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

by Robert Price

  “You probably woke half the neighborhood!” she said. “Are you drunk?”

  He couldn’t reply, for adding to his confusion was the horror of discovering the den utterly demolished.

  “What the hell got into you?” his wife continued, her voice filled with exasperation and not a little fear. Carson wanted to reply but found himself transfixed by the carnage around them. The pool table was on its side, cracked in the center with two legs smashed. The floor was littered in broken glass and pool balls, the wall behind the bar damp with spilled alcohol. His framed Pollock prints there were smashed and askew, chaotic reminders of the strange seizure that had consumed him.

  “Judy, damn,” he sat up and his limbs ached like he had been through a day’s field training. Despite his confusion and horror, he was quick to make an excuse now. “Sleepwalking. Must have had a nightmare. I’m sorry hon.”

  It was a pathetic excuse, but she nodded in sympathy. Putting down the glass she rubbed his knees. “You look half dead, Don. Let’s get you back to bed and we’ll talk about this in the morning.”

  “Yes, yes.” Carson tried to compose himself further but as she helped him to his feet his mind whirled with horror.

  That blasted kid’s comics, he thought, they did something to me!

  “Watch your step, don’t step on the glass.”

  “Yeah thanks,” Carson replied absently. The way the comics had been cut and pasted, the way they were altered, had altered him somehow, and brought about a break of extreme psychosis. And what if Judy had appeared in the room while he’d been wrecking it? Carson shuddered.

  “It’s okay Don, really.” As his wife patted his hand and led him through the door, Carson had difficulty holding back his tears.

  A few nights later Carson took his wife to see a Vincent Price movie, filmed in some new, ‘3-Dimensional’ technology. He did it in way of an apology, as his conscience at what could have happened in his den weighed heavily on him, so much so it completely obliterated his thoughts concerning the shooting of the deranged kid. The portfolio had been returned to the Bureau without a word about his seizure as Carson thought his theory, of how the configuration of words and pictures had initiated his mental derangement, just might send him on a one-way ticket to the nuthouse.

  House of Wax, the movie was called, and Judy got a real kick out of the new 3-D technology. Carson didn’t see anything special about it at the time, until the next week they returned to the cinema because Judy wanted to show her sister the amazing new thing, and this time, he saw it. When the guy whacked the paddleball right at the camera, Carson, like many other movie patrons around him, found himself ducking. It was a strange sensation, something he knew wasn’t real causing this involuntary physical reaction, and he couldn’t help but be reminded of the incident with The Treader of the Stars.

  The remainder of the movie left him deep in thought. On the previous showing, he hadn’t gotten the trick, but once his brain got use to it… It made Carson think: is that what the comic book was like, that you had to see the trick in order to get it? He’d been unfortunate enough to receive a concentrated dose through the kid’s mangled portfolio, so what if some people got it right away, and turned nuts like he had? That’s what really scared him.

  Or was he just going crazy? As far as he was concerned, those committee hearings couldn’t come fast enough.

  Some months after his episode with insanity, Carson was involved in a disturbing case of a teen brought in for beating his mother to death with a hammer. A standard, albeit bloody, murder case that fell under local police jurisdiction, the FBI nevertheless got a courtesy call because the woman had worked as a secretary in the Detroit bureau field office. Carson didn’t meet the kid in person, but he saw a mug shot. A spotty, snotty nosed juvenile, it was the Funny Times Comics incident all over again. It came as no surprise then, that the kid owned copies of the Treader of the Stars. Carson later found out that the little bastard even had an issue of it folded and stuffed into his back pocket when he was busted.

  Then the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency arrived, and comic book publishers were brought to account on their comics’ effects on juvenile delinquency. Following the proceedings, Carson found some of it to be complete hokum. Batman and Robin faggots? Wonder Woman a bondage freak? But darker issues were covered concerning the depiction of murder, bloodshed, and torture in comic books, and by the end of the proceedings a Comic Code Authority was created and certain publishers were forced to drastically censor their comic books. Some titles, too graphic to be censored without cutting them to pieces, were cancelled altogether.

  Funny Time Comics wasn’t mentioned during the hearings, for compared to the likes of EC Comics, their covers and interiors were rather tame to the eye and didn’t create an instant abhorrence in those running the committee. Carson went to his superiors trying to give evidence against the publisher: after all, they had a near fatal stabbing and a dead mom in their favor, but red tape and jurisdictional issues stopped him and Moore from ever getting near the hearings.

  The hearings did good, Carson couldn’t doubt that. They perhaps went a little far in some cases, with werewolves, zombies and vampires being banned from portrayal in comics, but gone were the comics that depicted bondage, excessive gore and sexual violence. But, what of those comic books out there already, in the hands of America’s youth? Nothing could be done about those, and as far as Carson knew, the damage was already done.

  One thing he could do however, was find back issues of The Treader of the Stars himself and destroy them. This he did, buying them from used bookstores, garage sales and by placing ads in newspapers, beginning what would become a lifelong obsession.

  A few days after the final issue of The Treader of the Stars was released, Funny Time Comics suffered a fire that turned the building into a burnt out wreck, with Smilansky the only victim. An apt end, though a little late in coming, but at least fate brought some justice to the world for a man that published such deranged trash.

  Over the following years Carson’s grim interest in comic books grew, especially where murders were involved, and when the most extreme cases of violence and murder appeared, he made a point of searching the case files for evidence that fueled his own personal obsession. It wasn’t hard to find.

  In 1957 the country was shocked to silence when a weird but harmless looking fellow from Wisconsin was arrested for murder, grave robbing, desecrating corpses, cannibalism, and necrophilia. This farmer, Ed Gein, had turned his home into a house of horrors with cut off lips dangling from strings, upturned skulls used as bowls, human skin stretched over furniture, ten severed female heads, a box full of tanned and treated lady parts, and more grotesqueries. And while everyone in law enforcement who didn’t personally inspect Ed’s horrible house poured over the hundreds of crime scene photos with morbid curiosity, Carson was sure he was the only one who fixated not on the ghoulish decorations, but on a copy of The Treader of the Stars that could be seen in one of the photos right next to Ed’s belt made out of women’s nipples.

  A year later, Charles Raymond Starkweather, a James Dean fixated killer, murdered eleven people including his girlfriend’s two-year-old sister. After his first killing, that of service station attendant Robert Culvert, Starkweather claimed he had transcended his former self and now lived on a higher plane of existence where he was above humanity’s morals and laws. It came to no surprise to Carson, as he delved into the case notes, that Starkweather’s fourteen-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate had been an avid reader of boys’ comic books, including The Treader of the Stars. Carson guessed she had shared her interest with Starkweather too.

  Then there was the Texas Tower Sniper, Charles Whitman, who in 1966 massacred and killed fourteen people after murdering his wife and mother. In an interview, one of his buddies from the Marines said, “Old Chuck was sort of quiet, kept to himself. A nice guy, just sort of odd. While all of us would blow off steam playing cards and drinking, he would usually be
off in a corner reading one of his funny books. Yeah, that’s pretty much all he did, read those stupid funny books.”

  Carson found and burned more issues of that damn comic in his furnace, but it seemed a never-ending task. As the years passed and the horrors mankind perpetrated against his brothers grew, real life monsters appeared to replace those banned from comic books.

  Many killers Carson read about in biographies, for after retiring from the FBI in the 1970s he had no further access to the case files. Still, he found enough.

  Charles Manson, a burglar, rapist and a pimp in his younger, troubled years, was a deranged monster that moved on to more heinous crimes that ended up tainting America culture for decades to come. In a biography, Carson read this disconcerting quote from Manson: “I tried desperately to live a normal life as a boy, but the world wouldn’t let me. Still I tried following the rules, read comic books and bought baseball cards, things I treaded into the dust of my childhood as being a man of power became my true calling.”

  Another human monster, Ted Bundy, the serial killer, rapist and necrophiliac, spent a disturbed childhood in Tacoma where he later described to biographers that he would roam the neighborhood searching through people’s trash for lurid comic books and detective magazines. Another youth tainted by The Treader of the Stars? To Carson’s eyes, it was certainly a possibility.

  An old man in a world he barely recognized, Carson, a widower of some fifteen years, went through a daily routine that while not exactly stimulating, at least gave his lonely life some meaning. As the 1980s arrived he continued his search for the comics, and spent a good portion of his bureau pension buying comic store catalogues and making phone calls to stores across the United States and Great Britain. It seemed the supplies of The Treader of the Stars were finally running dry. He hadn’t incinerated a copy for over two months now, and with every comic shop listed in the phone directories he diligently searched at the 96th Street Library, Carson felt he finally had a handle on things.

  The library being a daily goal for as long as he could remember, Carson walked to the building by cutting though Midtown Park, walking slowly so as to avoid slipping on the icy footpath. The cold spell this January played havoc with his arthritic knees, and while walking, he looked to the frost encrusted grass and thought of warmer days when he could sit on one of the graffiti-scarred benches and watch the world go by. He left the park, looked both ways before crossing Lexington Avenue (for the drivers these days were utter maniacs), and went to continue another part of his daily ritual: buying a paper from Geoff’s Magazines, a small stand that had appeared on the avenue a few years previously. He could just read the papers for free in the library, but Geoff was a friendly face and he liked to chew the fat on occasion.

  Geoff, completing the sale of a magazine to a sallow-faced priest, saw Carson’s approach, his brown face forming a toothy grin. “Hey Mr. G-man! Braving the weather too huh?”

  “As always,” Carson replied and returned the smile. He usually bought a copy of The Times, The Post too if there was something interesting to follow, and he was about to ask for the former when he stopped dead in his tracks. A line of comic books hung near the top of the magazine rack, dangling from clothes pegs on a piece of string. There was the usual fare, Batman, pictured battling some gaudily clad villain, The Amazing Spiderman fighting his own garish enemies, and between those two comic books he saw The Treader of the Stars. He even recognized the issue, despite the fact the cover art had been updated. It was number three, the Yellow Menace issue. The cover depicted the Treader standing over a cowed enemy dressed in yellow rags and a cracked white mask, both men trapped in a battle of wills with black energy bolts pouring from the Treader’s hands, white ones from the Yellow Menace’s.

  Carson’s blood ran cold. “No,” he said. “It can’t be.” It was too horrible to be true.

  “Hey Mr. Carson what’s up? You’ve gone pale. You wanna sit down?” Through a haze Carson heard Geoff pull his plastic chair out from behind him.

  “The Treader of the Stars,” Carson said, the words more ominous now than ever before.

  “Oh that?” Geoff said. “Comic books are hot again since the Superman movie was a such a big hit. They’ve even gone back and reissued a load of old titles bought from out-of-business publishers. The Crimson Ghost, The Deadman Detective, The Black Cat, and The Iron Golem they’re all back. But that Treader one, that’s the best seller by far. I hear it because it’s got a dark edge to it. You know, that’s what the kids want these days. The days of good guys punching bad guys for the American way is on its way out. Now everything’s got to be dark, and it’s just getting darker.”

  “Darker,” Carson repeated and his legs went weak at the knees.

  “Mr—Hey!” Geoff sounded panicked, his voice coming from a distant shore as Carson collapsed, face down into oblivion.

  Apart from a few scrapes, Carson had suffered no real injuries from his fall. This felt like no consolation as he sat brooding at the dinner table in his small apartment. The only item on the table was a large tin box, scratched and battered, and Carson stared at it as he had done for the past two hours after being discharged from the hospital. He’d taken a taxi home alone, for he had no one now, cancer having taken his wife all those years ago, and even Moore, Moore had been killed during a shootout on an Indian Reservation back in ‘73.

  He gulped, swallowed heavily, and opened the tin, the lid creaking upwards with a whine of rusted hinges. Inside lay his old Smith & Wesson Model 10 service revolver, the brown wooden handle worn but the black gunmetal barely aged from when he had last used it, all those years ago in the parking lot outside Funny Time Comics. Carson lifted the gun reverently from the tin, checked that it was still loaded, and pressed the barrel into his open mouth.