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

by Robert Price

  “It’s true. You know that plane Buddy has hired? Well he was planning to just go with Waylon and Tommy but when I get to hear of it, I persuade Tommy to let me have his place.”

  “Persuade?” I ask.

  “Okay, we decided it on the toss of a coin and I won.”

  Now one part of me is pleased to hear this because I know Ritchie used to have a fear of flying and I’m glad he’s conquered it. But another part of me is just a teeny-weeny bit envious as I’m dying of flu here and I could really do with being on that plane as well.

  “Listen,” I say, trying to disguise the eagerness in my voice, “did Dion say anything about wanting to go on that plane?” By the way, I reckon Dion’s next single release Teenager in Love is going to be a huge hit.

  “He did mention about it in the dressing room,” Ritchie replies, “but then he went all awkward when it came to the thirty-six dollar air ticket price. Something about thirty-six dollars being the monthly rent his folks had to pay for their apartment when he was growing up in the Bronx and he couldn’t justify the indulgence.” Ritchie shrugs his shoulders. “Funny people eh! You are on in ten minutes, go break a leg!”

  “And you,” I reply although what I’m actually thinking is where’s Waylon Jennings got to, I need a word with him.

  Right, I need to prepare for going on stage but before I do, there’s just a couple more notes I want to jot down in my journal.

  I suppose the sixty-four thousand dollar question anyone would want to ask about the GO2 is: what happened after Fort Bliss? Where to begin? I got shipped out to a place called Area 51, in the middle of the Nevada Desert, to be shown some dead GO2s they had in storage. These included a couple of fish-like creatures found swimming in the Miskatonic River estuary, near Innsmouth in Massachusetts, and the pickled remains of a winged octopus thing. And ‘thing’ is the only word to describe this abomination against nature, recovered about ten years’ previously from a UFO crash site near Roswell, New Mexico.

  I also had more briefings from the Three Stooges. Studied more sections of the Al Azif Grimoire or The Necronomicon as it is also called. And I went on a couple of ‘monster’ hunts with Ivan and Willy. Both expeditions were out on the Great Lakes, up in Canada looking for the Ogopogo, the Manipogo, the Winnipogo and any other of their Pogo cousins who are meant to swim in those deep waters. But we found nothing, despite having the finest sonar equipment Uncle Sam could provide.

  “All very interesting,” as I said to Lancaster one evening over a beer in a downtown El Paso bar, “but what does all this have to do with me? Why do the United States Army special forces need a radio DJ, who’ll be back on civvy street in eighteen months’ time.”

  It was then, well probably about the time we were onto our third round of Buds, that Professor Lancaster let me in on the secret. “It’s all to do with rock ‘n’ roll music, well at least the sound waves created by the music. You know how dogs can react to sounds we can’t hear? Those are ultrasonic high frequency sounds that they can hear but are outside the audible range of the human ear. Then, at the other end of the acoustic scale, literally, are infrasonic sounds. Because of their ultra-low frequency, they are also inaudible to us but sometimes you can feel that sound.”

  “Like when you are standing too close to the speakers at a hop and the bass player has one of those new Fender electric bass guitars and is playing the rhythm line way down low?” I suggest.

  “My point exactly,” says Robbie. “And that’s why Majestic 12 is interested in not just you but a whole stack of other young people in the rock ‘n’ roll music industry. You see exposure to ultrasound and infrasound may not hurt us human beings but these GO2s, because their origins are extraterrestrial, they have an entirely different reaction to sound waves. The noise can actually disable and kill them. The sound waves resonate within their body cavities in such a way that it mashes up their internal organs and turns them into jelly!”

  “No way, Jose,” is all I can bring myself to say.

  Robbie takes another drink from his bottle and nods. “Oh yes my friend, sound waves can kill. Majestic 12 have been working on sonic weapons for a number of years. One of Willy Ley’s friends tipped us off that the Nazis, led by a crazy Austrian called Zippermeyer, had been experimenting with a sonic cannon called a Luftkanone and that kind of jump-started our research. There’s also a Doctor Vladimir Gavreau over in France who is working on sonic guns although so far he has inflicted more harm on his own research team than on any GO2s!

  “Now simultaneously to all this,” says Robbie, staring into my eyes to hold my attention, “we also knew some types of music could have a similar devastating impact. The potential harmful effects have been known for at least a couple of hundred years. For example there was an Italian violinist called Paganini whose virtuoso playing and the notes he could create were so radical for his day that everyone was convinced he must have sold his soul to the Devil to be that good. They said the same thing about Robert Johnson. And why do you think Hank Williams was killed? Because he could naturally sing ultrasonic notes.

  “Music is a weapon and rock ‘n’ roll has made it a whole heap more potent thanks to electric amplification. Thanks to it being broadcast into every home and car by radio. Thanks to every platter the record companies press creating another copy of those killer tracks, the GO2s can be defeated. The Pentagon is developing sonic cannon to tackle these monsters head on but in Majestic 12 we now realize pop music offers an alternative approach. Through people like you and your involvement in the music industry, we can mobilize a whole generation of young Americans to fight for our cause. To wage a guerilla war! Every time a teenager plays a Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent or Everly Brothers disc on the jukebox at their local diner or the record player in their den, they are striking a blow for freedom.”

  “So basically,” I said, “Uncle Sam doesn’t want me for what I can do while I’m in the Army but for what I will be able do when I’m discharged?”

  “Got it in one,” said Robbie, nodding. Then he looked at his watch and said he had to be going. As he stood up to leave, he leaned over to me and whispered “Have you ever thought about the Old Testament story of Joshua and the Siege of Jericho?”

  “You mean how the walls came tumbling down when his priests blew their trumpets? Oh my, I get it now…the Israelites attacked Jericho with a sonic weapon!”

  “Right on the button, that Ark of the Covenant was also some sort of weapon. But did you ever think about the enemy Joshua was fighting?”

  “They were the Canaanites,” I replied, those Bible readings I listened to at Sunday school were not wasted on me!

  “And who did they worship? I’ll tell you who: the fish-god Dagon!”

  “But isn’t he one of The Great Old Ones mentioned in The Necronomicon!” I replied.

  “There you go,” said Robbie, “So now you can see we have not been making up this Alter Kinder stuff as we go along. Congratulations soldier, you are now part of a cause that has been fighting evil since Biblical times. Oh man, I hate these GO2s even more that I hate snakes.” Then he tipped his fedora at me and headed out of the bar. I never saw him again.

  “Five minutes to curtain up Mister Richardson,” I hear one of the stagehands call out to me. Time for me to focus on the present…

  -2-

  Well, I survived tonight’s show. Just goes to show that what doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger. As soon as I walked on stage and felt the vibe from the audience, I forgot about how sick I felt. I performed all my favorites: Bopper’s Boogie Woogie, Little Red Riding Hood, You Made a Monkey Out of Me, Walking Through My Dreams, Pink Petticoats, the slow one Beggar to a King, Big Bopper’s Wedding, a couple of the songs I originally wrote for other people: Running Bear and White Lightnin’ and then I finished off my set with Chantilly Lace. Oh yeah, and I also sang my Purple People Eater novelty number, which is my own personal way of making fun of the GO2s! As Robertson Lancaster once said “People don’t fear something t
hat makes them laugh.”

  After that, I came off stage on a natural high and bumped into Waylon Jennings. My luck was in as I somehow convinced him to swap his seat on the plane with me. Well, he’s young and tough and can survive another night on the bus. Me, I’m from Texas and I don’t do cold. Besides, if I don’t shake off this flu, I won’t be doing much of anything tomorrow.

  Now we’re in the car on the way to the airport. Apparently Buddy hadn’t realized I’d swapped places with Waylon, so as we drove away from the Surf Ballroom, Buddy jokingly called out of the window “Well, I hope your ol’ bus freezes up.”

  And Waylon shouted back “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!”

  We all laughed, even little Ritchie who is no fan of flying.

  By coincidence, Buddy and I had been discussing Ritchie earlier in the week and whether he might make a suitable recruit to the Majestic 12 project. We both feel his Latino background might make him more receptive, whereas Dion is much too much of a street-wise New York City boy to believe in alien monsters crawling up from the depths of the ocean, like that giant octopus in the movie It Came from Beneath the Sea.

  Too right we want more recruits, like Ritchie, for Majestic. We’ve already got young Eddie Cochran signed up, we have high hopes for him. And Elvis too, why else do you think he made no effort to dodge the draft? Elvis is over in Germany now, helping the Army clear out some GO2s the Nazis inadvertently unleashed in the Harz Mountains. As for Buddy, of course he’s involved. In fact he’s been in league with Robbie and the rest of the guys at Majestic far longer than me. He even travels with a little .22 caliber pistol “just in case” he runs into a GO2 on his travels. Me? I can’t help think I’d feel a whole lot happier with something with a little more stopping power, like maybe a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum or even the Colt .45 Peacemaker my granddaddy used to own.

  We reach the Mason City airfield a little after midnight. I notice it’s starting to snow and that the pilot, Roger Peterson, seems to be just a kid. Okay, maybe not as young as Ritchie but still a little green for my liking. Buddy doesn’t seem to care, in fact he seems more interested in my idea for short television clips (music videos is the name I’ve coined for them) we were discussing on the way to the airport. Believe you me, video will be the future of music television.

  Anyway, the three of us settle down in the cabin of the little red and white Beechcraft Bonanza, the pilot opens the throttle and we start taxiing down the runway. We don’t speak during the take-off, much too noisy to make ourselves heard, but once we are in the air, the weather starts to close in and I begin to get a bad feeling about this flight. What worries me is we look to be heading into a whiteout yet the pilot is staring intently at the instrument panels in the cockpit as if to try to make sense of their readings. That’s all we need, a disoriented pilot flying us blind into a blizzard.

  I don’t mention this to Richie, who has his eyes closed. I’m not sure if he is asleep or merely trying to blot out all sensations and conquer his fear of flying but I try to draw Buddy’s attention to our situation, as I’m wondering whether it might be safer to return to the airfield. To my surprise, Buddy is taking no notice of what is happening inside the cabin but instead is peering out through one of the side windows into the gloom.

  “There’s something out there to our left,” he says. It’s big and it’s heading towards us.”

  “Is it another plane?” I ask, leaning over in my seat to share his view.

  “I’m not sure. It has to be, I can make out the wings but it’s showing no lights. Oh, man, I can see those wings more clearly now and they are flapping. Whatever it is, it’s alive. Either a giant bird or flying lizard, maybe even a dragon? Something like those pterodactyl dinosaurs you read about in books.”

  The creature is a lot closer now and I can see its features a little better. It is huge and its wings are like those of a giant bat. But then I catch sight of its head. It is not the beaked head of a bird or even the snapping jaws of a lizard I see. Instead it is an abomination, a nightmare. The front of its head, its face, is a tangle of writhing, twisting tendrils and tentacles.

  Aghast, I look at Buddy and he returns my look of horror. We’ve both seen pictures of this creature before in the pages of The Necronomicon.

  Buddy pulls out his little .22 pistol from his pocket and slides open the cockpit’s side window. “If I can hit it in the eyes, we may have a chance,” he tells me.

  I nod encouragingly but I have my doubts. Then fate deals us a cruel hand as our pilot also catches sight of the creature. Peterson cries out in shock and instinctively hauls on the control column to roll the plane away from the monster. Only then does he realize that, distracted by the snowstorm and the poor visibility, he has allowed the plane to descend too far.

  From where I’m sitting I can see the airspeed indicator. We’re flying at one-hundred-and-seventy knots. From where I’m sitting I can also see the ground rushing towards us.

  So can the pilot and, heedless of the blasphemous horror flying straight towards us through the blizzard, he now pulls hard on the control column to correct our pitch.

  Oh My Sweet Lord he’s too late! He’s lost control of the plane.

  There is an awful tearing sound as the tip of the right wing hits the ground. Then the plane flips over and we begin to tumble and skid, for what seems like an eternity of pain and nausea, in a jumble of debris and screaming, flailing bodies across the snow-covered landscape. In the final moment before everything goes black, the thought enters my head that I sure hope that flying monstrosity ain’t going to be waiting for me when I wake up.

  THE TERROR THAT CAME TO DOUNREAY

  BY WILLIAM MEIKLE

  I didn’t know what to expect. All they’d said was that it was a matter of national security. Just what they wanted with a fifty-year-old doctor of biology with a gammy leg and a drink problem I wasn’t told. I was given a train ticket and a contact name and sent off on an interminably slow train to Thurso.

  Once there I was met by a sergeant and a truck—both of them well past their best. We rattled along an unpaved road for what seemed like hours, coming to a sudden halt at an manned checkpoint. A large sign at the side proclaimed the place to be Dounreay Site, AEC. That didn’t help me much. There was also lettering underneath, but that was mostly covered by a strange construction of leaf and twig that had been hung over it.

  An attendant waved a flashlight and a gun in my face, I showed him my paperwork and we were allowed through to a cordoned off area of Nissen huts with a towering concrete structure beyond.

  The whole site lay along the top of what looked to be a raised beach, with the largest building clustered closest to the sea. A fogbank hung a mile offshore and moonlight danced in rocky coves. In other circumstances I might have found the spot calming, but I was not in the best of moods after my journey.

  Without further ado I was marched inside one of the huts to meet the commander of the base. I’m afraid the Colonel, a stiff little man with a stiffer little moustache, didn’t take to me. From what I understood of my short briefing, I was seconded to this unit to ‘do my bit against the Soviets’. But by the time his orderly led me, via a warren of corridors through and between the maze of Nissen huts, into a lab that butted onto the concrete block, I was still none the wiser. It was only when I was introduced to the head of the team that I began to have some inkling as to why I had been summoned.

  I knew Professor Rankin by reputation as an iconoclast, a visionary…and as mad as a bag of badgers. We’d worked together for a brief period during the war, and last I’d heard he had gone over to the Yanks for a huge stipend at one of the West Coast think tanks. I never expected to meet him here on a remote Scottish shoreline. His unruly mop of white hair shook as he grasped my hand. He was as thin as a rake, but his grip was as hard as cold steel.

  “Ballantine. And not a minute too soon. Come over here, man. You need to see this.”

  He dragged me over to a long trestle covered wit
h electronic gear; all lights, switches, meters and dials.

  “You know this isn’t my thing,” I started, but he was insistent.

  “Just look.”

  He flicked a switch. Lights started to flash, meters started to swing.

  “What am I looking for?” I said after several minutes.

  “Look closer.”

  I was at a loss. Clearly there was something important here I was meant to understand, but for the life of me it just looked like a series of lights and meters. It was only when I gave up looking for an answer that one came to me. I had to squint to see it, but it was there, a persistent flickering shadow that played over the instruments. As elusive as smoke in wind.

  Rankin leaned over and switched off the equipment. Now that I knew what I was looking for I could see it as it dispersed, rising away from the electronic gear.

  “What the hell was that?”

  Rankin smiled, but there was no humor in it. He looked to be more angry than anything else.

  “That’s what I’m hoping you’ll tell us,” he said. “Come on, I’ve got some Scotch in my hut. Let’s see what we can do about getting some of it inside us.”

  First of all I had to get myself settled. I was given a bunk in a dormitory-sized hut occupied mostly by squaddies who were already either bedding down for the night or preparing for night shift guard duty.

  “What are they guarding against?” I asked Rankin once I had joined him in his quarters. He had a small hut to himself, and had done his best to make it appear homely. Shelves filled with technical books filled the walls, and a pair of armchairs had been arranged beside a cast iron stove that filled the room with heat. Rankin poured two generous measures of Scotch, handed me one and waited until I got a pipe lit before starting.

  “I don’t suppose you know anything about what we’re doing here?” he said in reply to my question

  I shook my head.