“Death Is an Elephant” (Weird Tales, February 1939)

Bloch, Robert [Nathan Hindin]. “Death Is an Elephant.” Weird Tales, February, 1939, pp. 7-20. https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV33N01193901/page/n9/mode/2up

This story begins with the end of a circus season and the pressure felt by the owner and public relations agent of the circus to make the coming year one to remember. Competition is fierce, and novelty is the name of the game. They travel to the Philippines to meet with their wild animal agent, the man who secures strange and fascinating wildlife for circuses to bring back to the United States to exhibit. The agent tells them he can get the sacred white elephant of Jadhore—a being worshipped by adherents to that peculiar religion—if the money is right. It seems as if the local political leader is running out of money and needs to maintain his appearances, and so he is willing literally to sell out his devout constituents. One practical difficulty for the circus owner and public relations man is that the elephant must travel with a priestess and a group of handlers. Furthermore, the circus cannot do anything to train the elephant or to adorn it in any way. The restrictions seem onerous, but the public relations person—the man who tells the story—convinces the owner that all of the restrictions plus all of the other wonders they will bring back with them all serve to make the exhibit even more appealing. The conflict in the tale unfolds when the priestess appears and is unwaveringly hostile. Two men die on the journey back to California, and then more begin to die at the circus location during rehearsals.

Nevertheless, the show is a huge hit. The elephant does seem to exert a profound and arcane hold on individuals and the circus audience in general. Was it an occult process that bound the adherents to their symbol? Or was it a more mundane force akin to what drives any religious person to believe deeply in their stories? When the “accidents” become to numerous to ignore, the public relations agent reasons that the priestess is using a form of hypnosis to cause the victims to want to kill themselves by putting themselves into dangerous situations. While the body count rises, the protagonist sets a trap for the priestess who ends up being shot by the security guards during a show. The elephant kills the local political leader and then goes on a rampage. It is also killed in the chaos. The public relations man survives the carnage but is unsure about how to think about the whole thing.

I really love this story. It takes us to a different world with a different set of objectives than previous stories, mostly. These characters are no haunted by arcane knowledge or driven by the desire to understand something occult. They just want to put on a great show, a spectacle that draws more people than the shows of their competitors. The idea that they travel to distant locations and take “exotic” animals to bring to a traveling circus in North America is a strange thought. Traveling great distances by ship—in this case to the Philippines—is now such an alien concept, but that’s part of the charm of reading old stories. I do keep coming back to the idea that somehow, some way, this young guy in Milwaukee with no money and only a public high school education is able to invent worlds like this. It reminds me a little bit of Robert Neville of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Armed with only a public-school education, he uses the now-abandoned Los Angeles Public Library to learn everything he needs to know about epidemiology, mythology, psychology, and a host of other subjects. That novel was published in 1954, but it shows a kind of a gusto for learning—and the sheer ability to learn—that I don’t see all that often these days. One of the main purposes of education is to make a person self-sufficient, after all. Like Neville, Bloch in real life demonstrated that a person with curiosity, energy, and a library card could make the world into whatever he wants. That kind of thing inspires me!