Crossover of the Week

1921

THE FACELESS FIEND

Charles St. Cyprian and Ebe Gallowglass battle a psychically-created invisible creature that uses humans’ brains and spines as host bodies. St. Cyprian asks Gallowglass if he did or did not give her Harzan’s monograph on the detection of ab-human manifestations, traces the Voorish Sign in the air, and scrawls out the Sign of Koth. St. Cyprian recalls Hesselius’ encounter with something like the creature: a vicar overindulged in exotic teas and accidentally forged a psychic conduit between himself and a nasty entity from elsewhere. St. Cyprian spreads the powder of Ibn Ghazi to make the creature visible.

Short story by Josh Reynolds on The Royal Occultist website. The invisible creature is related to the one seen in Amelia Reynolds Long’s short story “The Thought Monster,” which appeared in Weird Tales in 1930, and was adapted in 1958 as the film Fiend Without a Face. Harzan is from William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki story “The Haunted Jarvee.” The Voorish Sign and the powder of Ibn Ghazi are from H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Dunwich Horror.” The Sign of Koth is from Lovecraft’s story “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Dr. Martin Hesselius is from the stories collected in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly, including “Green Tea,” which depicts the incident involving the vicar.