last year’s Tales of the Shadowmen…

  Matthew Baugh: Captain Future and the Lunar Peril

  New York City, 2021

  The green man seemed to come out of nowhere.

  The dark-uniformed Planet Patrol Officers were startled, but only for a moment. Their training took over and they moved in on the man, atomic flare pistols ready. He raised his goggles and blinked at them amiably.

  The man wasn’t actually green, not the way a native of Jupiter, or a four-armed giant Martian, or one of the sea-people of Venus is green. He was wearing an outlandish green costume that covered every inch of him except for his face. It looked like the woolen suits old deep-sea divers once wore. The face was youthful with plain features and the expression of a perennial dreamer. It seemed a harmless face, but harmless people don’t often materialize from thin air in front of the Manhattan headquarters of Earth’s government.

  “Keep your hands away from your body!” a guard barked. “Don’t move!”

  The green man looked at the guns around him with mild alarm and disobeyed the instructions. His finger stabbed a button on the chest of the suit and he disappeared. An instant later, half a dozen flashes of light seared through the air where the man had been standing.

  The guard commander swore under his breath and pulled out his televisor.

  “Code red!” he shouted into the unit. “Intruder is an Earthman, approximately 200 centimeters tall and very thin. He is dressed in a baggy green coverall with a hood. Secure the building at once and get the President to safety!”

  The green man reappeared in an office on the top floor of the Government Tower. There was only one person in the room, a distinguished-looking man with silver hair. He was Daniel Crewe, the President of Earth and the de facto head of the solar system.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded.

  The green man held up a hand to fend off questions. He produced a small can and sprayed the door with it.

  “What are you doing?” Crewe repeated.

  “Forgive me sir,” the green man answered. “There is something I have to tell you and I could not let your policemen stop me.”

  Crewe nodded agreeably. It would be only a matter of seconds before his security team came crashing through the door. It was best to keep this intruder calm until then.

  “You have an unorthodox way of starting a conversation,” he said, “but you have my full attention. What is it that you want?”

  “Sir,” the young man swallowed nervously. “I know that in three days you are scheduled to dedicate a museum on the Moon.”

  Crewe nodded. The whole world knew about the event. It commemorated the landing in the Sea of Tranquility 50 years earlier. That mission had been the beginning of the rush of space exploration that had left colonies on all the worlds of the system. The museum was to be built at Tranquility Base. Soon the glassite dome would be filled with air so that all could visit the monument to human achievement.

  “You must destroy the landing craft!” the young man said. “Blast it or bomb it! Use your most powerful weapons. Nothing must remain.”

  The sound of flare pistols erupted in the corridor as the guards attempted to blast through the office door. The atomic bursts should have cut through the heavy wood with ease, but nothing happened.

  “Why?” Crewe asked. “In the name of all that’s sane, why would I want to destroy something so valuable?”

  “If you don’t destroy the landing site, billions will die!”

  A bolt of red flame shot across the room and the green man fell. Daniel Crewe spun towards the source of the shot. It was one of his guards. The man had used magnetic clamps to cling to the side of the building and had fired through the window. The blast had grazed the green man, leaving an ugly burn across his forearm.

  “Don’t kill him!” Crewe cried.

  The green man had an expression of terror on his face. His hand shot to a switch on the chest of his costume. The guard fired again but the bolt of atomic flame passed through empty air. The green man had vanished.

  It was evening in Paris and the young man sat in a café wearing a nervous expression. He had exchanged the green costume for an inconspicuous synth-silk zippersuit. It fit him reasonably well, though the sleeves and legs were too short.

  “Monsieur St. Menoux?”

  The man sprang to his feet at the sound of his name. The speaker was a big man, not as tall as he was, but more heavily muscled. His pale eyes stood out vividly in a face that was nearly as dark as his black hair. The man was dressed in a spacer’s leather pants and a shirt of iridescent Venusian spider silk.

  “I am St. Menoux!” he replied. “Are you the man who...” he trailed off and looked around nervously.

  “I’m Stark,” the big man said. “Don’t worry, we aren’t being watched.”

  St. Menoux could feel the controlled power in Stark’s grip as they shook hands. The dark man’s face was intelligent and his expression calm, but there was something barbaric hiding in those eyes. He made St. Menoux think of a trained tiger, friendly but in no way safe.

  A waitress appeared and took their order. She was very pretty, but her skin was covered with short, tawny fur and her eyes had vertical pupils. Stark said something to her in a strange, guttural language and her face brightened. She took their order for drinks and walked away with cat-like grace.

  “I’ve never seen such a girl,” St. Menoux said. “Is she an alien?”

  Stark gave him an odd look.

  “She’s from Mercury.” He shook his head. “I’ll never get used to seeing lightsiders in human clothing.”

  “You spoke her language?”

  “My parents were prospectors on Mercury,” the big man replied. “I grew up there.”

  The drinks came. St. Menoux had a brandy and Stark had a blood-colored liquor.

  “Segir,” he said at the other’s unspoken question. “It comes from Sha-Ardol.”

  “Sha-Ardol?”

  Stark’s pale eyes narrowed.

  “I often use the old names for the planets,” he said. “I hope you don’t have a problem with that.”

  “Please,” St. Menoux stammered. “It’s only that I had never heard any of these ‘old names.’ ”

  “Vulcan is uninhabited, and the people of Mercury have no name for their world. The other planets, in the names of their own people, are Sha-Ardol, Barsoom, Eurobus
, Cykranosh, L’gy’hx, Yaksh and Yuggoth.”

  “Vulcan?” St. Menoux was perplexed. “I only know of nine planets.”

  “Then you’ve led a sheltered life, friend. In addition to those ten, there are the wandering worlds of Rhea and Mongo. Their orbits are so eccentric that thousands of years pass between each visit they make to the inner system. That makes an even dozen planets, and 30 moons.”

  St. Menoux shook his head in wonder.

  “These things are new to me,” he said. “I am a time traveler from the last century.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  St. Menoux held out a small capsule.

  “Take this and you will see.”

  The door to the President’s office was still in the same place it had been when St. Menoux had vanished. If the Living Brain were right, it would always remain there.

  “How can that be, Simon?” Captain Future asked.

  “The door is frozen in time,” the Brain responded.

  The organ was suspended in a transparent glassite case that floated a meter and a half above the floor. It spoke from an electronic voice box attached to the outside of the case. The Brain had once been a human scientist named Simon Wright. When his body failed, he had his brain transplanted to its present home so he could continue his scientific research.

  “If that’s true, we could blast the building to atoms and it would still be there, hanging in the air,” the young scientist continued.

  “That’s right Curtis,” the Brain replied. “All physical change is four-dimensional in nature. Suspend time and no change is possible.”