The Mannikin” (Weird Tales, April 1937)

Bloch, Robert. “The Mannikin.” Weird Tales, April 1937, pp. 441-452.
https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v29n04_1937-04_sas/page/n57/mode/2up

The unnamed narrator, on a break between semesters at then university where he teaches, vacations in Bridgetown, which is known for its natural beauty and excellent fishing. He bumps into an old familiar from his own college days, Simon Maglore, a friend whom he has not seen in years. Maglore seems friendly enough, but he has aged poorly. The physical deformity on his back has grown immensely, and his face reflects accumulated stress. The narrator is worried for his friend and decides to visit him. At the door, Maglore angrily shouts at him to leave, his whole bearing agitated and alarming. The narrator asks around town about him, and most people there hold a very low opinion of Maglore, saying he and his family are involved in all manner of occult activities. 

The narrator chalks that up to rural and ignorant prejudice. He visits his Maglore again, and Maglore seems better at first. Then he begins speaking about his research into witchcraft and, especially, familiars. His ideas are so alarming that the narrator decides not to wait for him to ask for help. He brings a doctor to Maglore’s house the next day, and they find Maglore dead. The narrator reads some of Maglore’s most recent writing and it tells of the thing on his back, how it has been controlling him, making him do terrible things with worse to come. The final image in the story is of Maglore in a pool of blood on the floor and the thing on his back—the thing that people assumed was a deformity—was actually a being feeding on Maglore the whole time. 

I have been keeping a list of the books mentioned in Bloch’s stories as I conduct this blog. A new one in this story is not one that Bloch or another participant in the Cthulhu Mythos invented, although it sounds as if it easily could have been. De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis (1734) by the Lutheran pastor Michael Ranft (1700-1774) sat on Simon Maglore’s shelf next to Ludvig Prinn’s masterwork and also Cabal of Saboth and Mycroft’s Commentaries on Witchcraft. Only Ranft’s book is real. He began his study of the hungry dead after hearing stories about corpses that devoured the linen in their caskets The title of his book is translated as On the Chewing of the Dead in Their Tombs. (It just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it?) Amazingly, this was not the first book to use that title. In 1679, Philip Rehruis published a short book using that title. Vampire historians (in both senses of the phrase, presumably) have looked to the Ranft book especially as expressing a credible foundation for the idea that dead bodies could spring to life and, at time, begin chewing hungrily. For the Bloch story, those in the know would see this title and be one step closer to the truth of Maglore’s predicament. Once we find out that his research is on with familiars, we already see this ending coming: “'There was Maglore, on the floor, in all that blood. He was naked to the waist, as I have said; and he lay face downward. But on his back was the 'Thing, just as he had described it. And it was that little monster, afraid its secrets would be revealed, that had climbed a trifle higher on Simon Maglore’s back, wound its tiny black paws around his unprotected neck, and bitten him to death” (452).