Yes, that paper was the reason I dropped Pickman; Richard Upton Pickman, the greatest artist I have ever known—and the foulest being that ever leaped the bounds of life into the pits of myth and madness. Eliot—old Reid was right. He wasn’t strictly human. Either he was born in strange shadow, or he’d found a way to unlock the forbidden gate. It’s all the same now, for he’s gone—back into the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt. Here, let’s have the chandelier going.

Don’t ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don’t ask me, either, what lay behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman was so keen to pass off as rats. There are secrets, you know, which might have come down from old Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells even stranger things. You know how damned life-like Pickman’s paintings were—how we all wondered where he got those faces.

Well—that paper wasn’t a photograph of any background, after all. What it showed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas. It was the model he was using—and its background was merely the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life.

The Atomic Conquerors

Edmund Hamilton

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Looking back, one is struck with wonder that we know as much of the story as we do; that we comprehend as fully as we do the nature of the strange doom that rushed out onto humanity from a lonely hill in southern Scotland. Had it not been for one small thing, the casual curiosity of a young student, that appalling invasion would remain to this day quite unexplained. A trifle, certainly, that passing interest of a rather commonplace young man, but except for that interest, and what it led to, we would understand nothing of the vast drama that was played around and above us.

Not that our ignorance or knowledge could have affected the outcome of that drama! Beside the tremendous forces that rose and fought and crashed, mankind was but a mass of tiny, frightened pigmies, running about beneath battling giants. Yet one remembers that it was one of those same pigmies, it was a single embittered, insane man who loosed all of that ancient terror upon us and caused an age-old cosmic feud to flare out in dreadful war, universe struggling with universe in titanic combat, immense, unthinkable.…