The Purple Pterodactyls

Foreword

W. Wilson Newbury is younger than I, and he plays a far better game of tennis. Moreover, while I have made my living as a lumberjack, naval officer, teacher, lecturer, and scrivener, he selected his profession soon after leaving college and has remained faithful to it ever since.

Willy is a banker—not one of those faceless fellows who peer out of tellers' windows—but a dark-suited, well-brushed, short-haired type who jockeys a desk behind a row of marble pillars in one of the city's largest banks. And Willy, as all his friends call him to keep him from getting a swelled head, is smart.

Although we are different in many ways, Willy and I, we have always had one thing in common: a lively interest in the occult. And the occult seems to have a strange affinity for Willy.

Just why the esoteric seeks out a conventional, upright family man like W. Wilson Newbury, I cannot imagine; but somehow dwellers from the realms of metaphysical worlds beyond worlds keep tangling up the strands of his life. It may be that whatever prescience or intuition lets him separate a trustworthy loan applicant from a dead beat opens the shutters of his mind wider and makes him more psychically aware than the rest of us; but this gift—or curse—is not something a banker can discuss with the average run of mankind.

Bankers are supposed to be sane and sensible—the backbone of the community. A financier who talks of his involvement in fey happenings might cause a run on the bank, or trigger a recession, or at the very least lose his job. Since I hunch over my typewriter all day and am not given to gossip, I have been one of the few people in whom Willy could confide.

Willy was an avid reader of Weird Tales, that long-lamented record of the fantastic; and some of the unworldly happenings chronicled therein and the writers who set them down must have had a great influence on Willy.

The unnamed friend in "Balsamo's Mirror" is Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the fantasist of Providence, Rhode Island. In a letter to his Aunt Lillian Clark, Lovecraft told of buying a little pottery oil lamp from ancient Greece. He wrote: "It sits before me now, enchanting in its glamour, it has already suggested at least one weird story plot to my imagination: a plot in which it will figure as an Atlantean rather than Hellenic survival." Although Lovecraft never composed the tale, Willy in some inexplicable way experienced it.

In the story "Far Babylon," aficionados of fantasy will recognize the man in the cowboy hat as Robert E. Howard, the versatile poet and writer of Cross Plains, Texas. In a letter to Lovecraft, Howard mentioned a "sending of serpents" as the germ of a possible plot. And here again the occult broke through. That idea, combined with certain experiences of my peripatetic banker friend, became the aventure recounted here as "A Sending of Serpents." In the same story, Willy's remarks about "Zikkarf" allude to the fictional planet Xiccarph, on which Clark Ashton Smith laid several of his tales.

I, for one, am grateful to Willy Newbury for sharing adventures that are occasionally frightening, always amusing and sometimes unforgettable. I hope you will enjoy them, too.

L. Sprague de Camp Villanova, Pennsylvania