a woman in a nearby town six years before and now wish to reclaim Aaron, the child she bore. The woman's abusive alcoholic husband knows of the creatures and that they are mostly benevolent, but wants to take revenge on them for impregnating his wife. It is implied that all modern humans originally came to be as a result of similar relationships between these creatures and primordial women, but over time male humans drove the creatures to the brink of extinction. Davidson reaches the town, where a posse of gun-toting locals are eager to slay the monsters. After a violent confrontation in which the townsfolk manage to kill one of the largest creatures along with Aaron, the remaining creatures vanish and arrange for Davidson and a few survivors to become trapped in quicksand, which then hardens when they are half-buried. Trapped, they are left to die in the burning desert heat. The idea of a group of people sinking in quicksand which then hardens around them was later used by Barker in the film Lord of Illusions. "New Murders in the Rue Morgue" Lewis is a 73-year-old man who goes to Paris after his friend, Phillipe, is arrested for butchering a young woman. After insisting that an orangutan committed the murder, Phillipe commits suicide in his cell. Lewis does not believe the story until he sees the primate firsthand. The beast is dressed like a person, completely shaved, and wields a razor. Lewis learns Philippe, a notorious eccentric, raised the animal himself as a strange experiment based on the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Despairing at the fact others seem unable to see the orangutan as the animal it is, Lewis throws himself into the Seine, as the orangutan continues to present and live as a human. Volume Three "Son of Celluloid" An escaped convict dies behind a film screen while hiding from the police. Over the months following his death, a cancerous tumour in the convict's body gains sentience from the strong emotions of the cinema's audiences and comes to life. After one night's show, the creature hunts down several patrons remaining in the cinema, projecting images of John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe as vivid hallucinations to lure them in and consume them, but it is seemingly destroyed in turn by the cinema's usher. Some time later, the usher, having tracked down a girl