The Purple Pterodactyls
L. Sprague de Camp
Foreword
W. Wilson Newbury is younger than I, and he plays a far better game of tennis. Moreover, while I have made my living as a lumberjack, naval officer, teacher, lecturer, and scrivener, he selected his profession soon after leaving college and has remained faithful to it ever since.
Willy is a banker—not one of those faceless fellows who peer out of tellers' windows—but a dark-suited, well-brushed, short-haired type who jockeys a desk behind a row of marble pillars in one of the city's largest banks. And Willy, as all his friends call him to keep him from getting a swelled head, is smart.
Although we are different in many ways, Willy and I, we have always had one thing in common: a lively interest in the occult. And the occult seems to have a strange affinity for Willy.
Just why the esoteric seeks out a conventional, upright family man like W. Wilson Newbury, I cannot imagine; but somehow dwellers from the realms of metaphysical worlds beyond worlds keep tangling up the strands of his life. It may be that whatever prescience or intuition lets him separate a trustworthy loan applicant from a dead beat opens the shutters of his mind wider and makes him more psychically aware than the rest of us; but this gift—or curse—is not something a banker can discuss with the average run of mankind.
Bankers are supposed to be sane and sensible—the backbone of the community. A financier who talks of his involvement in fey happenings might cause a run on the bank, or trigger a recession, or at the very least lose his job. Since I hunch over my typewriter all day and am not given to gossip, I have been one of the few people in whom Willy could confide.
Willy was an avid reader of Weird Tales, that long-lamented record of the fantastic; and some of the unworldly happenings chronicled therein and the writers who set them down must have had a great influence on Willy.
The unnamed friend in "Balsamo's Mirror" is Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the fantasist of Providence, Rhode Island. In a letter to his Aunt Lillian Clark, Lovecraft told of buying a little pottery oil lamp from ancient Greece. He wrote: "It sits before me now, enchanting in its glamour, it has already suggested at least one weird story plot to my imagination: a plot in which it will figure as an Atlantean rather than Hellenic survival." Although Lovecraft never composed the tale, Willy in some inexplicable way experienced it.
In the story "Far Babylon," aficionados of fantasy will recognize the man in the cowboy hat as Robert E. Howard, the versatile poet and writer of Cross Plains, Texas. In a letter to Lovecraft, Howard mentioned a "sending of serpents" as the germ of a possible plot. And here again the occult broke through. That idea, combined with certain experiences of my peripatetic banker friend, became the aventure recounted here as "A Sending of Serpents." In the same story, Willy's remarks about "Zikkarf" allude to the fictional planet Xiccarph, on which Clark Ashton Smith laid several of his tales.
I, for one, am grateful to Willy Newbury for sharing adventures that are occasionally frightening, always amusing and sometimes unforgettable. I hope you will enjoy them, too.
L. Sprague de Camp Villanova, Pennsylvania
Balsamo's Mirror
My friend in Providence took long walks, especially at night. He loved to end up at a graveyard, an abandoned church, or some such site. Since he earned a meager living by writing for Creepy Stories, he claimed that these walks inspired him with ideas. In any case, one such walk that he took with me gave him some ideas he had not foreseen.
When I was an undergraduate at M.I.T., my people lived too far away, in upstate New York, for frequent visits home. So on week ends, when up on my studies, I rattled over from Cambridge in my Model A to see my friend. We had become pen pals through the letters column of Creepy Stories. I had invited myself over, and we had found each other congenial in spite of differences of outlook, age, and temperament.
I used to love to argue. A thing I liked about my friend was that he could argue intelligently and always good-naturedly on more subjects than anyone I ever knew. Some of his ideas were brilliant; some I thought were crazy but later came to agree with; some I still think were crazy.
We found plenty to debate about. Politics was hot stuff, with the Depression still in full swing the year after Roosevelt had closed the banks. I was pretty conservative still, while my friend had just been converted from a Mesozoic conservative to an ardent New Dealer. Another young student, who sometimes dropped in, was a red-hot Communist sympathizer. So we went at it hot and heavy.
We also disputed religion. My friend was a scientific materialist and atheist; I was still a believing Christian. We argued esthetics. He defended art for art's sake; I thought that philosophy a pretext for indolence and had no use for idlers, whether rich, arty, or plain lazy.
We wrangled over international affairs. He wanted America to rejoin the British Empire; I was for splendid isolation. We argued history. He was devoted to the eighteenth century; I thought that men wearing wigs over good heads of hair looked silly.
"Willy," he said, "you are looking at the superficies only. The perukes are not significant. What is important is that this was the last period before the Industrial Revolution, with all its smoke and rattling machinery and hypertrophied cities and other horrors. Therefore, in a sense, this was the most gracious, elegant, civilized time we have ever seen or shall ever see."
"What," I said, "would you do with the surplus nine tenths of humanity, whom you'd have to get rid of if we went back to eighteenth-century technology? Starve them? Shoot them? Eat them?"
"I didn't say we could or should go back to pre-industrial technology. The changes since then were inevitable and irreversible. I only said ..."
We were still arguing when we set out on one of our nocturnal prowls. My friend could always find something to show the visitor. This, he would explain, was the house once owned by a famous Colonial pirate; that was the site of the tavern where he was seized before being hanged; and so on.
This balmy May evening, under a gibbous moon, my friend was on the track of a piece of Colonial architecture on Federal Hill. We hiked down the steep incline of Angell Street to the center of Providence. Thence we continued west up the gentler slope of Westminster Avenue, where the restaurants were called trattorias. Near Dexter Street, we turned off and trudged around little back streets until we found the Colonial house.
The doorway was still there, but the rest of the ground floor had been eviscerated to make room for a small machine shop. My friend clucked. "Damned Dagoes!" he muttered. "A pox on 'em." His ethnic prejudices, although weakening, were still pretty strong.
We examined the doorway with my pocket flashlight, my friend being too absent-minded to think of bringing his own. At last we started back. We had already walked two miles, and the climb back up Angell promised a rigorous workout. Since it was night, we could not use the elevators in the County Court House, at the foot of the slope, to save ourselves some of the climb.
In this tangle of alleys, my friend took a wrong turn. He quickly realized his error, saying: "No, Willy, it's this way. This should take us back to Westminster. I don't think I know this street."
As we neared the avenue, we passed a row of little shops, including a Chinese laundry. Nearly all were closed, although ahead we could see the lights of restaurants, bars, and a movie house on Westminster. My friend put out a hand to stop me before one place, still lit, in the row of darkened shops.