Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 5 (1925-05).djvu/134



O LONG as the human race lasts, the old legends of witches and vampires and the evil eye will grip the imagination. Is there, among the readers of anyone who actually believes in witches and demons and werewolves? Probably not; yet when one of these old legends is tied up with the facts of modern life, as in Seabury Quinn's The Phantom Farmhouse and Out of the Long Ago, it has a pull like a Fordson tractor. These two stories were tales of werewolves, based on rank superstition; yet they created a flood of requests for more like them.

When mankind ceases to thrill to tales of magic and djinns and the ceaseless warfare between occult forces of good and evil, when the Arabian Nights lose their charm and Sheherazade is forgotten—then the freshness will have gone from life and mankind will have passed from the enchanted realm of the imagination into a somber world of sober logic—a drab, uncomfortable mental world in which the childhood pleasures of fancy are forgot. Men will be no longer human beings; they will have become a race of flesh-and-blood machines.

But in the meantime, exists for those who want to escape for a time from the drab commonplaceness of everyday life; and in the pages of this unique magazine the werewolf is brought to grief (as in Greye La Spina's Invaders From the Dark); the malignant vampire is foiled, his head cut off, and a stake driven through his heart (as in Victor Rowan's Four Wooden Stakes); the "afflicted children" are pinched by witches, and swear away the lives of innocent old women (in Seabury Quinn's true tales of Salem witchcraft: Servants of Satan); and the enlightened modern psychic destroys the monstrous familiar created in the caves of Verdun by medieval devil-worshipers (in Stephen Bagby's Whispering Tunnels).

On such legends has built its popularity, adding to this type of stories tales of the marvelous science of the future, wars of the worlds, voyages through space, great inventions foreseen by the prophetic eyes of imaginative authors.

A type of story that seems more and more to find favor with you, the readers, is the tale that introduces you to local legends in various little-known parts of the world. Chinese occultism lives again in the exquisite tale told you in last month's issue by Soong Kwoen-ling and James W. Bennett; Lieutenant Burks recreates a Dominican legend in his Desert of the Dead; Lieutenant William J. Stamper, whose keen eyes and ears missed none of the local color and superstitious customs of Haiti during the occupation of the Black Republic by the American marines, has recreated for you