The War of the Worlds Murder

by Max Allan Collins

  “Look who’s talkin’.”

  Grandfather felt red rise into his face. But he said nothing more, and merely returned to his armchair.

  Carl Phillips was saying, “Hundreds of cars are parked in a field in back of us, and the police are trying to rope off the roadway, leading into the farm, but it’s no use. They’re breaking right through. Cars’ headlights throw an enormous spotlight on the pit where the object’s half buried.”

  With the exception of Leroy, the Chapmans sat forward. Little Susie had cuddled up next to her older brother and was holding his hand. Tight.

  “...some of the more daring souls now are venturing near the edge. Their silhouettes stand out against the metal sheen. One man wants to touch the thing—he’s having an argument with a policeman. Now the policeman wins.... Ladies and gentlemen, there’s something I haven’t mentioned in all this excitement, but...it’s becoming more distinct. Perhaps you’ve caught it already on your radio. Listen, please...”

  The Chapmans leaned forward—and even Leroy turned back toward the radio. A scraping sound, faint but distinct, crackled over the air waves.

  The reporter was asking, “Do you hear it? Curious humming sound that seems to come from inside the object. I’ll move the microphone nearer. Here...now, we’re not more than twenty-five feet away. Can you hear it now?”

  The Dorn sisters had heard all of it.

  They, too, had turned up the volume (the younger sister, Miss Eleanor, doing the honors) and their knitting was dropped to their laps, unattended, as their wide eyes stared toward the radio.

  Ironically, neither woman had much interest in the news, normally—they took pride in not reading much of anything in the local paper except the church news. Neither sister read current magazines; why waste their time reading trash? History, the Bible, education, religion.

  Miss Jane’s hands were folded. “God is in His Heaven,” she said.

  Having resumed her chair, Miss Eleanor said, “And all’s right in the world.”

  But neither of them sounded terribly sure of either statement.

  In the modest living room of an apartment in Brooklyn, an out-of-work housepainter named Dennis Chandler, 36, sat with his wife, Helen, listening to the radio. The childless couple had guests—Helen’s younger brother Earl and his wife Amy and their five-year-old Douglas. Dennis and Helen had neither a car nor a telephone. He and his wife went to a local Methodist church about once a month. They’d gone this morning.

  Like many listeners, Dennis had switched from Charlie McCarthy only to accidentally land on the station reporting the fall of a meteor. He and his wife and their guests had heard exactly the same thing that the Chapmans had, and most of what the Dorn sisters had.

  Dennis, too, was excited and concerned, though not as frightened as his wife and their guests, who were sitting forward, trembling. Douglas was on his mother’s lap, arms draped around her neck.

  “You know, Earl,” Dennis said, “we could drive out in your car to where the meteor hit. Could be something to see.”

  Earl, who was in his late twenties, said he wouldn’t mind. “Sounds like an adventure,” he said.

  But then, when the radio announcer said that he and the Princeton professor had travelled eleven miles in ten minutes, Dennis sat forward in his armchair and said to his wife Helen, “That wasn’t any ten minutes, was it? They were just on!”

  Helen said, “It’s hard to keep track of time, but...you might be right.”

  “It was ten minutes,” Amy said. “Wasn’t it, Earl?”

  Earl wasn’t sure.

  Dennis said, “Anyway, with all these news flashes, the streets around Princeton would be packed—they couldn’t get there that fast, even if it was ten minutes!”

  Helen, frowning in thought, suggested, “Why don’t you check the listings, in the paper?”

  Dennis snapped his fingers. “Good idea, honey.”

  The husband went to the kitchen where the Sunday Daily News lay on a counter, waiting to wrap garbage. He shuffled through to the radio listings and found that CBS was offering The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s presentation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds at eight P.M.

  Chuckling to himself, he returned to the tiny living room, settled back in his armchair and said to all assembled, “It’s just a silly play! What knuckleheads we are—shall we switch back to Charlie McCarthy?”

  “No!” Helen said. “If it could fool us like that, then it’s well done. Let’s keep listening!”

  Everybody agreed that was a good idea, so they indeed kept listening, and really enjoyed the show, laughing heartily at times, little Douglas smilingly shrieking with safe fear.

  But the Chapmans (with the notable exception of young Leroy) were legitimately terrified.

  Carl Phillips’s excited voice crackled out of the console:

  “... do you still think it’s a meteor, Professor?”

  “I don’t know what to think. The, uh, metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial...uh, not found on this earth. Friction with the earth’s atmosphere usually tears holes in a meteorite. This thing is...smooth and, as you can see, of cylindrical shape...”

  Leroy said nothing.

  But in his mind, hearing Professor Pierson’s voice, the boy heard himself scream: “That...is...the...Shadow!”

  His little sister was hugging Les, shivering with fear, and Les looked pretty scared, himself.

  Normally, Leroy would’ve been sympathetic. He loved his siblings, though the three had the usual kid squabbles. But right now, he relished their discomfort.

  “Just a minute!” the announcer yelled. “Something’s happening! Ladies and gentlemen, this is terrific! This...end of the thing is beginning to...flake off. The top is beginning to rotate like a screw, and the thing must be hollow...”

  And Leroy laughed out loud—a deep laugh, in imitation of his favorite radio avenger.

  Grandfather stood, went over and lifted the boy up by the arm and swatted his blue-jeaned bottom.

  But Leroy only smiled.

  Like the Shadow, Leroy knew.

  Rusty, at his desk at State Troopers’ HQ in upstate New York, sat in gaping astonishment as the words tumbled out of his radio. Upstairs, against his better judgment, Rusty’s no-nonsense duty corporal, Richard Stevens, had switched his radio on, too, and was listening.

  And now Corporal Stevens was sitting at his desk with the same wide-eyed, open-mouthed astonishment as that dope Rusty.

  Both troopers, seated before their respective radios, watched the little talking boxes as if they could see the images reporter Carl Phillips was describing, and indeed on the movie screens of their minds, they could.

  And then a succession of overlapping, agitated voices jumped out:

  “She’s movin’!”

  “...darn thing’s unscrewing!”

  “Stand back, there! Keep those men back, I tell you!”

  “It’s red hot, they’ll burn to a cinder!”

  “Keep back there. Keep those idiots back!”

  Then—a hollow metallic clunk.

  “She’s off! The top’s loose!”

  “Look out there! Stand back!”

  That was all Rusty needed to hear.

  He ran up the two floors, corncob pipe tight in his teeth, and leaned in the doorway, from which he saw the normally cool-calm-collected duty corporal standing at his desk, staring at the radio, looking like a wild man.

  And then the announcer was back: “Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top, someone or...some thing. I can see...peering out of that black hole two luminous disks...Are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be almost anything...”

  The corporal looked toward Rusty and the expressions of the two men mirrored fear and astonishment, matching the outburst of awe from the crowd at the scene.

  Phillips was saying, “Something wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it’s another one, and an...another one, and another one.... They look like tentacles to me. I, I can s
ee the thing’s body now, it’s large, it’s large as a bear—glistens like wet leather, but that, that face, it, it.... Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable.”

  Rusty crossed himself.

  “I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. Its eyes are black and gleam like a serpent, the mouth is a kind of V-shape with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to, oh, quiver and pulsate, and the monster or whatever it is can hardly move, it seems weighed down by...possibly gravity or something, the thing’s...rising up now, and the crowd falls back now, they’ve seen plenty. Oh, uh, this is the most extraordinary experience, ladies and gentlemen. I can’t find words.... Well, I’ll pull this microphone with me as I talk. I’ll have to stop the description until I can take a new position. Hold on, will you please, I’ll be right back in a minute....”

  Brief dead silence was followed by a gentle waterfall of tinkling piano.

  “So,” Rusty managed, “was I lyin’?”

  “I better call ol’ Flannel Mouth,” the corporal said.

  That nickname—whispered in select company only—referred to their much unloved lieutenant, who lived close-by.

  “You better call Flannel Mouth is right, Corporal Stevens—you better right away!”

  The corporal frowned and gestured dismissively. “Get back to your post! See what’s coming over the teletype about this thing!”

  By the time a real Princeton professor—Arthur Barrington, Geology Department head, behind the wheel of his dark blue Chevrolet sedan—rolled into Grovers Mill, one might think police cars and other emergency vehicles, plus emissaries of the press (including rival radio stations), would be wall-to-wall in the tiny town.

  But as student Press Club member Sheldon Judcroft, leaning out the front seat rider’s side window, reported, nothing much seemed to be cooking.

  Even for a bump in the road, Grovers Mill was quiet. An old clapboard mill and a feedstore—no gas station or lunchroom or even bar—made up the entire “downtown.” A scattering of houses nearby represented the village itself. There wasn’t even a street lamp.

  Professor Barrington, sitting up and peering out into a slightly foggy night, said, “See what the nearest town is, Sheldon.”

  As assigned navigator, the student had charge of the map and was using a flashlight from the glove compartment.

  “Cranbury, sir,” Sheldon said. “Just five miles.”

  The boy pointed toward a road sign.

  The professor—the real professor—nodded and drove.

  Back at the Columbia Broadcasting Building, Walter Gibson remained unaware of the invasion’s impact on some of its listeners. He had a murder to try to solve, and an hour to do it in.

  The speaker in the twentieth-floor lobby was sharing the latest fake broadcast: “We are bringing you an eyewitness account of what’s happening on the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey.”

  As the program returned to gentle fingering of piano keys, Gibson pressed the button for the elevator.

  “We now return you to Carl Phillips at Grovers Mill.”

  The elevator car arrived and the writer rode down to the seventeenth floor, where yet another security guard—Fred—had seen neither Virginia Welles nor George Balanchine, nor the alley-thug trio. And if Fred had seen Dolores Donovan around, boy, he’d’ve remembered it, a dish like that.

  Gibson did not bother speaking to any of the newspeople on seventeen, because they were either on the air or bustling around reading teletypes and making phone calls and typing up stories, much like a newspaper office.

  Anyway, he had the immediate sense that in this building, the world of news and that of entertainment, several floors up, were twains that never met.

  On the elevator he asked the same questions of the elevator operator, Leo, that featherweight “boy” pushing sixty who seemed to worship Welles.

  As they spoke, the elevator car stayed on the seventeenth floor. Leo didn’t mind if Gibson had a Camel; in fact, Leo took the occasion to smoke a Chesterfield. Hey, it was Sunday night. Traffic was light.

  Leo knew who Mrs. Welles was, didn’t think he’d seen her today; but then there was another elevator (self-service, for the ambitious), and a service one, too. So that meant next to nothing.

  Floundering, Gibson said, “What did you mean, by you don’t think you saw Mrs. Welles?...”

  “Well...I, uh...well...”

  Gibson figured this stall for a prompt, and showed Leo a couple of bucks to prime the pump.

  But Leo was damn near offended. “I don’t want your money, sir. Any friend of Mr. Welles is a friend of mine. But—there was a lady who could’ve been Mrs. Welles.”

  “Could?”

  “Yeah, well—she was in a coat and a scarf and sunglasses, and she kept her back to me.”

  “Like she didn’t want to be recognized?”

  “I dunno. Maybe.”

  “When was this?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe an hour ago? Half hour? Forty-five minutes, maybe—I don’t keep close track. I just go up and down.”

  “Thanks, Leo. Thanks. Listen, can you take me to see the janitor?”

  “Sure. He’s on eighteen, right now. Fixing the men’s room. Name’s Louis. Him—he might take your money. In fact, I’d recommend offering it.”

  “Thanks, Leo. Take me up a floor, would you?”

  “That’s what they pay me for.”

  The seventeenth-floor news center of the Columbia Broadcasting Building did not pipe in the network’s programming, so Gibson had not heard what so many others had—the Dorn sisters, for example.

  The two sisters, seated in their rockers, having set their knitting aside, had with their own ears witnessed the opening foray of Armageddon.

  “Ladies and gent...Am I on? Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, here I am, back of a stone wall that adjoins Mr. Wilmuth’s garden. From here I get a sweep of the whole scene. I’ll give you every detail as long as I can talk, and as long as I can see....”

  Miss Jane reached bony fingers out to Miss Eleanor and the two sisters, still seated, held hands.

  They listened mesmerized as reporter Carl Phillips told of more state police, a good thirty of them, arriving to cordon off the pit, but the crowd was staying back of its own volition now.

  The captain of police was conferring with Professor Pierson, the astronomer from Princeton. Then the two men separated and the professor moved to one side, studying the object, while the police captain and two of his men approached, carrying a pole with a flag of truce.

  “If those creatures know what that means...what anything means.... Wait a minute, something’s happening....”

  Miss Jane squeezed Miss Eleanor’s hand and Miss Eleanor squeezed Miss Jane’s hand, as a terrible hissing turned into a diabolical hum that built and built and built....

  “A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror. What’s that? There’s a...jet of flame springing from that mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord...they’re turning into flame!”

  Terrible screams seemed to shake the radio.

  The screams continued as Carl Phillips soldiered on, reporting, “Now the whole field’s caught on fire, the woods, the barns, the...the gas tanks, tanks of automobiles, spreading everywhere, it’s coming this way. About twenty yards to my right—”

  Dead silence.

  The two sisters, as one, fell out of their chairs onto the floor and hugged each other, and began to pray silently, though their lips moved. Miss Jane’s prayer, in the sanctuary of her mind, went as follows: “God forgive me of my sins so that I will not be commited to eternal purgatory.” Miss Eleanor’s prayer was of a similar nature, though it included a private confession about touching herself in a sinful way (some years before—frequently, though).

  Then the women froze as finally the awful silence was filled by an announcer’s voice, bright and almost cheerful as he said, “Lad
ies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grovers Mill. Evidently there’s some difficulty with our field transmission; however, we will return to that point at the earliest opportunity.”

  The two sisters left their embrace to assume proper, prayerful kneeling positions, side by side but separate.

  The announcer continued, all business as usual: “In the meantime, we have a late bulletin from San Diego, California. Professor Indellkoffer, speaking at a dinner of the California Astronomical Society, expressed the opinion that the explosions on Mars are undoubtedly nothing more than severe volcanic disturbances on the surface of the planet.... We continue now with our piano interlude.”

  And a piano, ever so sweetly, played “Clair de Lune.”

  As for the Dorn sisters, they remained on the floor, as the broadcast continued: kneeling; praying; off their rockers.

  No one at the informal dinner party in Tudor City was requesting radio reviewer Ben Gross’s permission to switch back to The Chase and Sanborn Hour.

  Almost all dinner conversation had ceased.

  Gross watched his wife and the other dinner guests as they seemed deeply if uneasily engrossed in the melodrama, which after a leisurely start of seemingly endless musical interludes had built in pace, a veritable cascade of sensational news “bulletins.”

  During the frightening, effective device of cutting to dead silence, after the creatures rose from the pit, spreading fire across the landscape, no one touched their food (well-done roast beef being the main course).

  But no one asked for the show to be switched off, either.

  Then the announcer was back on with another realistic interruption: “Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a message that came in from Grovers Mill by telephone. Just one moment, please.”

  In the most crisp, convincing manner, the voice informed listeners that some forty people lay dead in a field east of Grovers Mill, including half a dozen state troopers—bodies burned beyond recognition.

  “The next voice you hear will be that of Brigadier General Montgomery Smith, commander of the state militia at Trenton, New Jersey.”