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

by Robert Price

  Jimmy wrenched his wheel to the left.

  Their front quarter panels met with a flat, hollow sound, like a pair of trashcan lids coming together.

  The Rebel was doing one hundred and twenty five.

  The impact spun the front end of the car violently around. The tires left the road, spraying gravel as they scrabbled for traction. The whole car tipped suddenly over the embankment.

  Georgie latched onto the outside of the driver’s side door as the wheel jerked out of his hands.

  The car flipped and landed on its left side with a smash that blew out the green tinted Solex windshield and crushed his left arm between the ground and door. He felt his stomach churn as the car continued to roll. He actually saw his forearm tear loose from his elbow in a shocking burst of blood. Before the pain hit he struck the top of his head hard on the roof. His consciousness was clubbed down into the pit of his stomach. Bereft of vision and hearing, it succumbed to total darkness.

  Gale Storm was cooing ‘Dark Moon’ somewhere, a siren urging his mind to the shore of reason.

  There was a bad smell in the air. Faint. Like rotten fish.

  Georgie opened his eyes. His ears rang from the bright light shining from the green ceiling. His head felt like somebody had strapped a hot iron to the top of his skull.

  Jesus, I totaled, he thought. His dad was gonna murder him for wrecking that car.

  Then he remembered his arm.

  But he must have imagined that, because he could feel the arm still there, move it even. When his swimmy eyes cleared, he saw it there on the metal table beside him, and lifted it to be sure.

  He figured he must be at a hospital, but when he turned his throbbing head to take in his space, he saw he wasn’t. The floors were poured concrete, gray. The walls were unadorned. The only windows were high on the walls, making him feel like he was below ground.

  Of all the various machines, the only one Georgie could identify was a meat freezer in one corner. The rest was all Dr. Frankenstein stuff; banks of controls and switches, blinking lights, gauges, spiraling copper coils and tubes of bubbling liquid. He almost laughed.

  He tried to turn on his side, and realized he was strapped firmly to the table by a pair of broad black leather restraints over the white sheet that covered him up to his chest.

  “Hey! Hey what gives?”

  The music snapped off. There was no sound but the bubbling and droning of the weird machines.

  Then Georgie heard a squeaking noise.

  From out of the dark emerged a bag of a man, pale skinned, with a sagging face and wiry gray hair springing out from beneath a black hat pulled low, almost to the bushy brows that sprouted over drooping, bloodhound eyes.

  He was dressed in a rumpled suit and white lab coat, and seated in an old wheelchair.

  Pushing him was the black haired girl with the deep red lipstick and the green cigarette pants, in motion ten times the Venus that had distracted him at the start of the race.

  In the old man’s lap was a blue Dictaphone. As the girl pushed him, he keyed the mic and whispered into it, through a pea souper of a foreign accent.

  “Twelve midnight. Subject, George Calato, aged seventeen years. Awake. Lucid.”

  As he said the last, the girl wheeled him to a stop beside Georgie.

  “Hello, George.”

  His face had no expression. Not even the great eyebrows twitched.

  “How do you know my name, man?”

  “Your driver’s license was in your pocket,” the old man said, a little testily.

  “So who’re you? What the hell am I doing here?”

  “My name is Dr. Golovkin. You were in an automobile accident in front of my house. Do you remember?”

  “Yeah sure I remember.”

  “My granddaughter extracted you from the wreck and brought you to my home. She saved your life.”

  He looked up at the girl. She was expressionless as her grandfather, but beautiful, like one of those Greek statues. She still had on the dark sunglasses.

  “Thanks.”

  “She doesn’t speak English.”

  “What are you? A Russkie?”

  “Something like that, yes,” said Golovkin.

  “How come you didn’t call an ambulance?”

  “The nearest hospital is an hour away. Your needs were immediate. The car that struck you did not remain behind.”

  That rat Jimmy had left him to die. He’d get his. Georgie opened his lips to ask why they hadn’t called an ambulance for him now, but the doctor cut him off.

  “Do you remember anything about the accident?” Golovkin asked.

  He remembered his arm ripping off, but he said nothing. His glance down at his arm seemed to be all the answer the doctor wanted.

  “Yes. Your arm. It was damaged, but not irreparably. I had to administer an anesthetic gas to sedate you. Do you feel any pain now?”

  “Just a little in my head.”

  “You may be suffering from a concussion. With your permission, I’d like to administer an additional dose. It may help you sleep. Then when you awake, you’ll feel better.”

  “I ought to get going.”

  “But of course, my granddaughter will drive you home. But first.”

  He raised one weak, wrinkled hand. The girl stepped out from behind his wheelchair, went around to the other side of Georgie, and began to fiddle with something under the table.

  Golovkin put the Dictaphone mic to his lips again.

  “Twelve oh five. Administering second Liao dosage.”

  “Really, I’m okay, man,” Georgie protested weakly.

  The girl was looming over him. One cool smooth hand clamped down with surprising strength on his forehead. She slapped some kind of mask over his mouth and nose. There was a hiss and he smelled something sweet and serene that reminded him of his mother’s lilac water. He felt the cool wind of the anesthetic blowing down his throat and sucked it in. The effect was immediate. The ache in his head subsided to a pleasant warmth.

  He almost protested when she took it away.

  Her hair dangled down. She was lovely.

  “Twelve oh six. Subject appears tranquil.”

  “You bet, pops,” George agreed.

  “No sign of rejection.”

  The walls of the room expanded and contracted like a living thing, in tune to the chugging of the machines. It was like he was inside a heart made of concrete and metal.

  He felt sleepy. He laid his cheek on the cool metal and blinked. There was a metal tray on a wheeled cart next to him, and he noticed on the floor, a trail of water leading to the freezer, as if something had been taken out of there and defrosted.

  He closed his eyes.

  The next thing he knew, it was morning. He was sitting on his front lawn.

  A yellow Pontiac was pulling away from the curb, The Great Pretender wafting out of the open window.

  He stood slowly, and groggily stumbled up the walk to his house, his mind a waking mind, still trying to separate faintly recalled dreams from memories, and all of that from the present reality.

  The screen door banged open.

  His father was looming there, red faced in his grimy coveralls.

  “What the hell you stayin’ out all night for when you got school in the morning?” his father roared, the smell of Schlitz blanketing Georgie in an invisible cloud.

  “Ain’t going,” Georgie managed. “Sick.”

  “I oughta box your damn ears! Get in here!”

  He stepped aside and Georgie plodded into the kitchen. The cat, his mother’s orange cat, Gloria, rubbed against his leg, then stiffening, hissed at him, and scampered off.

  “I’m late openin’ up the garage on account of you.”

  “I was out. With friends.”

  “All night on a Thursday? Where’s your coat?”

  Georgie realized he was just in his t-shirt and jeans.

  “What the hell’s gotten into you?” he sniffed at him. “Phew. You stink. You hun
g over?”

  “That’s a laugh comin’ from you,” Georgie snapped, before he’d thought about it.

  “You watch your mouth!”

  “Or what? Are you pissed ‘cause I didn’t come home or ‘cause you’re losin’ business? Maybe if you let me have a goddamn life of my own instead of makin’ me go there after school everyday, I wouldn’t—!”

  He stopped short then, as a weird sensation came over him. His left arm was shaking uncontrollably. He clapped a hand to it. The flesh seemed to run between his fingers like wax. It threw him into a panic. He needed to get away from his dad.

  “Aw the hell with this!” he shrieked, and turning, he ran out of the kitchen for the stairs up to his room.

  “Don’t you try and turn this around on me!” his father yelled after him. “You’re grounded, you hear? I’m goin’ to work, but don’t think we ain’t gonna have this out when I get back tonight!”

  Georgie ran into his room and put his back to the wall. He was scared to look at his arm, but he wasn’t sure why.

  He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on his dresser. He was a wreck. He rolled up the sleeve of his t-shirt to his shoulder. He turned his arm over. There was a slight discoloration about midway up past his elbow. Not a scar exactly, just a subtle difference in color.

  He thought hard about the accident again.

  The wreck, Golovkin, that chick. And what had he felt in the kitchen? That weird spasm? Was it some side effect of the gas Golovkin had given him? He ran his hand through his mussed hair.

  He guessed it was only a matter of time before the cops came knocking, probably at the garage about the wrecked Rebel out on Highway 99. No doubt Golovkin or one of the kids had reported it. His dad hadn’t been at work, didn’t know it was missing yet. He was going to catch holy hell tonight.

  Georgie went to his bed and sat down. His head felt like it weighed fifty pounds. He dug in his jeans pocket and took out his crumpled pack of cigarettes. At least he still had them. He pulled one, lit a match, took a drag. It tasted funny, but familiar. Before he knew it, he was at the filter. He set the end on the nightstand and let his head fall back on the pillow.

  Once his dad learned about the wreck, the cops would find out about Golovkin.

  What the hell was Golovkin about anyway? All that weird stuff in the basement? Maybe the guy was some kind of commie spy or something. What was he doing in Modesto, though? Well, you don’t stay secret in someplace like Washington DC or New York City. Actually Modesto wasn’t a bad place to hide, except for the fact that there was nothing here important to spy on.

  Maybe the girl was a spy too. Did they have girl spies? Sure. They probably made the best ones. Maybe she wasn’t his granddaughter at all. They sure didn’t look alike.

  He was thinking of her when he dozed off.

  Georgie couldn’t help staring at the girl’s swaying backside as she crossed the room to the wheeled cart sitting in a puddle of water next to the freezer.

  She pushed it back to the table. When she stopped beside Golovkin, she reached into the tray and lifted a plastic bag about the size of a pillow. Sloshing inside it was a shifting mass of what looked like something shoveled off the floor of a slaughterhouse. It was pinkish and gray, and changed whenever Georgie tried to focus on it, all nipples and knuckle bones and a sudden bloom like an ear or a black animal eye popping open, rolling in between a pair of lids and then disappearing. The whole mixture was swimming in some bloody liquid, like the drippings of defrosted chicken, and seemed to be constantly moving, though the girl wasn’t shaking the bag. Maybe it was the gas again, playing tricks on his eyes.

  He laid his head back and closed his eyes to stop the spinning world.

  Golovkin’s voice droned into his Dictaphone.

  “The Freygan method was an unwieldy undertaking, and made no considerations for the psychological effect of symbiosis. The end result was oft-times uncontrollable, savage. Working from the recovered Greenwood notes, I have streamlined the treatment considerably, substituting the use of parabolic reflectors with an infusion of vita-rays and a catalytic compound developed by the Mi-go. Combined with the regular introduction of Liao-gas to encourage psychic adaptation, the first stage of the process is for the most part, quite painless.”

  Georgie looked from the old man to the girl. She was leaning over, upending the bag. The weird stuff was sliding slowly from it, plopping wetly, like a quaking afterbirth into the tray. With it came an awful, fishy stink.

  Somehow his bandages had been unwrapped. It was shocking to see the point where his left arm simply ended in a ragged stump. He couldn’t see the wound well, but the lack of his left arm was enough to make him whimper.

  The girl slapped the gas mask over his face. He breathed deep reflexively.

  His eyes went to the girl, lingered tantalizingly on her form. She was older than him. Maybe a college girl. He could see the white mounds of cleavage through her open jacket, straining against the black top she wore beneath. Her lips were so red.

  When the mask came away, his head slumped to the table, no will in him to lift it.

  His eyes went to the silver tray.

  Something dragged itself ponderously over the lip. It bubbled and boiled. The bubbles sprouted a dozen tiny human eyes that rolled and blinked. It flopped down onto the table and oozed towards his stump. He wanted to scream but he couldn’t summon any effort.

  He felt a sharp tug at his shoulder then. A vertical fissure had opened in the mound of fleshy ooze, wide enough to fit around his stump. The edges of the opening changed multiple times. At one point it sprouted shaggy hairs, and mimicked a pair of giant lips, and then it rippled and diminished.

  He felt nauseous. Then something was in his mind. Not the voice of Golovkin, not his own confused thoughts.

  Something new.

  He was startled awake by a frenzy of hissing and yowling coming from the open doorway of his room. Gloria the cat was agitated to the point of hysteria. He sat up. Something huge moved rapidly in the corner of his eye, snapping back from the doorway like a rubber band toward the bed. The cat skidded off, feet padding quickly down the stairs.

  His left palm was full of clumps of Gloria’s orange hair, stuck together with some snotty fluid. He wiped the hand on his jeans in disgust.

  There was a trail of the same sticky slime leading from the bed to the doorway.

  He gasped, pulled himself to his feet. His hair was in his face. He blew at it, whimpering, thinking of the nightmare. It was a nightmare, right?

  He was ravenously hungry. But it was a strange hunger. It didn’t emanate from his belly. Somehow, he felt it as a pervading ache in his left arm.

  His eyes went to the cigarette butt on his nightstand. He picked it up. Smelled it. This wasn’t one of his Marlboros. It smelled…funny. He dug out the pack and opened it. None of them were his. What was this? Marijuana? He flung the carton in his wastebasket.

  He brushed the hair angrily from his face. Was he losing it? What was happening? Why? The answer popped into his head. Because of that chickenshit sonofabitch Jimmy Lucas. Georgie could still see the scared look in Jimmy’s eyes as he sideswiped him off the highway. Over Debbie Lomax. No, it wasn’t even over her. That’d be too noble for that chickenshit. It was just so he wouldn’t lose in front of the kids at school. To a Mexican.

  He slammed his hand down on the dresser.

  To his surprise, the entire thing broke down the middle, collapsing in a heap of busted wood and seven years’ bad luck.

  He stared at his arm. The skin was shiny, as if sweating. It looked plastic. He touched it. It was covered in that slime.

  He looked down at the rubble of his dresser. He had smashed it with one hit. God, what had happened to him? Then he got the thought in his head. This wasn’t his arm. He’d lost his arm in the wreck. And that nightmare about that bag of moving goop…had that really happened?

  He grabbed his own wrist and shook it.

  The arm did nothing out
of the ordinary. It stank a little though.

  He went to the bathroom to change his shirt and wash away the coat of slime. It was early evening already. His dad would be back soon. He was surprised he wasn’t back already with the cops.

  He peeled off his shirt and ran the sink water, splashed his face and pits.

  He couldn’t find his comb anywhere. Looking in the medicine cabinet mirror, he tried to smooth his hair and nearly jumped through the ceiling when his left hand came eye level. There was no hand at the end of his wrist, but a black comb, just like the one he’d been looking for. He shrieked in surprise.

  Instantly the comb seemed to melt and reform into his hand.

  He stared at his hand. He wanted to run screaming. But what the hell? He couldn’t escape a piece of himself.

  The hand became a comb.

  He thought about his hand.

  It changed back.

  A comb.

  Actually, it was kind of cool.

  He ran it through his hair, gingerly at first, then styled it into the usual DA and pompadour. He didn’t even need to hunt up his hair grease. The comb hand seemed to provide it.

  Then it was just his hand again.

  It didn’t even hurt. All it took was a thought.

  Crazy.

  He stared at himself in the mirror, made a fist with the hand, flicked his finger out. It became a switchblade. Even made the click sound.

  But all this playing around made the arm ache.

  Hungry, he thought, remembering the mouth that had latched onto his stump on the table in the dream.

  What did it eat? He didn’t know.

  Anger boiled up over that Jimmy Lucas. He was a freak now, and it was all his fault.

  Something in his head, that new something he’d felt in the dream, said yes!

  Georgie threw on a shirt and skipped down the staircase two at a time.

  It took Georgie a half an hour to hike to Burge’s, and by the time he got there the sun was going down.

  Friday night. The joint was hopping, cruisers pulling in and out.

  The car he was looking for, that cherry red two tone Golden Hawk with the brand new dent on the front left quarter, was in the lot. He boogied over and tried the door. Locked. He thought about the keys. Didn’t even matter that he’d never seen them before. His finger fit right into the keyhole and with a twist of his wrist the door locks popped up. He sank into the cushioned driver’s seat.