“How—how,” I stammered, “could you get these girls here without leaving any trace?”

  He smiled conceitedly. “The obvious is never noticed. I merely drove up beside them in an inconspicuous car when no one was near and offered a lift—I had of course met each girl before. Once inside the car, a quick hypodermic with a little serum of my own and they were under my control. Then I put a hat with a mourning veil on them and drove out into the country, where I changed cars.”

  “But no one ever saw them go through your gates!” I remembered Helen Ferguson and thanked God I could still keep him talking.

  “My Ford delivery truck came through with supplies—an inanimate woman can easily be made into a bag of potatoes. Sometimes I drove it disguised as my chauffeur.” He answered my question, then turned to the orchids.

  “Good-bye for the present, my little darlings. Soon you shall have new companions.” He shut the door and turned to me. “I shall wear you in my buttonhole—flaunt you in the eyes of the good Mr. Stanton, and you will caress me as the others do—my white orchid.”

  “No, no!” I screamed. “Kill me outright—anything but that.”

  As long as I live I will hate myself for being such a coward, but the horrors with which I was surrounded were too much for me. I begged, I pleaded, but he only laughed at me. Finally he flung me into a chair and tied my wrists to its arms.

  “I must prepare for the operation,” he said.

  He went away and presently returned with a dark ball of fungus root. Soon those hideous things would be feeding upon me. The thought was so horrible that I must have fainted, for the next thing I was conscious of was O’Malley dressed in a white surgeon’s gown standing before a perfectly equipped operating table that he had wheeled into the room. Near it was a long table fixed like the one on which Helen Ferguson lay. Soon I would be like her, unable to move, or to speak, or to suffer anything except the most terrible mental anguish.

  O’Malley was adjusting a tray of instruments now. It seemed to me that I couldn’t see him quite so clearly. Was terror making me blind? Through the heat of the room I noticed a sweet, sickly smell. Was it some kind of anesthetic O’Malley was using? Was this the end? Vaguely I saw him pick up a hypodermic syringe and start toward me. As he came it seemed to me that he swayed. The sickly sweet smell was overpowering me. This was the end. The blackness engulfed me and even the horror was gone.

  From far off I seemed to hear Rex’s voice calling. “Darling, darling,” it was saying over and over.

  I wanted to open my eyes, but I couldn’t. There seemed to be weights on them. At last I managed to flutter my lids, and looked up into Rex’s face. It seemed to have aged. There were strained lines I had never seen before.

  “Thank God she’s coming around!” he said.

  I was immediately conscious of other men bending over me and the murmuring rustle that the wind makes through the leaves of trees. Perhaps I had actually died and was in heaven, only then Rex—

  “Rex,” I whispered weakly. “It is really you—am I alive?”

  “My darling!” He gathered me in his arms convincingly. “You are all right. Thank God! It was a close thing.”

  “O’Malley didn’t—” I didn’t dare look down at myself.

  “No, no—we were in time. Oh, my dear!” He buried his face in my neck as though overcome with emotion.

  One of the men spoke. “I think we should get Miss Howard to the hospital. She needs treatment and rest.”

  Rex pulled himself together. “I’ll carry her to the car,” he said and picked me up.

  “Where are we?” I was tremendously weak and helpless but my head was clear.

  “She should be quiet,” the same man spoke.

  “I must know what happened,” I whispered to Rex.

  “We’re leaving the grounds of Orchid House,” Rex answered.

  “O’Malley?” I shivered convulsively.

  “He will never trouble you again. O’Malley is dead,” Rex assured me with a tone of finality in his voice.

  When we were in the car and I was resting in Rex’s arms with the cool night air reviving me more and more, I asked him to tell me what had happened, and he, knowing I could not rest until I knew, satisfied my curiosity.

  “When O’Malley said you had been taken ill and he had sent you home, I knew he lied. You would never have gone off like that without a word to me! I knew something was wrong. I left almost at once and contacted one of my men who had been watching the gate. He had seen the car leave and a girl in it. He recognized your clothes but was sure the girl wasn’t you; he’d seen you on the way in. I’d known that if O’Malley was actually connected with the disappearance we would have to raid Orchid House, so I was prepared with a new kind of gas that paralyzes. If an antitoxin is given within a certain length of time it is harmless; otherwise the person who inhales it dies. I knew O’Malley would do nothing while the guests were there, so I waited and got ready. As soon as everyone had left, my men and I, fully protected with masks, entered Orchid House, spraying the gas as we went. It is very powerful and travels so fast that a little is sufficient. By the time we’d reached the house the servants and guards were overcome.

  “I had noticed that O’Malley hadn’t shown us the fourth tower. I made for it and we sprayed the gas under the door. Then we tried to open it. You’ll never realize the agony I went through when we couldn’t. It was so awful; I lived a thousand years in a few minutes. You might already be dead, but if we were in time to save you from O’Malley, unless we got through that door before long it would be too late for the antidote, and the gas would kill you. Finally, as a last resort, we blew off the door, and got to you just in time to administer the serum and carry you out into the open air.”

  Rex paused and brushed my hand against his cheek. The miracle had happened—I had been snatched back from the brink of unutterable horror just in time.

  “I had the strange orchids destroyed—O’Malley and the girl were paralyzed. They died long before you came around. We didn’t try to save them.”

  “I’m so glad—oh, Rex, Rex, I’ll never forget her eyes!” I clung closer to him for comfort.

  “My dear, my dear, I know. I’ve seen your hair. Someday you will tell me everything, but not now—now you must forget what’s happened and rest and recover from all this. I will do my best to help and make you happy.” He leaned down and kissed me tenderly.

  The years have passed. Rex has kept his promise. We have known happiness too great for words to describe. But even that happiness has never been able to wipe away the memory of the affair of the Strange Orchids.

  AMELIA REYNOLDS LONG (1904–78) was an American author who wrote SF, fantasy, and detective stories for early-twentieth-century genre magazines. Long grew up loving William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the work of Edgar Allan Poe, eventually bringing her affinity for the weird to her writing career. She lived most of her life in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Harrisburg High School in 1922 and then attended the University of Pennsylvania, earning her BS in education in 1931 and her MA in the same field in 1932. She was a talented writer who published SF in professional and amateur publications alike. While Long usually sold SF under her full given name, F. Orlin Tremaine shortened her byline to “A. R. Reynolds” for Astounding, and Long herself occasionally employed the pseudonym Mordred Weir to ensure that she did not saturate the market with too many stories published under her real name.

  Long made her first SF sale to Weird Tales in 1928 and went on to publish nineteen more genre stories in venues that included Amazing Stories, Astounding, and Stardust. Her tales tend to focus on science professors who get into comic situations involving some combination of hypnosis, romance, and experiments gone awry. Her works were popular with editors and fans alike, and her 1930 short story “The Thought Monster” was made into the low-budget SF monster movie Fiend without a Face (1958). By the mid-1930s, Long had become disenchanted with SF because she felt the genre had “lost its wonder through the sheer extravagance of mechanical magnitudes” (“Time” 122). Around that same time she began to establish herself as an Agatha Christie–style mystery novelist, using her own byline and the pen names Peter Reynolds, Patrick Laing, and Adrian Reynolds. She published more than thirty mystery novels between 1936 and 1952 and then switched to poetry for the rest of her life. During this period she also worked as a textbook editor at Stackpole Books and as a curator at Harrisburg’s William Penn Museum. Today, Long’s name lives on in the Pennsylvania Poetry Society’s Amelia Reynolds Long Memorial Award.

  Although Long was somewhat skeptical about the merits of SF in general by this time, her 1937 short story “Reverse Phylogeny” is an outstanding example of what Tremaine called “thought-variant SF.” As he explained in the December 1933 issue of Astounding, this mode of SF was characterized by the development of an idea that “has been slurred over or passed by” in other, more action-oriented tales (qtd. in Langford, “Thought-Variant”). In Long’s story, Professor Aloysius O’Flannigan performs a public experiment in which he hypnotizes a group of volunteers to establish a scientific basis for the existence of Atlantis. As such, “Reverse Phylogeny” capitalizes on the early-twentieth-century fascination with ancient mysteries, especially, as they articulate, with what were then the new sciences of anthropology and archaeology. While the individual experiences related by the volunteers provide plenty of action for readers, they are not the point of Long’s story. Instead, O’Flannigan treats them as pieces of evidence that will settle scientific debates over the reality of Atlantis once and for all.

  “Reverse Phylogeny” also demonstrates Long’s skill at infusing genre fiction with humor. Like other comic SF authors, Long often “mocks or satirizes standard SF conventions” in her fiction, and “Reverse Phylogeny” is no exception (“Comic Science Fiction”). O’Flannigan is very much a parody of the traditional SF scientist, one who takes his work seriously but whose experiments lead to comic chaos rather than great triumph or great tragedy. In this particular story, O’Flannigan is trying to settle an academic debate, and the confused narrator underscores the fickle nature of such debates when he complains, “You have the darndest way of switching from one side of a question to another!” In what is likely to strike readers as a less fortunate aspect of her story, Long turns to racial stereotypes for laughs: her protagonist O’Flannigan, the silver-tongued Irish scientist who spoils for a good (intellectual, if not physical) fight, and the character Chief Rain-in-the-Face, a laconic savage who lapses into bouts of scalping and other menacing behaviors. But though—or perhaps because—it features such elements, “Reverse Phylogeny” provides readers with an excellent snapshot of comic SF as it was first written in the early twentieth century, especially as it anticipates the explosion of comic SF written by Henry Kuttner, L. Sprague de Camp, and Arthur K. Barnes in the 1940s and the proliferation of comic SF across media today.11

  “Reverse Phylogeny”

  Astounding Stories, June 1937

  Once more I have before me the task of explaining to the public another of the escapades of my friend, Professor Aloysius O’Flannigan. Not that Aloysius has asked me to do so; he is far too proud for that. But when—because of a minor incident that had no place in his original plan, and for which he can in no way be held responsible—remarks are made that the whole experiment concerning the lost continent of Atlantis had a decidedly fishy flavor, and when certain malicious-tongued individuals begin to accuse an inoffensive, peace-loving man like Aloysius of deliberately attempting to drown Mr. Theophilus Black on dry land, it seems to me that in mere fairness something ought to be done about it.

  It all began with a series of articles of a well-known science magazine, of which Aloysius is an ardent reader. Dropping into his library one day, I found him sitting cross-legged upon the floor, with several copies of the magazine strewn around him. As I entered, he glanced up, made a dive for one of the magazines, and thrust it at me.

  “Eric, I want you to read this!” he exclaimed, his eyes gleaming behind his thick-lensed spectacles. “Then tell me what you think of it.”

  He had turned this magazine open at an article entitled: “Atlantis: Proof of Its Existence,” written by a Mr. Theophilus Black. It was a well-constructed article, exhibiting excellent imaginative qualities and, to my mind at least, quite a bit of erudition on the part of its author. As I finished it and was about to comment, Aloysius pushed a second article into my hand.

  “Read this before you say anything,” he directed. “Then give me your reaction to both of them.”

  The article in the second magazine was called “Atlantis Debunked,” and it lived up to its title. I read it as Aloysius directed and, whereas only a few minutes before, Mr. Black had me willing to swallow the whole continent of Atlantis, Mr. Kenneth McScribe, the author of the second article, now had me gagging on the first pebble. I looked helplessly at Aloysius, feeling a trifle groggy.

  “There are several other articles here, but you needn’t go into them,” he said understandingly. “But what do you think of the Atlantis theory as a whole?”

  “I hardly know,” I answered, trying to sort out my jumbled reactions. “There seem to be equally good arguments on both sides.”

  “That’s what I felt, too.” He nodded. “Mr. Black’s logic is excellent, but he builds it upon a rather porous situation, upon which Mr. McScribe has very cleverly turned a microscope. But, in his enthusiasm, Mr. McScribe has used too powerful a lens and blurred matters a little. For example”—he picked up one of the magazines and selected a particular paragraph—“Mr. McScribe would throw out the evidence of the air-cooled volcanic rocks found in the Atlantic Ocean because Mr. Black cannot quote their geological age. I fail to see where their age has a great deal to do with it. After all, the question is not when Atlantis might have existed, but whether it existed at any time.”

  “True,” I agreed hopefully. “And the very existence of those rocks is a strong indication—”

  “Not so fast!” he broke in. “The existence of those rocks need indicate nothing more than a now-submerged island; and it’s going a little strong to construct a whole continent out of that—a little like making a mountain out of a molehill, on an exalted scale.”

  “You have the darndest way of switching from one side of a question to another!” I complained. “A fellow can’t tell whether you actually turn the corners, or just wander in a circle.”

  “I’m afraid you haven’t got the scientific mind, Eric.” He sighed. “What I’m trying to do is sift the evidence.”

  “And what have you found so far?” I inquired with a touch of sarcasm.

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” he admitted. “You see, both Mr. Black and Mr. McScribe have made the same error of arguing over material evidence: such things as similarity of place names on both sides of the Atlantic, prehistoric remains, social development, and the like. They should look for psychological indications: racial characteristics or instincts in man himself that would either prove or disprove his descent from inhabitants of a continent—”

  He broke off in midsentence, and a rapt expression came over his face. “Divil an’ all!” he exclaimed, slapping his right fist into the palm of his left hand. “I believe it could be done; I’m going to try it!”

  “Now what?” I asked a little fearfully, knowing from past experience that when Aloysius used that tone anything might be expected to happen.

  “I’m going to awaken racial memory,” he replied. “After all, our so-called instincts are nothing more than inherited race memory, as any psychologist will tell you. If those dormant memories can be aroused, brought up from the unconscious into the conscious mind and—”

  “But how can it be done?” I wanted to know.

  “Through hypnotism, of course,” he answered. “I could turn the mind of a subject back through the deep strata of instinct bequeathed to him by his ancestors, inducing him to relive them as if they were a part of his own experience, until we had discovered whether there was or was not an Atlantean layer. Why, we might even settle the mooted question of whether mental traits can be inherited!”

  There are times, I reflected, when nothing else in the English language is so expressive as the single word “Nuts.” But I said nothing, hoping that he would work off his enthusiasm by writing a letter to the magazine. I should have known better.

  It was only a week later that he sent for me to come around again. Upon arriving at his house, I found that he already had three other guests: two very scholarly looking gentlemen and a full-blooded Indian, feathers and all.

  “Eric,” he said, “I want you to meet Mr. Black, Mr. Scribe, and Chief Rain-in-the-Face. Gentlemen, my friend and sometimes colleague, Mr. Dale.”

  Mr. Black and Mr. McScribe acknowledged the introduction with the usual polite phrases.

  Chief Rain-in-the-Face (ah! The appropriateness of that name!) confined himself to a noncommittal “Ugh.”

  As for me, I’m afraid I let my jaw fall open rather foolishly.

  “I wrote to Mr. Black and Mr. McScribe about my planned experiment to settle the Atlantis question,” Aloysius went on, “and they very graciously consented to act as subjects. The fact that they are on opposite sides in the debate will give added significance to our findings.”

  “I see,” I managed a trifle weakly. “And where does—er—Chief Rain-in-the-Face come in?”

  “In order to prove or disprove Mr. Black’s contention that the first settlers on the American continent were from Atlantis, it was necessary that a genuine Indian take part in the experiment,” he explained. “Of course, in order to be really scientific, we should have an Egyptian as well but none was procurable. However, Mr. Black is convinced that his earliest forbears were Atlanteans; so that will have to suffice.

  “And now, gentlemen,” he continued, “if you are ready, we will begin the first step. Eric, you will act as witness and recording secretary.”