Lorelei of the Red Mist by Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury

Book Details

A thief makes the biggest score of all time and then dies trying to escape. His dying mind is transferred into the body of a warrior who is being used by a sorceress to destroy her enemies.

Lorelei Of The Red Mist (1946)
by Leigh Brackett & Ray Bradbury
He died—and then awakened in a new body. He found himself on a world of bizarre loveliness, a powerful, rich man. He took pleasure in his turn of good luck . . . until he discovered that his new body was hated by all on this strange planet, that his soul was owned by Rann, devil-goddess of Falga, who was using him for her own gain.

The Million Year Picnic (1946)
by Ray Bradbury
They were supposed to be starting on a picnic, a wonderful day of fun. But there was a gun in the boat, and too much food and equipment. And just behind the veil of vacation—instead of the soft face of laughter——there was something hard and bony and terrifying.

In 1944, Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) had published a hard boiled detective novel, No Good From A Corpse, very much in the tone and tradition of Raymond Chandler. In 1946, Warner Brothers was producing Chandler’s The Big Sleep directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. William Faulkner was writing the screenplay but having trouble with the adaptation. Hawks told his secretary to call “this Brackett guy” to help out.

At the time that Warner Brothers contacted her, Brackett was in the middle of writing Lorelei of the Red Mist. She and her husband Edmond Hamilton were living in Los Angeles near their good friend Ray Bradbury. When Brackett was called to Hollywood, Bradbury (1920-2012) stepped in and finished “Lorelei”.

At around the same time that Brackett was writing “Lorelei”, Ray Bradbury was writing The Million Year Picnic. “Picnic” was one of the earliest of the two dozen or so stories that Bradbury wove into The Martian Chronicles.

Lorelei of the Red Mist and The Million Year Picnic were both published in the Summer, 1946 issue of Planet Stories.

Lorelei of the Red Mist contains 4 illustrations.

Files:

1. Brackett-LoreleiOfTheRedMist.epub

Excerpt: Lorelei of the Red Mist

THE Company dicks were good. They were plenty good. Hugh Starke began to think maybe this time he wasn’t going to get away with it.

His small stringy body hunched over the control bank, nursing the last ounce of power out of the Kallman. The hot night sky of Venus fled past the ports in tattered veils of indigo. Starke wasn’t sure where he was any more. Venus was a frontier planet, and still mostly a big X, except to the Venusians—who weren’t sending out any maps. He did know that he was getting dangerously close to the Mountains of White Cloud. The backbone of the planet, towering far into the stratosphere, magnetic trap, with God knew what beyond. Maybe even God wasn’t sure.

But it looked like over the mountains or out. Death under the guns of the Terro-Venus Mines, Incorporated, Special Police, or back to the Lima cell blocks for life as an habitual felon.

Starke decided he would go over.

Whatever happened, he’d pulled off the biggest lone-wolf caper in history. The T-V Mines payroll ship, for close to a million credits. He cuddled the metal strongbox between his feet and grinned. It would be a long time before anybody equaled that.

His mass indicators began to jitter. Vaguely, a dim purple shadow in the sky ahead, the Mountains of White Cloud stood like a wall against him. Starke checked the positions of the pursuing ships. There was no way through them. He said flatly, “All right, damn you,” and sent the Kallman angling up into the thick blue sky.

He had no very clear memories after that. Crazy magnetic vagaries, always a hazard on Venus, made his instruments useless. He flew by the seat of his pants and he got over, and the T-V men didn’t. He was free, with a million credits in his kick.

Far below in the virgin darkness he saw a sullen crimson smear on the night, as though someone had rubbed it with a bloody thumb. The Kallman dipped toward it. The control bank flickered with blue flame, the jet timers blew, and then there was just the screaming of air against the falling hull.

Hugh Starke sat still and waited . . .

He knew, before he opened his eyes, that he was dying. He didn’t feel any pain, he didn’t feel anything, but he knew just the same. Part of him was cut loose. He was still there, but not attached any more.

He raised his eyelids. There was a ceiling. It was a long way off. It was black stone veined with smoky reds and ambers. He had never seen it before.

His head was tilted toward the right. He let his gaze move down that way. There were dim tapestries, more of the black stone, and three tall archways giving onto a balcony. Beyond the balcony was a sky veiled and clouded with red mist. Under the mist, spreading away from a murky line of cliffs, was an ocean. It wasn’t water and it didn’t have any waves on it, but there was nothing else to call it. It burned, deep down inside itself, breathing up the red fog. Little angry bursts of flame coiled up under the flat surface, sending circles of sparks flaring out like ripples from a dropped stone.

He closed his eyes and frowned and moved his head restively. There was the texture of fur against his skin. Through the cracks of his eyelids he saw that he lay on a high bed piled with silks and soft tanned pelts. His body was covered. He was rather glad he couldn’t see it. It didn’t matter because he wouldn’t be using it any more anyway, and it hadn’t been such a hell of a body to begin with. But he was used to it, and he didn’t want t» see it now, the way he knew it would have to look.

He looked along over the foot of the bed, and he saw the woman.

She sat watching him from a massive carved chair softened with a single huge white pelt like a drift of snow. She smiled, and let him look. A pulse began to beat under his jaw, very feebly.

She was tall and sleek and insolently curved. She wore a sort of tabard of pale grey spider-silk, held to her body by a jeweled girdle, but it was just a nice piece of ornamentation. Her face was narrow, finely cut, secret, faintly amused. Her lips, her eyes, and her flowing silken hair were all the same pale cool shade of aquamarine.

Her skin was white, with no hint of rose. Her shoulders, her forearms, the long flat curve of her thighs, the pale-green tips of her breasts, were dusted with tiny particles that glistened like powdered diamond. She sparkled softly like a fairy thing against the snowy fur, a creature of foam and moonlight and clear shallow water. Her eyes never left his, and they were not human, but he knew that they would have done things to him if he had had any feeling below the neck.

HE started to speak. He had no strength to move his tongue. The woman leaned forward, and as though her movement were a signal four men rose from the tapestried shadows by the wall. They were like her. Their eyes were pale and strange like hers.

She said, in liquid High Venusian, “You’re dying, in this body. But you will not die. You will sleep now, and wake in a strange body, in a strange place. Don’t be afraid. My mind will be with yours, I’ll guide you, don’t be afraid. I can’t explain now, there isn’t time, but don’t be afraid.”

Excerpt From: Leigh Brackett. “Lorelei of the Red Mist.”