“Pink Elephants” (Strange Stories, August 1939)

Bloch, Robert. “Pink Elephants.” Strange Stories, August 1939, pp. 41-49.
​https://archive.org/details/Strange_Stories_v02n01_1939-08/page/n39/mode/2up 

The story opens with the narrator and a friend arriving at a party where they find Mitre, the host—normally a sober and sedate guy—very, very drunk. The other guests arrive and Mitre continues to drink to alarming excess. An unexpected guest arrives, a person who demands that Mitre return an object to him. Mitre refuses angrily. Agitated and very drunk, Mitre then asks everyone to leave. The narrator, who is Mitre’s psychologist, asks if he should stay but Mitre promises to visit the office the next day. In the office setting, Mitre tells the whole story. He was in India at a shrine to Ganesh, the god with features of an elephant, when he stole a small trinket: a stone carving of an elephant. He thought it would make a good memento and that nobody would miss it. the strange man who visited the party then pursued him throughout Europe and back to the States offering him increasing amounts of money for the return of the small idol. Every time, Mitre refused. Now the strange man has stopped asking. He now will take it from Mitre. Mitre begins to hear compelling, hypnotic music in the night. His psychologist thinks Mitre is hallucinating it all and sets up a trap for the strange man. Mitre will wait in his apartment until the music begins. 

He then calls the psychologist who calls the police and then rushes to Mitre’s apartment. He finds Mitre unconscious on the floor. As the music plays, the psychologist sees a small object seeming to crawl up to the window and open it. Gunshots below announce the arrival of the police. The psychologist sees that the crawling object at the window is, indeed, the small stone elephant. When the music stops, the little elephant falls from the window and shatters on the pavement. The psychologist discovers that Mitre is dead, the victim of trampling by a tiny elephant.

This one has a party scene like many others that Bloch will create in the future. One of my favorites is “The Night They Crashed the Party,” which is coming up in 1951. This story has much in common with others. An unthinking American or Brit steals something of supernatural import and is pursued.  They make bad decisions and meet a grisly end. This one, like “Death Is and Elephant,” features, and the title indicate, elephants. Bloch had a passion for the circus; his paintings often features tigers and other exotic animals he likely saw as a child, experiences that left a strong impression on him. I found this note on Wikipedia, so I don’t have it firsthand, but in 1985 Robert Weinberg wrote that the covers for the run of Strange Stories are “among the worst ever seen on any pulp” (Weinberg 626). The cover of the issue in which “Pink Elephants” appears is quite the statement. There is a green-faced man’s bald head with red lightning bolts shooting from where his neck might have been. Instead of a body, only tentacles writhe below the head. Moving lower on the cover, it appears as if the tentacled head is gigantic, floating in the air above an ocean liner that is on fire. A submarine lurks in the foreground. To cap it all off, the lower left quadrant is dominated by a skull, white with green innards. It seems to be a mélange of images from several stories but, now that I have described it, I wish it was all from a single tale!