"The Thing on the Floor" by Thorp McClusky

0:00:00 Ch 1 - Charlatan or Miracle-Man?
0:04:03 Ch 2 - The Spider and the Flies
0:21:21 Ch 3 - The Hypnotic Lamp
0:28:20 Ch 4 - The Stolen Jewels
0:31:36 Ch 5 - Ethredge Hears Startling News
0:36:21 Ch 6 - Ethredge Asks Help
0:41:54 Ch 7 - The Spider's Lair
0:46:57 Ch 8 - Stepan
0:54:28 Ch 9 - The Spider Spins
1:00:37 Ch 10 - A Little White Pellet

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Published in 1938

$5,000 in 1938 would be worth in the ballpark of $100,000 today!

6'3" = 190.5 cm

jigger: in this context, a measuring cup used in mixing drinks that usually holds 1 to 2 ounces (30 to 60 milliliters)

Enrico Caruso: an Italian (from Naples, although his parents were from Piedimonte) operatic tenor. He died in 1921, but was making commercial recordings right up until 1920. While the story was published in 1938, we don't know when the actual temporal setting of the story was, but could be the 1910s or 20s. Given the story is clearly set in the USA, and the cops are drinking whiskey, it's presumably not during Prohibition, which was from 1920 to 1933. Both before and after could work.

Einstein famously published E = mc^2 in 1905, but the idea of mass-energy equivalence predates Einstein by a few decades (arguably a few centuries even, as early as Isaac Newton! Although only in concept, no math to that effect was done until the end of the 19th century, by Umov and Preston and De Pretto).

Coué: Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie, a French psychologist and hypnotist who created psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion

J.B. Watson: John Broadus Watson, an American psychologist who popularized the theory of behaviorism

50-cent pieces have been minted on and off for most of US history. A few gaps here and there, typically just for a few years, but they were being minted continuously from 1817 to 1921, and then from 1927 to 1929, and then continuously again from 1933 to the present. So the use of a 50 cent piece here doesn't help us any to narrow down the temporal setting of this story. Most Americans today are familiar with the JFK half-dollar that started being minted in 1964, but 50-cent coins go back all the way to 1797!

Mazda lamp: a trademarked name registered by GE in 1909 for incandescent light bulbs. This name was used all the way up until 1945! The name is from Ahura Mazda, the god of Zoroastrianism.

Luce - apparently there are at least three difference pronunciations for this name depending on whether the bearer of the name is British, French, or Italian. Since this story is set in the USA, I went with the English pronunciation. I don't like it myself, but oh well.

Chapter 6 sounds like something Hollywood would write. Well, maybe not so much in the year 2024 A.D., Hollywood no longer has even this level of "sophistication" any more, but 20th century Hollywood anyways.

mujik (in Russian: мужи́к): man, typically used to refer to a peasant

The picture used is the illustration for the story in Weird Tales, by Virgil Finlay

The follow along: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales/Volume_31/Issue_3/The_Thing_on_the_Floor

There are quite a few errors in the above link - looks like just bad OCR.

Given the length of this story, I recorded it over two sessions, so if you notice a change in my voice quality or differences in the character voices after chapter 5, that's why.