“But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and goes, and you stir from the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like the lenses of two-foot cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean sea on your shoulders, heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles of water, faint and familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you begin to rise, slow, slow. You feed yourself on great slakes of cod and minnow, on rivers of jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn months, through September when the fogs started, through October with more fog and the horn still calling you on, and then, late in November, after pressurizing yourself day by day, a few feet higher every hour, you are near the surface and still alive.
You’ve got to go slow; if you surfaced all at once you’d explode. So it takes you all of three months to surface, and then a number of days to swim through the cold waters to the lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest damn monster in creation.
And here’s the lighthouse calling to you, with a long neck like your neck sticking way up out of the water, and a body like your body, and, most important of all, a voice like your voice. Do you understand now, Johnny, do you understand?”
The Fog Horn blew.
The monster answered.
I saw it all, I knew it all—the million years of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps dried on the continental lands, the sloths and saber-tooths had their day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.
The Fog Horn blew.
“Last year,” said McDunn, “that creature swam round and round, round and round, all night. Not coming too near, puzzled, I’d say. Afraid, maybe. And a bit angry after coming all this way. But the net day, unexpectedly, the fog lifted, the sun came out fresh, the sky was as blue as a painting. And the monster swam off away from the heat and the silence and didn’t come back. I suppose it’s been brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over from every which way.”
The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog Horn crying at each other. As the lights hit them, the monster’s eyes were fire and ice, fire and ice.
“That’s life for you,” said McDunn. “Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can’t hurt you no more.”
The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.
The fog Horn blew.
“Let’s see what happens,” said McDunn.
He switched the Fog Horn off.
The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could hear our hearts pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow greased turn of the light.
The monster stopped and froze. Its great lantern eyes blinked. Its mouth gaped. It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched its head this way and that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off into the fog. It peered at the lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It reared up, threshed the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled with angry torment.
“McDunn!” I cried. “Switch on the horn!”
McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he flicked it on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fishskin glittering in webs between the fingerlike projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a caldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us.
McDunn seized my arm. “Downstairs!”
The tower rocked, trembled, and started to give. The Fog Horn and the monster roared. We stumbled and half fell down the stairs. “Quick!”
We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down toward us. We ducked under the stairs into the small stone cellar. There were a thousand concussions as the rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly.
The monster crashed UpOn the tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and I, holding tight, while our world exploded.
Then it was over, and there was nothing but darkness and the wash of the sea on the raw stones.
That and the other sound.
“Listen,” said McDunn quietly. “Listen.”
We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over and upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone’s thickness away from our cellar.
The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone.
The thing that had called to it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. The sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night, must’ve thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the Lonesome Bay horn. All’s well. We’ve rounded the cape.
And so it went for the rest of that night.
The sun was hot and yellow the next afternoon when the rescuers came out to dig us from our stoned-under cellar.
“It fell apart, is all,” said Mr. McDunn gravely. “We had a few bad knocks from the waves and it just crumbled.” He pinched my arm.
There was nothing to see. The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing was a great algaic stink from the green matter that covered the fallen tower stones and the shore rocks. Flies buzzed about. The ocean washed empty on the shore.
The next year they built a new lighthouse, but by that time I had a job in the little town and a wife and a good small warm house that glowed yellow on autumn nights, the doors locked, the chimney puffing smoke.
As for McDunn, he was master of the new lighthouse, built to his own specifications, out of steel-reinforced concrete. “Just in case,” he said.
The new lighthouse was ready in November. I drove down alone one evening late and parked my car and looked across the gray waters and listened to the new horn sounding, once, twice, three, four times a minute far out there, by itself.
The monster?
It never came back.
“It’s gone away,” said McDunn. “It’s gone back to the Deeps. It’s learned you can’t love anything too much in this world. It’s gone into the deepest Deeps to wait another million years. And, the poor thing!
Waiting out there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little planet. Waiting and waiting.”
I sat in my car, listening. I couldn’t see the lighthouse or the light standing out in Lonesome Bay. I could only hear the Horn, the Horn, the Horn. It sounded like the monster calling.
I sat there wishing there was something I could say.
THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS Warner Brothers 1953
80 minutes. Produced by Hal E. Chester and Jack Dietz; directed by Eugene Lourie; screenplay by Lou Morhe;m and Fred Freiberger, director of photography, Jack Russell; associate producer, Bernard W. Burton; special technical effects by Ray Harryhausen; special effects by Willis Cook; art direction by Robert Boyle; edited by Bernard W. Burton; music composed and conducted by David suttolph; makeup by Louis Phillippi; sound by Max Hutchinson; assistant director, Howard Hough.
Cast Paul Christian (Prof. Tom Nesbitt), Paula Raymond (Lee Hunter), Cecil Kellaway (Prof. Elson), Kenneth Tobey (Col. Evans), Ross Elliot (George Ritchie), Donald Woods (Capt. Jackson), Lee Van Cleef (Corp.
Stone), Steve Brodie (Sgt. Loomis), Michael Fox (The Doctor), Frank Ferguson (Dr. Morton), King Donovan (Dr. Ingersoll).
DEADLY CITY by Ivar Jorgenson filmed as
TARGET EARTH
(Allied Artists, 1954)
“You’re all alone in a deserted city. You walk down an empty stree
t, yearning for the sight of one living face—one moving figure. Then you see a man on a corner and you know your terror has only begun!”
So goes the original blurb in the March 1953 edition of If magazine for Ivar Jorgenson’s “Deadly City.” The intriguing story of a depopulated metropolis must have suitably impressed producer Herman Cohen, who subsequently bought the property and rushed it into theaters less than nine months later.
Cohen, who entered the camp-film Hall of Fame with his I Was a Teenage Werewolf in 1957, shot ‘Target Earth in just seven days for the minuscule amount of $75,000.
“It was definitely a low-cost picture,” he laughingly admits. “I wish we could have had more money. We could only afford one robot and we made him do double duty most of the time.”
Yet even with the relatively low budget, Cohen resourcefully turned out a surprisingly compelling feature, one which adheres quite faithfully to the short story.
The tale begins as a small and diverse group of people awake one morning to find themselves alone in a deserted city. All at once the commonplace becomes as eerie as the most haunted of houses. A vacant street, an empty restaurant, a ghostly subway platform with not a train in sight—they all add up to a bafFling mystery that seems insolvable.
“The audience had a lot of fun with the picture,” recalls Cohen with pride. “Even though we played it straight, they sat in their seats with tongues-firmly-in-cheek. They knew exactly what was going to happen next.
The only thing I can hope to do with my audience is to let them have a good time and startle them now and again. When they’re laughing the most, throw them off-balance and make them scream.”
Cheap shocks notwithstanding, it is admittedly difficult to assess the motive behind an exploitation film like Target Earth. Is it cheaply produced in every way to cash in quickly on a craze, or is it the most esthetically acceptable product that can be done with minor resources?
The answer, of course, is purely academic if the picture is
entertaining ...
and Target Earth is definitely that.
DEADLY CITY
by Ivar Jorgenson
HE AWOKE slowly, like a man plodding knee-deep through the thick stuff of nightmares. There was no definite line between the dream-state and wakefulness. Only a dawning knowledge that he was finally conscious and would have to do something about it.
He opened his eyes, but this made no difference. The blackness remained.
The pain in his head brightened and he reached up and found the big lump they’d evidently put on his head for good measure—a margin of safety.
They must have been prudent people, because the bang on the head had hardly been necessary. The spiked drink which they had given him would have felled an ox. He remembered going down into the darkness after drinking it, and of knowing what it was. He remembered the helpless feeling.
It did not worry him now. He was a philosophical person, and the fact he was still alive cancelled out the drink and its result. He thought, with savor, of the chestnut-haired girl who had watched him take the drink. She had worn a very low bodice, and that was where his eyes had been at the last moment—on the beautiful, tanned breasts—until they’d wavered and puddled into a blur and then into nothing.
The chestnut-haired girl had been nice, but now she was gone and there were more pressing problems.
He sat up, his hands behind him at the ends of stiff arms clawing into long-undisturbed dust and filth. His movement stirred the dust and it rose into his nostrils.
He straightened and banged his head against a low ceiling. The pain made him sick for a minute and he sat down to regain his senses. He cursed the ceiling, as a matter of course, in an agonized whisper.
Ready to move again, he got onto his hands and knees and crawled cautiously forward, exploring as he went. His hand pushed through cobwebs and found a rough, cement wall. He went around and around. It was all cement—all solid.
Hell! They hadn’t sealed him up in this place! There had been a way in so there had to be a way out. He went around again.
Then he tried the ceiling and found the opening—a wooden trap covering a four-by-four hole—covering it snugly. He pushed the trap away and daylight streamed in. He raised himself up until he was eye-level with a discarded shaving cream jar lying on the bricks of an alley. He could read the trade mark on the jar, and the slogan: “For the Meticulous Man.”
He pulled himself up into the alley. As a result of an orderly childhood, he replaced the wooden trap and kicked the shaving cream jar against a garbage can. He rubbed his chin and looked up and down the alley.
It was high noon. l uncovered sun blazed down to tell him this.
And there was no one in sight.
He started walking toward the nearer mouth of the alley. He had been in that hole a long time, he decided. This conviction came from his hunger and the heavy growth of beard he’d sprouted. Twenty-four hours—maybe longer.
That mickey must have been a lulu.
He walked out into the CrOSS street. It was empty. No people-no cars parked at the curbs—only a cat washing its dirty face on a tenement stoop across the street. He looked up at the tenement windows. They stared back.
There was an empty, deserted look about them.
The cat flowed down the front steps of the tenement and away toward the rear and he was truly alone. He rubbed his harsh chin. Must be Sunday, he thought. Then he knew it could not be Sunday. He’d gone into the tavern on a Tuesday night. That would make it five days. Too long.
He had been walking and now he was at an intersection where he could look up and down a new street. There were no cars—no people. Not even a cat.
A sign overhanging the sidewalk said: Restaurant. He went in under the sign and tried the door. It was locked. There were no lights inside.
He turned away—grinning to reassure himself. Everything was all right. Just some kind of a holiday. In a big city like Chicago the people go away on hot summer holidays. They go to the beaches and the parks and sometimes you can’t see a living soul on the streets. And of course you can’t find any cars because the people use them to drive to the beaches and the parks and out into the country. He breathed a little easier and started walking again.
Sure—that was it. Now what the hell holiday was it? He tried to remember.
He couldn’t think of what holiday it could be. Maybe they’d dreamed up a new one. He grinned at that, but the grin was a little tight and he had to force it. He forced it carefully until his teeth showed white.
Pretty soon he would come to a section where everybody hadn’t gone to the beaches and the parks and a restaurant would be open and he’d get a good meal.
A meal? He fumbled toward his pockets. He dug into them and found a handkerchief and a button from his cuff. He remembered that the button had hung loose so he’d pulled it off to keep from losing it. He hadn’t lost the button, but everything else was gone. He scowled. The least they could have done was to leave a man eating money.
He turned another corner—into another street—and it was like the one before. No cars—no people—not even any cats.
Panic welled up. He stopped and whirled around to look behind him. No one was there. He walked in a tight circle, looking in all directions.
Windows stared back at him—eyes that didn’t care where everybody had gone or when they would come back. The windows could wait. The windows were not hungry.
Their heads didn’t ache. They weren’t scared.
He began walking and his path veered outward from the sidewalk until he was in the exact center of the silent street. He walked down the worn white line. When he got to the next corner he noticed that the traffic signals were not working. Black, empty eyes.
His pace quickened. He walked faster—ever faster until he was trotting on the brittle pavement, his sharp steps echoing against the buildings. Faster. Another corner. And he was running, filled with panic, down the empty street.
The girl opened he
r eyes and stared at the ceiling. The ceiling was a blur but it began to clear as her mind cleared. The ceiling became a surface of dirty, cracked plaster and there was a feeling of dirt and squalor in her mind.
It was always like that at these times of awakening, but doubly bitter now, because she had never expected to awaken again. She reached down and pulled the wadded sheet from beneath her legs and spread it over them. She looked at the bottle on the shabby bedtable. There were three sleeping pills left in it. The girl’s eyes clouded with resentment. You’d think seven pills would have done it. She reached down and took the sheet in both hands and drew it taut over her stomach. This was a gesture of frustration.
Seven hadn’t been enough, and here she was again—awake in the world she’d wanted to leave. Awake with the necessary edge of determination gone.
She pulled the sheet into a wad and threw it at the wall. She got up and walked to the window and looked out. Bright daylight. She wondered how long she had slept. A long time, no doubt.
Her naked thigh pressed against the windowsill and her bare stomach touched the dirty pane. Naked in the window, but it didn’t matter, because it gave onto an airshaft and other windows so caked with grime as to be of no value as windows.
But even aside from that, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter in the least.
She went to the washstand, her bare feet making no sound on the worn rug.
She turned on the faucets, but no water came. No water, and she had a terrible thirst. She went to the door and had thrown the bolt before she remembered again that she was naked. She turned back and saw the half-empty Pepsi-Cola bottle on the floor beside the bedtable. Someone else had left it there—how many nights ago?--but she drank it anyhow, and even though it was flat and warm it soothed her throat.
They Came From Outer Space Page 18
