Henry Kuttner: "Messer Orsini's Hands," "The Graveyard Curse," "Hell's Archangel," and "My Name is Death"

Let's delve deeper into Haffner Press's 2010 volume Terror in the House, over 600 pages of 1930s stories by Henry Kuttner.  We're just going to read like 10% of that total today, four stories that appeared in Spicy Mystery in 1938. 

"Messer Orsini's Hands" 

Renaissance Italy!  Orsini, a charlatan who claims to be a wizard, is in the dungeon of one Lorenzo, Lord of Castello, a lackey of the famous Cesare Borgia!  Lorenzo has had Orsini accused of a capital crime in hopes of extorting from him two bribes: all of Orsini's money as well as Orsini's "reed-slim" blonde wife, Angelica.  Orsini is willing to give up the money, but won't reveal where his Angelica is hiding.

Lorenzo already has a girlfriend, the sexy brunette known as Black Rosina--the Rose of Darkness!  Kuttner tells us more than once about her rounded thighs.  Hubba hubba.  Lorenzo moves the sham wizard to one cell of a large chamber separated into two cells by vertical bars--in the other cell paces a ravenous lion!  Lorenzo says that at a random moment the bars will drop and Orsini will be cat food!  But one night Black Rosina comes to the cell--she tells Orsini that the bars will not drop randomly--that was just one of Lorenzo's psychological tricks--only when a lever is pulled.  She undresses and shares her luscious body with Orsini, along with some food and wine--holy crap, the wine was laced with a truth drug and and a sedative and when Rosina asks, the dozing Orsini tells her where Angelica is hidden!  It turns out that Lorenzo and Black Rosina have an open relationship, and after Lorenzo is done raping Angelica, Rosina is going to torture the blonde for fun!

"I am Black Rosina!  The devil himself would come crawling to my feet to hold me in his arms as you have, Messer Orsini.  That's why I fear no man--and dare anything!"

It is not long before Lorenzo and Rosina stand before Orsini's cell, stripping Angelica as he watches.  Orsini grabs Lorenzo's throat through the bars, begins to strangle the man!  Rosina grabs a sword and chops off Orsini's hands!  As Orsini bleeds to death, he calls upon Satan for aid, offering Ol' Scratch his eternal soul.  Orsini dies and then is eaten by the lion as Rosina watches in fascination.

That night, just moments before he is about to rape the drugged Angelica, Lorenzo hears a scream from Black Rosina's room--he dashes there to find her dead, the bruises on her throat indicating she was strangled!  When he gets back to his room he finds that Angelica is also dead, that someone has administered to her some of the poison he keeps in his room.  As we readers expect, these deeds of vengeance and mercy have been accomplished by Orsini's hands, which are running around like spiders.  They leap to Lorenzo's throat, begin squeezing!

The ghost of Orsini, a phantom with gory stumps at its wrists, appears to tell Lorenzo that, just as he tortured Orsini with the idea that the lion attack could come at any random time, his hands, invisible, will always be on Lorenzo's throat, squeezing, but they won't kill him just yet...Lorenzo will be subject to destruction at any time, but never know when the metaphorical axe will fall!  Rather than suffer this torture, Lorenzo grabs some more poison and commits suicide.

This is a good sex and gore story, with interesting images and characters and even a central philosophical theme--the anxiety that comes from knowing you will die, but not when!  "Messer Orsini's Hands" also has the fantasy content I was hoping to find, something the Kuttner stories we read from Thrilling Mystery lack.  "Messer Orsini's Hands" may be susceptible to a feminist analysis that says Black Rosina is a personification of men's fears that women will use their sexual power to overturn the social order, to achieve dominance over men; Angelica, on the other hand, is treated like an agency-lacking object by everybody.  "Messer Orsini's Hands" might also serve as a warning not to base your career on deception, and to not get mixed up with people who do, like poor Angelica did.      

"The Graveyard Curse" 

This Spicy Mystery cover story shares elements with some of the stories we've already read that appear in Terror in the House, like "The Secret of Kralitz," "Laughter of the Dead" and "Bamboo Death."  

Our narrator Arthur Kenton and his cousin Peter are the only surviving members of their wealthy family.  Peter hit his head some years ago and is physically and mentally weak.  Kenton's father died mysteriously when Kenton was five, twenty years ago, leaving a note that his will should not be read until Kenton was 25, and tomorrow is the big day!  Today our narrator returns to the family mansion to meet cousin Peter, the family lawyer Adam Freese, and the mansion's caretaker, Fitch Dale, a guy who also hit his head in the past--his brain is OK, but his face bears a monstrously ugly scar.  Oh yeah, Peter's nurse, curvaceous blonde Susan Blake, is also there.  Blake is a knockout whose breasts Kuttner talks about a lot, and Arthur Kenton flirts with her outrageously from the word go.  Kenton is a skilled flirt, I guess, because that night Blake comes to his room and they have sex.

All his life Kenton has been hearing about the supposed family curse, and in his bedroom (when Susan Blake isn't there keeping him occupied) he learns all about it.  First there is a book he discovers in a secret cubbyhole.  Then a mysterious figure appears to him and carries him away, through the air, to a tomb where his eerie guide--his living dead father!--directs him to have sex with a female corpse which he animates with his Satanic powers.  You see, centuries ago, the head of the Kenton family had sex with a demon or monster or something, so each of his descendants has occult powers that manifest themselves at age 25.  In return for these powers, the Kenton males can only gain sustenance by having sex with dead women.

Like so many promising opportunities in life, this all turns out to be a scam.  The book is a fake and was planted, and Kenton's bizarre necrophilic trip was staged--he was drugged (with marijuana) and his living dead father and the dead lady he had sex with were actors.  It turns out that Freese and Dale are in cahoots, trying to get Arthur Kenton to commit suicide so they can (somehow) get control of the estate.  Susan Blake and cousin Peter are not in on the scam, and in the final fight they save the narrator's life.  Peter gets killed, but Blake only gets injured when Freese uses her as a human shield, crushing her breasts as he holds her between himself and the barrel of Arthur's pistol.  The final lines of the story see Arthur and Susan kissing lovingly in the same room in which the bullet-ridden bodies of  Dale, Freese and Peter are still oozing blood.

I hate these Scooby-Doo things in which the cool supernatural stuff turns out to be a preposterous hoax, and the images and characters of this story are weak.  (Black Rosina should have been a recurring character, like Fu Manchu!)  Thumbs down for "The Graveyard Curse!"

"Hell's Archangel"

Robert Gordon is driving his fiancé Marie up to her Uncle John's remote house in the mountains when his car breaks down and they have to hike a few miles through the forest to get there.  On the way they stop to make out and are accosted by a weirdo--a skinny dude carrying a crude cross upon which is crucified a rabbit.  This crazy mountain man declares he is Gilles de Rais, that he has returned from Hell after meeting Satan to inhabit this trapper's body.  

I attended public school and spent my youth watching TV and playing on the Atari 2600, and so I had ever heard of Gilles de Rais.  It turns out Kuttner didn't just make this name up--Gilles de Rais is real, and even has a wikipedia page as long as Clark Ashton Smith's!  This guy was a 15th-century French knight with a passion for the theatre and for spending money who was later condemned for devil-worship, pedophilia and child murder, though it seems some people think he was framed by those who would benefit from his fall.

There was no TV or Atari when Bob Gordon was a kid and maybe he went to a good school, I don't know, but he immediately recognizes the name of Gilles de Rais.  A fight erupts when Gilles demands that Bob and Marie pay homage to Satan, and Marie knocks the kook out with a tree branch while he and Bob are wrestling over a knife.  

Uncle John shows up with a skinny little guy whom Bob thinks looks like a rat, Jim Hobson.  Gilles sneaks away while nobody is looking.  Up at the house Bob meets Uncle John's Japanese handyman Tommy and a red-headed knock out, Sylvia Dorte.  Sylvia flirts with Bob and the instant they are alone together they start making out!  Damn!  Later in the day Bob feels guilty and is making out with Marie again.  This guy is leading a hell of a life!

That night there is a somewhat bewildering series of events that leaves everyone dead except for Bob, who is wounded, and Marie, who is stripped naked and groped, and then covered in blood--but don't worry, it is somebody else's blood.  To make a long story short, rat-face Hobson and sexalicious bombshell Sylvia were blackmailing Uncle John--they knew him when he was a miner in Alaska and killed a guy in a drunken fight.  Uncle John skipped town and came to the lower 48, but by chance these blackmailers found out where he was.  Uncle John is a think-outside-of-the-box kind of guy, and comes up with the crazy idea of using the insane local trapper who self-identifies as Gilles de Rais to get rid of his blackmailers; John dressed up as the devil, and ordered Gilles to kill Hobson and Sylvia.  Gilles decapitates Hobson with an elaborate Rube Goldberg mechanism, which is fine by Uncle John, but Juneau's Most Wanted's simple plan starts going off the rails when Tommy tries to protect Sylvia and Marie from the maniac--the Japanese gets decapitated and Gilles carts off both the blackmailing hussy and John's innocent niece! 

Bob manages to find the clearing where Gilles has his altar and the two gorgeous girls are in his custody.  Unfortunately, Bob steps in one of Gilles's bear traps and has to watch the proceedings instead of being able to intervene.  (Lots of these spicy stories have this conceit, a guy being forced to watch sexual abuse--a common fetish, I guess.)  Sylvia is stripped and tied to a cross and then Gilles pushes the cross over into a bonfire where Sylvia gets burned to death.  Full of blood lust, Gilles strips Marie and is going to sacrifice her to Satan by chopping her up with a hatchet as she lays on his altar when Uncle John appears and tries to stop him; both he and Gilles die in the ensuing fight.  Fortunately for her mental health and the reputation of Marie's family, Marie is unconscious during all this, and Bob will never tell her about the sexual assault she suffered nor about her uncle's scandalous past...nor about his little dalliance with that hot number Sylvia.  Zowie!

"Hell's Archangel" is too absurd and, except for Gilles, there is absolutely zero characterization.  (Oh, Black Rosina, the more I see of these stories the more I wish you had survived to star in your own series!)  The ways the blackmailers get killed are creative and interesting, but that is it.  Thumbs down, even though this story introduced me to a new figure in the pantheon of odious Frenchmen.           

"My Name is Death"

Norman is a young man who works at a gas station.  He'd like to marry his girlfriend Jean, but he doesn't have any money.  Then a weird guy, pale and fat, with black eyes and movements that remind Jean of how a worm moves, drives into the station.  He offers Norman 500 bucks if he'll do a mysterious job for him.  Jean tries to discourage her boyfriend, but with 500 smackers Norman could open his own gas station and marry Jean, so he takes the job.

The weirdo takes Norman to an old decrepit house.  Oh my, this is the house Norman has been hearing about since he was a kid--the house reputed to have been once inhabited by a witch!  There is a pretty girl there, Yola, another person Wormface lured in with the promise of easy cash--she is scared and Norman forgets about Jean for a few minutes and comforts her by embracing her and kissing her.

(All the kissing scenes in today's stories are the same, use the same phrases, Kuttner talking about how the woman's breasts are pressed to the man's chest, for example.  Broadly considered, these exploitation stories have some of the characteristics of a commodity.) 

Wormface directs Norman to a spot in the yard and tells him to dig.  Norman and Wormface dig up a coffin--inside is a mummified old woman, and Wormface tells Norman to kiss her if he wants those 500 greenbacks!  

When Norman hesitates the freak pulls a gun, so Norman kisses the disgusting corpse.  The evil soul of the witch enters Norman's body, and then Wormface forces Norman and Yola to kiss.  The witch now inhabits Yola's body!  Wormface reveals his evil scheme: he is the witch's descendent, and in a healthy body she will be able to train him in witchcraft.  But Yola's body is not strong enough to contain the witch's powerful soul--Yola shrivels up and dies.

This already poorly tied together story becomes even more nonsensical when Jean suddenly appears, she having been worried about Norman.  Norman and Jean kiss, and somehow the witch's soul is now in Jean's body; soon Jean starts shriveling up like Yola did!  But then, during a distraction resulting from the sudden appearance of Wormface's former partner, another aspiring wizard, who kills Wormface because he jealously wants the witch's tutelage all to himself, Norman burns up the old corpse and Jean recovers.  The second would be wizard tries to extinguish the flames and he burns up along with the witch's corpse.

I like the idea of a witch's soul enduring in her corpse and moving into a living person's body via sexual contact, but Kuttner doesn't seem to be playing fair here--when Yola died, the witch's soul must have either returned to Norman's body or to the corpse, and when it shifts to Jean after he kisses her, it seems that it must have been in Norman's body.  But then how does burning the witch's corpse save Jean?  Also irritating is how Jean's body just instantly recovers from the premature aging process--a good horror story ending would have left Jean a decrepit old woman, a victim of Norman's greed and gullibility: all his life Norman would be haunted by how his falling for a get-rich-quick scheme destroyed his girlfriend's life, a valuable lesson to us all!  Instead we get a stupid happy ending, which, like the happy endings of "The Graveyard Curse" and "Hell's Archangel" leave innocent people--brain damaged Cousin Peter, Japanese gardener Tommy, and here greedy dupe Yula--the victims of horrible deaths, so they feel a little silly.  Thumbs down.

**********

The only good story in this batch is "Messer Orsini's Hands," the only one with memorable characters and with an appropriately unhappy ending.  Disappointing.