supposedly buried with an unknown woman in an
unmarked tomb. Clutching a stone taken from the
cairn, O’Brien falls asleep and reverts back
through time to the Battle of Clontarf, where he
discovers the truth. Odin himself had participated
in the battle clothed in human flesh, and he is still
trapped in those decaying bones and will be until a
touch of holly sets him free to meddle once more
in the affairs of humanity.
Ortali, intent upon treasure, disturbs the cairn
and inadvertently revives the demonic Odin just as
O’Brien discovers that the woman who brought
him the cross has been dead for three centuries.
Odin is no longer the anthropomorphic god of
Norse legend but an inhuman creature who bru-
tally slays Ortali before O’Brien can use the mysti-
cal cross to drive him away. In a fashion typical of
stories of this type and era, the conclusion is
abrupt and not entirely conclusive. Howard’s de-
piction of the conflict between gods of different
faiths, of which the “White Christ” is only one,
was a common element in both his fantasy and his
supernatural fiction.
“The Calamander Chest”Joseph Payne
Brennan(1953)
Ernest Maax is inordinately pleased with himself
when he finds a chest of calamander wood, a beau-
tiful, fine-grained variety, on sale for an almost sus-
piciously low price. He purchases it and has it
moved to his small apartment, where he cleans
and polishes his new find so that it can be properly
displayed. A few days later, he sees—or thinks he
sees—a finger emerging from under the lid, but
upon closer examination it is gone and the chest is
empty. The same illusion occurs once again, how-
ever, and the shaken man decides to dispose of the
chest at the earliest possible opportunity.
His first attempt to have the chest burned fails
through a combination of circumstances that he
takes as a sign that he is making a mistake. Al-
though he has reluctantly accepted the possibility
of the supernatural, he feels no real sense of men-
ace, although the visions are by their very nature
unsettling. When the next manifestation occurs,
which includes the magical disabling of the chest’s
lock, he experiences a terrifying nightmare in
which the now animate finger lures him inside the
chest. Thoroughly alarmed now, he arranges for a
moving firm to take the chest away and throw it
into a quarry, but their truck breaks down, delaying
them until the next day.
That night Maax’s nightmare comes true. He
is wakened by a furious scratching sound and finds
himself drawn inexorably to the calamander chest.
The movers arrive the following morning and take
away the locked and unusually heavy box. Maax,
of course, is never heard from again, and we subse-
quently learn the history of the chest, which was
used to suffocate and murder its former owner.
The concept that a horrible death can imbue
inanimate objects with, if not a ghost, at least a
ghostlike presence, is a common one in the litera-
ture of the supernatural. BRENNAN’s story is a typi-
cal though unusually well-told example of the
form, with effectively only a single character and a
very straightforward plot whose inevitable conse-
quences remain suspenseful even though the
reader knows, or at least suspects, the rough form
of the climax almost from the outset. It is also an
excellent example of how some of the best and
most disturbing horror fiction can achieve its ef-
fects without explicit gore, and, in fact, Maax’s fate
is implied and never actually described.“The Calling”David B. Silva(1990)
Although David Silva has not been a prolific
writer within the horror genre, his small body of
novels and short stories are highly regarded, and
he has also shown considerable skill as an editor.
“The Calling” is probably his best short story and is
also a good illustration of a trend that has become
particularly popular in modern horror fiction, the
use of a single, often very graphic and disturbing,
image to leave the reader with a sense of shock, an
image that often becomes more disturbing when
contemplated later than when first encountered.
The protagonist is a middle-aged man who
gives up his career and his home to move back in
with his terminally ill mother, who is dying of can-
cer. There are no villains in the story. The mother
is trying desperately to hang on to her dignity and
be as little of a burden as possible. The son has his
moments of frustration and resentment but always44 “The Calamander Chest”