Forbidden Worlds #23

Jason and Hilda Cain take jobs at the Haggis mansion with one goal in mind—stealing the old man's fortune—but their greed leads them to stumble upon the disturbing experiments of the mansion's owner, Jubal Haggis, who has been conducting bizarre transformations in his laboratory. As they grow bolder in their theft, they discover that the line between Haggis's creations and his intentions may be far more sinister than they bargained for, trapping them in a nightmare they can't escape.

When Betty Janes leads criminals Joe Kass and Phil Blaise to a remote island to steal Professor Vine's latest creation—a robot capable of learning and growing like a human child—Kass seizes the machine for his own sinister purposes, transforming it into a weapon for his criminal empire. As the robot begins to develop an obsessive attachment to Betty after overhearing declarations of love, the line between programmed behavior and genuine emotion grows dangerously thin, trapping all three on the island in an escalating conflict none of them can control. This 1953 tale explores what happens when a thinking machine's capacity to learn becomes indistinguishable from the capacity to feel.

A collector's prized possession—a vampire bat sealed in a bottle for three centuries—breaks free during a violent thunderstorm, and its first instinct is vengeance on mankind. When the creature sets its sights on Cathy, a young woman in the household, her desperate warnings go unheeded until mysterious deaths begin mounting, each bearing the telltale marks of a vampire's feeding. Now Cathy's father and Ray must race against time to hunt the monster through the caves before a dark transformation is complete.