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

by Robert Price

  Bill

  October 16

  Joaquin said he knows the way to the Black City. I met him at the bar last night. He said he’d take me. I wasn’t sure what to bring. A pith helmet? In the end, I just brought myself wearing a gray suit and fedora. Joaquin smiled when he saw me back at the bar.

  “Are you ready, Bill?” he said.

  “Un memento.” I ordered a shot of tequila to steady my nerves. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Joaquin offered me his hand. That surprised me. Every imaginable perversion happened in Mexico City. But it was always behind closed doors, in the shadows. As we walked down the street holding hands, nobody took any notice of us. No, that’s not true. They noticed all right. But they looked away. Street vendors frying animal parts not fit for consumption by man or beast turned their heads as we passed. Two peso whores with lips the color of a baboon’s ass went inside and locked the doors. We were shunned by the lowest of the low, outcasts among the outcast. It was a good feeling, a feeling of power.

  It wasn’t long before we reached our destination: a crumbling old church at the end of a narrow alley. I didn’t see the alley until Joaquin jerked my arm and pulled me into it. I don’t think anyone else saw the alley either. My skin turned clammy with fear. I had started down a path from which there was no return.

  The church had been abandoned for years, maybe centuries. What little light that shone through the grimy stained glass windows did little to relieve the ancient gloom. Ancient pews so rotten they wouldn’t have supported a skeleton’s weight faced an empty nave. There was no Jesus nailed to a slab of wood looking down on us, no Mary weeping tears of blood. This was another kind of church. It was here before the Spaniards came with their crosses and guns, before the Aztecs had come to rip out the still-beating hearts of men in the name of their vile deities.

  “This is not a young land,” Joaquin said. “It is old and dirty and evil. Before the Spaniards came. Before the Indians and the serpent-men of Valusia. The Old Ones were. The Old Ones are. And the Old Ones shall be. They wait dreaming, locked in the in-between places, waiting for someone to turn the key.”

  He released a catch in the lectern, which slid aside to reveal a flight of stone steps that led beneath the pulpit. Lighting a half-guttered candle in a rusty lantern lying upturned on the floor, he beckoned me to follow him down the steps into the darkness. By all rights I should have fled. Run screaming out of that den of blasphemy, back into the company of the living. But I was a marked man. I was like him now, an agent of the Old Ones.

  At the bottom of the steps was an underground chamber. There was an altar here, an oblong slab of smooth onyx. I wondered briefly if Joaquin intended to lay me out on it and plunge a dagger into my chest. Instead, he felt along the altar’s edge with his fingers and found a secret chamber inside the black stone. He withdrew a wooden box, whose lid was engraved with strange hieroglyphs.

  “Take it,” he said.

  I looked into his black eyes, which were filled with stars and galaxies. This was no man, no member of the human race.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He threw back his head and crowed. “I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Begone and ask no more.”

  I was pushed by an invisible force, back up the steps and out of the ruined church. I stumbled from the invisible alley and back into the thrum and bustle of humanity once more. I didn’t stop running until I was back in my room, where I opened the box. Inside was a little glass vial, which was filled with a powder the exact color of the moon. The fabled hypnosium mentioned in De Vermiis Mysteriis. I’ll send you a report when I get back.

  Bill

  October 19? 20? 21?

  I started the ritual. The ritual is like tea. You got your spoon—that’s for mixing the junk with water until it dissolves into a clear solution. You got your cup—that’s to hold the water to put in the spoon. And you got your needle—the needle’s got a thousand and one uses—it’s your ace in the hole, your secret weapon and your skeleton key all rolled up into one.

  I held the vial up to the light, peering at the silvery dust piled up inside. Then I pulled out the stopper, breaking the seal made by a nameless alchemist who’d lived when Atlantis was young. Carefully, I tap-tap-tapped powder into my spoon. Just a little of it, just enough to try ‘er out. Flake by flake, I measured it. Each one of those miniscule flakes was worth more than a gold brick to a Conquistador. I scrupulously replaced the stopper and set the vial on the windowsill, out of reach of accidents. I drew 10 cc’s of water into the needle from the cup and squirted it into the spoon, where it pooled at the bottom of the concavity. Then I pulled the plunger out of the needle—it’s like a Swiss army knife, I tell you—and used the rubber end to mix the flakes into the water. It glittered like stardust for a second then turned clear as crystal. I popped the plunger back and drew the solution into the pointy tip of the needle through a tiny wad of cotton to filter out any impurities. I forced the air out of the top of the needle—carefully, so as not to lose a single drop of that dream-juice, and tap-tap-tapped the side to dislodge the tiny bubbles. I took off my necktie and tied it around my arm, real tight so the throbbing blue veins stood out. My favorite one is a mighty leviathan that runs straight down the middle. But it was all crusted over, so I settled for the next biggest, a tributary just to the right of it. I thrust the needle into my arm and hit it on the first try. I knew I hit the vein by the unmistakable popping sensation it made. I drew the plunger back and was rewarded by the flood of blood rushing in and alchemically combining with the solution of hypnosium. I mustered my courage and kicked it. I only had moments to pull the needle out. In a matter of seconds, the nod set in. And the dish ran away with the spoon.

  At first I thought I’d gotten a hot shot. That’s when someone substitutes poison—usually strychnine—for your junk. But no, this was the real McCoy. I wasn’t in a shabby hotel room in Mexico City anymore. I was in a perfumed garden, an Arabian palace. A fountain bubbled in a courtyard and veiled houris roamed ready to perform acts of exquisite pleasure. They had whatever equipment you needed—penises, vaginas, assholes, the gamut. And when you were done with them, they evaporated in a puff of sweet-smelling smoke, leaving you on a feather bed with a hookah on the side table and an unlimited supply of opium, hashish and tobacco. Too soon I’d wake back in my dingy room in Mexico City, and quickly fill the needle again with hypnosium, my beloved hypnosium.

  I don’t know how long I lingered in this garden of unearthly delights. It was beyond space and time. It could have been a few minutes; it could have been a thousand years. I don’t know how many of the houris I consumed. It might have been an infinite number. But there came a time when I was approached by cold-eyed guards with bare, muscular chests and scimitars dangling from their waists. They took me to an audience with their master, a nervous man wearing a frayed tweed suit and greasy wire-rimmed glasses. He was sitting on an embroidered silk pillow, the stem of a hookah in his hand. It took me a minute, but then I recognized him.

  “Barlow?”

  He smiled, revealing blackened teeth. “Hi, Bill,” he said, taking a hit from his pipe. He exhaled a cloud of fragrant smoke. “Where are my manners?” he added, gesturing to one of the other stems of the hookah. I took a hit myself. The hashish in the bowl crackled as it burned.

  “What the hell is going on?” I said. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I am dead. In the waking world, at least. But it seems I merely traded one realm for another.”

  An old man wearing a turban sat slumped in one corner. He looked like shit. His eyes were red-rimmed and sunken into their sockets, but still they darted back and forth as he read a strange, mildewed book in his lap, his long-nailed fingers obsessively turning the pages back and forth and back and forth.

  “That is not dead which can eternal lie,” he crooned madly. “And with strange aeons, even death may die.”

  I’d met my share of repulsive characters, but these two took the cake. Just bein
g in their presence made me queasy. I started to back away, but the guard grabbed my arm and held me in place.

  “Look, I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” I said. “But I’d like to get back to smoking opium and screwing houris, if that’s all right.”

  The Mad Arab took a hit from another one of the stems of the hookah and started coughing convulsively. He spat a gray-green globule of what could have been part of one of his lungs onto the floor and fixed me with a stare that made my blood run cold with horror. “In his house in R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

  Barlow’s skin turned yellow and then green and his flesh melted into viscous rivulets of transparent jelly, revealing a monstrous black centipede that gibbered and writhed on the silk pillow, which was now covered with mucous slime that pooled on the floor nauseatingly. Waves of fecal stench filled the room and I vomited a colorful mush onto my shoes. The centipede looked at me with Barlow’s icy blue eyes, although they were now as lifeless as a crab’s eye on the end of a stalk.

  “You are an agent of the Old Ones now. You will be receiving your instructions soon. Remember: nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”

  Then I awoke on my piss-soaked mattress, shivering and sweaty. The Atlantean vial was empty. Shrill, discordant piping carried into my open window. I didn’t have the strength to get up and close it. The habit had fixed on me. I would have to score another fix, and soon.

  I set out to find the church that Joaquin or Nyarlathotep or whatever his name was had taken me to. Maybe there was more hypnosium in the basement. I walked up and down the street where the alley had been, but try as I might I couldn’t find it. On the sidewalk, someone had set up an altar filled with flickering candles, flowers and Virgin Marys. Christ, how the Mexicans loved the Virgin Mary. Do what you mother tells you, boys.

  “Hello, Beel,” came a weary, disdainful voice. “Enchoying the night air?” I turned around to see Detective Muñoz standing behind me wearing a cheap suit that was too small for him and a sweat-stained fedora. He had been hassling me since arriving in Mexico City, trying to get the drop on me. “I have a few questions to ask you about the death of your wife, down at the station.”

  I considered making a run for it. I’d have had a good chance of outrunning this lard-ass flatfoot. But then I saw a couple of Federales coming towards me from the other end of the street. La policia. I was trapped like a rat. I decided to be gracious about it.

  “By all means, detective. Let’s you and me have a little chat.”

  The interrogation room was windowless and empty but for a plain wooden desk. Puke green walls with peeling paint. Hot as hell. All police interrogation rooms were the same. Muñoz sat on one side of the desk and I sat on the other. He offered me a cigarette and I took it, inserting it in my mouth and lighting it in one deft motion. Muñoz produced a .38 Special—the one I’d used to kill my wife—and the hideous statue of the octopus man I’d inherited from Barlow. He placed them on the table. Then the detective opened a manila file folder and flipped through its considerable contents.

  “Some tasty stuff in here, amigo,” he said. “You sure done a lot of drugs. Morphine, Dilaudid, heroin. Like to ride the horse, eh?”

  “I’ve cleaned up my act,” I said. “I’m a married man now.”

  Muñoz slammed a meaty fist down on the desk. “You were a married man. Before you put a bullet in your wife’s head. Whatchoo got to say about that, amigo?”

  He didn’t sound like my amigo, and I had nothing to say.

  “Nothing would give me more pleasure than to put a gringo junkie like you in jail. Throw away the key, you know what I mean?”

  I did know what he meant, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “But it looks like you got some friends in high places.” He slammed the file shut. Then he stood up and opened the door, admitted a tall gaunt man in a trench coat and snap brim fedora. Muñoz made a gun shape with two fingers and a thumb and mimed shooting me in the head. Then he left the interrogation room, leaving me alone with the newcomer.

  “Special Agent Armitage, FBI,” he said, extending a hand, which I shook. It closed around mine like a steel vise. What was it with these all-American types and their death-grip handshakes? Armitage sat in the chair Muñoz had vacated and leafed through the file the detective had left on the desk.

  “You’ve been a naughty boy, Bill,” he said. “But I think you’re just the man for the job.” He pulled a new file from inside his coat and laid it on the desk on top of mine. This file was labeled TOP SECRET. He opened it. There was a photograph of a man wearing a dark suit. His jaw was abnormally elongated and he had a constipated expression.

  “Ever hear of a man named Howard Phillips Lovecraft?”

  “Sure. Pulp fiction writer, right? Never read his stuff myself. Heard it’s pretty trashy.”

  “That was his cover story. We have a big file on him back at the Bureau. This is just the tip of the iceberg. He’s been involved in subversive, anti-American activities. Old J. Edgar himself is interested in him.”

  “Didn’t he die back in the thirties?”

  “We’ve looked into it. We believe his death in ‘37 was faked and that he’s hiding out somewhere in the South Pacific. He’s the leader of a vast conspiracy whose sole purpose is to bring down the United States government and pave the way for an extraterrestrial invasion. Probably in cahoots with the commies, although we can’t prove that yet.”

  “What’s all this got to do with me?”

  Special Agent Armitage offered me a Lucky Strike. I took it. He took one himself and we lit up together. “We need a deep cover operative. Someone who can infiltrate Lovecraft’s organization. I think your writing background makes you ideally suited for the job.”

  He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a wooden box. Placing the box on the table, he opened it. Inside was a sight more beautiful to me than diamonds: another vial of hypnosium and a syringe. He pushed the box towards me.

  “What do you say, Bill?” he said, baring his canines. “Are you ready to serve your country?”

  I was already rolling back my sleeve. I’d do anything to protect the right to bare arms. In a matter of seconds, I had prepared the solution in a dirty coffee spoon and the needle was poised above a vein.

  “One last thing,” Armitage said. He walked around the desk and slipped the .38 Special in my pocket. “No American should venture into a foreign land unarmed.”

  The cold point of the needle punctured my vein—a vampire’s kiss. The blood spurted into the glass tube with all the urgency of a sexual release. I rammed the plunger home. The last thing I saw was the octopus idol staring at me with bulging fishy eyes.

  November 3, 1951

  47° 9’S 126° 43’W

  It was arranged for me to book passage on a Norwegian freighter, en route from Mexico to Australia. That it be a ship flying the flag of a neutral country was essential to my cover. The FBI must have paid the captain a pretty penny to make a detour to the required co-ordinates: 47° 9’S 126° 43’W. R’lyeh. The Black City. It was my assignment to infiltrate Miskatonic, Inc., a subversive un-American organization based on a tiny island in the South Pacific.

  The Black City was a dream place, a ruin of impossible angles and grotesque carvings of abominable gods. The captain nervously agreed to meet me back at the landing spot in twenty-four hours. But as I watched the rusty tub steam away, I wondered if he’d come back. Why would he? He’d gotten his money. He could always claim I’d been lost at sea. Fucking lutefisk-eating Norwegian.

  I sat down on a toppled column and tapped out the last of the hypnosium into my spoon. I had a kit in my coat pocket. Every junkie does. It had everything I needed: spoon, needle, a bottle of water. I rolled back my sleeve and tied off. That’s when things started getting weird.

  At the center of the city, a vast black monolith rose from the ground like an erect penis. Bestriding its tip was the big brother of my figurine, that revolting octopus thing. At the base of the monolith
was an aperture that yawned open like a starving maw. A fetid, anal stench wafted from the interior. Looks like it was my job to crawl into it. The things a man does for his country. I shimmied up the slimy glistening rectum into the bowels of R’lyeh.

  I found myself in a cavernous cathedral of black onyx. Echoing around the vaulted chamber was a cacophony of clacking typewriters, punctuated by little dings and the occasional fart. Along the wall were hexagonal chambers like the cells of a vast honeycomb.

  I peered into one of the chambers, and saw an emaciated man in the tattered remnants of a tweed suit chained to a typewriter, which he was pounding furiously. It was Barlow. A pulsing tentacle dangled above him, and he greedily sucked it like a teat. I looked over his shoulder at the sheet of paper scrolled through the pincers of his insect-like typewriter. The words typed on the sheet were a tangled briar of obscure adjectives: rugose, gibbous, eldritch, squamous. Barlow popped the tentacle out of his mouth and a translucent white jelly ran down his chin.

  “Hello, Bill,” he smiled, offering the tentacle to me like it was a reefer. “Would you care to try some elder jism?”

  I shook my head no. Shrugging, Barlow went back to sucking and typing, his expression slack with bliss. “Iä Cthulhu,” he droned through his puckered lips. “Iä Yog-Sothoth. Iä Shub-Niggurath.” I left him to his work.

  Making my way past the row of chambers occupied by chained-up writers rat-tat-tatting their keys and suck-suck-sucking jism from tentacles like it was fucking ice cream soda, I came to the heart of the operation, where a giant bat-winged octopus squatted on an onyx throne. This was no statue. This was the thing itself, a living monstrosity, its tentacles winding through the cavern, feeding a thousand junkies like a goat suckling her young.

  The creature turned to look at me, and I saw what looked like a human face covered by a murky layer of green jelly. Using the razor-sharp talon at the end of one its bat wings, the creature sliced a seam down the front of its gelatinous skin from the top of its head to its pulsating asshole. Human hands poked out from the inside of the skin and peeled it away with a horrible schlupping sound. Shedding the now-flaccid octopus skin, a man wearing an immaculately pressed black suit stepped out. He looked perfectly ordinary, except for a queerly protruding jaw, and chuckled at my expression of revulsion.