Unusual Tales #3

In a Near Eastern country, a local magician dazzles the crowd with his craft, prompting officials to summon a rival from America to maintain balance. Morton the Magnificent arrives with unmatched skill, proving himself the greater mage before delivering a cryptic message to the people—only for word to soon arrive that his plane had vanished, leaving his fate unknown.

An ambitious industrialist named Burt bankrolls a visionary scientist named Jeff's experimental time machine, the Cyclo-Metronome, with hopes of turning his investment into quick profits. When Jeff devises a scheme to harvest prehistoric carbon and compress it into a priceless diamond worth billions, the two travelers journey back millions of years—only to have their plans derailed by unexpected obstacles and a mysterious force that strands their cargo in time. Now Burt and Jeff must use all their ingenuity to track down their fortune before someone else does.

Paul Protto, a successful Hollywood producer, accepts a mysterious offer from a wealthy backer named Egro Setus to film an ambitious science-fiction picture called "Menace from Mars"—complete with real flying saucers designed by his benefactor. As production moves to Washington, D.C. for an invasion sequence, cameraman Max Winkler and director Dave Golden witness something far more disturbing than movie magic when the ships in the sky multiply far beyond what was scripted. What begins as a Hollywood spectacle spirals into something genuinely dangerous, and the line between filmmaking and reality becomes terrifyingly thin.

In "Why?", baby Billy Bailey’s sudden refusal to sleep through the night at just 13 months becomes an unexpected lifeline when his restless wakefulness alerts his parents to a fire they might have otherwise slept through—just in time to escape. A quiet, grounded moment of childhood unpredictability turns into a quiet miracle, all in five pages of early 1956 fantasy.

Down under in Sydney, a killer shark called Saroti has been terrorizing the beaches and claiming lives despite protective nets, prompting Commissioner Peabody to bring in Dan Conway, a renowned big-game fisherman, to handle the threat. But before Conway agrees to hunt the creature, Peabody takes him to a remote native village where the locals have a mystical connection to the shark—one that may have deadly consequences for them if Saroti is destroyed. What unfolds is a three-hour battle on the open sea that will test Conway's skill and nerve, and raise questions that defy easy explanation.