Pulp Fiction, 1938 · page 23 of 64
10 Story Book, August 1938 — page 23: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page Analysis This is story prose from a pulp magazine (page 24), with no illustrations visible. The text is a first-person narrative about the narrator's relationship with a woman nicknamed "Sphinx Face" or "Lucy" (real name Lucretia), who is characterized as eccentric, dark-minded, and dangerously intellectual—interested in poison, voodoo, cannibalism, and crime. The narrator describes her morbid fascinations and hints at her suspicious behavior, including what appears to be sneaking into someone else's house. The passage reads as noir or crime fiction with darkly comedic elements, establishing the woman as a potentially sinister character while the narrator contemplates whether she might commit "the perfect crime."
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
24 INTRIGUING STORIES, SPICED WITH PRETTY GIRLS! unswerving, inexorable as the knell of Doom. They call her Lucy. She lives alone, by what means no one has ven- tured to inquire but she seems forever to be stirring and mixing things in great iron pots. Like a witch. She brags to me that she has read eight volumes on the Spanish Inquisition. And that she could give a Mayan witch doctor points on jungle voodoo. She fairly drools when she starts speculating on the delights of cannibalism. And she’ll sit for hours, dis- effects of slow cussing the various poisons. Her real name is Lucretia. She tells me dreamily how she dissect- ed her dog. She wasn’t mourning a dead pet. She was gloating over the neat job she had made. “A butcher couldn’t have done it better,’ she bragged. Once she strangled a rattlesnake with her bare hands. It gets so that my fingers start hitting the wrong keys when I hear her heavy tread on the stair. In the midst of my tenderest passage, she’d stalk in, sink into my best lounging chair and with a deep sigh, touchingly confide how much she’d love to commit the perfect crime. “I tell you my heart’s deepest secrets,” she murmurs. “We have so much in com- mon.” I lay awake one night trying to figure out what Sphinx Face and I had in com- mon. Finally it came to me. We both dis- like Jenny the Girl Mountain. She had, on a couple of occasions, robbed us to get money for sweets. She filched some change that Lucy had left lying loose on the grocery counter while both were shopping. From me the Infant Elephant begged some magazines bearing my un- dying romances and when, flattered, I gave them to her, she promptly ex- changed them for a dozen all-day suck- ers. I found her choking on one in a nearly-fatal attempt to destroy the evi- dence. Sometimes I didn’t know whose acquaintance I could have more joyfully dispensed with, the Gorging Gallumpus or the Macabre Medusa’s. Well, that isn’t getting my love story written. Goodnight! Little Jungfrau is coming back. Not coming, sneaking is the word. What’s she up to now, looking around her so furtively? Her mother’s away marketing. I’m sure she hasn’t been to the clinic that quick. She’s stealing up the back way too. I better look up the stair shaft. No, she’s not going into her own house. She’s on the top floor, sneak- ing’ Lucretia’s! And Sphinx Face told me she into—well, for gosh sakes,—into couldn’t bear her because she always smelled of cheap candy. What in the world would she be easing herself in there for? If Lucy had a son now, or something. Little Hippo (I should stop maligning innocent animals) Little Hip- po isn’t amorous. I once knew a fat girl who was... Boy, if only I was a murder mystery writer, would I put my trained im- agination to work! With the material I POR. .% I’d elaborate on the way the Sphinx’s bulging eyes light up when she tells me in sepulchral tones how she longs to com- mit the perfect crime. I think I know how She’d snare the Midget Mountain in with some silver ly- she’d go about it, too. ing around. Then with the tremendous strength that crushed a rattlesnake, she’d Comicbooks.c©