Our man tarbandu read and blogged about Whispers II back in 2010 at The PorPor Books Blog--I am just catching up now!
This is one of the stories that first appeared here in this hardcover edition of Whispers II. It would later be included in the Etchison collections The Dark Country and Talking in the Dark.
I find those police procedural things in which the detectives sit in the precinct and talk about clues to be boring, and that is what we have here. A psychic woman who loves to smoke cigarettes sits in a Los Angeles police HQ with the obese police chief, going into a trance and seeing visions and giving the Chief all the clues he needs to collar a prime suspect. This woman, we learn, travels all over the country helping catch murderers and find missing persons and all that.
By the end of the story we realize that this woman really has psychic powers, but she doesn't always use them for good! The murderer the fuzz are looking for, she can see, is some Hispanic vagabond, but she leads the coppers to her ex-boyfriend, a college professor who dumped her and broke her heart! She is trying to send an innocent man to the clink for life! And she has a list of other people she thinks wronged her that she is going to similarly frame!
Etchison complicates the story by coming up with a bizarre explanation of how the corpse of the girl murdered by that Latino vagrant came to police attention--a powerful rainstorm caused a mudslide at a cemetery and 47 corpses were disinterred and flowed down hill into people's yards. When the cops counted up the bodies there was one too many, because that Latino killer buried his victim in the cemetery. Maybe Etchison included this convoluted series of events in his story for symbolic purposes, or just to provide an opportunity to introduce some weird visuals into his tale.
I guess I'll call this one acceptable filler.
"Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" by Ken Wisman (1979)
Normally when I buy an anthology or get one from the library I just read a few stories that attract me and ignore most of the book's contents; life is brief, and I let my spider sense guide me away from stories I won't appreciate. But sometimes, and this is the case this week with Whispers II, in a spirit of adventure and open-mindedness, I will grit my teeth and read all the stories in a book. And here with "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" it is teeth-gritting time, because this story is making my spider sense tingle like crazy. First, there's the joke title; I rarely like joke stories. Second, when I flipped through Whispers II I noticed that four or five of this story's dozen pages were taken up with verse. Thirdly, I had never heard of Ken Wiseman before and when I looked him up I saw that he had written an environmentalist novel about a baseball-playing Neanderthal. "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" is the kind of story I would in ordinary circumstances dismiss out of hand and immediately forget even existed.
"Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" is written in a kind of fairy tale/tall tale style, but I guess ironically. To employ a word I rarely use, I think we can also call it "ribald." In the surreal universe it depicts, men drive to the country, an area known as Mount Nemesis, where there are seven lakes inhabited by sexy aquatic fairies--mermaids and naiads and the like--to go fishing; "fishing" in this context means attaching jewels or sweets to a line and tossing it in the water and then reeling in one of the females who grabs it to have sex with her. This story is an uninspired satire conflating the hobby of angling and the pursuit of love.
The plot: The narrator, Oscar, and his oversized friend Archie, are on a fishing trip. Here's a sample of Wisman's poetry, describing Archie, for you:
Now, Arch he was a Nemesis man;
A mountain o' man was he.
No bigger lover in the land,
His pole was a huge oak tree.Archie learns that there is a secret eighth pool known as Hades Hole. In it our heroes spot a particularly beautiful water nymph, a Scylla, and over the years they spend many fishing seasons trying to catch her. Finally, they acquire the biggest pearl imaginable, one with a magic spell on it, and the Scylla takes this bait. But instead of being dragged ashore for a quickie, the Scylla pulls Archie down into her labyrinthine lair, where she makes him her husband and he must clean the cave all day.
I will concede that "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" is a competent specimen of its type, but this is not the sort of thing I want to read. I'll call this acceptable filler.
"Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole" made its debut in Whispers II, and for some reason has never been reprinted anywhere.
Manly Wade Wellman has a good reputation, wrote one of the Captain Future novels and appeared in Weird Tales and Astounding, so in theory I should be interested in him, but I've avoided him because my impression has been that he writes about hillbillies and the American South, topics that have never exercised much hold over me. But maybe I have been wrong, maybe this guy is some kind of virtuoso wordsmith and will inspire in me a fascination with moonshine and mint juleps?
John (Wellman's most famous character and our narrator) and his fiance Evadare come to a small town in the mountains. The sexiest woman in this town, Trill Coster, a slut who used her feminine wiles to break up families and ruin men's lives, has just died. The people in this town believe in "sin-eating," that a living person can take on the sins of a recently deceased person so that person won't go to Hell, and the one man in this town who still had tender feelings for the impious and malignant Trill Coster is begging people to take on the dead troublemaker's sins. Evadare, whom John portrays as a woman of pure character, always trying to help everybody, agrees to accept Trill's sins.
That night around the campfire Trill's sins, smoky forms with green glowing eyes, surround our heroes and offer them jewels. A woman from the town, a sexy wench who envied Trill's power over men, also comes by to try to seduce John. Evadare rejects the sins and John rejects the seductress, and in the morning we learn that the seductress, who longed to be like Trill, has gone insane--she took up one of the jewels and Trill's sins have been transferred to her. John and Evadare are married in the spot where, by resisting all temptation, she affirmed her goodness and he affirmed his commitment to her.
This isn't really my thing but it succeeds in its aims, the pacing and structure and style are all good. Moderate recommendation, I suppose. I will probably stop giving Wellman such a wide berth.
"Trill Coster's Burden" is another story that was first published in Whispers II, but it has been reprinted in a number of Wellman collections and some anthologies.
"Conversation Piece" by Ward Moore (1978)
Yes, there are two stories with this title in Whispers II. We read Moore's "It Becomes Necessary" three years ago.
It is Independence Day in New York, the year 1805! In the midst of the festivities a businessman, Nicholas Apperson, sees a beautiful foreign woman, he suspects a Russian, and is so taken with her he leads her away and has sex with her. These two don't even talk--this woman doesn't even speak English, so they can't talk!
After much sport in the dark during the fireworks display, the foreign beauty's dozen or so companions, most of them men, catch up to them. The woman was willing and seems to have no regrets, but her compatriots are agitated, drawing swords and pulling pistols. None of them can speak English, but make their desires known by signs, many of which involve the pistols. The merchant and the foreigners go to Apperson's house, where Apperson eagerly agrees to marry the beauty, whose name is apparently Tatyana and who is apparently a princess. The marriage is accomplished that very evening and followed by a raucous party, the Russians having brought with them a violin and Apperson directing his servants to empty the wine cellar for the occasion. The Russians depart, never to be seen again, and Nicholas and Tatyana Apperson enjoy a long happy married life, during which they never speak intelligibly to each other, instead communicating via little signs and smiles.
"Conversation Piece" is long, with lots of details of interior decor, costume, social customs, politics and ideology (Apperson keeps stressing that he is a republican who disdains aristocracy, for example) that I guess are supposed to make you think you are in the New York of the Napoleonic Era. If there is speculative fiction content it is well-hidden--I kept thinking maybe it was going to be revealed that these Russians were time travelling refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution or something like that, but there were no signals I could decipher of such an esoteric meaning lurking below the surface.
I can't say this story is bad, but I can't recommend it, either. Yet again "Acceptable" is what we have to go with.
"Conversation Piece" was first printed in Whispers #11-12, and has never appeared outside the Whispers brand.
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All four of these stories are about women, as seen from a male perspective. Women are mysterious, maybe incomprehensible; women have strange powers that can be used to make us do things that we don't want to do, things that may be immoral or dangerous; a relationship with a woman can make or break your life.
In our next episode we finish up with Whispers II.
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