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

by Robert Price

  When Talbot came in at ten, the sheets were still twisted in a sweaty noose from when he got up. But now a man in a raincoat and a green Stetson fedora sat on the bed, smoking Talbot’s last Lucky Strike.

  “How’s the stag film business treating you, Tarkovsky?” His smile was like a leather bag overflowing with loaded dice. Picture Jack Oakie on a Benzedrine drip and nine years without slumber.

  “Can’t complain,” Talbot said. “Beats the hell out of jail.” His starch only held out for a few seconds before he rolled his eyes at the ruddy, acne-scarred face of the panty-sniffing peeper who wrecked his life.

  “You’re not as big a surprise as you make out,” Talbot said.

  “What gave me away?”

  “The studio head tried to write me a kiss-off check with a broken arm tonight, so I figured I must be due.”

  Cooley smiled sadly and tapped ash on Talbot’s pillow.

  Talbot patted himself down and threw up his hands in surrender. “You must be tired, you didn’t even trash the place this time,” he said.

  “We don’t have to go through that, pal.” Cooley got up and moved like smoke between him and the door. “We’re old friends now, right? Friends don’t keep secrets.”

  Sweat popped on his brow. His feet kicked chips off the cracked linoleum. “You fingered me and blacklisted me and all you could prove was that I fought for my country, I voted for Eisenhower, and the most radical group I belonged to was the Writer’s Guild. Why do you still do it?”

  “You should’ve represented yourself, ‘stead of wasting all that dough on that sheenie lawyer.” Pulling a nightstand drawer, the man took out a dull brown box, flipped it open with his thumb. The Bronze Star looked like a cheap Xmas ornament in his big, callused hand. “She let you keep all this? Man, she must’ve been sweet on you, even after all the dirt you did her. Maybe you should go back and try to patch it up. I could swear an affidavit you ain’t getting any on the side, now.”

  The dummy in #7 was singing that Marlene Dietrich song from The Blue Angel in an awful, mocking falsetto. The dog in 9 barked and bit the wall. The dummy screamed, “Cock zich oys, nudzi!”

  Cooley picked up the nearest heavy thing—a Writers’ Guild Award for Best Written Film Concerning Problems with the American Scene in 1949—and threw it at the wall. It went right through the flimsy sheetrock and shattered something expensively loud in 9. The Doberman whined.

  Dropping the spent cigarette on the floor, Cooley blew smoke in Talbot’s ear with his next, whispered words. “How’d you like to work in real pictures again? Maybe even direct…”

  Talbot’s gaze roved all over Cooley without finding his eyes. “I don’t know any more than the last time you kicked my door down, Cooley. And I’m still no belly-crawler.”

  “You won’t have to go in front of a committee. You won’t have to go on Last Man Out or write a mea culpa for Red Channels. You just have to do what you do. Make pictures. Come in with me now, or when we subpoena you tomorrow morning. You don’t want to see the matinee show.”

  A fountain made of four big concrete clamshells drooled indigo-tinted water in the center of the Tahitian Arms’ tiki-infested courtyard. Fritz lurched out at them in his bathrobe, holding an ice pack to his head. “Who the hell you think you are?”

  Cooley waved a badge at him like a fastball. “Special Investigator from the House Committee for Un-American Activities. Uncle Sam sent me to kick your rotten kraut dog to death.”

  Fritz popped a vein in his temple. “That dog is a champion purebred, he pour the pork to Lana Turner, you should some respect to show…”

  Cooley kicked Fritz in the crotch, grabbed his breadstick neck and threw him headfirst at the fountain. Fritz broke the bottom shell with his face and flopped under the syrupy trickle of too-blue water.

  Adolf came barreling out the window screen of 9 and padded right past Fritz to leap through the saggy screen door of 7. High-pitched, asthmatic screams and weeping followed Adolf as the Doberman came back out and sped away from the Tahitian Arms with the mutilated ventriloquist’s dummy dangling from its jaws.

  Talbot refused a shot of bourbon at the Timbuktu Room on Normandie. “Just as well,” Cooley allowed. “They piss in the white man’s drinks. But if you’d rather be seen at the Brown Derby or the Beachcomber on my arm, we can do that thing, instead.” To the bartender, “Just the bottle, Buckwheat.”

  “You forgot I don’t drink,” Talbot shouted over the noise. The club was a bottomless cavern, blue with smoke more grass than tobacco. On the tiny thrust stage, Pharaoh Jones and the Nile Crocodiles turned ‘Caravan’ into a ferocious jungle fertility rite. Half the brass section dropped their horns and picked up machetes and hatchets, which they banged on tin pails. Pharaoh Jones kicked over his vibraphone and produced a scythe, spinning and whipping it over the conked heads of the jumping, crazed crowd.

  Cooley poured a shot of bourbon and knocked it back. “What if you could do it over?” His yellow teeth clenched as his gag reflex kicked in. It was a near thing, but he kept it down. “If you could go back, would you just name some names and get it over with?”

  “I’d tell you the same thing I told you in ‘47. Go shit in your hat.”

  “You know all those excellent comrades you had in that artists’ colony back in England, after the war? We found them all, the ones who came back. Your excellent friends rolled over on you. You know what they told us?”

  “I was only there for a month! I was tired, I needed to get away and some friends led me out there. When I was there it was…well, it wasn’t innocent, but it was none of your—”

  “Your cute little English ‘artist colony’ was a nest of Communists, anarchists and sexual deviants. After ‘47, they ceased to exist, and since the Limeys have this brilliant thing called the Secrets Act, they don’t even have to tell us what happened to them.”

  Talbot just shook his head, watching the flash of blades striking sparks onstage. Pharaoh Jones held up a white chicken.

  “You never knew anything worth knowing, Talbot. We always knew that.” Cooley offered Talbot a shot. “The one who fingered you first was a pro… She didn’t know you or your Limey friends. Probably just threw you in to pad her list.”

  Cooley sighed at the untouched shot glass and went to claim it. Talbot threw an uppercut which Cooley caught, twisted and used to lift Talbot off his barstool.

  “You knew I was clean, so why did you ruin my fucking life?”

  Not even mildly upset, Cooley twisted Talbot’s wrist until he somehow had Talbot whimpering at his feet. “Clean?” He picked up the bottle as he dragged Talbot to the back door.

  In the alley, Cooley let him fall and gratefully hug filthy concrete. “Because you were a pinko fellow traveler of dubious character and foreign ideas. Because you threw the First Amendment at a special Congressional investigation, and so violated the Smith Act. Because you held your ideals above your own skin, even over your own country.”

  Inside, Pharaoh Jones did something that made the crowd scream like the club was burning down.

  “America is the only bright candle in the endless night, and a storm is coming. You need to see how dark it really is out there, before we can let you go back to work.”

  Cooley pulled him to his feet and offered him the bottle.

  “You go to hell. I served my country…” Talbot grimaced as he took the bottle and swigged from it. His deep-set eyes were ringed with shadow but glowed in the red neon light. “I’ve never even met anyone who wanted to overthrow the government. You tarred me as a subversive. Why would you do anything for me?”

  “All writers are subversive, see? What do you do, but make up lies for a living? Better a hundred of you ‘innocent’ moral termites go down, than one real Soviet operative goes free to do real harm to this great democracy.” A deep sigh and a hurricane of wet coughing. He snapped his fingers and peeled the cellophane off a fresh pack of cigarettes. “They’re eating us alive from the inside out, and weak sisters
like you are letting it happen.”

  Talbot hugged his arms, trying not to shake. The muscles of his jaw bulged like he was cracking walnuts.

  Cooley stared at him with a tired smile. “Do you love your country?”

  “Even now…yes, I do.”

  “Good for you. Then you might just be able to help save it.”

  Cooley looked away as someone came out of the club. A short young Negro in a green sharkskin suit saw Cooley and spun to go back inside, but Cooley caught him and pinned him to the wall.

  Rifling his pockets, he rubbed a shiny green bundle in the kid’s face. “What’d I tell you about selling this shit?”

  “Man, they all grasshoppers down here. I just sell what they want…”

  “You sell what you’re told to sell.” Stuffing his pockets with bags of white powder, he shoved the kid towards the door.

  “Man, nobody want that shit…it’s…it’s evil…”

  “You push it hard enough, they’ll want it more than air.” He herded the kid back into the club, turned and caught Talbot by the shoulder. Driving him down the alley, Cooley pressed the bundle of sandwich-paper envelopes of grass into his hand. “Smoke up, Hubert. I didn’t forget. We’ve got a long drive and lots to talk about.”

  Prowling westward on Sunset, they hit clubs, restaurants and bars. Cooley braced busboys, pinched pushers, shook scandal rag sheet-sniffers. Passing white powder, demanding answers. Where is SHE? Talbot hid under his hat in the car.

  Waiting down the block from the Formosa Room, Talbot fidgeted with the door latch and looked up the street. Some kind of red carpet gala was gearing up. Arc lights swept the sky from two theaters around the corner. The lights and the noise were constantly on the edge of some almost ecstatic climax. Every night like we just won a war.

  And why not? With every release, we nuke the impossible. Fix history. Fuck the future. Teach our enemies to adore us, and our allies to fear us. Steal their dreams and force-feed them our own. Who cares if we got handed our asses in Korea? John Wayne will keep winning World War 2 forever. The Russians got the Bomb? They’ll never get Marilyn Monroe. Hollywood even slew the HUAC dragon, if only in its dreams. Gary Cooper left it to die with lead in its guts in High Noon.

  Clearing his throat, he said, “Thank goodness for movie stars.”

  Cooley spat. “America finally has some royal feet to kiss.”

  “Bullshit,” Talbot said. “With movie stars, we got walking talking gods.”

  Cooley chuckled. “Must’ve been a hell of a kick, playing puppeteer and making all those fancy little tin gods dance and say your stupid words, eh, Tarkovsky?”

  “You know how it feels.” His eyes were red, his face stupidly beatific, but his hands still shook when he wasn’t trying to strangle them.

  “You can go back to work wherever you want. After…”

  “After making agitprop for the American way of life. The American worker is the grease that lubes the gears of this great nation.”

  “That’s the ticket. We don’t need to push the propaganda; we just need to make something everybody will watch, that’ll open the right doors in their heads so the real program gets through.”

  “The real program?”

  “It’s subliminal, Mr. Talbot.” The woman’s voice, husky and languid, came from close behind him. “The Chinese call it xi nao, or ‘brainwashing.’”

  Cooley jumped out of the car. “Ah, here’s our missing comrade. Now it’s a Party.” Whistling the Internationale, he came around and opened the door for the woman who stood on the curb.

  Her platinum hair was a shock of spun sugar curls wrapped in a red scarf. Her figure was a secret closely held by a fur-trimmed burgundy frock coat. She smoked a black cigarette in a long red holder. She had a wide, lush mouth and migraine-colored eyes. She glanced at Talbot with a calculated flash of frigid heat, but she demurred at introducing herself. She slid into the front passenger seat and Cooley slammed the door.

  “Hugh Talbot,” he brayed as he started the engine, “may I introduce Her Majesty the Red Queen of Hollywood, Miss Lila Corliss. I do believe you are acquainted with each other by reputation…” He winked at Talbot and made a lewd hand gesture.

  Talbot turned away and began to roll a reefer. The grass kept spilling out onto the floor tiled in stained issues of Variety, Hush, Aware, Red Channels and Police Gazette. The carpet underneath was red-black and sticky and stank like a butchers’ shop.

  Swinging out onto the road ahead of an Italian sport coupe and a howling pack of taxis, the royal blue ’53 DeSoto Fire Dome Deluxe sedan left smoking black rubber on the red carpet in front of the Formosa Room. Talbot left a racing stripe of vomit on Doris Day and Howard Keel.

  Driving up winding Coldwater Canyon, they ditched the city. Burnt orange Chinese lanterns adorned green-black eucalyptus groves filled with parked cars with curtains. Halloween shadows gilded a long line of looming, impressively ugly palaces like an audition for House of Usher. Talbot wanted to pull over to be sick again. Cooley told him to hang out the window.

  “You know what America’s real weakness is? Well, any modern superpower, I mean.” Cooley killed the dregs of the bourbon and lit a cigarette. “It’s not a nation of people bound by blood, see, by a common culture. It’s just a bunch of strangers tied together by an idea.”

  An oncoming convertible filled with drunken beach bunnies swerved to pass the DeSoto. Cooley tossed the bottle to smash their windshield.

  “You look at the War. Germany kept fighting ‘til we came knocking on Schickelgruber’s bunker, and the Japs had to be atom-bombed twice before they folded.”

  Talbot rolled up the window and laid down on a back seat the size of a prison bunkbed. “But their fascism couldn’t hold a candle to ours.”

  “Do go on,” said Miss Corliss.

  “People’s loyalty to an idea is paper-thin when push comes to shove, see? There are foreign powers—shit, you don’t even want to know—that would seek to infiltrate our civilian population and adulterate it. Our borders are like a fucking sieve, and more of them creep in every day to suck us dry. They’ve even tried to strike at us through our drinking water.”

  Talbot sat up and wiped his mouth on his sleeve and rubbed his eyes. “Boy, when you go crazy, you don’t stop halfway for a manicure.”

  Cooley turned and raised a fist just high enough to make Talbot flinch. “It’s true. The Russkies do it to their own satellite countries to stunt their mental development, see? But they use a crude fluoride-based system. We’ve had to take steps to protect our water supply, and fortify the civilian populace who consumes it.”

  Lighting a cigarette and running his fingers through his dirt-encrusted hair, Talbot said, “We put fluoride in our water. Is that a Communist plot, too?”

  “It only looks like fluoride. These mineral molecular chains, they’re pretty rare in nature. They tweak the blood chemistry just so much… it’s untraceable, but it’ll change you just enough so we can know really who’s one of us, and who’s a foreign agent.”

  Miss Corliss fitted a new cigarette into her holder. Her expression of polite interest had not changed since Cooley began his drunken civics lecture. “That’s a fascinating idea, Mr. Cooley. Why, one could immunize the working class against disease, and…”

  “Sure, one could, if this was Red China.” Cooley guffawed like a mule. “But this is a question of national security. If you grow up with our tap water, it makes you unable to knock up, or get pregnant with, a foreigner. Pretty soon, Americans will be more like each other than like anyone from outside. We’ll be a true American race…hell, someday, our own species.”

  “Sure,” Talbot groaned, “that’ll fix everything.”

  Corliss smiled a big million-dollar grin. “Is it just you who believes this, or are all of you experimenting with that new Swiss hallucinogen…”

  Cooley blinked at her, genuinely alarmed. He stared at his hand on the wheel as if counting and recounting his fingers. “Not much farth
er now,” he mumbled.

  They emerged from the canyon and turned west on the twisted spine of Mulholland Drive. The heavens below them were crazed with stars. Talbot scrubbed his eyes, but it was still upside down. The stars lay in the basin of a vast valley, while the defeated sky above was an empty vault of dishwater-colored dust.

  They cruised along the ridge until they couldn’t see another light. They sailed through a gate with a couple armed MP’s standing at attention with German shepherds on leashes. Cooley threw them a Nazi salute, whistling the “Duck and Cover” jingle through his crooked teeth.

  Low, beige Quonset huts and shadowy mounds of machinery passed by. “Nike missile base,” Cooley said, “on the surface.” The DeSoto stopped beside a row of cinderblock bunkers with their own electrified fence. Talbot looked over the seat and immediately started shaking his head, moaning, “No, no, no.”

  “Oh, so you figured it out, already?”

  “Oh no, you want somebody else.”

  “No, we need you.”

  “But I can’t—”

  “You said you wanted to go back to work. Here’s your chance.”

  “I won’t. I can’t…not like that…”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  Talbot pointed at the red and white transmitter tower looming overhead. “There is no goddamned way I’m working in television.”

  Inside the main building, their driver’s licenses were taken, fingerprints checked, and a lock of hair and a vial of blood taken from each of them, including Cooley. Then they got in an elevator and went down three floors.

  Beyond the armed guards and the bank vault doors, it looked like the front office and bullpen of a TV station. A morgue filled with reels of film and a transmitter room filled with looming towers of blinking lights and whirring fans fed off the bullpen, but there were no studios, no sets or other signs of life.

  “What station is this?” Talbot asked.

  “Channel Zero,” Cooley said. “Whole operation is underground, buried in lead. Officially, they only go on the air when the bombers knock out everything else. Stay put. I’m gonna go see a man about a horse.” He slipped out of the room.