One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings, of that blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening out of the opaque cone of smoke. And then, night and extinction – nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.
So you understand the roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world just as Monday was dawning – the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult round the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward. By ten o’clock the police organisations, and by midday even the railway organisations, were losing coherency, losing shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefacation of the social body.
All the railway lines north of the Thames and the South-Eastern people at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and trains were being filled, people were fighting savagely for standing-room in the carriages, even at two o’clock. By three people were being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street; a couple of hundred yards or more from Liverpool Street station revolvers were fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect.
And as the day advanced the engine-drivers and stokers refused to return to London, the pressure of the flight drove the people in an ever-thickening multitude away from the stations and along the northward-running roads. By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes, and a cloud of slowly sinking black vapour drove along the Thames and across the flats of Lambeth, cutting off all escape over the bridges in its advance.
If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London, every northward and eastward road running out of the infinite tangle of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress.
Directly below him the balloonist would have seen the network of streets far and wide, houses, churches, squares, crescents, gardens – already derelict – spread out like a huge map, and in the southward blotted. Over Ealing, Richmond, Wimbledon, it would have seemed as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the chart. Steadily, incessantly, each black splash grew and spread, shooting out ramifications this way and that, now banking itself against rising ground, now pouring swiftly over a crest into a new-found valley, exactly as a gout of ink would spread itself upon blotting-paper.
And beyond, over the blue hills that rise southward of the river, the glittering Martians went to and fro, calmly and methodically spreading their poison-cloud over this patch of country, and then over that, laying it again with their steam-jets when it had served its purpose, and taking possession of the conquered country. They do not seem to have aimed at extermination so much as at complete demoralisation and the destruction of any opposition. They exploded any stores of powder they came upon, cut every telegraph, and wrecked the railways here and there. They were hamstringing mankind. They seemed in no hurry to extend the field of operations, and they did not come beyond the central part of London all that day. It is possible that a very considerable number of people in London stuck to their houses through Monday morning. Certain it is that many died at home, suffocated by the black smoke.
I have not space here to tell you of my adventures during the days that followed – of how I saw men caught for the Martians’ food, of how the third falling star smashed the house where I was resting, and of what I saw while I was hiding there. When I came out into the air again I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of another planet. Everywhere spread the red weed, whose seed the Martians had brought with them. All round were red cactus-shaped plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute their footing. The trees near me were dead and brown, but further, a network of red threads scaled the still living stems. I went on my way to Hampstead through scarlet and crimson trees; it was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood-drops.
It was near South Kensington that I first heard the howling. It crept almost imperceptibly upon my senses. It was a sobbing alternation of two notes, ‘Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla,’ keeping on perpetually. I stopped, wondering at this strange, remote wailing. It was as if that mighty desert of houses had found a voice for its fear and solitude. It was not until I emerged from Baker Street that I saw, far away over the trees in the clearness of the sunset, the hood of the Martian giant from which this howling proceeded. I watched him for some time, but he did not move.
I came upon the wrecked handling machine halfway to St John’s Wood Station. At first I thought a house had fallen across the road. It was only as I clambered among the ruins that I saw, with a start, this mechanical Samson lying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and twisted, among the ruins it had made. The fore part was shattered. It seemed as if it had driven blindly straight at the house, and had been overwhelmed in its overthrow.
A little beyond the ruins about the smashed handling machine I came upon the red weed again, and found Regent’s Canal a spongy mass of dark red vegetation.
The dusky houses about me stood faint and tall and dim; the trees towards the park were growing black. All about me the red weed clambered among the ruins, writhing to get about me in the dim. Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me. London gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the white houses were like the eye-sockets of skulls. About me my imagination found a thousand noiseless enemies moving. Terror seized me, a horror of my temerity. Far away, I saw a second Martian, motionless as the first, standing in the park towards the Zoological Gardens, and silent.
An insane resolve possessed me. I would die and end it. And I would save myself even the trouble of killing myself. I marched on recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the light grew, I saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and clustering about the hood. At that my heart gave a bound, and I began running along the road. Great mounds had been heaped about the crest of the hill, making a huge redoubt of it. It was the final and largest place the Martians made. And from behind these heaps there rose a thin smoke against the sky. Against the skyline an eager dog ran and disappeared. The thought that had flashed into my mind grew real, grew credible. I felt no fear, only a wild, trembling exultation, as I ran up the hill towards the motionless monster. Out of the hood hung lank shreds of brown at which the hungry birds pecked and tore.
In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And, scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians – dead! – slain by the putrefactive and disease bacateria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in His wisdom, had put upon this earth.
Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.
THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS
by Ray Bradbury
The year 1953 proved a real bumper one for monster buffs for it also saw the appearance of the first of a series of pictures featuring reanimated prehistoric creatures.
Writing in his authoritative survey, Science Fiction In The Cinema (1970), John Baxter said, ‘The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was very much a template for those films which followed it, and seeing it today we easily forget that, when it was made, the elements were fresh and novel.’ The film told the story of a giant fifly-foot-tall rhedosaurus, frozen for eons in an Arctic glacier, which is awoken by an atomic test and rampages towards its ancient breeding grounds at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York.
The impact on audiences of this picture was very largely due to its brilliant special effects and the life-like movements of the monster created by one of Willis O’Brien’s protégés, Ray Harryhausen. Warner Brothers also, surprisingly, chose a former French art director, Eugene Lourie, to make the picture, but his clever use of sinister images and implied horrors invested it with a mood of subtle fear which certainly left an indelible impression on my young mind. There were also scenes where the beast destroyed a lighthouse, and later ran amok in the Coney Island amusement park, which were quite breathtaking. The human co-stars, Paul Christian, Paula Raymond and a youthful Lee Van Cleef, were simply overwhelmed by the monster’s presence.
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms derived from a short story by one of the modern masters of fantasy fiction, and a life-long devotee of horror movies, Ray Bradbury (1920– ). In fact, it was one of two of his stories made into films in 1953, and the pair certainly earn him an important ranking among those who have contributed to the development of monster movies. The other picture, It Came From Outer Space, made by Universal, was based on Ray’s original screen story, “The Meteor”. Directed by Jack Arnold and starring Richard Carison and Barbara Rush, the picture was billed as ‘The world’s first 3-D science fiction film.’
After such an auspicious start, it remains a mystery to me why many more films have not been made from the rich treasure trove of novels and short stories from Ray’s pen. As it was, other aquatic visitors followed, including The Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954) and It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955), as well as a deluge of Japanese monster movies all stemming from Godzilla, King Of The Monsters (1955), the story of a fire-breathing dinosaur who quite literally became a national hero! As John Baxter commented on this phenomenon, ‘Beginning in the USA, but spreading quickly all over the world, the creature/monster cycle became a major feature of commercial cinema, encouraging every type of producer, from the largest through the most creative down to the sharpest get-rich-quick promoter, to try his hand at the form. In Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and France monsters appeared, giant insects ravaged five continents, and the whole SF film field choked to death in a belated, undisciplined spring.’
* * *
Out there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the grey sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was always our voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam.
‘It’s a lonely life, but you’re used to it now, aren’t you?’ asked McDunn.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re a good talker, thank the Lord.’
‘Well, it’s your turn on land tomorrow,’ he said, smiling, ‘to dance the ladies and drink gin.’
‘What do you think, McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?’
‘On the mysteries of the sea.’ McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail in two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn’t a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road which came lonely through dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a stretch of two miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.
‘The mysteries of the sea,’ said McDunn thoughtfully. ‘You know, the ocean’s the most confounded big snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colours, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big peacock’s tail, moving out there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away, the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way, they came all those miles to worship. Strange. But think how the tower must look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the God-light flashing out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They never came back, those fish, but don’t you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?
I shivered. I looked out at the long grey lawn of the sea stretching away into nothing and nowhere.
‘Oh, the sea’s full.’ McDunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking. He had been nervous all day and hadn’t said why. ‘For all our engines and so-called submarines, it’ll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know real terror. Think of it, it’s still the year 300,000 Before Christ down under there. While we’ve paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other’s countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard of a comet.’
‘Yes, it’s an old world.’
‘Come on. I got something special I been saving up to tell you.’
We ascended the eighty steps, talking and taking our time. At the top, McDunn switched off the room lights so there’d be no reflection in the plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning easily in its oiled socket. The Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every fifteen seconds.
‘Sounds like an animal, don’t it?’ McDunn nodded to himself. ‘A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten billion years called out to the Deeps, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do. You been here now for three months, Johnny, so I better prepare you. About this time of year,’ he said, studying the murk and fog, ‘something comes to visit the lighthouse.’
‘The swarms of fish, like you said?’
‘No, this is something else. I’ve put off telling you because you might think I’m daft. But tonight’s the latest I can put it off, for if my calendar’s marked right from last year, tonight’s the night it comes. I won’t go into detail, you’ll have to see it for yourself. Just sit down there. If you want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel and take the motorboat in to land and get your car parked there at the dinghy pier on the cape and drive on back to some little inland town and keep your lights burning nights. I won’t question or blame you. It’s happened three years now, and this is the only time anyone’s been here with me to verify it. You wait and watch.’
Half an hour passed with only a few whispers between us. When we grew tired of waiting, McDunn began describing some of his ideas to me. He had some theories about the Fog Horn itself.
‘One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, “We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was. I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of ete
rnity and the briefness of life.”
The Fog Horn blew.
‘I made up that story,’ said McDunn quietly, ‘to try to explain why this thing keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The Fog Horn calls it, I think, and it comes . . .’
‘But –’ I said.
‘Sssst!’ said McDunn. ‘There!’ He nodded out to the Deeps.
Something was swimming towards the lighthouse tower.
It was a cold night, as I have said; the high tower was cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through the ravelling mist. You couldn’t see far and you couldn’t see plain, but there was the deep sea moving on its way about the night earth, flat and quiet, the colour of grey mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble, a bit of froth. And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-coloured, with immense eyes, and then a neck, And then – not a body – but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water on a slender and beautiful dark neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.
I don’t know what I said. I said something.
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