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

by Robert Price

  My little lie has come back to haunt me. “It’s ten miles away,” I say. “Uphill all the way. With those creatures circling—”

  “You said yourself they’d be in the shelter at Devil’s View,” she snaps. “If I can find them, they’re sure to let me in. Maybe these creatures aren’t there yet. It’s got to be safer than here.”

  After nightfall, we make for the edge of town, Marcy and I holding each other, Harve scouting a few yards ahead with his pistol. Patrols of the creatures fly overhead. If there are this many in every American town and city, there must be millions of them. Most of the shelters we pass have been opened, but some remain sealed. With the threat of the beasts, I daren’t risk hammering on a shelter hatch, even if I thought anyone would believe our warnings. “Sorry folks,” I mutter, “you’re on your own.”

  Day 49

  We trudge upwards, the town behind us. Progress is slow; less than five miles a day, by my reckoning. Harve is enjoying this, I’m sure, proving that he’s a survivor and we need his skills. Apart from the tremors which shake the ground, the world is dead. There are no birds singing in the forested slopes around us; Harve might be a hunter, but there’s nothing to hunt; nothing to eat.

  The white dust we kick up leaves us gasping for breath. Marcy and Harve are both out of cigarettes. We’ve all got headaches and I’m certain that even if I had my medical supplies, I wouldn’t be able to cure us. We had to drink the water, we were so thirsty. Marcy was dreadfully sick earlier and I’m barely holding it together.

  Another rumble shakes the ground. Marcy falls to her knees.

  “Hey, MacNeil!” I call, “wait for us.”

  He scowls, but stands there, watching the swaying trees and the skies above.

  “Come on,” I tell Marcy, “We can reach Devil’s View by nightfall.” I make the mistake of looking back: from this height, we can see for miles. A burned, gray wasteland, empty highways, flattened towns.

  As dusk approaches, we round a bend in the road; five bat-creatures rocket towards us.

  “Run!” I yell to Marcy, stooping as I charge for the trees. Harve fires, three shots in succession, attracting the attention of three of the beasts, though he doesn’t seem to have hit any. Marcy runs behind me, but the other two creatures swoop quickly, healthier than us and not wearied by a two-day uphill trudge. She cries out as a creature lands on her. I turn and in a blur, the other one is on me, wrestling me to the ground, enveloping me in its leathery wings. If that beak gets around one of my arteries, it’ll drain my blood in seconds. I kick and punch at the thick wings, but it holds me tighter and tighter. My breath comes in gasps. Images of my wife flash into my head: alive and smiling; dead and cold; resurrected, twisting in anguish.

  An eerie voice brings me back to the present: a buzzing, static-filled voice, as if from a badly-tuned radio. The bat-creature releases its deadly grip, leaving me splayed on the ground, with a full view of where the sound has come from.

  I have never seen anything so horrific in my life. A man-sized creature hovers over us, even more terrifying than the bat-beasts. It has a long insect-like abdomen of many sections, ending in a barbed tail that twitches near me. From its pinkish body sprout wide membranous wings and numerous pairs of clawed arms. Its head is a mass of quivering antenna as it addresses our captors in its strange language.

  The bat-beast drags me to the road, where Marcy is held by another one. The other three surround Harve, who rolls on the ground, screaming. His severed arm lies a yard away, still holding the pistol, ripped off by one of the creatures. I rush to him, tearing off a strip of his shirt to bandage the stump. None of the creatures interfere. On the contrary, the hideous insect-like leader seems fascinated by what I’m doing. I think about plucking the pistol from Harve’s severed arm, but daren’t risk it with the creatures hovering around me.

  The insect-monstrosity gives more orders and we’re hustled up the road, the light dimming around us. The hairs on my neck prickle, as I wonder what horrid fate awaits us. Harve staggers, muttering curses, as one of the bat-beasts gorges on his severed arm, like a kid with a chicken drumstick. There’s no sign of the pistol. I reach out to Marcy; she yelps.

  “Relax,” I tell her.

  “Relax? Are you insane?”

  “For the moment they want us alive,” I say. “That’s the best situation we’ve had for a long time. Even our fellow humans weren’t that generous.”

  “You’ll do anything to stay alive, won’t you?” She laughs; it has a hysterical edge to it, but I know she’s right.

  Day 49: Devil’s View

  We reach an area of level ground nestling between the wooded ridges of Devil’s View. Three massive cubes stand in the clearing, each about twenty feet wide, dotted with small portholes of a cloudy glass-like material. As one cube vibrates, shaking the ground about us, I get an idea: somehow these gigantic alien boxes are responsible for the earth tremors. Dozens of the bat-creatures flap around the cubes, while two insectoid leaders look on.

  Marcy cries out when we reach the demolished remains of the store and the wooden tourist cabins. “Adam!” Lurching from the grip of her guard, she looks around wildly, as if she expects her husband to wander out of the store with a beer. Her guard swoops into the air with a shriek, but Marcy stops by the blackened remains of a Plymouth Savoy. She straightens from looking inside and lets the guard bring her back.

  “Marcy?” I call out.

  She looks up, tears streaming down her cheeks. “They weren’t in there.”

  “Let’s hope they’re in the bunker,” I say. I glare at Harve, daring him not to contradict me.

  We are taken past the cubes; beyond them is the Devil’s View bunker. Its hatch, like most of the others, has been crudely torn open. Marcy shudders and sobs.

  “Great,” Harve mutters as we are pushed forward, “we come all this damned way to find they were bat-food too. What great plan are you gonna come up with now, Doc? Because I’d sure like to hear it.”

  “We’re still alive—against the odds—and that’s all that matters.”

  “I’d rather die a hero,” Harve says, “than live like a cripple, waiting to be eaten by a giant bat.”

  “Go ahead,” I say, as we stop midway between the gigantic cubes and the bunker.

  The hovering insectoid looks down at us. “You will wait,” it crackles, its voice a distorted buzzing that pierces the inner ear. It takes a moment for me to register that it spoke English.

  “You know our language,” I say. “What are you doing here?”

  “Yeah,” Harve adds, “why don’t you clear off back to where you came from? We’ve got enough damn foreigners and commies already.”

  “We were invited here,” it replies, “by your own President, to eradicate the ones you call communists. In exchange, we use our cubes to mine for the substances in your mountains—chiefly, uranium ore. And your President saved a plentiful supply of human flesh in the bunkers, to feed our Byakhee workforce.”

  “What the hell?” Harve blurts.

  I am too stunned to speak. President McCarthy sold out our world to these monsters? Surely, even he wouldn’t go that far?

  “Where is my family?” Marcy shrieks.

  “You will have the answers,” its voice hisses to me, “from your own President.” It turns to Marcy. “As for your family: I believe they are with the President in the bunker.”

  Marcy surges forward. “I want to see them. Now!” She struggles against the creature’s grip. “Adam! I’m out here!”

  “Silence!” the insectoid hisses, its voice even more distorted when raised. “Silence, or our Byakhee servants will feast on your blood.”

  Two of the Byakhee bat-creatures emerge from the bunker, with a hovering platform between them. A cluster of strange equipment covers it: a squat metal cylinder about a foot in height, connected by cords, tubes and sockets to three other apparatuses far removed from our technology.

  “What’s all this junk?” Harve says, as they ha
lt in front of us.

  “I am your President,” a voice intones from the cluster of equipment.

  Harve stiffens to attention, like any good soldier.

  President McCarthy’s voice is the same lifeless monotone as his radio broadcast. Inside the cylinder, a human brain pulsates. “I said I’d find a way to beat the communists and I have.”

  Day 50

  Join them or die. Become one of the select few whose skills can aid our new overlords from Yuggoth. There was really no alternative. Back when the air filter failed, we gave our reasons for staying alive. This time, we convinced ourselves to go on living. Harve is a survivor, eager to help his President reign over what is left of the Earth. For Marcy, it came down to family, and now she’s finally reunited with her scientist husband and her two children—their brain cylinders are linked together in a corner of the bunker.

  Even though their bodies were injured, ravaged by radiation, both Harve and Marcy struggled with the idea of having their brains preserved in a cylinder. As a doctor, I saw the benefits straightaway, as I’m sure McCarthy did, with the health problems he had. We are immortal now; we’ll never feel pain, never need to sleep, eat or drink. Our masters from Yuggoth inform me we can even travel the galaxy in these cylinders. But the most important thing is I will never die. I’ve always tried to preserve life—for others first, but more recently, for myself—and now I have finally cheated death!

  Day 57

  I need to occupy my mind in this immortality. I am haunted by dread images: the Burtons, begging us not to close the hatch; Frank’s face as I betray him; Clara Glenville with a Byakhee clamped to her neck; Ed Cassidy glaring at me as Dan bleeds in his arms; my wife, pleading with me to end her resurrected existence. They repeat over and over and over again. I have no eyes to close, no medication to take, no sleep to help me forget. If it carries on like this, I will lose my mind. An eternity of madness—there must be something I can do to stop it!

  PUTNAM’S MONSTER

  BY SCOTT T. GOUDSWARD

  Walter looked back over his shoulder as he ran, eyes wild, mouth open, gasping for breath. He heard the hard heavy footfalls catching up from behind. They’d followed him from the street. He leapt at the security door, colliding full force, knocking out the guard on the other side. A damp red smear painted the wall, an obscene lithograph, where the guard’s head collided with the painted cinderblock wall.

  Walter jammed chairs under the handles like he’d seen in the spy films. The library door loomed ahead. The hallway seemed to elongate with each frantic step; his black wing-tip shoes squeaked on the tiles, marring the polished surface with black streaks. Walter hit the swinging door hard; he went into an uncontrolled slide on the thin carpeting, his arms flailing, looking for anything to grab onto.

  The silent room resounded with a great rip as half of his suit coat tore and was left behind, clinging to the corner of a metal shelf. His thin black tie felt like a noose, and as Walter slid, foot pointed towards a display case like it was home plate, he finally started to slow. His breaths came hard and fast, spittle quivering on his bottom lip.

  Walter stood up, looking at the glass topped display case. Three heavy steel locks hung in place, keeping the case closed. Walter struggled against the locks, grunting and groaning. At last, he ripped off his tie and the remains of his coat, dropping them on the floor. He heard the faint shouting approaching as he struggled with the case.

  His glasses fogged as sweat rolled down his face and dripped onto the glass. He saw his own crazed expression, but still knew what had to happen. Beyond the well-insulated walls of Innsmouth University, the helicopters were coming, and the bombers, and by this point the army. Putnam’s beast was destroying the ocean town.

  What the University kept hidden and locked away was the only thing that would save them all. Walter balled his fist, prepared to smash the glass with his hand; after a second thought, he drove his elbow through it. The glass shattered; pain ripped up his arm as the jagged glass tore into his flesh. He grabbed them all, ignoring the display cards with the small typed warnings ‘handle carefully with supervision.’

  Walter hugged the tomes to his chest and ran for the small librarian’s office. He locked and barricaded the door with the desk. There was one window with reinforced glass. His blood-slick hands flew across the pages, leaving crimson smears, seemingly absorbed into the pages. His fingers stopped on a passage; blood leaked down his hand to feed the book. Walter didn’t know all the words, though some he’d seen in the professor’s notes Summoning Spell.

  Constance tittered as she spied the empty desk. Three rows, six desks in each, with one empty, last row, first desk. The typewriter sat quiet amongst the clickety clack of the other typists, or glorified secretaries, as Churchman called them. Her sweater was draped loose across her shoulders to show off her ample cleavage, and over the curve of her horn-rimmed glasses, she spied.

  Walter stumbled in, twenty minutes late. All typing ceased for the few seconds it took for him to stagger to his desk and get his coat off. He unlocked the lower left drawer and dropped in a brown paper bag, and a copy of Astounding Science Fiction. The inbox on the narrow desk was crammed with banded bundles of papers and folders. Sometimes the ‘girls’ liked to drop their extra work on his desk. With a heavy sigh, he loaded the typewriter with a clean piece of paper and got to work.

  Walter glanced at the open folder on his desk as his fingers flew across the keys. His system was infallible. Translate the notes, work them into the text already on the page, mark the page done and then drop it into an open desk drawer. The women were tidier in their storage of completed pages, but none of them had Walter’s speed.

  Walter was in the typing pool because he was fast and knew it. Walter could pound out over seventy words a minute; he was the fastest typist in the pool, thanks to his mother. His shorthand was the best, also thanks to his mother. It was at her urging that he took administrative courses in college instead of the sciences that he loved. “You’ll never get anywhere with the science,” she’d chided while a Chesterfield burned between her fingers. “It’s only because of me you work at the university.” He dropped another empty folder into the desk drawer. The once-laden inbox was now half-full.

  Walter smirked as he heard the others trying to keep up with him. He didn’t worry about chipping a nail or smearing make-up, he pounded away until his work was done. In his mind he pictured Constance pleading with Churchman, as he escorted her from the office, faux-leather purse clutched tight to her chest, hands full of damp tissues and tears rolling down her face. While Walter imagined fancy ends to his co-workers; they dreamed of Kirk Douglas, James Dean and the latest Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley songs.

  Walter drummed his fingers on the desk, trying to decipher some notations in the margins of a paper. The words were almost as strange as some hand-drawn doodles. He shrugged and dropped the paper into the drawer. His mind wandered to the newest episode of The Adventures of Superman as he glanced out the window. The college campus spread out before the slightly opened windows. A cool sea breeze rolled in, and Walter reveled in it. The girls liked it warm, sometimes too warm. The ocean was right there and the cooling winds that blew off of it were often lost.

  The sun glinted off the other windows in the office buildings, administration, science and research; the dormitories were further towards the city as were the classrooms. What always seemed to steal his attention away was the reactor silo.

  Churchman leaned against the little brown desk that held no other form or function. The small fans on either side of him did little to cut the stale office air. He looked over the desks at the bodies attached to their typewriters. He slid a finger under his collar, damp with the sweat rolling off his balding head, trying to ease the tension.

  He watched them through his brown-rimmed Ronsurs. He found the clacking of the keys terribly relaxing, knowing they were working and he wasn’t. Taking a deep breath, George Churchman clapped his hands lightly as if at a golf
match. “Ladies and gentleman, please.” He waited as fingers slowed on keys, until the typing stopped. George waited for the last typist to stop; it was Walter, always Walter. The last to work and the last one to stop. Walter’s fingers hovered above the keys, the tips teasing the letters as they waited above the enameled surface.

  “A new opportunity has been made available.” Walter shifted his fingers on the keys, his eyes darting to the pile of papers in his desk tray. As Constance watched, a bead of sweat trickled down Churchman’s cheek to be absorbed in his shirt collar. She loosened the top button on her shirt, exposing a tad more view.

  “There’s one new position, and our department has been chosen to fill it.” Churchman’s eyes swept the room, lingered on Constance’s chest, a smiled playing at the corner of his mouth. “And our little office here will fill it.” The excited chattering rose. “Please keep in mind that we took everything into consideration, from output to attendance and security clearance.” George looked around the room, trying to read the expressions. “There’s a pay increase and a transfer to the Marine Studies division of Innsmouth. You’ll be leaving Miskatonic; you’ll be working directly with their research staff.” Churchman shrugged apologetically, “Walter, they chose you.”

  Walter’s expression was blank; he looked from the typewriter to Churchman to the ladies next to him. He closed the folder on his desk and added it back to the stacks. He forced a smile and opened the desk drawers to remove his personal items.

  “Anything to say to the ladies, Walter? You won’t be seeing them any time soon.” Walter stood, draped his sport-coat over his shoulder.

  “I am going to miss the view,” he said to Constance.

  Walter struggled to keep up and write at the same time. The team powered on ahead of him, while he fought to get all their words down, pausing for a step to keep the dictation flowing. His shoes clicked off the black and white floor tiles as he ran to catch up.