"The Space-Eaters" by Frank Belknap Long

"The cross is not a passive agent. It protects the pure of heart, and it has often appeared in the air above our sabbats, confusing and dispersing the powers of Darkness." -John Dee's Necronomicon

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0:00:00 Chapter 1
0:54:14 Chapter 2
1:04:09 Chapter 3

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Published in 1928

Partridgeville: a fictional town on the coast nearby to New York City

"The House of the Worm" - there are several stories with this title, one by Mearle Prout published in 1933, another by Gary Myers published in 1971. Robert E. Howard (whom I believe is meant to be the friend in this story?) wrote "Worms of the Earth", but even that was published in 1932, four years too late for this story. This must be a fictional title then. (Henry Wells I presume is supposed to be H.G. Wells. Long and Howard might have known each other personally, and they were at least part of the same circle of correspondents centered around H.P. Lovecraft, but Wells would have been quite a bit older than either Long or Howard, and it's not clear to me there was any personal connections to Wells, other than that Long enjoyed Wells' works.)

Radcliffe: Ann Radcliffe, English novelist of Gothic fiction, gaining prominence in the 1790s, with "The Mysteries of Udolpho" perhaps being one of her best known novels.

Maturin: Charles Robert Maturin, an Irish Protestant (a descendent of French Huguenots) clergyman and author of Gothic plays and novels, perhaps most notably "Melmoth the Wanderer" published in 1820.

"Get a rope" - I wonder how many people today have a useful amount of rope lying about their house? I don't, despite having a good many useful things, although I do have plenty of twine and some cordage, but proper rope? Not as common as it would have been a hundred years ago, I expect.

The Narrows - a tidal strait that separates Staten Island from Brooklyn, connecting the Upper New York Bay and Lower New York Bay, being the main channel through which the Hudson River empties into the Atlantic.

$4 in 1928 would be worth around $75 today! For ten blocks? NYC taxi rides today (i.e. in October 2024) are $3 base charge + 70 cents per 1/5 of a mile (or per 60 seconds of slow or stopped slow) + $1 for an evening ride (8pm to 6am). There are some other fees that might apply, but would probably not have existed back in 1928, so we'll go with these. Let's assume north-south blocks, which is exactly half a mile (800 meters). So $3.00 + $0.70 * 2.5 + 1.00 = $5.75. Handing over $75 for a $6 ride! D:

East-west blocks are 750 feet, so 10 blocks would be 7500 feet (2286 meters) = 1.4 miles, or 7/5 miles, so $3 + 7 * 0.70 + 1 = $8.9. So a little bit more expensive, but only a little bit. Still nothing remotely close to $75.

The picture used is the illustration in Weird Tales (Aug 1928) for the story, by Hugh Rankin

To follow along: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Space-Eaters

We never are told the cause of the fire in Mulligan Wood... The text perhaps could be said to weakly suggest the space-eaters started it, presumably to get the attention of us humans, but my initial thought was the doctor who operated on Wells started it in a desperate hope to destroy the beings before they could fully manifest. There's nothing in the text to suggest it other than the doctor's stark utter terror at realizing what was wrong with Wells. But as nothing is explicitly stated in the text, it is left as a mystery for us readers to fill in as we see fit.