Tidbit: back in the Spring of `83, Twilight Zone magazine ran a two-part article called "The Fantasy Five-Foot Bookshelf", a collection of annotated lists of significant works of horror and fantasy, put together by Thomas M. Disch, Karl Edward Wagner, and some dude named R.S. Hadji who no one ever heard of before or since - some have speculated that he might not even have been a real person but a pseudonym of some famously type, or even of Wagner/Disch or editor T.E.D. Klein himself. The lists were interesting as hell and have revealed themselves over the years to be mostly complete bullshit (Wagner particularly used this as an opportunity to plug some okay-to-outright losuy obscurities that he himself dug). Also tacked onto this list were a couple from T.E.D. Klein including the "13 Scariest Stories Ever" (or some such). Most of those were well-known to me even at the time and now, having read all of them (and lots more) I would say that if Klein's choices weren't necessarily THE 13 scariest, they were all good, scary stories. One that eluded me, however, was "Stay Off The Moon" by Raymond F. Jones, which, it seems, has never been collected in anthology or collection of Jones' stories, for reasons unknown. It has recently been reprinted in Black Cat magazine, and in a print-on-demand you can get from Amazon, or if you're just a cheap bastard like me you can get it on Gutenberg or Internet Archive, so Jones' story is no longer difficult to find - yay!
Now let's talk about what it's doing here, because I do try really hard to keep content on this blog explicitly linked to HPL and his milieu, and avoid things that are simply thematically simpatico with all things Lovecraftian. But I also allow myself to break my own rules, being as its my f'ing blog and I'll post about what I please, and anyway while "Stay Off" contains no Lovecraftian tropes or anything of the kind, it is more than thematically simpatico with all things Lovecraftian. It's totally Lovecraftian, intentionally or not, regardless of whether Raymond F. Jones, who was mostly known for fairly hard SF/space opera, ever even heard of The Necromomicon or gave a damn if he did. This sits cheek by tentacle with Cthulhu stories as surely as hot dogs sit next to Italian sausage, even if they do get stocked in separate parts of the grocery store, and once you read the story (or if you're a lazy pig, this totally spoiler-full synopsis, you will agree.
(And if, anyone out there chooses to disagree, in the spirit of being contrary, you can drown yourself in a swimming pool full of deep ones for all I care because this is my blog and therefore I am right about everything, at all times!)
Okay, so here we are and it's 1962, and James Cochran, super-brilliant chemist now working on the Apollo program at NASA has himself and awesome new toy - a robotic portable laboratory/probe that's been landed on the moon which, controlled from earth, can drill up samples of moon stuff and send chemical analysis back to Earth. Cool huh? Oh and it's called The Prospector.
Also BTW, James' brother-in-law is Allan Wright, who is now an astronaut slated to be one of the first men to land on the moon and boy is Allan ever excited. Also BTW James has a boss named Hennesy who happens to be a mega-dick and expects James to produce results that only support the glorious moon project which will make the Universe Safe For Truth, Justice, and the Amurrican Way, goddamit, so he better not undermine any of the plans with any namby-pamby pinko commie scientific stuff, get it?
So Jim scoops up some samples of moon crud and runs analyses on them, and ... hmmm ... those analyses don't make sense. Moon crud seems to be calcium, sodium, and silica. But it's not - not exactly. WTF? And what does this mean? Well it means "the moon has come from somewhere else, from a region of space where atoms and electrons are not even the same as atoms and electrons here ... somewhere so far away its beyond the edge of space as we know it!" - as Jim explains in a late-night call to his friend.
Much debate ensues as to who to tell, and what about the possibility that moondust may be toxic, lethal. VERY toxic and lethal? Well, NASA ain't too happy about his findings, but they can find a way that will probably protect astronauts from getting contamined by extra-toxic moondust. As to the idea that the moon comes from "somewhere else" ... well that really doesn't sit too well, even though Jim's data is solid enough to make it tough to label him a crackpot.
Meanwhile, Jim keeps drilling into the moon. And next he comes up with evidence of ... life. Something alive, five hundred feet below the surface of the moon. Again, Jim questions his findings, tests his findings, and his finding is that his findings are accurate. Unquestionable. What he's drilled up is living tissue. He tries moving the Prospector 100 feet away and drilling again. And hits an even larger concentration of tissue. And when he makes a reading of that, what he gets back bears an uncanny resemblance to an EEG reading .... brain-wave patterns.
Time to call in his old college buddy, Tom Banning, who just happens to be a scientist studying the human brain, and an expert in EEG's. Tom concurs - it looks like an EEG. Jim has another idea. It seems Tom has been able to take the EEG waves of one person and apply them to the brain of another, allowing the receiver to understand some of the thoughts of the individual from whom the EEG waves were taken. Tom's game, so they try it, on Jim:
Like a fearful, billowing blackness rising out of the depths of Hell itself, it washed over him. It sucked at his very soul, corroding, destroying, a wind of darkness where the very concept of light was unknown ... He sensed that out of some far reach of space, where time and dimension were not the same, the thing had acquired an eternal nature of a kind that knew no birth and could experience no death in the dimensions of man. He sensed that its nature and purpose were pure destruction, of life in any form ... life and it could not exist in the same universe.
Umm, yeah. Bottom line - there's something on the moon, that's alive, and it's fucked up.
Jim decides to make one more try, another 100 feet away. He also tries to communicate with the heads of NASA, who won't give him the time of day. He gets a look via the Prospector's cameras at a black shape that he recognizes all too well, and crashes the Prospector, causing Hennesy to fire him.
Jim goes to the newsmen he's come to know through the program and convinces them of his findings, stating that the moon project must be shut down. Whatever it is that's on the moon - and for all intents and purposes, is the moon, is something that's been dormant for ages, eons, but is now awake. And not happy. And it can come here. And Earth has no weapon that could stop it. They believe him, but the powers-that-be kill the story, and Jim is officially labeled a crackpot. His brother-in-law Allan, pissed that Jim might screw up his big chance to be the first man on the moon, tells him never to contact him again.
Jim and his wife move to the Canadian wilderness and try to make a new life off the grid. They listen to the radio broadcast of the moon landing, and get to hear Allan killed. The President tells the world it was an accident. Jim follows scientific reports of changes to the moon. He konws the thing on the moon is coming....
Like a lot of 50's/early 60's sci-fi, this story is mainly about ideas rather than incidents. There's no action or running around, characterization is kept to a minimum (but still present and effectively done). The only real incidents are Jim digging up some samples and analyzing them, and the real story is what he thinks and learns from his findings. In that sense it's not so different from, say, "The Call of Cthulhu", which is also mostly about the protagonist learning things and collecting dots, and its those things he learns and connects that are the scary part. Jones story is drier - Lovecraft was canny enough to throw in a scene with some depraved cultists in a swamp and a face-to-face with old tentacle puss hisself, but Jones is playing a more subtle game.
I dunno if it's one of the scariest stories ever but its definitely a creepy one and a successful merger of typical hard 50's sci-fi with Lovecraftian creepella. And although as I said I have no idea how familiar Jones might have been with HPL, this story sure makes me think such a merger was exactly what he intended - Jim's vision while beein EEG'd seems like it could have come straight from "The Music of Erich Zann". Anyhoo this one's well worth seeking out.
