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

by Robert Price

  3. WEBBED FINGERS

  4. MUSHY VOICE

  5. SEA-SMELL

  6. GILL FLAPS

  “Now that you know what to watch for,” the narrator says, “it’s up to you to stay alert. If you notice anyone with some of these tell-tale signs, report it at once. Remember, the safety of your family, friends, and fellow Americans could be depending on you.”

  The closing-credits came up—“This has been a civil defense production from the Department of Eldritch Emergency Preparedness.” Then the 3-2-1, and then a blank white square filled the screen. The loose end of the film strip made its familiar whap-flutter-whap noise.

  Mikey, puffed with self-importance at being one of this week’s Class Helpers, switched off the projector and began the process of re-threading the reel to rewind it. Georgina turned the overhead lights on and raised the blinds, letting spring sunshine spill through the windows.

  Miss Chambers glanced at the clock above the door and saw that they still had time to go over some fractions before the readiness drill. The students groaned when she instructed them to open their math workbooks, but complied.

  They did eight problems before a click and a chime issued from the PA speaker on the wall. Principal Ross read the noon announcements—Open House next week, sixth grade field trip permission slips due, Arkham Care Brigade was collecting letters for injured servicemen, the cast list for the school play would be posted after lunch.

  There followed a pause, another click, and a brief scratchy hiss. Then the speakers jingled out a bouncy tune and a chorus of perky singers:

  What do you do when the sirens sound?

  And the sky goes strange for miles around?

  Well the first thing you do is to hit the ground!

  You DUCK (do-dee-do) and COVER

  Just DUCK (do-dee-do) and COVER

  What if there’s a color from out of space?

  And cyclopean horrors all over the place?

  Well better make sure that you hide your face!

  Just DUCK (do-dee-do) and COVER

  Yes DUCK (do-dee-do) and COVER

  (do-dah!)

  The song finished with a brassy flourish and cymbal clash. The alarm whooped a shrill triple-blast.

  The children, on cue, in a flurry of motion, pushed back their chairs, scooted beneath their desks, squeezed their eyes shut, tucked their foreheads down by their knees, and laced their fingers at the napes of their necks.

  Miss Chambers walked among the rows, checking, nodding, and making occasional corrections. “Head lower, Marcie. Billy, your left foot’s sticking out. Mary-Lou, are you chewing gum? That had better not be a comicbook, Charlie.”

  Mary-Lou was able to get rid of the evidence with a guilty gulp, but Charlie did not have that option.

  “It’s Professor Patriot, though!”

  She tapped her foot, snapped her fingers, and reached down.

  “Awwww…” He snaked up his arm to hand over the comic.

  “Thank you,” said Miss Chambers crisply. She rolled it into a tube and proceeded toward the rear of the classroom, smacking the cylindrical roll of colored newsprint into her palm.

  When the all-clear and then the lunch bell sounded, the orderliness broke into a genial chaos. Students scrambled out from under their desks, girls fussing at their clothes, boys jostling each other. They raced for the row of lunchboxes and brown bags on the shelf beside the door.

  Moments later, the last echoing footsteps faded from the hall, and the room was quiet again.

  Miss Chambers smiled, shook her head, put down the confiscated comic, and went about tidying up in preparation for the afternoon lessons. She straightened askew desks, pushed in chairs, erased the fractions from the blackboard, and listed a dozen new vocabulary words:

  Squamous

  Rugose

  Cyclopean

  Amorphous

  Stygian

  Unutterable

  Loathsome

  Tenebrous

  Foetid

  Ichor

  Monolithic

  Lambent

  Satisfied with the state of the classroom, she sat down and slid open the drawer where she kept her own sack lunch. As she arranged the sandwich, carrot sticks, hard-boiled egg and oatmeal-raisin cookies, she noticed that Charlie’s comicbook had relaxed into a mostly-unrolled curl.

  Professor Patriot…

  She smiled and shook her head again.

  There he was on the cover, in a dramatic action pose, wielding a glowing yellow-white stick of chalk that reflected in the lenses of his hornrim glasses. Professor Patriot always managed to look both respectable and rumpled in his tweed jacket with the elbow patches, slacks, flag pin, and sneakers. His brown hair was short enough to not alarm anybody’s parents, but tousled and unruly enough that the kids found it ‘cool’ as well as vaguely rock-and-roll. Young but not too young, old but not too old, he gave every impression of the dedicated teacher…but quirky, the kind that made learning fun.

  Also on the cover were hideous half-reptilian/half-canine creatures, fanged and gaunt, boiling out of an unearthly rift in reality, raging as they came up short against a brilliant flare of light issuing from the equations Professor Patriot had etched in mid-air.

  Bold comicbook lettering splashed jagged and excited across the page: WILL THE POWER OF EUCLIDIAN GEOMETRY DRIVE BACK THE HOUNDS OF TINDALOS???

  She’d brought a paperback to read while she ate her lunch, but found herself leafing through the comic instead. It was silly, without a doubt. It made light of the everpresent threats under which they all now lived, turning horror into mockery. It was absurd and over-the-top in its heroics.

  And yet…

  Reading it somehow made her feel better. More hopeful, more in control, more confident that the world they knew and loved would survive this, would emerge stronger than ever.

  That was the entire purpose. Like the daily drills, and the civil defense films put out by the Department of Eldritch Emergency Preparedness. Yesterday, it had been Big Sister Susie who had the problem…her best friend Ronette had fallen in with a Bad Crowd.

  “Aw, come on, Susie, don’t be a square! We’re just going down to the lake to drink some beer and do the Dance of Dagon. All the cool kids will be there!”

  Or like the jingles, which, yesterday had been about what to do if you found a suspicious tome of ancient evil sitting around:

  Just don’t LOOK

  (do-dee-do, do-dee-do)

  In the BOOK

  (do-dee-do, do-dee-do)

  JUUUUUUUSSSSST

  DOOOOONNNNN’T

  LOOK!!!

  (dah-dah!)

  So, they had their Fungus-Free Victory Gardens, and the Arkham Care Brigade delivering letters to the hospitals and asylums. They had cartoons in which various Warner Brothers characters carried out wacky hijinks against the Mythos Menace, and the MovieReel clips celebrating the brave scholars and scientists of this great nation’s military fighting the good fight to protect the American way of life. They had comedy sketch shows like Miskatonic 6-5000 on television, and radio serial dramas like The Rats in the Walls.

  And they had Professor Patriot. There was even a stage show that toured the country, with puppets, comedians, and an actor in a tweed jacket and hornrims. The chorus girls were the Patriettes, leggy beauties in short pleated skirts and tight tweed vests. The highlight of the performance was said to involve the Professor punching Cthulhu in the face.

  The comic’s last page was an advertisement in which the Professor rescued an innocent family, closed the Thirteen Gates, and saved the day, all because:

  “Even evil cultists can’t resist the wholesome fruity goodness of Mostest Snack Pies! Mmm, they’re the Mmmostest!”

  The back cover sported a mail-in offer to sign up for the Professor Patriot Fan Club, complete with certificate, flag-pin badge, Patrioteer membership card, and Omniglot Decoder Ring. The ring in the picture—an antiquarian sort of relic, corroded with verdigris—bore little r
esemblance to the plastic baubles she’d seen several students wearing to school.

  Done with her lunch, Miss Chambers stepped outside for a breath of fresh air before venturing over to the teachers’ lounge to get a cup of coffee.

  She’d walked to school through another perfect Niceville morning of clear blue skies, warm sunshine, butterflies dancing above the flowerbeds, birds twittering in the trees. Now, the day had warmed and gone slightly muggy. The breeze had stilled. The cars motoring up and down Main Street, chrome glinting, fins gleaming, looked dreamlike and faraway in the haze.

  In the lounge, the talk was of Senator McCarthy’s latest committee findings, the relative merits of Oldsmobiles versus Buicks, the unfortunate Ladies’ Garden Club incident regarding Mrs. Mallory’s debut of her ‘Sweet Yuggoth’ orchid, Mr. Jenkins’ new color television, and the subversive musical and literary influences of juvenile delinquents possibly creeping toward their very own town.

  “Here?” Mr. Benson scoffed as he filled his pipe. “In Niceville?”

  “Preposterous,” said Mrs. Andrews, with the imperious declaratory tones worthy of the seniormost member of Ashton-Smith Elementary’s faculty.

  “I did hear that they caught a group of teenagers over in Fairview,” Nurse Harper said. “Reading…reading The King in Yellow.”

  Gasps arose, but Mrs. Andrews withered them all with her gaze. “Well, that is Fairview for you. Ever since they put in that roller-rink, what do you expect?”

  Mr. Evans, the vice-principal, nodded. “Heard they were talking about having one of those drive-in movie theaters put in, too.”

  More gasps, and a round of tutting disapproval, greeted this. They moved on to a discussion of Niceville’s own movie theater, the Paradise, which normally showed decent, family films like Singin’ in the Rain and Cinderella. The latest poster in the ‘Coming Soon’ display case, however, was for Marlon Brando and James Dean in The Thousand Young.

  Jill Chambers, sipping her coffee, listened and said nothing. Her status in the school hierarchy—newest, youngest, unmarried, pretty, a hometown girl who’d been in many of these very teachers’ own classes not so long ago—didn’t lend itself well to speaking out.

  Besides, she’d been on dates to roller-rinks and drive-ins…she’d read part of The King in Yellow herself in college, though it had frightened her so badly she’d thrown the book away long before reaching Act II…and she might go see The Thousand Young, despite the leather jackets and sullen pouts that made both stars look like Bad Boys of the worst sort.

  It wasn’t as if she had her family’s reputation to worry about, either. She was the only Chambers left in Niceville now. When her parents were mentioned, it was usually in tones of sidelong sympathy flavored with delicious hints of gossip, tragedy and scandal.

  “You heard about Frank Chambers, of course,” they’d say. “Poor Vera. It’s no wonder she…” This would be accompanied by a significant, knowing lift of the eyebrows and a pantomime gesture of tilting a glass.

  “All because of what happened to their son, you know.”

  “Surprising the daughter stayed, don’t you think? Oh, she’s a nice enough girl and all, but…”

  Danny Chambers had been the ideal clean-cut all-American boy—good-looking, popular, athletic, class president as well as captain of the football team. Everyone adored and admired him. When he’d enlisted, it seemed like the whole town turned out to see him off at the train station, waving from the platform as he waved back from the window, on his way to San Diego.

  Jill, who’d adored and admired him more than anyone, had even planned to join the Army Nurse Corps when she finished high school. She’d follow in his footsteps, do her part, serve her country, make them proud.

  But then, Danny died in the South Pacific, along with all of his shipmates aboard the USS Derleth at the Battle of R’lyeh. Their father…well, they’d found him in the garage, the military notification telegram still in his hand, as if he’d figured no further note was needed.

  After the funerals, their grief-stricken mother had gone to Des Moines to live with Aunt Rose, leaving Jill on her own.

  She did have to admit it was lonely sometimes. The house, small though it was, often felt too big with just her in it. She’d given up on the nursing idea, becoming a teacher instead…and though she liked it, and was good at it, she still had the occasional pang of wondering what might have been, of feeling as if she’d taken the safe path rather than the right one.

  From out on the playground came the distant trill of the recess monitor’s whistle, signaling the students to gather up their jacks, jump ropes, basketballs and bubblegum cards. The faculty performed their own variation on this, rinsing cups, finishing crosswords, and stubbing out cigarettes.

  The change in the weather sapped the sass out of even the most rambunctious of her students. They went through the Presidential Health-and-Fitness regime with limp dispiritedness, barely complained at all when Miss Chambers sprang a math quiz on them, and wrote listlessly in their journals without the usual giggling and whispering.

  The afternoon dragged by, each tick of the clock more and more sluggish as the hands crept endlessly around.

  The alarm whooped.

  Miss Chambers, who’d been fanning herself—with what turned out to be Charlie’s comic—nearly sprang out of her skin.

  The familiar triple-blast was followed by a series of shriek-pause-shriek-pause siren wails that went on and on.

  The students, startled but well-trained, obediently shoved back their chairs and ducked under their desks.

  “We already had the drill,” said one of the girls in an indignant fussbudget that’s-so-unfair! tone.

  “Heads down,” Miss Chambers said, recovering herself as she got to her feet.

  In the pauses between the shrieks, she heard protests from neighboring classrooms and annoyed outbursts from her fellow faculty. She was sure there’d be a good deal of discussion in the lounge about this.

  Her own training took over with the comfort of routine, despite the ongoing sirens. She moved down the aisle between two rows of desks.

  Another more distant but ear-splitting screech joined the din.

  “Is that the town whistle?” someone shouted.

  “That’s the town whistle!” shouted someone else.

  Anxiety rose in Miss Chambers’ throat like bitter acid.

  “The fire bell, too!” a third someone cried, and yes, there was a persistent jangling clangor adding to the cacophony.

  Several of her students chimed in:

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What is it?”

  “I want to go home!”

  “Make it stop!”

  “Miss Chaaaaaaambers!”

  “Stay where you are!” she barked, in her most authoritarian teacher-voice. “Heads down!”

  The classroom door burst open and Tommy stumbled in, clutching the restroom pass. He lunged at her, tripped, fell to his knees, and grabbed her skirt.

  “The sky!” he howled. Then he dove under his desk.

  The other children screamed.

  “Stay put!” Miss Chambers ordered.

  She rushed to the nearest window, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  The sky over Niceville was green.

  A terrible, churning, bilious green…the western horizon choked with clouds that were not clouds but undulant, amorphous, spongelike masses…from which dropped a rain that was not rain but something else, some sort of writhing, dark specks…

  Townspeople ran, frantic, in all directions. Cars sped down streets, tires screeching. They sideswiped mailboxes, hopped curbs, plowed headlong into storefronts or collided with each other in snarls of chrome and gleaming metal.

  “The bunker! The basement! Hurry!” It sounded like Mr. Evans, the vice-principal, his voice a hectic urgency mixed with the maniacal laughter of impending insanity. “Get the students to the bunker!”

  The school hall filled with a mad stampede of footsteps, v
oices raised in cries of fear, cries of pain.

  Some of Miss Chambers’ class began sliding out from under their desks but she knew if they went out there it’d be a packed mob of bodies, a throng, pushing and jostling. They’d be trampling each other in their panic. She raced to the door and banged it shut.

  “Stay put!” she ordered again.

  It halted their surge toward the exit, but they did not all return to their duck-and-cover positions. They gathered in the aisles, the girls clutching hands, the boys trying to act brave.

  They’d propped the windows open in vain hopes of catching a sluggish breeze. Now a hard wind gusted. It stank of mold and spoiled coleslaw. The half-lowered blinds snapped and flapped, whipping about, some rattle-rolling back up. Papers blew everywhere.

  The hideous green sky filtered the daylight to a swamp-sickly hue. The black, spongelike masses dipped lower, toward the buildings, shedding their weird rain of writhing specks. Closer now, they resembled burrs or jellyfish, something both prickly and tendriled. There was purpose in their descent, as if targeting in on anyone or anything that moved.

  As Miss Chambers and her students stared in horror, one of the writhing things divebombed a fleeing man. Its myriad whip-thin tentacles lashed around his head and neck. He tried to yank it off, went into flailing, jerking spasms, and landed in a flowerbed amid a flurry of tattered petals…but, mercifully, blocked from view.

  “Class Helpers, shut the windows!”

  She hadn’t known she was going to speak, but Mikey and Georgina were on it like a flash. They slammed and latched all the windows.

  Aircraft swooped in from the northeast, fighter jets with engines roaring and machine guns firing in peppering staccato. All the boys cheered and some of the girls did too as the jets engaged the clouds-that-weren’t-clouds in an aerial battle. The enemy fired back with some kind of organic javelins, long and twisted, glistening, tipped with barbed points.

  The machine guns riddled the not-clouds, pierced and perforated them, blew off large irregular chunks that hailed down in a grisly shower of ichor and dark, spongy matter.

  A helicopter appeared next, buzzing in low and heavy like a bumblebee. It was apparently heading for the Niceville Town Hall when the plummeting shredded mass of one of the not-clouds struck it with a wet, indescribable noise of rotors chugging and chopping and clogging. The helicopter veered out of control. A man either jumped or was hurled from it as it wobbled, wallowed, and plunged drunkenly toward the school.