Forbidden Worlds #77

Bill Matthews, a salvage man haunted by vivid memories of a pirate captain named John Dufresne, seeks help from psychiatrist Dr. Drew Compton, convinced he's losing his mind. Through Matthews's account, a legendary tale unfolds: the ruthless Mermaid and her captain's brutal plunder of merchant vessels, followed by a terrible curse sworn by their desperate victims—a curse that seems to strike immediately when greed overtakes survival. What truly connects Matthews to a man dead for three centuries, and whether the curse is real or delusion, becomes the mystery that torments him.

When uranium prospectors Jon Corbin and Rick Thrale discover a cursed castle in Central Europe, they learn a thousand-year-old tale of the Duke Nikor, whose lust for conquest drove his alchemist Bruno—and later his successor Malvi—to develop a weapon of unimaginable destructive power. As the experiments reach their catastrophic conclusion, the castle itself becomes a monument to the hubris that destroyed a tyrant and his domain.

On the distant planet Icon I—a world frozen a million years in Earth's past—Jeff Random, once a ruthless big-game hunter, now works as a game warden protecting the planet's prehistoric wildlife. When wealthy sportsman Morton Greade hires Random to help him poach rare trophies, the two set out on a safari that tests Random's conscience and draws the attention of the sharp-eyed warden Farraday.