Atomic-Age Cthulhu: Tales of Mythos Terror in the 1950s

by Robert Price

  Also from Chaosium

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  Mysteries of the Worm by Robert Bloch

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  The Yellow Sign and Other Stories by Robert W. Chambers

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  A Long Way Home

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  ATOMIC AGE CTHULHU: Terrifying Tales of the Mythos Menace

  Edited by Brian M. Sammons & Glynn Owen Barrass

  Atomic Age Cthulhu is published by Chaosium Inc.

  This book is copyright © 2015 by Chaosium Inc.; all rights reserved

  All stories are original to this collection.

  All material © 2015 by Chaosium Inc. and the authors.

  Cover illustration © 2015 Victor Manuel Leza Moreno.

  Edited by Brian M. Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass.

  Editor-in-Chief Charlie Krank.

  Similarities between characters in this book and persons living or

  dead are strictly coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-56882-398-0 (e-book)

  www.chaosium.com.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Bad Reception by Jeffrey Thomas

  Unamerican by Cody Goodfellow

  Fallout by Sam Stone

  Eldritch Lunch by Adam Bolivar

  Little Curly by Neil Baker

  The Day the Music Died by Charles Christian

  The Terror That Came to Dounreay by William Meikle

  The Romero Transference by Josh Reynolds

  It Came to Modesto by Ed Erdelac

  Within the Image of the Divine by Bear Weiter

  Yellow is the Color of the Future by Jason Andrew

  Fears Realized by Tom Lynch

  Professor Patriot and the Doom that Came to Niceville by Christine Morgan

  Rose-Colored Glasses by Michael Szymanski

  The Preserved Ones by Christopher M. Geeson

  Putnam’s Monster by Scott T. Goudsward

  Operation Switch by Pete Rawlik

  Names on the Black List by Robert M. Price

  The End of the Golden Age by Brian M. Sammons & Glynn Owen Barrass

  INTRODUCTION

  So why Atomic Age Cthulhu, why bring Lovecraftian horror to the 1950s? Because few other points in history seem so tailor made for the paranoia and fear that is so important to the Cthulhu Mythos. While many places in the world were still recovering and rebuilding from the Second World War, this was a good time for America in many ways. The economy and industry were roaring, the middle class exploded and it seemed like everyone could own their own home, car, or perhaps even one of those new amazing televisions, and the nation was filled with pride over a hard won victory. Very few, if any other decade is remembered more fondly and viewed through thicker rose-colored glasses than the 1950s is for Americans. It was a time of innocence where the music, movies, cars, and everything was just so much better than anything before or since. It was a time of progress and strong moral values and optimism. The future never seemed brighter. And yet, all that was largely a façade. Just below the shiny surface of “everything is great” there was a festering fear that wrapped its clammy tentacles around everyone regardless of race, sex, or age.

  Never before in history did the world face a global threat as it did in the shadow of the A-bombs, and later the even more devastating H-bombs. Mankind had always waged war, but now humanity had the power to eradicate all life on the planet with the press of a button. Educational films were made to show how to survive a nuclear blast, and at the movie theaters the classic monsters of the 30s and 40s were replaced by the horrors spawned from that atom. Children were instructed to crawl under their desks at school if “The Bomb” was dropped, as if a few inches of wood would make any difference. Many regular families either had new bomb shelters dug into their back yards, or converted existing basements and storm cellars into something with a more grim purpose.

  Then there were the unseen dangers, the enemies that were everywhere, even in our midst. There were the usual cultural threats, exemplified in this decade by devilish rock n’ roll, morally corrupt books like Lolita and Catcher in the Rye, disgusting nudie magazines like Playboy, and then there were the sinister comic books that were corrupting the minds of the youngest readers. A real world monster from Wisconsin named Ed Gein shocked the country with his vile crimes to such an extent that he would spawn fictional nightmares for decades to come such as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs.

  But books, movies, and even the rare psychotic predator were one thing, the threat of a very real but unknown army of people, striving to overthrow the entire government and strip away all personal freedom, was quite another. This cabal of evildoers were everywhere, could be anyone including you neighbors, friends, politicians, the actors you idolized in cinema, the entertainers that sang to your children, or maybe even your family members. Of course we’re talking about the dreaded Red Menace, the godless communists. Those dastardly Reds were spreading all over the globe in the 1950s; they were even reaching into cold depths of space by the end of the decade. These commies had to be stopped by any means necessary, lest the good people of America lose everything and if that meant undertaking an old fashion witch-hunt of American citizens, then that was a small price to pay for safety.

  So in the 1950s you have people thinking that everything is A-OK, but in reality you’ve got a global threat that could change the world as we know it, one that can’t be fought against and if ever unleashed, barely survived. There’s an insidious corruption growing, spreading, influencing the young and easily led. Not to mention a virtual cult of secretive people working in the shadows to further their own nefarious ends. Sure sounds like a place and time perfect for the Cthulhu Mythos to us.

  So here you have Atomic Age Cthulhu, bringing Lovecraftian horror to the postwar golden age. Within the pages of this book you will find stories about creeping, crawling menaces far more foul than any communist. Movies, music, television, and comic books have the potential to corrupt the minds, dreams, and sanity of people in ways never even thought possible in Seduction of the Innocent. The devastating nuclear weapons are a very real threat, but here you will learn that they pale in comparison to the horrors of the Cth
ulhu Mythos when unleashed.

  This is Atomic Age Cthulhu, remember to duck and cover.

  Glynn Owen Barrass and Brian Sammons

  BAD RECEPTION

  BY JEFFREY THOMAS

  The 1954 RCA Craig with its seventeen inch screen had cost Stan a whopping $190. Sometimes he regretted not going for the Barton with a twenty-one inch screen, but that would have been fifty bucks more. He made a fair wage at the vast Plymouth factory on Detroit’s Lynch Road, but that didn’t mean he could afford to squander it.

  He was grateful he had passed the automobile plant’s required medical exam. As a Marine, seeking shelter in a trench from North Korean mortar fire, he had sustained a head injury that had required the insertion of a large metal plate in the front of his skull. His head there was markedly depressed. Despite his admission that he suffered chronic headaches, he had passed muster. Furthermore, his supervisor at the auto plant was a World War Two vet, who had taken an immediate liking to him. Maybe it was pity, Stan thought. In any case, he had been working at Plymouth for three months now, his first job since his release from the VA hospital.

  Generally Stan was a frugal man, living alone in a small second-floor apartment, eating Swanson TV dinners in front of his new TV, but a television was more than an indulgence these days; it was a necessity. Especially for a man living alone, with no wife and children.

  Stan’s wife was Lucy Ricardo. His sons were David and Ricky Nelson. His best friend was Joe Friday. His dog was Lassie.

  Like any good husband, father, friend, and master, Stan often had to undertake extra efforts to ensure the company of his loved ones…to coax and cajole these cathode ray phantoms into their visitations. In that way, his TV was a modern day ouija board. Though the Craig featured ‘ROTOMATIC TUNING’ to ‘pin-point your station for you automatically,’ and ‘MAGIC MONITOR’ circuits to ‘screen out interference’. Stan relied on a set of rabbit ears resting atop the box-like TV case, without which he’d be a medium without a planchette. This device consisted of a small black sphere from which sprouted two telescopic “ears,” acting as conductors, and between them something like a twisted wire helix. Making adjustments was such a standard routine that Stan barely noticed himself having to set down his TV dinner or bottle of beer to rise from his lumpy armchair and tweak one or both of the antennae just so. One didn’t question the limitations of technology when that technology was all one knew.

  Stan thought the dipole antenna’s black orb with its twin insect feelers resembled the helmet of some outer space monster, poking its head up from behind the TV to gaze back at him as he sat in his otherwise darkened living room with the television’s gray illumination fluttering over him. On weekends, and sometimes even during the week, he would fall asleep there in his armchair with a bottle of Schlitz still in hand. He lied to himself that the beer dulled the pain of his headaches, when in fact it only intensified his suffering by leaving him with crippling hangovers. At least it helped wash down the aspirin.

  Tonight, while slumped back in his chair, he dreamed he was at the plant—but whereas in his daily work he was on the team that installed the steering column, steering gear mechanism, steering wheel gearshift, and even the rear bumper of fish-faced American cars—in his dream he was instead helping to assemble hulking Sherman tanks of the type that had been used in Korea. In fact, the Plymouth plant had supported war-time efforts in the past by manufacturing trucks for the military, though Stan had never been part of such an operation. He had also learned that in a special clean room at the Plymouth facility, a team of Chrysler engineers had developed a cost-saving process for the military, electroplating steel drums with nickel in order to help refine uranium for the creation of atomic bombs, including the very first atom bomb. But Stan had of course never witnessed this project, either.

  Working on the tank assembly, just as in Plymouth’s real-life operations, was a mix of men and women, white and black. One of these workers was Alice, a young black woman with warm eyes and a bright easy smile. He had dreamed of Alice before. Standing on the far side of the tank they currently labored over, she looked up and gave him one of those big white smiles. Encouraged by this, Stan overcame his shyness to ask her, “Say, Alice, what are we making all these tanks for, anyway? I thought the war was over.”

  “There’s another one coming, honey,” she told him. She called everyone honey, but it made Stan’s heart give a little kick every time, even in dreams, as if she only ever said it to him.

  “Always is,” said Frank, another worker close by. “Another war, that is,” he clarified.

  “This one’s gonna be different,” Alice told them both. “Don’t know why we’re even gonna bother, though. No way we can win this one.”

  “The USA not winning a war?” Frank said. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “We’ll all be out of our minds,” Alice said, no longer smiling. “When we see them.”

  “Who is ‘them,’ Alice?” Stan asked her.

  She turned her now solemn gaze to Stan, and she was so pretty he almost didn’t notice the fear in her eyes. “Can’t tell you that, honey.”

  “What’s it, a secret?” Frank taunted. “You damn Negros gonna rise up against us, is that it?”

  “Can’t tell you who they are,” Alice repeated, unblinking, not taking her eyes off Stan’s. “Couldn’t if I tried.”

  Stan woke from this dream to the Indian Head Test Pattern on his seventeen-inch screen, blurred as if it weren’t tuned in properly, when in fact the blurring was from the pain that fizzed like static in his skull.

  Stan slouched in front of his TV with his third beer in hand. He couldn’t be bothered to shove a TV dinner in the oven tonight.

  Framed in the Craig’s glass screen, a window onto an easy make-believe, the world was all black and white.

  Tonight Lucy and Ethel had somehow wound up atop the Empire State Building dressed as Martian invaders, in bizarre costumes with insect-like feelers and wearing prosthetic noses, jabbering in some weird outer space language. The tight costume emphasized Lucy’s bust, and Stan found himself becoming aroused, just as he had in that episode when burglars tied Lucy up with rope and put a gag in her mouth. The beer in him made the scene all the more surreal. He was torn between changing the channel to spare his brain—already filled to bursting with agony both literal and figurative—or unzipping his fly to alleviate his frustrations.

  He had lost his job today.

  He blamed Frank, of course, but he also blamed the pain in his skull. A storm had begun rolling in late in the afternoon, the summer sky weighted with iron gray clouds, and he could swear that changes in barometric pressure, and maybe changes in the air from dry to damp, had an effect on the steel plate in his skull. His headache today had sent spots of burning color swarming across his vision, like weird organisms viewed through a microscope.

  He should blame Schlitz, too, because he’d had to endure a hangover at work this morning, but mostly it was Frank.

  At work they called Stan the Gorilla. He had overheard it behind his back, but sometimes the other workers like Frank had even teased him to his face. It was not only because Stan was tall and heavy-set, but because the way his metal-patched cranium dipped radically, it gave his head a concave slope like that of a gorilla. He’d tried to ignore these jokes, had even laughed along self-consciously that time he had caught another worker holding a piece of steel up in front of his own forehead and staggering around with a slack expression, like a zombie, while the other men snickered. But today they had gone too far.

  Stan had cornered Alice at a time when there was apparently no one else around, just as the workers were returning from lunch break, at her station where she helped assemble instrument panels. He had been summoning the courage to ask her out for weeks, and today he had finally stammered, “Hey, Alice, I was wondering if, uh, you’d like to catch a movie with me sometime. They say On the Waterfront is really good. You know…Marlon Brando? Or, um, The Atomic Kid with Mickey Rooney
sounds fun.”

  Alice had looked at him with a mix of surprise and sympathy. Or was it shock and pity? And not without a dash of horror. Stan figured the shock was partly from being asked out by a white man, and mostly from being asked out by a disfigured white man. After a stunned second or two she said, “Aw, honey, I’m sorry but I already have a fella. Thanks for offering, anyway…that’s awful sweet of you.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, immediately looking away, no longer able to meet her eyes. He shrugged. “I just thought. Anyway…sorry. See ya around.” And he had quickly turned to shamble off toward his own work area.

  But someone, probably one of the white women Alice worked with, had obviously overheard him…and told others what she’d heard. Because in no time, some of the men in Stan’s own area were laughing loudly and gesturing toward him. When Stan looked up from his work, there was Frank in front of him, saying to another worker named Jack, “You see how it is, Jack? If you can’t get yourself a nice regular white woman, you go for the next best thing, figuring she ain’t gonna be as picky.”

  “Hey,” Mike said, chuckling, “it ain’t no surprise the Gorilla would want to go with a monkey.”

  Stan didn’t consider his reaction, and didn’t hesitate in acting. He straightened up, took two strides toward the men, clapped each on the side of the head with one of his big hands, and forced their skulls together with a loud thunk. Mike dropped like the proverbial sack of potatoes. Frank managed to shuffle back a few steps, staring at Stan in dazed disbelief, before he went down.

  Stan’s boss took him aside later and was very stern, though he could have been worse about it, because he told Stan he was sorry when he fired him. Stan didn’t see Alice as he was walked out, but he supposed the story would get back to her. He wondered how she’d feel about it. He only hoped she wouldn’t be harassed by her coworkers henceforth.

  On his way out Frank, now awake and holding a cold wet towel to the side of his head, had shouted after him, “You’re crazy, you know that? Battle fatigue, huh, Stanley? Is that it?”