Forbidden Worlds #28 (1954)

In the quiet dread of a mental sanatorium, a doctor’s cruel joke takes a chilling turn when a delusional artist claims to be painting the portrait of a long-dead patient named Carlotta Behn—only to awaken something far more unsettling than madness. As the doctor watches in horror, the lines between memory, imagination, and the supernatural begin to blur, haunted by music only he can hear and a portrait that seems to breathe.

When a torpedo meant to destroy an iceberg veers off course and strikes a strange, massive creature buried within, the crew of the U.S.S. Penguin is thrust into a nightmare as the frozen beast thaws—and reveals itself to be alive, intelligent, and capable of controlling the ship’s systems. As the crew struggles to survive the creature’s psychic attacks and escalating violence, they realize too late that the iceberg was not an isolated anomaly, but the first of many such horrors awakening across the Arctic.

Jo, a skeptical narrator, guides readers through common everyday superstitions—walking under a ladder, black cats, the new moon, spilled salt, and broken mirrors—mocking their irrationality while implying that even the most rational people might secretly hold one. The story ends with a playful challenge: "I'm not superstitious—are you?" as the tone shifts abruptly to a promotional ad for a shoe store business.

In the eerie tale "The Evil Eye," a man named Vashna, claiming to be a relative of a murdered man, retrieves the corpse and secretly uses its eye in a dark ritual to create a deadly weapon. As he begins to use the cursed eye to kill and steal jewels, his crimes go unnoticed—until one night, he faces a confrontation that may be his undoing.

In a secluded laboratory, Professor Lambert conducts a radical experiment to transform a gorilla named Bobo using human brain hormones, aiming to prove his theory that animal nature can be fundamentally altered. As Bobo begins to develop human traits, the dynamic between master and subject shifts in ways neither could have foreseen, setting the stage for a profound and unsettling transformation.