Review: Horror Story: "Killcrop the Changeling" by Richard Thompson

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Noah Fluke, an “ancient and valiant mariner,” was an “active and triumphant eye-witness” of the sea battle off Touloun (Toulon) four years before the beginning of the story. His friend and superior officer, Lieutenant Hartwell, died in his arms and commended his widow and infant son to his care. “And d’ye see,” he would say when relating the circumstance, “who so fitting as I, that had known him from the time he was as high as a handspike? And, somehow, methought he weighed his anchor more cheerily when I’d given him my hard hand in token of promise, like.” Noah Fluke is incapable of speaking without invoking nautical metaphors. He soon learns that Mrs. Hartwell has died, i.e., “gone to her long home,” and Noah is left to raise little Basil Hartwell by himself. He loves the little boy. The love is returned. Noah has some property, but not enough to support himself and the boy. He comes across an ad for a house on Pickaxe Street, the former home of now deceased undertaker, the ownership of which is in some lengthy litigation between the firms of, ahem, Clutch and Readyclaw. They’re looking for a tenant to keep the place up: who “shall be rewarded for his trouble.” Oh, yeah, and never mind those rumors. And you thought lawyer jokes were something new. But it seems there are tenants in the house on Pickaxe Street already. And they like little Basil. But they don’t steal so much as make bad bargains. “Killcrop” is an old term for a child who eats everything in sight without gaining weight, thought to be a fairy changeling, especially in German folklore. Didn’t know that. Noah consults a German doctor who more or less throws them out of the house at the sight of the changeling. Like Noah, he speaks mangled English. Instead of nautical terms, though, he throws in German. Sorta German. Even I speak enough German to know the grammar is mangled. English-speakers who don’t know things like the German word for “devil” is “Teufel” might miss a few things, but none of these are major. Did the author not know better, or was he poking fun at the doctor? Like Noah, he is a ridiculous figure. This was cute. I liked it. It’s not a modern story, at nearly 200 years old. Nevertheless, the tongue-in-cheek writing was enjoyable. In my usual *cough*cough* exhaustive search, I could find no publishing history for this story, nor could I find any biographical information it author. Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), that wealth of information, was quite the letdown. Nor could I find an online copy of it. The anthology I read the story in notes it was first published in 1828. ISFDB attributed it to another Richard Thompson, a cartoonist, born in 1957 who left this world far too soon in 2016. _____ Title: “Killcrop the Changeling” Author: Richard Thompson First published: 1828