Strange Tales #29

In "Witchcraft!", a desperate executioner tries to revive his fading trade by accusing an old hermit of witchcraft, only to find her unbreakable under torment. When he disguises himself as the devil to pressure her into confessing, she agrees—just as a guard’s alarm shatters the moment. Stripped of his disguise and trapped by the truth, he realizes too late that the old woman was no mere peasant, but something far older and darker.

In "Dead Beat!" from Strange Tales #29 (1954), a con man flees with his ill-gotten gains only to return and discover his fiancée has invested every penny in the very scam he sold her—right under his nose. The story unfolds with a chilling twist of irony, where loyalty and deception blur in a tale of greed and mistaken faith.

In the claustrophobic depths of a subterranean drilling rig, a man makes a desperate choice to survive—only to realize too late that his co-pilot was no man at all. When a radio transmission reveals the grim truth, he’s left staring at controls with no way back, trapped in a machine he never understood. A chilling tale of isolation and mistaken assumptions, told in stark, suspenseful strokes.

In a dusty Indian courtroom, four witnesses—each claiming to have seen a crime—offer wildly conflicting accounts, even the ghost of the dead man joining the lie. When the Hindu God of Justice appears to witness their deceit, the truth begins to unravel in ways no one expected.