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

by Robert Price

  Oh she was a hottie, alright. Sweet as pie. He stuck his finger in the ignition and heard that V-8 engine turn over. She wasn’t as loud as the Rebel, but she was loud enough. He revved the engine and watched the glass door of Burge’s kick open. Three kids in blue Knights jackets poured out, with that Reds cap marking Jimmy Lucas out front.

  He cranked the radio. Little Richard was yelling his head off about Saturday night. Georgie laid on the horn as he peeled out of the parking lot, Jimmy running full tilt on those wide receiver legs, almost catching hold of the right tail fin till Georgie kicked the gas and left him coughing in a cloud of exhaust.

  He tore onto 9th, but he didn’t open her up until Babe Wilkes’ DeVille bottomed out in its haste to catch up.

  Georgie roared all the way to O Street, the whine of the McCullough supercharger kicking in as he passed under the big arch that read WATER-WEALTH-CONTENTMENT-HEALTH. He didn’t keep them much more than a dot in his mirror, all the way out to 99.

  When he neared the bend where the Rebel had wrecked, he slowed, but not much. He wanted Jimmy to see what he was gonna do.

  He wrenched open the door and jumped out, hit the shoulder rolling.

  The Golden Hawk hit a telephone pole at somewhere around sixty, and the pole split that beautiful raised hood right down the middle like it was butter.

  Georgie picked himself up and walked over to the hissing wreck. Not a piece of it was unbent but the trunk. He jumped up on it and sat there, waiting.

  Soon the DeVille screeched to a stop and her doors popped open. There was Dombrowski and Babe. Jimmy nearly dropped the bat he was carrying when he saw the wreck.

  “What the hell did you do to my car?” he wailed.

  “Jesus, Jimmy,” said Dombrowski. “It’s that Mexican kid.”

  Georgie hopped down off the trunk and walked brazenly down the middle of the road.

  The three of them looked nervous now.

  “Hey,” Babe wheezed. “Hey kid, we all knew you were gonna be okay.”

  And Georgie knew. None of the kids had called the cops or an ambulance. They’d all split. Every last one of ‘em. Split and left him to die.

  “Shut it, square,” Georgie snapped.

  Jimmy continued to advance, staring only at his twisted car.

  “You sonofabitch, you’re gonna wish you never crawled outta that wreck.”

  Jimmy brought the bat up, and that was the last thing he did.

  Georgie had thought about turning the arm into a knife or something, but it leapt up without any prompting from him. It grew immense, like a python, and flowed straight at Jimmy’s face. Every finger on the big hand at the end of it sprouted a jagged tooth. By the time it reached him, it was a huge mouth that clamped down on Jimmy’s head and shoulders.

  Georgie tried to jerk the arm back in surprise, but the motion tore off Jimmy’s head completely, like he was picking the head off a daisy. The arm arced up whip-like through the air, trailing Jimmy’s dancing, bloody vertebrae, slurping it up like a noodle, blanketing Dombrowski and Babe in blood and slime.

  Jimmy’s body took a few steps, swung the bat half-heartedly, and collapsed on its belly in the road.

  Dombrowski and Babe turned to run.

  The arm splashed down on Dombrowski’s head, lifting him into the air.

  Babe tumbled back into the Coupe. Georgie could hear him wheezing uncontrollably as the ignition whined, the engine stubbornly refusing to turn over, as if paralyzed by what the ogling headlights on either side of the DeVille’s grill had seen.

  Georgie felt a pleasant shiver travel the length of the arm and down his own spine.

  Dombrowski crumpled to the ground headless.

  The arm undulated. Georgie could feel and hear the crunching of their skulls. It was like rock candy. Even tasted something like it somehow.

  The DeVille’s engine spluttered to life and the car lurched onto the shoulder. Babe threw the thing into reverse. His face was beet red in the mirror.

  Georgie threw his arm at the back window. It smashed through the glass. He didn’t see exactly what it did, but he felt that same pleasurable sensation, like a taste of candy, and the car rocked on its chassis. Babe’s foot kicked through the windshield and stayed there, ankle bleeding.

  The arm slid from the shattered window and snaked back to Georgie, like a tape measure returning. A minute later it was just an arm again.

  Georgie felt bloated and sick.

  He stumbled over Jimmy’s headless body and puked into the road. He pulled up the sleeve of his shirt. The discoloration on his arm had moved. It was over his shoulder now. He found it under the collar of his shirt. Sweat broke out on his scalp.

  What the hell had he done?

  It was getting dark. He knew where he had to go and it wasn’t home.

  Georgie pounded frantically on the door to the house on the hill with the yellow Pontiac in the driveway.

  “Doc! Lemme in! You gotta take it off! I’m sick! I’m real sick!”

  The light in the window came on. There was a rattling of the handle.

  The door swung open.

  It was her. She still had those damned sunglasses on. Her hair was perfect, the color of starless space, and her lips were red as the hood of that Golden Hawk.

  “I gotta see your grandfather,” he stammered. “I’m sick. He did something to me. This arm…”

  She put one white finger to those full red lips.

  The next minute she had taken him by the hand. The left hand. Her touch was cold.

  She led him inside, down the basement steps.

  The machines were silent.

  She pulled a chain and the light over the steel table came on.

  Roaches scurried for the shadowy corners.

  She took a cigarette pack out of her pocket, Black Lotus brand. He’d never heard of it. He was afraid for her. Afraid what the arm might do.

  She flipped open the pack and bit a cigarette. He didn’t see her strike a match, but he smelled it. In a minute it was lit. She took it from her lips and blew a cloud of sweet smelling smoke into his face.

  He took it into his lungs. It was the same stuff that had been in his smokes. The smell…it reminded him of her.

  He floated up with it, to the low ceiling, then through it, passing up into the sky, through the clouds. Way up there he exploded. But it was a good kind of an explosion, like on the fourth of July. He drifted down to earth in fiery fragments.

  “To understand Stage Two, the most radical deviation from the Freygan method, but the one which garners the most appealing results, we must consider the Chalden word ‘shaggathai,’ and its implied relation to the root word ‘shoggoth.’ ‘Shaggathai’ is thought to mean ‘fornication.’”

  It was Dr. Golovkin’s voice, whispering through his head. What was going on?

  “The shoggoth itself is asexual, but when created from the merging of sentient flesh and proto-shoggoth, it is necessary to achieve the final obliteration of the base humanoid physique willingly. This ultimately renders a creature which is obedient and yet capable of some rational thought. A potentially powerful weapon. With a generous application of Liao to once more stimulate psychic symbiosis, a physical joining with an earlier generation subject is encouraged to awaken and foster the mental union of host and parasite.”

  He didn’t remember getting undressed, but he was entwined with the girl on the cold table. She still gripped his hand tightly as he lathered her icy chest and tried to push himself ever deeper into her. He was like a pup nuzzling at feeding time, but what she fed him was more intense than any nourishment he’d ever had.

  Her lips never parted except to accept his probing kisses. She made no sound, no expression. It was infuriating to him. She still had the glasses on.

  He released his grip on her hip and reached up, yanking the sunglasses off.

  Her eyes were black holes, pink rimmed, and from their depths sprang a pair of slithering proboscises, tipped with tiny gaping, gummy mouths that s
ucked the air like dying eels. Her hand was full of writhing tendrils, the curling ‘fingers’ lined with suction cups that drew at the animate flesh of his strange hand, both of them slick with an oozing slime like the feel of spoiled ham. He could not tell where his fingers merged with hers. They were one.

  Over her shoulder he saw the shadowed shape of Golovkin in his chair, the edge of the light glinting off his Dictaphone mic.

  The eyestalks reared back and elicited shrill, inhuman piping sounds that raised Georgie’s short hairs.

  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  Then they plunged towards his own eyes, the puckering little mouths sealing over his eyeballs and sucking, drawing them out.

  He screamed. Something thick filled his mouth.

  “Stage Two ends. The subject host is consumed because it wants to be,” droned Golovkin. “The requested large scale demonstration will commence Saturday evening.”

  Georgie dreamed strange, subpolar dreams.

  He awoke in his bed.

  His arm hung to the floor, a tremendous thing now, pulsing. It wound lazily around the corner, like something engorged.

  He got up and followed it, retracting it slowly as he went.

  Down the hall, to his father’s room. It had slipped under the closed door.

  He heard the crackling, the wet sucking noise.

  He yawned.

  Across the street from the theater, he finished a Black Lotus cigarette and watched Debbie and the other kids from school file past the box office into some schlocky horror movie.

  When they were all inside, he went to the man at the counter.

  “One for The Blob.”

  The show was about to start.

  WITHIN THE IMAGE OF THE DIVINE

  BY BEAR WEITER

  With smooth chubby cheeks, two working eyes that mirrored each other, and a full head of blonde hair, the young girl was an abomination, a freak. She was younger than Mirabel by several years, though Mirabel had no way of really knowing—the girl did not look like anyone she knew now. Before, yes—but those days were gone, as were the Damned.

  And yet here one was, clutching a doll to her chest.

  It was the tattered Raggedy Ann doll that tugged at Mirabel’s heart first. The doll—one eye missing, hair torn out, an arm shredded to fluff, burn marks across its surface—was like herself; it was one of her kind, one of the blessed.

  The girl can’t be all bad if she has a doll like that, Mirabel thought.

  Mirabel had found the girl in the loft of her family’s barn, hiding behind a stack of hay bales. She had heard crying first—a good sound, a normal sound, but unusual to come from there. Maybe Timmy or Carl is hiding inside, she had thought. It would have been fine if it were one of them, even if they shouldn’t be playing here alone.

  This, though—finding one of the Damned, one who should no longer be—this was big. Mirabel should report her to the priests, and the girl should be offered to the Angels. It was the right thing to do. Plus, everyone would know how she had done a good deed—like her friend, Timmy. She would be treated differently, with honor and respect.

  But the girl held that doll. And through her sobs she spoke. “Can you help me?”

  Her voice was strong, even though she spoke just above a whisper. Most of the people Mirabel knew sounded thin, taut, wheezy, or gurgly—each different, like their looks. Mirabel herself spoke with an airy voice, and a lisp where the left side of her mouth pinched up and her lips never met.

  Mirabel worked up the courage to respond. As different as she was, the girl did not look threatening. “You should not be here,” she said finally.

  The girl’s lower lip quivered, and she started crying harder. “I’m lost,” she said.

  Report her, Mirabel thought. It’s the best thing you can do for everyone. “Where did you come from?” she asked instead.

  “We lived in a cave in the woods. Me, my brother, and my dad. There were a few others, like Uncle Billy—who wasn’t really my uncle.”

  “How long did you live there?” Mirabel asked. Stop asking her questions. Report her!

  “I’ve always lived there, I think. My brother said we used to live in a house, but I don’t remember it.”

  Mirabel only had vague memories from before the time of Angels—gathering around the radio, riding in the back of her Pa’s old ’39 truck, and seeing her first and only movie: Cinderella. She could not picture what Cinderella looked like any more, though she suspected she would be as horrid as this girl.

  “But then it rained so much, and wouldn’t stop, and everything flooded. It was night when the waters poured in. My brother and dad couldn’t get out…” Her voice broke from the sobs. “I couldn’t find the rest.” Her talking sped up. “I had been told to follow the river and I would find more people, but the river kept getting smaller and it became a creek and that led me to here.” She gestured behind her, toward the stream between this land and the farm beyond.

  “I saw people last night and started to go to them, but then I saw…they looked…”

  “Like me,” Mirabel said, finishing her sentence.

  The girl looked down. She hugged the doll tight, the doll that was so unlike its owner.

  “What’s your name?” Mirabel asked.

  “I’m Ginny,” she said, looking up again.

  “I’m Mirabel.” She extended her hand.

  Ginny looked at it briefly before shaking it. Ginny’s hands were odd, with each finger completely separate from each other. Mirabel’s right hand had the last two fingers growing together, and on both hands extra skin between each digit. Her friend Carl said the webbing made her swim faster, but he had one arm partially fused to his body and she thought that was the reason he was slower.

  “Are you hungry, Ginny?”

  Ginny’s eyes grew big and she nodded furiously.

  “I’ll bring you something to eat, and some water, too.” Mirabel started down the ladder. “Stay there, and don’t make any sounds.” She thought she heard a quiet “okay” in response but wasn’t certain.

  The house sat a little ways off and Mirabel’s thoughts weighed heavy on her as she walked. She knew what was right—the Damned had started their wars and nearly destroyed the world—certainly they had got what they deserved. The Angels didn’t save them. But Ginny—she was just a kid, even younger than herself; how did she cause any of these problems?

  Ginny was different. And she acted as if Mirabel’s people were the strange ones. She just doesn’t know any better. Mirabel’s mom had said the same thing many times about Timmy’s parents, often with a tsk tsk sound. She, too, supported their sacrifice but not, as she called it, their vilification. Mom was patient and understanding—Mirabel could be, too.

  Maybe the Angels had overlooked Ginny, and others like her. But if she was overlooked, how can I help her?

  That was a tough one. She pondered it as she worked—making a beef-scrape sandwich and filling a thermos with water. She had no more of an answer by the time she returned to the barn.

  Once inside, however, amongst all of the equipment her Pa had on the ground floor, a small idea sparked in the back of her mind.

  It’s not possible, she thought, climbing back up the ladder. Still, the idea clung.

  Back up on the top level, Mirabel handed Ginny the sandwich first. Ginny had held a few pieces of paper but tossed those to the side and snatched the food.

  “Oh, thank you!” she said. With food in her mouth, she sounded much more like people Mirabel knew.

  “Is it good?” Mirabel asked. Ginny nodded quickly. Mirabel already knew it was good—her cow, Bess, grew the best meat. She could have fed Ginny some scrapings from Hoss, the bull, and she would have been satisfied—even though they only used him for stews. The girl ate too fast to really appreciate the food. She placed the thermos by the papers Ginny had dropped.

  The papers were small, white, and almost stacked. The bottom sheet, though—the corner of a black and white photo peaking out—
hinted at something interesting. Mirabel knew of photos but had only seen a few in her time. She picked up the sheets.

  Each one contained a picture of people—before people, like Ginny—unmarked, unscarred, standing aggressively straight, and smiling fiendish grins. Her hands trembled as she looked through them.

  Ginny saw her looking and smiled herself.

  Mirabel gasped. “You should not have these!” She shook the photos in the air. “These are forbidden. Sacrilegious. We should burn them!”

  “No!” Ginny shot up, trying to grab them back but Mirabel stood, holding them high. The girl jumped in the air, but just couldn’t reach. She sat back down, sniffing. “That’s my family! Those are all I have left.”

  “They’re dead now, as they should be. They were damned anyway.”

  “Don’t say that,” Ginny yelled.

  “It’s true—”

  “It’s not!”

  “The Angels have told us this. They came down to—”

  “There are no angels! They’re from another world!”

  There it was. Mirabel froze, one hand cocked back ready to strike. First Timmy’s parents, and now…this. “Don’t you say that. What would you know about it?”

  Ginny glanced at the fist, but carried on in a quieter voice. “It’s what my dad told me. He said that the war was so bad it opened something, or called them here. And the things, the aliens, they made it even worse. He used to be a scientist, he—”

  Mirabel slapped her. Her hand left a bright red mark across Ginny’s otherwise smooth skin, and Ginny scrunched her face up in response.

  “He was a fool. He knew nothing, and he’s dead now. God sent the Angels to look over the chosen, those of us who did not cause or aid the horrible war. Do you not see how we have been remade in their image?” How could she not see it?

  Ginny’s head tilted to the floorboards, and she mumbled something too quiet to hear. “What was that?” Mirabel asked.