by Robert E. Howard
unfinished fragment (published posthumously, June 1988)
(from The Early Adventures of El Borak)
Another aborted Allison adventure, but this one gets some good distance before it wraps up. There is a Helen who appeared in an earlier fragment, formerly Channon but now Tranton, who they have some history with, and they get invited to a German castle party, with something weird inhabiting the west tower.
Howard's caricature of Germans radiates from his impression of World War I. The host of the party is a sexual predator who frequently talks about old times where women's consent didn't matter and who tells a lot of sexually charged stories where the powerful exert their will over the powerless. Howard's ethos, played out through his idealized barbarians, is that those with power need the consent of the powerless and must look out for them. I'm broadly generalizing here, though. Like, powerless is a sort of relative concept, but as long as you have the ability to exploit the powerless, you are at the mercy of anyone more powerful than you.
This story also has a story within it that we haven't seen before: Allison working as a private detective, winding up at a house party where his sister Marion was at, and finding a man murdered in his own room, with Steve finding out that it was a snake! This is probably a setup to whatever the final twist in this story is, where it seems like the German host is keeping some sort of primate in the west tower.