SOURCE: "The Footfalls Within" by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, September 1931)

DESCRIPTION: "...Kane felt the cold fingers of fear claw at his brain, but he braced
himself, and lifting the ancient staff, struck with all his power into the centre of the Horror. And he felt an unnameable, immaterial substance meet and give way before the falling staff. Then he was almost strangled by the nauseous burst of unholy stench that flooded the air, and somewhere down the dim vistas of his soul's consciousness re-echoed unbearably a hideous formless cataclysm that he knew was the death-screaming of the monster. For it was down and dying at his feet,
its crimson paling in slow surges like the rise and receding of red waves on some foul coast. And as it paled, the soundless screaming dwindled away into cosmic distances as though it faded into some sphere apart and aloof beyond human ken. Kane, dazed and incredulous, looked down on a shapeless, colourless, all but invisible mass at his feet which he knew was the corpse of the Horror, dashed back into the black realms from whence it had come, by a single blow of the staff of Solomon..." ("The Footfalls Within" by Robert E. Howard)

NOTES: The demon trapped inside the mausoleum was forced inside by Solomon, suing the cat-headed stave now in Solomon Kane's possession. When Arab slavers break open the locked door, the demon comes out in a bloody cloud, killing the leader of the Arabs. Kane dispatches the thing using the sharp end of the Staff of Solomon.

HISTORY: The comic book version appeared in Marvel Preview #19 (1979). Adapted by Donald Glut, it was illustrated by Will Meugniot and Steve Gan.

 

---