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

by Robert Price

  “So you never met him, you two ever talk on the telephone?” Moore asked.

  “No. I mentioned it to him once, but he said he didn’t trust telephones. The only way we ever communicated was through letters that accompanied the issues he sent in, and the ones I’d send back with his monthly check.”

  “You got any of his letters?” Carson asked.

  “Oh, maybe his last one, but I don’t know. Once I read ‘em, I usually tossed ‘em in the trash. No reason to keep ‘em.”

  “What about his address?”

  “Yeah, that I got. Here, let me get it for you,” Abe said and then walked into his tiny, cluttered office. The two agents followed close behind. The publisher cleared his desk of piled newspapers to uncover a rolodex. A quick flip through it and he pulled out a card with a name and address on it and handed it to Agent Carson.

  “Thomas Buckwell,” The agent said and then read the address. “This is about eighty miles away from here.”

  “Yep,” Abe added.

  “Swell, another long drive,” Moore muttered.

  “You got any of his comic book stuff that he sent you around here?” Carson asked.

  “No, as I get them in, I send them to the printer. It’s a month-by-month thing. Kind of scary not having anything in advance by the guy, but then just dealing with the man is kind of scary too.”

  Carson nodded. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Smilansky. We’ll look into this, but rest assured, we will get back in touch with you soon. This isn’t over,” Carson said, delivering the standard FBI farewell threat. With that the two agents let themselves out.

  On their way back to the car, Carson asked, “So what do you think?”

  “He’s sort of a weasel, but probably not a subversive. All he cares about is money.” Moore said.

  “My take on him too. It’s this Thomas Buckwell that’s got all the crazy ideas.”

  As Agent Moore opened up the driver’s side door to the car he said, “Let’s go sort him out, but first let’s stop for lunch. I’m starving.”

  Carson got into the car, grunted an acknowledgement, and the two G-men drove off.

  After nearly two hours of driving north, the agents had left Detroit long behind. Even the new suburbs that had been slowly but steadily spreading out from the Motor City since the 40s were now far to the south of them. Out here it was farms, apple orchards, and tiny townships. A slice of small town America as anything Norman Rockwell ever painted for the Saturday Evening Post.

  “Okay, this little spit of nothing is Clio, keep your eyes peeled for Woodside Road,” Carson said, looking up from the open map in his lap.

  “There it is,” Moore said and turned off the highway that had only finished being paved four years back onto a single lane dirt road. “I would never have expected a writer or artists living this far out in the sticks.”

  “I think that will be the least of Mr. Buckwell’s eccentricities.” Carson said, folding up the map.

  The black sedan pulled up to a clapboard, cracker box of a house hemmed in on all sides by tall grass and weeds. An old tire swing hung from a tree out front, making lazy circles in the breeze. The front porch had lost one of its banisters that held up its roof, so half of the porch was a crumpled mess. One of the side windows had been broken and now a piece of cardboard covered the hole. The house was the picture of neglect and there was no car parked on the two dirt ruts that served as a driveway, but thin threads of smoke drifting out of the chimney told the agents someone was home.

  Moore and Carson carefully approached the front door, both ducking under the sagging porch roof, and Moore pounded on the door hard enough to rattle the windows in their frames on either side of the entrance.

  “God damn it, I’m coming,” someone bellowed from inside.

  The door was wrenched open with the squealing protest of warped wood and a blubbery man in stained dungarees and a blue work shirt with its sleeves rolled up stood on the other side.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Thomas Buckwell?” Carson asked.

  The man took a moment to look at the two men, rubbing a hand over his chin stubble, before answering. “Yeah, who the fuck are you two?”

  Moore shoved the man inside, following. “We’re the FBI, pal. Stow that talk or we’ll bring you in for indecency.”

  Buckwell barked out a single laugh but quickly stopped and looked both confused and wary. “You two for real?”

  “Yes sir we are,” Carson said, stepping into the house and showing the man his ID. “We want to ask you a few questions about the comic book you write.”

  “What for?”

  “Because we think it’s a filthy rag full of filthy, un-American ideas, that’s why. Tell us, Thomas, you one of them pink-os?” Moore said as he looked around the gloomy front room.

  “Hey I ain’t no Commie!” Buckwell said indignantly. “I stormed the beaches of Normandy, damn it.”

  “You sure you and your neighbors aren’t part of the Communist Party of America? Out here in the sticks, who knows what you all could get up to?”

  “What? Hell no, we’ll all just farmers and such. Good God fearing folk, that’s all.”

  “But you’re not a farmer, are you Thomas? You’re a writer and an artist. An intellectual,” Moore jabbed, stressing that last word that to J. Edgar Hoover and most of his Bureau Boys was just another word for a dirty red.

  “Huh? What, wait, you—”

  “And don’t give us that ‘we’re farmers’ bull! Most of the Ruskies who started the Communist party were farmers.” Moore continued the intimidation. Keeping the perp reeling and off his game was a sure way of making him slip up and say something he otherwise wouldn’t. “As far as being ‘God fearing’ we know that’s a lie. We’ve read your sick little funny books and we know all about what you really think about God, Thomas.”

  “But wait, you don’t understand.”

  “We want to understand, Thomas.” Carson spoke up now that Moore had softened the man up with his verbal blows. “Why don’t you tell us about your comic book? Maybe we got it wrong and it’s not as subversive as we think it is.”

  “That’s just it, it’s not my comic book. I didn’t write it, my brother did. I’m Henry Buckwell. Tommy was my brother.”

  The two agents exchanged glances for the briefest of moments.

  “But you told us you were Thomas at the door,” Carson said.

  “You trying to pull a fast one?” Moore reached out and grabbed Mr. Buckwell by the front of his shirt and pushed him up against a wall. “Lying to a Government Man will get your ass tossed in the joint before you can say ‘I like Ike’.”

  “No, wait, stop.” The chubby man blubbered, his face red and his eyes watery. “Look, my brother is dead. He was living here with me and writing those crazy books and was making good money for doing it too. So after he died, one of his checks came in the mail. And then another and another. So I…well I sort of cashed them. Look, he was my little brother, he would have willed them to me if the fool had ever done a will. It’s not like I was hurting anyone. So when you two showed up here in your suits and driving that big, fancy car, I thought you were bankers or accountants or something, so that’s why I said I was Tommy. Honest to Christ that’s why.”

  Moore let go of Henry’s shirt. The man was broken, no need to keep menacing him. He nodded at his partner. Carson would take the lead in the questioning now.

  “What do you mean your brother is dead?”

  “He’s dead. He killed himself three months back. Went out into the field one night with my shotgun and blew his damn head off,” Henry Buckwell said. “He was crazy, as in really crazy. The doctors said he was a schizo. Ever since he was a boy he heard voices. Made our lives hell, me and my folks, having a loony in the family. No matter how we tried to hide it, people knew. They snickered behind our backs and steered far clear of us, like we all had the crazy and it was contagious. My damn brother couldn’t keep quiet about it. Always telling anyone t
hat would listen about the ‘voice from the stars.’ That’s what he called it. That’s why he named his comic book what he did. That’s why he started doing it in the first place. He said that he had to, that the Treader told him secrets and that others had to know them too. So they could ‘become like they are’ or something.”

  “Sounds like a Grade-A loony,” Moore said without a hint of sympathy in his voice.

  Henry nodded. “And then three months back all of the sudden he said he was finished. The Treader told him he was done and Tommy was happy for the first time I could remember in a long time. He came out of his room and even had a beer with me. We watched the Jack Benny show on the TV I had talked him into buying. He didn’t talk much, he never did, but it was a good night. Then around two in the morning I was woken up by the shotgun blast. After looking all over the house for him, I found his trail through the tall grass outside and eventually what was left of him. He still had both barrels rammed into his mouth and the top of his head was nothing but a pile of wet pulp.”

  Henry had tears trailing down his face and he wiped his runny nose on the back of a bare forearm.

  “I’m sorry about your brother, Mr. Buckwell,” Carson said earnestly. “Did he leave a suicide note?”

  Henry shook his head.

  “Could we have a look at his room, at any of his possessions or work that he left behind?”

  “Ain’t nothing of his left. He didn’t have much to start with, just a few clothes and some art supplies and I sold both off after he was dead. As for his work, I told you, he said he was done. When I was cleaning out his room after his… afterwards, I found that he had the last six issues of his comic book finished and in a box ready to be mailed to Detroit. There was a note on top asking me to take it to the post office like I always did for him. So I did. I didn’t do it so I could keep getting his checks. Honest I didn’t. I did it because he was my brother. Yeah he was crazy and all, but damn it, he was still my little brother.”

  After a quick inspection of Thomas’ now empty room, the two agents said that they had all that they needed from Henry for the moment and that if they needed anything else, they’d come back. Henry sheepishly asked about ‘the check stuff’ but Carson told him to forget it. Check fraud was not high on their list of priorities this day. Once outside Moore lit up a cigarette and turned to his partner.

  “Now what?”

  “Now I say we go back to Mr. Smilansky and find out why he didn’t tell us that he had at least three more issues of The Treader of the Stars all ready and waiting to come out. ‘Kind of scary not having anything in advance’ my eye.”

  Moore shook his head and said through a smirk, “You can never trust a Jew.”

  The two then got back into their car and started their long trip back south to the city.

  The return to the city was a quiet one, the agents saving their energy for their upcoming encounter with Smilansky. When they turned onto the publisher’s street, Carson said, “We should have gotten the guy’s home address, you know.”

  His partner shook his head. “No, he’s in, if that rusted piece of shit Plymouth is his car anyway.”

  Moore pulled up into the lot and a minute later they were heading towards the building. As they walked, Carson pulled his pencil and notepad from his pocket and scribbled down the Plymouth’s number plate. Moore grunted in approval.

  Rat tat tat. Moore pounded on the door. When no answer was forthcoming, the agents shared an uneasy glance. “Let’s check out back,” Moore said and turned. Carson went to follow when the door flew open, pausing both men in their tracks.

  “What the? Can’t a man use the can in peace?” Smilansky, red-faced and angry, paled considerably when he saw who’d been knocking. “Oh, I wasn’t expecting you two again,” he continued, his words innocent sounding. “Forget something?”

  Moore stepped past Smilansky into the building while Carson ushered him in, kicking the door closed with his shoe. All subterfuge of ‘good cop, bad cop’ gone, Carson snarled, “You can drop the act, Mr. Smilansky.”

  “What, what?”

  “Just say ‘what’ again you little weasel and see what happens.” Moore said and stepped up close to the publisher.

  Smilansky looked to Carson for help but the grim-faced agent shook his head.

  “You lied,” Moore said, looking down at the far shorter man.

  “No more issues of The Treader?” Carson added. “We spoke to ‘Thomas’ about that.”

  Smilansky backed away from Moore. “You actually met him?” The surprise was evident by his tone.

  Moore gave him an ugly grin. “Sort of.”

  The publisher looked quizzical for a moment then raised his hands in defense. “Okay, okay. I have more issues. I didn’t tell you because you know, this business is my bread and butter. I didn’t want ‘em taken away from me.”

  Carson scanned the room. “They here then?”

  The other man quailed. “You can’t have ‘em—it’s my best-selling title… and… and I made a call to my lawyer while you were gone.”

  Moore looked to Carson and raised an eyebrow. “A relative, I bet.”

  Smilansky ignored the stereotype quip and continued. “Those comic book hearings of yours don’t start till next year, and I’ll be done with the Treader by then.” His confidence growing, the old man stood straighter. “So, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Moore was fuming when they left the building, his face twisted into a scowl. “Damned lawyers!” he said and spat on the asphalt. Carson shrugged his shoulders and said, “We can still bring him in you know.”

  His partner paused and Carson followed suit. Moore thought for a moment and replied, “Aw screw it,” before continuing towards their car.

  “Hey, hey?” Moore was just opening his door when a rasping voice appeared behind him. Beyond Moore’s bulk Carson saw the unkempt kid from earlier rush across the lot.

  “Oh brother,” Carson said.

  Moore was far less eloquent. “Scram you little shit or else!”

  Undaunted, the kid continued his approach, panting as he spoke. “I thought you said you didn’t work here?” he whined. “I knew you were lying. You’re just like everyone else. Always putting me down, laughing at me, lying to me, never listening to me.” He stopped before Moore and from Carson’s line of sight, disappeared beyond the big man’s shoulders.

  Moore sounded exasperated, “Look kid just—”

  “Well you’ve got to listen to me now,” the kid said, cutting Moore off mid-sentence. “Now I’ve got something important to say and you’re all gonna listen.”

  “Huh?” Moore said in a surprised voice. There was a sudden scuffling sound and Carson, darting around the car, witnessed his partner trying to push the kid away, his big hands pressed against the teenager’s bony shoulders. To Carson’s horror, the kid, his spotty face twisted in rage, had a switchblade pressed into Moore’s gut. Carson froze. The kid withdrew the knife and a fountain of blood followed.

  Carson’s world slowed down. The kid looked at him, his wild face blood-spattered, as beside him Moore collapsed slowly to his knees. Fighting through his shock Carson pushed his hand into his jacket. It reappeared holding a heavy black revolver: his Smith & Wesson Model 10. He aimed, pulled the trigger, and with a cannon-like boom the kid’s face impacted, the back of his head exploding in a cloud of red mist. Time reasserted itself, the kid collapsed backwards, and Moore issued a loud groan. Carson lowered his gun and took the few steps needed to reach his partner, crouching beside the injured man.

  “Agh, the little shit knifed me!” Face glossy with sweat, Moore looked to Carson with panicked eyes. “I’m gonna die!”

  Carson re-holstered his gun and removed his jacket. Balling it in his hands he pressed it against the ugly flower of blood forming across Moore’s chest. “I’ll get on the radio,” Carson said urgently, and thought rather than move his partner to reach the door he’d run round to the other side. A movement caught his eye
and he saw the kid’s portfolio at Moore’s feet, the contents partially spilled to the asphalt, blowing in a slight breeze. He saw random frames from comic books there, glued haphazardly together, images of a black hooded superhero battling unearthly foes.

  “Crazy.” Carson said as he examined the kid’s portfolio. The incident now eight hours behind him, Carson sat slouched at the pool table in his den. His partner was in hospital, stable and getting better despite the kid’s attempts to murder him, and Carson, unable to sleep, his mind still filled with the events of the day, had tossed and turned beside his wife’s sleeping form before he had given up, risen and walked downstairs in slippers and pajamas to his den.

  He’d signed the portfolio out of the evidence locker after a quick interview with Bateham. There were procedures to follow, when an agent shot a citizen dead, but with the violent assault and hospitalization of Moore it had gone smoothly enough. Still Carson had trouble escaping the fact he had killed the kid, hence the insomnia, hence the reason he sat here, a scotch in one hand and an eight ball in the other, the kid’s disjointed scrapbook flat on the pool table between them.

  He was struggling to make sense of it all. Perhaps there was none. The pages were out of order and from different issues. Some had words crossed out, others were underlined, but they were all from The Treader of the Stars. Carson blinked. His vision blurred and the room seemed to spin for a moment. He’d only taken a sip of scotch so it wasn’t that so… The pages throbbed, or at least, that’s the impression his skewed vision gave him. The next moment, he was screaming himself hoarse.

  “Honey? Honey!” his wife’s voice appearing through a black haze, a sudden splash of wetness across his face halted his screams. Carson opened his eyes to find her staring down at him, her long red hair disheveled around a petite, worried face. She had an empty glass in her hand.

  His face wet from what she’s done to bring him around, his body was soaked in sweat, his hands shaking and… he looked down and found a broken pool cue clutched in his right hand.