Marvel Tales (1949 series) #101

Larry Adams, a self-made man who dismisses fate as superstition, is arguing the point with his friend Willie Grant on a rain-soaked Saturday afternoon at their golf club when a gaunt, unsettling stranger in black interrupts to side with Willie. The stranger vanishes as abruptly as he appeared, then reappears at their downtown bar, and again outside Larry's office the following morning — gone each time Larry moves to confront him. That evening Larry's wife Alice mentions the thin man in black had come to the house asking for him, and Larry dismisses the whole affair as one of Willie's pranks. His boss then sends him to Chicago on business, and Larry books a morning flight.

Boarding the plane, Larry discovers the stranger seated nearby. During the flight the engine catches fire and the aircraft plummets in flames — and in his terror Larry hears the stranger offer him one more chance to live. He awakens at home in bed; it is still the morning of his departure, and the crash was a dream. Shaken, he refuses to take the plane, bets Willie ten dollars it will crash, and drives away. At a stoplight he watches the plane climb smoothly into the sky — and then it falls burning onto his car, killing him. The stranger's voice closes the story over Larry's gravestone: the date of his birth and death were written from the beginning.

The Spider!

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Benjamin Blair, a loner known as "Buggy" since childhood for his obsession with insects, steals a rare Lycosa spider he names Taranta from a traveling medicine show run by Dr. Wombo and keeps it secretly in the cellar of his ancestral Blair House in Cedar Grove, Vermont. Taranta grows enormous on a diet of flies, moths, and then progressively larger prey that Benjamin directs it to kill — his cat Toby, a neighbor's dog, a farmer's cow — until its venom also infects Benjamin's parents, who die covered in silky spider-fuzz. When neighbor Farmer Willie arrives to investigate his missing animals and breaks into the cellar, Taranta kills him too. Attempting to flee with the spider to a cliffside cave, Benjamin is bitten when Taranta — having tasted human flesh — turns on its master and plunges into the sea. Benjamin stumbles back to Blair House to discover his own flesh sprouting silky spider-fuzz, and the story closes with his mad declaration that he still lives there.

The Voice of Doom

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Wealthy New Yorker Harry Wilson, acquitted of murdering his stuttering wife Gloria, returns to his Park Avenue apartment to find that a green parrot left in the living room has somehow learned to repeat Gloria's voice — her halting stutter and her accusation of murder. Maddened by the haunting sound, Harry visits his psychiatrist friend Greg Parrington, who dismisses the voice as guilt and devises a test: a newly purchased Spanish-speaking parrot, unable to mimic English, is locked alone in the living room for two days to see if it repeats any voices heard there. The bird emerges sullen and silent, and Harry convinces himself there is nothing supernatural in the room. But when Greg opens the door the following visit the parrot immediately cries out in Gloria's stuttering voice, and the shaken Harry confesses his crime aloud. Lunging to silence the bird, he tumbles out the open window to his death, and the parrot delivers the closing verdict.

The Hidden Men

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Bob Brown and his wife Alice rent out their spare room to a mild, bespectacled bachelor named Henry Jasper, who immediately insists on an inside bolt for his door. After a quiet week, Jasper confides to Bob that their neighbor Frank Mills is one of a race of interplanetary invaders who conceal their antennae at will and are preparing to conquer Earth, and that he alone has discovered the secret and is working on a plan to stop them. Bob and Alice dismiss Jasper as harmlessly eccentric, though his paranoia begins to unsettle Bob at home and at work. When Jasper's three weeks are up, they find the room already vacated; a policeman then arrives to report that Jasper was struck by a car while jaywalking and killed — ruled accidental.

Bob and Alice go to clear the room and are interrupted by Mills, who laughs at Jasper's story until antennae visibly rise from his head: the invasion is real, Jasper had to be silenced, and Mills's people drove the car. He kills Alice with a touch and demands Jasper's counter-invasion plan. Bob fights free and flees to a police station, but the captain dismisses his story as delusion and has him confined to a barred room. When the police captain returns, he reports that Frank Mills denies everything and that Alice's death is recorded as a heart attack — and that Bob needs treatment. A doctor arrives to sedate him; as he steps close, Bob sees, in horror, that the doctor too has antennae.