Out of the Night #17 (1954)

John Graves and his friends venture to the island of Crete, drawn by rumors of the Minotaur’s buried gold, only to find the townspeople terrified and secretive. When one of them, Steve Lokus, is marked with a monstrous symbol and begins acting strangely, the group realizes they’ve stumbled into a living cult still sacrificing to the ancient beast—now leading them into the labyrinth’s depths.

When a mischievous pixie arrives at Smathers College on a mission to become human by winning a professor’s love, the normally stoic Professor Dobbins finds himself caught in a whirlwind of supernatural antics and campus chaos. As the pixie’s presence triggers a wave of suspicion and rumors, Dobbins must navigate a campus in turmoil—where even his colleagues believe he’s lost his mind—while trying to uncover the truth behind the pixie’s strange mission.

Jo, a young boy grieving his father’s death at the hands of a mysterious mountain lion, takes up his father’s hunting rifle to hunt the beast himself, defying his mother’s warnings. When the rifle suddenly fires on its own, Jo is terrified—only to be saved by what he believes is his father’s ghost, wielding the same gun. The story builds on the eerie mystery of the rifle’s power and the unexplained death of the father, leaving Jo and the townsfolk questioning whether the killer was ever truly a beast at all.

In the shadowed halls of an ancient European castle, a tormented woman named Marta returns after years away, desperate to confess a dark secret she believes she’s been driven to commit. Haunted by a mysterious voice that seems to read her thoughts and urge her toward violence, she recounts how a strange fan from a vanished curiosity shop may have awakened something far more sinister within her. As her past and present blur, Marta grapples with the terrifying possibility that her actions were never her own.