Ray Cummings 22 min read

In a shadowy Village curio shop, a snake-eyed old man presses an exquisite ivory chess set on a browsing stranger.

Ray Cummings's 1920 tale sets its uneasy mood among the black shadows and appraising eyes of a Greenwich Village art shop, where a Moorish ivory chess set carries more than craftsmanship. Atmospheric weird fiction from a prolific pulp master better known for his scientific romances. Read it for a creeping, well-turned tale of curios and menace from the early days of the pulps.

In its time

Published in 1920, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

22 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).