Wilford Allen is a bit of a mystery. Terence Hanley at Tellers of Weird Tales wrote about Wilford C. Allen Jr. of Oregan but there is a good chance he is not the Weird Tales author. This Allen is a Californian from his two letters in Weird Tales. No matter because he was an interesting storyteller.
“The Arctic Death” (Weird Tales, June 1927) has two men going to the Arctic to discover the reason why people there are dropping dead, their bodies unharmed except for a covering of frost. Charles Breinbar creates a suit and goggles that counteract the effects of the Arctic Death. His companion is George, the narrator. First they land their plane beside a remote trading post. The death comes and all the people there drop dead, including McIntosh the post factotum. George, with the aid of his goggles, sees a misty like ectoplasm attacking the victims.
Breinbar adds temperatures to his map to try and find the nexus of the freezing cold, as low as minus two hundred. When he locates the foci the dead body of McIntosh appears and attacks the two men, knocking them unconscious. George notices before he passes out that his flesh seems to burn the dead man’s hands and that one of the floating clouds is nearby.
Upon waking up, Breinbar explains a few things. He believes the creature, the floating cloud, is the collective essence of some anti-matter beings. Armed with this knowledge he poses a single way in which the living creatures of the earth might defeat this new evil. They must find the epicenter.
The two men keep moving towards the spot on Brenbar’s map. George sees that the floating cloud creature is not a singular entity. There are many of the blobs floating around and try to attack the men. The burning hot of their suits is defense from the terrible cold of the attackers.
Eventually they arrive at the spot where the clouds enter our world, but it is solid rock. George despairs but Breinbar is prepared. He has a device that looks like a flamethrower that dissolves the rock with a ray. He burrows into the earth until he comes to a gigantic chamber. Inside this rests the central intelligence, a blinding, bright light. There is no way to reach the floating brain. The intelligence banters with Breinbar, discussing God and the survival tactics of a species. George believes they are doomed, but Breinbar tries one last strategy. He releases his spirit/intelligence from his body. He joins with the central intelligence, which accepts it hungrily.
George feels his own spirit being pulled. He also perceives that the cloud of spirit is divided, the original ultra-dimensional being and another faction. It is Breinbar and all the spirits of the humans and animals killed by the Arctic Death. The spirits attack the central brain. George misses most of this because he is sent back to his body. Only one of the two men may return and Breinbar sends George.
The story ends with a short denouement in which George returns to civilization, to a brilliant career in Science. He feels that Charles Breibar is with him even though that spirit now explores the universe in his new form.
This story reminded me of Edmond Hamilton’s “The Polar Doom” (Weird Tales, November 1928) in terms of setting and invasion theme but Allen tells it with far more immediacy. Where Hamilton sits above and watches, Allen puts you inside George’s skin, closer to the terror. Allen also skirts the boundaries of religion and metaphysical stuff that Hamilton would never have touched with a ten foot pole.
“The Swooping Wind” (Weird Tales, December 1927) is a short, unillustrated story. Charles Fritwell strikes up a conversation with an old man he encounters. The elder one is a scientist, Dr. William Estrich. Estrich tells of three strange events in his life.
When he was a child he was saved from a charging bull by a swooping gust of wind. When he was thirty he went to the Andes for his university. Again a swooping wind destroyed a gang of men, which Estrich learned afterward were robbers. His own guides were in cahoots with the bandits. Seeing the robbers destroyed the guides fell on their knees and begged mercy.
The last encounter happened after Estrich fell in love and got married. On his honeymoon in South America, a storm comes up and takes his wife away. She understands and tells him that he can not have her and his career in meteorology. She is swept out to sea. Now, Estrich hates the wind that holds him captive.
Fritwell mentions the conversation to another local. The man dismisses Estrich as an eccentric, harmless but crazy. Fritwell knows otherwise. A year earlier he had been in the Andres, had seen the site of the dead robbers, not so much as a coat was ever found of them. The guides, repentant, work in the local churchyard.
“The Bone-Grinder” (Weird Tales, January 1928) is a good old fashioned horror adventure tale. Four men go sheep hunting in the remote Sonora Mountains. As they leave the sleepy Mexican village, Tom Nelson suddenly seems like he is being attacked by invisible fiends. He rides off at a break-neck speed over the hills. One of the villagers tells them not to pursue, that the Bone-Grinder takes a victim every year. Jim, Tom’s brother, Bud Carson and Bert Alldyne, group leader, all ignores the man and follow but at a slower speed. The men notice strange marks on the sides of hills, where it looks like rocks have sideways or even uphill.
They find what is left of Tom and his horse. Something has smashed them into a pulp. They also find what did the job, a worm-shaped boulder, what the Mexican had called the Bone-Grinder. The men run but Jim turns around and goes back to be killed as well. Carson is turned next and Alldyne tries to help but an invisible force field holds him back. He sees that the marks that he thought were old pueblo walls are actually made by the monster from its victim’s bones.
Alldyne runs again. He gets all the way back to the town –where the train is about to arrive–before the invisible force taps him, forcing him to return. Alldyne continues to struggle. The men from the train think he has gone insane and put him on board, to be taken to the doctor in Hermisillo. As the train leaves, Alldyne defeats the impulse. A legend says the Bone-Grinder will disappear forever the day a man can defy its call.
There could be many stories that might have inspired this story. T. S. Stribling’s “The Green Splotches” (Adventure, January 3, 1920) or “Spawn of the Infinitude” by Edward S. Pilsworth (The All-Story June 1913) or even the early chapters of Edmond Hamilton’s “The Time-Raider” (Weird Tales, October 1927-January 1928). Whatever the source, this story is probably my favorite of Allen’s. It is action-oriented, horrific and the best kind of Weird Tale story. What follows will not be so…
“On a Far World” (Weird Tales, July 1928) is not a sequel but does use Brenbar from “The Arctic Death”. Crowley recounts how Breinbar told this story before he disappeared. The man had a way of observing worlds that is not described but gives us the tale of Nekka. The Earth-like planet is invaded by extraterrestrial space cars. First, the space ships appear on one of two moons and the Nekkans go nuts out of fear, looting and revolting. The invaders, known as the Drubbans, eventually attack the capital of Nekkalotta, destroying the central administration of the world, causing more chaos. Having struck, they return to the moon, and wait for a year.
In that year, Nekka falls even further into bedlam. When the final invasion comes, the Nekkans put up little resistance. The space cars open to reveal that the Drubbans are of two kinds, green-tinted giants and their pygmy servants, slaves from the planet Arku. The Nekkan guns take out the dwarfish invaders but the giants, the real masters, press their attack. The earth falls to the green giants.
The last part of the story has a group of Nekkans surviving in secret. Two are Corring and his girl, Elfa, charged with repopulating the world. They are helped by two medical doctors. The rest are given the job of spreading a virus that will kill the green ones. The information for the creation of the bacteria comes from some unexplain intelligence in space. The virus works very slowly, forty years in Nekkan time (only two weeks to the giants). The selected Nekkans take the virus out into the world and never return.
We see Corring, Elfa and their first child attacked by giants. The two doctors die to protect them. The giants die, and Corring confirms they have died of the virus. There is hope for Nekkan kind. The tale ends there, going back to Crowley and those listening to the tale.
This time Allen seems to have taken a page directly from Edmond Hamilton’s play book. Instead of the direct narration of “The Arctic Death” we get the omniscient narration that made Hamilton famous. How much direct inspiration did Hamilton have? I am not sure. He had written seven of his invasion tales for Weird Tales by July 1928. Just as likely the stories of Nyctzin Dyalhis may have been an influence. His “When the Green Star Waned” (Weird Tales, April 1925) had impressed many. Its sequel “The Oath of Hul Jok” appeared after Allen’s tale. Dyalhis and Hamilton were the authors who defined early Weird Tales Science Fiction.
“The Hate” (Weird Tales, June 1928) is a short two-pager about a cruel nobleman who kills a lad for no reason then slowly tortures the second one for trying to kill him. The story jumps to the trenches of France where a soldier pinned down in a foxhole walks towards a machine gun nest. Riddled with bullets his hate-driven corpse drives his bayonet into the machine gunner, ending the terrible circle.
The influence of H. P. Lovecraft will now become paramount in Wilford Allen’s tales. He doesn’t write Cthulhu Mythos pastiches (which is good) but his style becomes very murky, Lovecraftian in the worse sense. The authors he admired can be gleaned from two letters he wrote to the editors.
In the first of two letters (April 1928), Allen wrote: “I can’t omit a boost for The Infidel’s Daughter, which appeared two months ago” writes Wilford Allen of Santa Rosa, California. “It is the best story W. T. has printed since Lovecraft’s The White Ship last spring.”
The second letter (August 1931) says: “Wilford Allen of Sanger, California, writes to the editor: “Just a note to say I am glad that W. T. is to be monthly again, and in particular, to tell you how much better the cover is this month. I simply must have W. T. each month, but I admit that in the past there have been times on getting it at the news stand I have folded it over quickly to hide the cover from the view of people who might be passing and know me, in the manner of a henpecked husband sneaking off with Paris Nights. Now, if the covers continue like the present one, I will be proud to let any one — not just the few who judge a magazine by contents– know that I read W. T. I also want to say that Howard’s Children of the Night is splendid.”
“Night-Thing” (Weird Tales, July 1929) is a tougher read. It begins in murk and contains no dialogue. The story is the solloquoy of an evil entity that was once human. As a man he exulted in killing. once out of his body, he lingers around the dead to feed on their demise.
Beyonf Earth, the Night-Thing finds the space ships of the Lirans and the Mordans. we see the Lirans, who are immortal attack and flee, attack and flee. The Mordans look to be winning, after which they will render the earth to rock and waste, but suddenly a black wall of death comes and kills them. The Canopians, an off-shoot of the Lirans have devised this deadly weapon and the Lirans win! Earth is saved and the Night-thing can go back to hovering over corpses.
The story is an exercise in Lovecraftian atmosphere while it tells an Edmond Hamilton style space opera like his Space Patrol stories which he started in August 1928. This combination is weird and mostly pointless.
“The Planet of Horror” (Weird Tales, June 1930) will repeat this style choice, though perhaps a little more successfully with a point in space where ships keep disappearing. Smallins builds a self-driving ship to go to the spot then return. When the scientists open the remote ship, the man has devolved into something horrible. He tells the scientists not to touch him. He knows the truth about the thing that is destroying the ships but doesn’t want to tell. He does hint that there is a planet at that spot in space, a planet not made of matter but horror. His diary is read after he dies, but the four men who read it all die horribly.
The diary that drives men mad, a universe where the fabric of existence is horror. These are pretty obvious Lovecraftian ideas, but they don’t work for some reason. Where they could have created a chill of cosmic horror, they fail, leaving an unsatisfying mess. Which is too bad, because when Allen writes from an immediate point-of-view as in “The Arctic Death” and “The Bone-Grinder” he is good. (He never received any comments from readers in “The Eyrie”, but I think these two stories deserved more attention.) When he tries for something grander, his words fail to create vast impressions. Let us remember him for the good ones.
