fantasy. This Bram Stoker Award–winning short
story is one of the best of his more recent fantasy
tales, the story of a marvelous discovery that is
more impressive for its smooth, emotionally
charged prose than for the details of its plot. Wang
Zicai is an archaeologist whose name prophetically
means “rushing headlong toward suicide.” His ser-
vices are requested when an unusual archaeological
discovery is made under the Sahara following an
earthquake. There he is teamed with a colleague,
Amy Guiterman, and their relationship quickly
grows to become more than just professional.
They identify the buried structures, which are
surprisingly well preserved, as the fabled Shrine of
Ammon, where Alexander visited and asked the
oracle a single question, after which he left without
ever speaking of the conversation to another per-
son. The shrine itself was lost to history, its loca-
tion and fate unknown.
The excavation reaches the roof of an enor-
mous chamber and is stopped pending daylight,
but Wang and Amy sneak out of the encampment
after dark, determined to be the first to see the in-
terior, even if that means violating protocol. They
quietly break through into a chamber so immense
that it contains statues 500 feet in height. But they
find more than they bargained for, because Anubis,
the Egyptian lord of the dead, is there in person
waiting for them.
Obviously, they want to know what Alexander
learned. Anubis tells them the shrine’s true pur-
pose, which is not to prevent the dead from re-
turning to the world of the living but rather to bar
from the afterlife the one person who brought
about the death of the gods of the ancient world.
That person is Moses, whose efforts changed the
way humans thought about their gods forever. The
idea that the gods lose their power when people
stop believing in them is an old one in fantasy fic-
tion, but usually there is no effort made to identify
the catalyst for this change in perception.
“The Cheaters”Robert Bloch (1947)
Few of us would initially question the statement
that it is a good thing to know the truth about
where we stand with other people, but Robert
BLOCHproves that is not necessarily the case in
this classic supernatural thriller. The owner of a
second-hand shop purchases the entire contents of
an abandoned speakeasy, formerly the private
home of a man who dabbled in witchcraft and
alchemy. His relationship with his wife, Maggie,
and his single employee are not amicable, but he
does not realize how bad things have gotten until
he finds a pair of magic spectacles hidden in a
desk. The spectacles, also known as “cheaters,” are
embossed with the word “veritas,” or “truth,” and
when he wears them he can hear the thoughts in
the minds of people he sees. When he discovers
that his wife and employee are plotting to kill
him—they are also “cheaters”—he kills them pre-
emptively and is subsequently executed.
The glasses pass to Miriam Olcott, an aging
kleptomaniac and semi-invalid who resents the
presence of her daughter and son-in-law in her
home. She tries them on when her doctor comes
to visit and reads in his thoughts that he has been
bribed by the daughter to poison her so that they
can inherit her estate. She switches their cups so
that it is the doctor who dies but then overindulges
despite her medical condition and dies shortly af-
terward.
Her daughter inherits the house, and the
glasses are neglected at first, but her socially ambi-
tious husband prevails upon her to run a fancy cos-
tume party to which the leading community figures
will be invited. He dresses as Benjamin Franklin
and eventually dons the glasses during a poker
game, which enable him to win consistently. Then
he discovers that one of the other men is cheating,
assaults him, and is accidentally killed when the
others attempt to stop the fight. One of the wit-
nesses is a writer who suspects some of the truth,
steals the glasses, and researches their history. He
becomes convinced that using them to spy on oth-
ers inevitably causes the death of the owner and
resolves not to employ them for that purpose. In-
stead, he plans to don them only a single time, to
look at himself in a mirror. Unfortunately, the
knowledge of his own inner flaws is so devastating
that he decides to take his own life, destroying the
spectacles in the process. Bloch economically com-
bines four separate but related tales of horror into
a single story and demonstrates that too much of
anything, even truth, can be a bad thing.“The Cheaters” 53