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Packer, Peter. Peter Packer was created by “Cecil Corwin,” the pseudonym of C.M. Kornbluth (Clair and Gaynor), and appeared in four stories in Stirring Science Stories and Uncanny Tales in 1941 and 1942, beginning with “Thirteen O’Clock” (Stirring Science Stories, Feb. 1941).

Peter Packer is a young engineer from Boston who inherits a house from his grandfather, who has disappeared. His grandfather had the house built “to his own very sound plans,” which included a secret room in the attic. Peter breaks into the room and finds a clock with thirteen hours on the dial. The clock is stopped at 12:59. He sets it winding, and it strikes enormously loud chimes. When it stops, he wanders outside the house, and finds that the house is now surrounded by a forest. When he leans against tree, he feels its beating pulse. He is chased up a tree by a nasty monster, and then meets a “diaphanous shadow of a young girl”—Melicent, a young sorceress with a blasting finger. They are in the land of Ellil, which is plagued by monsters and vampires and threatened, as Melicent tells Peter, by the Almarish Reality Corporation.

Packer eventually discovers that “Almarish” is his Grandfather Packer, who says, “Once here I sized things up and began to organize on a business basis with the assistance of a gang of half-breed demons.” Peter insists that his Grandfather stop terrorizing Ellil, which he does. Melicent returns to Braintree with Peter, but without her blasting finger, which Peter insists she cut off. In the sequels Grandfather deals with various difficulties, including ghouls and Hell itself.

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