"The Pale Man" (1934)

Julius Long is a fairly obscure horror story writer, a lawyer from Ohio who published his handful in Weird Tales between 1933 and 1938. He died of conditions related to asthma in 1955 when he was 47 or 48 years old. In some ways this very short story, written when he was about 27, may have been a kind of vision of his own death. The first-person narrator is a low-level academic. "If only..." he laments, "I should now be a full-fledged professor instead of a broken-down assistant." He is even losing that position, likely for reasons of health, as he has been exiled to this rundown hotel in some small town on a mandatory vacation. "There is something positively gratifying about the absence of the graduate student face," he tries to console himself. He has a room in front with a view, 201—he had to haggle to get it. Way in the back is the pale man's room, 212. He arrived the same day. The pale man is more like moon-age daydream Ziggy Stardust with snow white tan. "I can not believe that he is ill," the narrator says of him, hinting the place might not exactly be a hotel, "for his paleness is not of a sickly cast, but rather wholesome in its ivory clarity." There is a sick woman in 208 or 207, however (the confusion could be a typo or it could be Long's suggestion of the narrator's mental unbalance), and she dies as the pale man moves closer to her. The pale man is steadily changing rooms in the story, like a checker piece on a board, from 212 to 211 to 210 and closer. The narrator wonders what will happen when he reaches the sick woman's room, but what happens of course is that she dies. And still the narrator does not understand who or what the pale man is. At one point the hotel manager is seen insisting the narrator leave and go to the hospital, which he refuses. That suggests his own death is not for long and it isn't. The story is almost underwhelming at first but things about it stick. "I suppose I should have guessed his identity when he skipped the three rooms the night I fell unconscious upon the floor." It stays with you.

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