If you missed the last one...
The Crawler from “Red Nails” (Weird Tales, July August-September October1936) is a creepier addition to an already creepy story. Trapped in the city of Xuchotl, Conan and Valeria are caught up in a Hatfield & MccCoy feud between the inhabitants of this dark metropolis. Like Xuthal from “The Slithering Shadow”, the self-contained city acts as a bottleneck for monsters. For the people of Xotalanc, there is a terror known as “The Crawler”. This nightmare terrorizes those who wander the city:
His hand came out of the dark and caught Valeria’s wrist as she stumbled blindly on the steps. She felt herself half dragged, half lifted up the winding stair, while Conan released her and turned on the steps, his ears and instincts telling him their foes were hard at their backs. And the sounds were not all those of human feet.
Something came writhing up the steps, something that slithered and rustled and brought a chill in the air with it. Conan lashed down with his great sword and felt the blade shear through something that might have been flesh and bone, and cut deep into the stair beneath. Something touched his foot that chilled like the touch of frost, and then the darkness beneath him was disturbed by a frightful thrashing and lashing, and a man cried out in agony.
I love those Lovecraftian italics (in bold). Conan will see what his sword did later:
“What the devil?” Then Conan saw what Topal was staring at, and he felt a faint twitching of the skin between his giant shoulders. A monstrous head protruded from behind the divan, a reptilian head, broad as the head of a crocodile, with down-curving fangs that projected over the lower jaw. But there was an unnatural limpness about the thing, and the hideous eyes were glazed.
Conan peered behind the couch. It was a great serpent which lay there limp in death, but such a serpent as he had never seen in his wanderings. The reek and chill of the deep black earth were about it, and its colour was an indeterminable hue which changed with each new angle from which he surveyed it. A great wound in the neck showed what had caused its death.
Even in death we only get small glimpses of this terror brought from the great depths beneath the city. The creature is serpentine, and its name suggests that it slithers rather than walks like a man. Karl Edward Wagner would use them for his Cthulhu Mythos-heavy Bran Mak Morn novel, The Legion From the Shadows (1976). He explains where the creatures may have come from:
“The People of the Dark have sunk far into the slime of devolution—deeper than Ssrhythssaa dares admit. There have been certain mutations, monstrous couplings with other creatures of the abyss. Certain of the offspring have escaped to lair in the unused sections of the caverns—feasting on carrion and fungi, breeding still more loathsome monstrosities. Were it mine to command, I should have exterminated them all. Ssrhythssaa finds them amusing.”
In that novel, Ssrhythssaa is a pure blood Serpent Woman (from the King Kull story, “The Shadow Kingdom” (Weird Tales, August 1929). The People of the Dark are the degenerate children of these Great Old Ones, mixed with human blood from the Bran story “Worms of the Earth” (Weird Tales, November 1932 and others). But KEW suggests some of the People bred with other, more terrible things. Conan, Kull and Bran Mak Morn exist in the same world, only separated by centuries. Wagner brilliantly mixes these ideas, using the crawlers for a second time.
Marvel Comics famously adapted “Red Nails” with the very best artwork of Barry Windsor-Smith’s run on Conan the Barbarian. It was reprinted a lot but the first appearance was Savage Tales #2-3 (October 1973-February 1974) with some inks by Pablo Marcos. Smith re-inked these and colored the story for Marvel Treasury #4 (June 1975). The Crawler doesn’t get much time because it is a busy story but we do see it in death.
This might have been the last image we got of the Crawler but an unfinished animated film from 2005 (with Ron Perlman as Conan and Mark Hamil as Tolkemec) gave us Mark Schultz’s version. Schultz was hired to drawn the most important scenes and the Crawler encounter was not neglected. In one version, it looks snaky and in the other more crocodilian.
Unlike other Howard monsters, the Crawler is not well seen. It is a terror by reputation mostly. As the Xotalancans, it is an ever-present nightmare when they are not safely behind their walls. The Roy Thomas/Barry Windsor-Smith rendition doesn’t even show what Mark Schultz has brought front and center in his design sketches. Conan slashes at the unseen terror on the stairs but reveals nothing. I suspect Robert E. Howard wrote it this way, first off because it is creepier, but also because he had an entire first section devoted to the Dragon. A second dragon fight would seem pretty redundant. He is more interested in Conan taking on the exiled sorcerer, Tolkemec.
Next time...The God in the Bowl….
