Story från 50s eller 60s: immaterial / rag creature dödar man

Du kanske sammanfaller två historier - jag tänkte också på "The Rag Thing" som nämns i user14111 svar. Men den "immateriella ondskanliga varelsen" "skapar formen av en kvinna från slumpmässiga odds och slutar" är väldigt som påminner om slutet på 1952-berättelsen " Ett ägg en månad från allt över "av" Idris Seabright "(Margaret St. Clair).

Varelsen i den här historien börjar inte som en trasa under sängen (den kläcker från ett ägg), men det börjar inte vara så viktigt, och det skapar en kvinnas form för att locka en man till sin död .

oväsentligt

The faint pecking from within the egg grew louder. The dark fissure on the pale blue-green background widened and spread. The halves of the shell fell back suddenly, like the halves of a door. The egg was open. There was nothing inside...

...The mnxx bird imago, left alone within the cabin, flitted about busily.

skapar formen av en kvinna från slumpmässiga odds och slutar för att locka honom till sin död

In its flittings in the cabin during his absence, it had managed to assemble for itself a passable body. It had used newspapers, grapes, and black wool from the afghan as materials. What it had made was short and squat and excessively female, not at all alluring, but it thought George would like it. It held the nail file from the drawer in its one completed hand...

...Her face was only a blur; there the mnxx bird had not felt it necessary to be specific. But she moved towards George with a heavy sensual swaying; she was what George had always wanted and been ashamed of wanting. She was here. He had no questions. She was his. Desire was making him drunk....

...When it was finished, George lay on the sodden carpet flaccidly. His eyes were gone, and a lot of his vital organs....

...The mnxx bird, on the fine strong wings it had plaited for itself out of George's head hair, floated out into the night.

Notera också

Båda dessa historier ingår i samma antologi, Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales , så du kan säkert ha läst dem samtidigt.

Detta är ett långskott.

Delar av din beskrivning påminner något om Donald A. Wollheim s 1951 novell "The Rag Thing" , först publicerad (som av David Grinnell) i Tidningen Fantasy och Science Fiction , oktober 1951 , tillgänglig på Internetarkiv . Ragdimensionen är dock inte oumbärlig, och det lockar inte sina offer till deras död genom att skapa en kvinnas utseende. Dessutom är det inte offren, men hyresvärdens slöta vanor som ger upphov till varelsen.

Hyresvärdinna och trasa:

In a way, though, it is quite possible to hold Mrs. Larch to blame for everything that happened. Not that she had what people would call malicious intentions, but just that she was two things practically every boarding-house landlady is—thrifty and not too clean.

She shouldn't have been in such a hurry to turn the heat off so early in March. March is a tricky month and she should have known that the first warm day is usually an isolated phenomenon. But then you could always claim that she shouldn't have been so sloppy in her cleaning last November. She shouldn't have dropped that rag behind the radiator in the third floor front room.

As a matter of fact, one could well wonder what she was doing using such a rag anyway. Polishing furniture doesn't require a clean rag to start with, certainly not the rag you stick into the furniture polish, that's going to be greasy anyway—but she didn't have to use that particular rag. The one that had so much dried blood on it from the meat that had been lying on it in the kitchen.

On top of that, it is probable that she had spit into the filthy thing, too. Mrs. Larch was no prize package. Gross, dull, unkempt, widowed and careless, she fitted into the house—one of innumerable other brownstone fronts in the lower sixties of New York. Houses that in former days, fifty or sixty years ago, were considered the height of fashion and the residences of the well-to-do, now reduced to dingy rooming places for all manner of itinerants, lonely people with no hope in life other than dreary jobs, or an occasional young and confused person from the hinterland seeking fame and fortune in a city which rarely grants it.

So it was not particularly odd that when she accidentally dropped the filthy old rag behind the radiator in the room on the third floor front late in November, she had simply left it there and forgotten to pick it up.

Kemiska reaktioner och livets födelse:

It is hard to say what is the cause of chemical reactions. Some hold that all things are mechanical in nature, others that life has a psychic side which cannot be duplicated in laboratories. [. . .] Heat and moisture and greasy chemical compounds were the sole ingredients of the birth of life in some ancient unremembered swamp.

Raggen sakar sitt första offer:

Anyway Skelty was found dead in bed the next morning. Mrs. Larch knocked on his door when he failed to come down to breakfast and when he hadn't answered, she turned the knob and went in. He was lying in bed, blue and cold, and he had been smothered in his sleep.

There was quite a to-do about the whole business, but nothing came of it. [. . .] Of course the body was unusually cold when Mrs. Larch found it, as if the heat had been sucked out of him, but who notices a thing like that? They also discounted the grease smudge on the top sheet, the grease stains on the floor, and the slime on his face.