A poster for the 1960 film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Wells called his subhuman creatures “morlocks,” which is suspiciously similar to the word “horlocks” in a supposedly true story (MGM / GEORGE PAL PRODUCTIONS/Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evans Picture Library).

      One of the strangers asked what they were doing there. The answer did not seem to persuade him, and a tense exchange followed. Fields suspected that they had come upon a criminal gang in hiding. Two other strangers joined the first three, and the two explorers were led deeper into the cave and, where the walls expanded, to a toboggan-shaped device. The device flew them silently and rapidly into the cave world. Finally, a similar vehicle, moving fast in their direction, appeared, forcing the one which the original party occupied to come to an abrupt halt. Fields wrote:

      One machine had no sooner stopped than our captors leaped from the machine and started to dash away. A fine blue light leaped from the other machine in a fine pencil beam and its sweep caught them and they fell to the cavern and lay still. The figures dismounted from the other machine and came close to us. Then I noticed they carried a strange object in their hands. It resembled a fountain pen flashlight with a large, round, bulb-like affair on the back end and a grip something like a German luger. They pointed them at us. After seeing what had happened to our erstwhile captors I thought that our turn was next, whatever it was.

      Instead, one of them inquired if they were surface people. Then he asked, “Where did the horlocks find you?” He went on to say, “You are very fortunate that we came this way. You would also have become horlocks, and then we would have had to kill you also.” Fields improbably quotes verbatim a long paragraph, the core of which is, “The people on the surface are not ready to have the things that the ancients have left. … There are a great many evil people here who create many unpleasant things for both us and the surface people. They are safe because no one on the surface world believes in us or them.”

      Fields and Joe were then flown up the cave, and they then made their way to the exterior world by foot. “What is the answer to the whole thing?” Fields asks. “I would like to know.”

      Possibly, the answer is as much H.G. Wells as Richard Shaver. In Wells’ famous The Time Machine (1895) the violent, evil underearthers of the distant future are called “morlocks,” a single consonant away from “horlocks.”²

       Brodie’s Deros

      Not all dero-related stories are of an origin as uncertain as the alleged Fields’. John J. Robinson undeniably existed, a figure on the East Coast UFO scene and an associate of New Jersey-based Saucer News publisher/editor James W. Moseley. Robinson had no reputation as a spinner of yarns, which makes his story no less hard to credit. It rests solely on his testimony. If we take him at his word, one possible explanation for the strange narrative is that he was the credulous victim of an elaborate prank.

      In the mid–1940s, so the account goes, Robinson lived on the third floor of a house in Jersey City. A reclusive artist named Steve Brodie occupied the second floor. Eventually, Robinson befriended Brodie, who nonetheless continued to behave eccentrically. He had a pronounced disdain for meat, and he seemed to live in fear that, as Robinson put it, “someone might be attempting to sneak up behind him.” He did two kinds of paintings: some depicting conventional scenes, the others capturing eerie, otherworldly visions. As he painted the latter, Robinson observed, he appeared to enter a trance state.

      On glimpsing an Amazing Stories issue in Robinson’s pocket, Brodie looked startled. Robinson proceeded to detail Shaver’s claims, to Brodie’s visibly mounting unease. “He writes of the dero!” he exclaimed with obvious disapproval. With much coaxing and a promise that he would not be ridiculed, Brodie spoke of a terrifying experience he had undergone seven years earlier.

      He and a friend had gone out west to prospect for semiprecious stones. Locals warned them to stay away from a particular desert mesa; several individuals had vanished there, they said. Naturally, the young men laughed off these words of caution. Just as predictably, they would pay the consequences.

      A few days into the expedition, hearing a cry from his companion, Brodie took startled notice of a cowled figure standing at the base of the mesa. Soon another appeared beside it. The first produced a rod-shaped device which it directed toward Brodie, who abruptly felt himself paralyzed. As Brodie’s friend took to his heels, the second figure aimed its own device at him. The next thing he knew, Brodie’s nostrils were thick with the sickening scent of burning flesh. That was the last he ever saw of his friend.

      A third figure approached Brodie, then placed something just below his ears, rendering him unconscious. “At this point in his narrative,” Robinson said, “Steve showed me why he wore his hair long at the back of his head. Behind each ear at the base of the parietal bones of his skull were bare, seared, scarred patches of skin upon which no hair could grow. Both of these areas behind the ears were a little smaller than the size of a silver dollar and were perfectly circular. Steve said they were the marks of a dero slave.”

      Of what followed from the initial encounter, Brodie had only nightmarish intermittent memories, flashes of recall in which he saw himself sharing a cave with other human beings. They were inside a cave, imprisoned by the deros who could kidnap any surface dweller they had a mind to take. As soon as one of his captors noticed that Brodie was conscious, he would be zapped into blackness.

      Then one day he woke to find himself walking the streets of New York City with no idea how he got