Crossover of the Week

Mid December 1925

THE THIRD DEATH OF HENRY ANTRIM

            Charles St. Cyprian and Ebe Gallowglass investigate a dead body at a Christmas party hosted by Porthos “Porky” Caruthers, whose guests include Roberta “Bobbie” Wickham. St. Cyprian notes that the bite marks on the neck of the victim are not the discreet pinpricks of Stoker’s sanitized account of the last vampire outbreak, but rather the red, wide marks of a beast of prey. St. Cyprian examines Caruthers’ collection of wanted posters for outlaws of the Old West, including Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin, Butch Cavendish, and Billy the Kid. Bobbie refers to an incident at an art opening, and St. Cyprian replies that the artist was a lycanthrope. Caruthers owns a .45 Colt Peacemaker that allegedly belonged to Lone Crow, an Indian mystic, gunslinger, and devil-hunter mentioned in the diaries of Shotgun Ferguson. Caruthers says that he has an agent trying to get access to a box of unpublished dime novels sealed away by Miskatonic University.

            Short story by Josh Reynolds in PulpWork Christmas Special 2013, PulpWork Press. Roberta “Bobbie” Wickham appears in two different series by P.G. Wodehouse, the Jeeves books and the Mr. Mulliner stories. The last vampire outbreak in England was chronicled in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Butch Cavendish is one of the Lone Ranger’s foes. The lycanthropic artist is Gabriel-Ernest Smythe from H.H. Munro’s story “Gabriel-Ernest.” St. Cyprian encountered Smythe in Reynolds’ story “The Artist as Wolf.” Lone Crow and Shotgun Ferguson appear in “weird” Western stories by Joel Jenkins. In Jenkins’ stories, Lone Crow sometimes visits Miskatonic University (from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.) This story takes place two weeks before Christmas.