Here we have yet another solidly American story, but whereas Howard gave us the backcountry version, Johnson gives us the urban one. Heavily influenced by Lovecraft, he gives us a peek at the dark underbelly of Manhattan Island, deep in the guts of the subway system.
In a weird way, this one is a bit of an SF tale, since it takes place in Johnson’s near future. The subways have recently been built, just as America joins World War II (keep in mind, this story was written in 1939, so Johnson made a pretty good guess that we’d join in the fray). Yet, a problem emerges . . . .
This does, indeed, have a frame, where an unnamed narrator is talking about his equally unnamed friend and his job down “far below,” in which they must keep passengers safe from a strange danger. It is his friend who relates the meat of the story, about how once upon a time, he was the director of the Natural History Museum. One day, the government brings in a strange, gorilla-like creature, dead, which they’d found in the subways. Apparently, a group of them attacked a train and slaughtered a bunch of people, and this was the only one that got left behind. (The government covered it up, naturally; one guy, who had his arm chewed off by a beast, had the ragged stump removed before he came to and was simply told he’d lost it in a train wreck.)
The friend discovers that the monster isn’t a gorilla, and though it has a lot in common with humans, it is not one of us, either. It’s simply something new. He then gets hired on to help with an elite group of guards, keeping humanity safe from the beasts that live below the city. Some of the guards go crazy, and in one case, a guard started changing into one of the beasts. They had to gun that fellow down, he’d gone so mad.
However, it has gotten to the point where the monsters no longer take the offensive. Human beings have been so savage to them that when they sense one of us near them, they try to retreat into the depths of the earth.
For someone so heavily influenced by Lovecraft, that’s an odd thing to bring up. Yet, as with 90% of Lovecraft’s other imitators, Johnson flubs when it comes to the core philosophy of HPL’s writing. The cosmic terror simply doesn’t come through, traded instead for horrible monsters wreaking havoc. Had Lovecraft written this one, he would have had the beasts win, hands down. Human beings are too small in his universe; they ultimately don’t matter. Yet here, Johnson has them beating back the things that crawl in the dark.
SPOILER ALERT: One thing must be said for Johnson’s tale: it pays off. Near the end, when the friend and the narrator get an alert in their office that the ghouls are out, and that guards are down there, scaring the shit out of the creatures before slaughtering them, the friend loses it. He starts ranting and raving about killing everyone like he was a Joseph Conrad character, screaming, “Exterminate the brutes!” Only then does the narrator see that his friend is starting to change, that he’s starting to take on the attributes of the beasts. So the taint is on anyone who works in the subways for such a long time, and if the narrator does the same, well . . . it’s a nice touch. So yeah. Maybe Johnson paid a bit more attention to Lovecraft after all. END OF SPOILERS.
It’s not much of a tale. It’s good, not great. Is it worth your time? Probably. It is kind of neat, but don’t expect too much.
[This story first appeared in WEIRD TALES, and it cannot be read online at this time.]
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