Needed: One Villain from Central Casting
One of the best things to do on a lazy Saturday afternoon is to curl up with a good pulp magazine. Here’s a story from the August 1936 issue of Thrilling Mystery (See this recent post for the cover scan to this issue):
The story is called “The Grave Gives Up”, by Jack D’Arcy. Check out that character on the far right in the illustration above. He looks like Freddie Kruger!
Anyway, the story starts out quite promising. Protagonist Gordon Lane is feeling sorry for himself one night, because his girlfriend, Janice, died two weeks earlier in a minor traffic accident. Then suddenly, the phone rings! It’s his girlfriend calling from beyond the grave! She says “Gordon! Come to me! I need you!” Then the line goes dead!
Sweet! A weird menace story! I don’t know what’s going on, but the story is fun so far, so I continue reading.
Gordon jumps in his car to visit Dr. Ramos, who signed Janice’s death certificate. When he gets to Dr. Ramos’ house, here is how the author introduces the doctor:
He was a complete atheist, a crass materialist…
WTF?! An atheist? We’re only two pages into this story, and it’s pretty obvious who the bad guy is going to be. Need someone who is willing to reanimate the dead? Use an atheist! They have no morals!
Anyway, Dr. Ramos (physician, scientist, atheist) tells Gordon that Janice was really dead. Gordon vows to find out what is going on, so he hops back in his car and screeches off to the cemetery.
Wandering through the graveyard (remember, it’s nighttime), he hears a noise coming from a crypt, so he drops in for a visit. He discovers that a bunch of the coffins are opening up and corpses are coming out! He runs out of there and over to the crypt that Janice is in. He opens her coffin, and it’s empty!
Let’s stop and think about this for a minute. Earlier, the author introduced an atheist character, which we know that we will later discover is the evil culprit behind the walking dead. Gordon, the protagonist, is not an atheist. He must be right and proper and moral! So why the hell is this “moral” character breaking open coffins?!
Back to the story. Gordon runs over to the caretaker’s cottage and pounds on the door. The caretaker comes to the door, and it’s that guy in the illustration above! It’s Freddie Kruger! Of course, Gordon doesn’t know this, because it’s almost 50 years before those movies will come out. Gordon turns his back on the caretaker and gets whomped on the head with a blackjack.
When Gordon wakes up, he’s in some sort of chamber beneath the cemetery. A bunch of zombies are digging a hole. Freddie Kruger occasionally smacks them with a whip to keep them moving. Janice is there, a perfect little zombie. And of course, the evil atheist Dr. Ramos is there, holding both a knife and a gun. I guess Dr. Ramos is the belt-and-suspenders type.
Here’s how Dr. Ramos is reintroduced in this scene:
The doctor’s casual atheism, which the village had tolerated, suddenly became a fearful thing to Gordon Lane. It was a black unholiness—a defy to the very God who had created him.
At this point, everything is explained. The zombies aren’t really dead. They’re some of Dr. Ramos’ indigent patients. Nobody would miss them, so he told the authorities that they died. He then gave them Cannabis to “stupefy” them. Once they were stupefied, they were susceptible to his evil hypnotic mind control. He was then able to use them as zombies to dig up some sort of treasure that was supposed to be buried hereabouts.
This is absurd, of course. Everyone knows that pot saps your motivation. All that stoners want to do is sit on the couch, eating Cheetos and watching Brady Bunch reruns. Stoners do not make good workers.
How Janice got involved is when she had her minor car wreck and was taken to Dr. Ramos. He fell in love with her. So he told everyone that she died, then he “stupefied” her with Cannabis and hypnotized her.
Anyway, then there’s a big fight. Dr. Ramos gives the knife to Janice to have her kill Gordon. But because she loves Gordon, a tiny piece of her brain is still awake. This enables Gordon to overpower her long enough to seize the knife and throw it at Dr. Ramos (who shoots but misses). He goes down. His spell over Janice is broken. Oh, happy day!
After a suitable reunion scene between Gordon and Janice, they realize that Dr. Ramos might wake up and be pissed off about the knife that’s sticking out of him. Gordon tells Janice to call the cops while he immobilizes the doc. Janice runs off. Gordon decides that revenge is better than due process, so he takes the doctor’s gun and shoots him with it!
That’s how it ends, folks. I don’t know how Gordon is going to explain how Dr. Ramos ended up dead, since he was still alive and passed out when Janice left.
But look at that ending. The protagonist, who the author assures us throughout the story is a theist, murders the doctor in cold blood! It wasn’t even self defense! The doctor was still passed out on the ground! And they portrayed the atheist as the bad guy!
September 5th, 2007 at 9:53 am
cool, “black unholiness”. the emo kiddies are gonna be so jealous of my black unholiness, and anyone whom i mention it to will either laugh or point out that i am actually white. awesome.
L