The Footfalls Within

Introduction

The story opens with Kane coming across the body of a young black woman. The corpse is fresh, and there are marks where whips and shackles have torn her flesh. It doesn’t take long for Kane to catch up with the slavers who killed her. He sees a train of blacks being led away by a group of armed Arabs and other blacks who have allied with them. They’re taking their captives to a slave market. They’re also driving them hard, neither giving them rest breaks nor providing them with ample water.

It was accepted by Weird Tales circa December 1930, and published in the September 1931 issue. Howard got $56.00 for the story.

In a letter (#150) to Tevis Clyde Smith he says:

I recently sold a story to Weird Tales, a Solomon Kane story about which I hesitated several months before finally sending. It’s about the poorest story I’ve ever sold, marking a distinct transition in my development as a writer — a sort of half-way mark between pure action stuff and the cosmic horror tale, to which style I have at last managed to achieve, to a certain extent at least. I doubt if I will sell Weird Tales any of the latter very soon, because my style of handling this new theme is bound to be clumsy and amateurish, but I feel that I may eventually gain some recognition in that field. Of course, I’ll never equal Lovecraft, but I believe I can do at least as well as most of the other Weird Tale writers do in that line. Not that I mean to drop my action stuff, not in the least.

And in a letter (#173) to HPL he mentions the story:

Yes, I did indeed like “The Whisperer in Darkness”, and appreciate the kind things you said about “The Footfalls Within”, which I feared failed miserably in creating the atmosphere I was striving after. I speak with full sincerity when I say I am bitterly disappointed that the Putnams rejected the mss. they were considering — disappointed not alone for your sake, but for the sake of literature as a whole.

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