Shadows Bend

by David Barbour

  At first they had decided against a fire, but then they succumbed to their instinctive fear of the dark and lit one, even at the risk of being spotted from a distance by anyone who might be following them. The night was too sinister to spend without relief. With the small campfire burning, Howard immediately fell on his bedroll and balanced his hat over his eyes. Within a few breaths he was snoring away in a deep sleep.

  “I’m sorry in frightened you back there,” Glory called to Lovecraft from the backseat of the Chevy. “But a girl’s got a certain sense of modesty, you know.”

  “I understand perfectly well,” Lovecraft replied. He made his way over and sat in the front seat with the door open. “I believe you are also correct about the nature of our imaginations, though certain license is clearly warranted given the events of the day.”

  “I still have no idea what’s going on. Will you explain it to me?”

  “Certainly,” Lovecraft said, “but I would prefer not to speak of such things tonight.”

  “I understand.”

  “But do feel free to discuss other topics.”

  Glory stifled a yawn and tapped a cigarette out its pack. She lit it with a quick flick of a match and drew a small puff. “When I was younger,” she said, “I used to wish the sky would rain ink or snow ashes. Do you mind my smoking? I know it’s unladylike and all.”

  “It’s hardly my place to enforce social conventions upon you. Please do as you wish.”

  “I always wanted to take astronomy. My school had an observatory, and Professor Mitchell was always encouraging the girls to explore the vastness of the universe. It’s too bad I never got around to it, because sometimes I just like to sit alone at night and look up at the stars. It would be nice if I knew them better.”

  “From the reference to a professor, I take it you attended a college? Though I must admit your appearance certainly belies such a conclusion.”

  “I went to a girls’ school back East for a while. Three years. Never finished.”

  “But surely, even if you did not complete your education, you must know some of the constellations and their stories?”

  “Yeah, I know a couple. The Big Dipper, the Little Dipper. And I know how to find the North Star.” She pointed with the glowing tip of her cigarette. “That’s about all.”

  “Those are otherwise known as Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and Polaris,” said Lovecraft. “I once wrote the astronomy column for a local publication.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful!” It was genuine pleasure in her tired voice. “So tell me, what’s that over there?” She moved the tip of her cigarette again, and it bobbed up and down like the tail of a glowworm.

  “That would be the Pleiades.”

  “And that?”

  “That is Canis Major, the Dog Star.”

  “When I was little my mother told me that every star was an angel. But they’ve had names all along.”

  Glory pointed off to the southeast at a string of stars. “And that?”

  “Ah,” said Lovecraft, following the tip of her cigarette with his finger. “There, in fierce gorgeousness crawls the Scorpion, with its brilliant fire red star Antares. A fitting portent of the flaming scenes which await our warriors on the Hun-infested plains of France.”

  “Why, you sound just like a professor, Lovey.”

  “I was merely quoting from a piece I wrote some years in the past,”

  Lovecraft replied, rather abashed.

  “The Hun-infested plains of France?” said Glory.

  “Well, many years in the past, if you’ll forgive me.”

  “And what are those?” Glory asked, pointing north now, toward three bright stars in a line. “Those look like they should add up to something.”

  “Ah, that would be the belt of Orion, the great hunter-Osiris, as the ancient Egyptians, the builders of the mysterious pyramids, knew him. With his consort, sister, and wife, who was known as Isis, his was the most revered constellation.”

  “Osiris—he married his sister?”

  “Yes,” said Lovecraft. “That was not at all strange for royal families in those times.”

  “Why, that’s incest,” said Glory in mock surprise. “Must have had some ugly kids.”

  “Actually, they did have progeny,” said Lovecraft. “He became the new god of the sun, but the tale of Osiris and Isis is a tragic one. In some sense, they are literally the star-crossed lovers.”

  “How romantic. Tell me the story. I always liked bedtime stories.”

  Lovecraft could hardly resist the invitation, nor could he have asked for a better audience. He began with a flourish, his fishy eyes sparkling in the firelight.

  “The most enduring tale from the Egyptian mythos is that of Osiris and Isis. Osiris, the god of the sun and the father of agriculture and Isis his sister, wife, queen, and consort, his helpmeet, the moon. They were the ideal couple, who represented man’s primary connections to terrestrial cosmology, but alas their happy reign was not to last.

  “Osiris had a brother named Seth, who was god of the desert and of dry things. Where Osiris was benevolent and kind, Seth was harsh and parsimonious. He was terribly jealous of Osiris, and he was terribly cunning; he wanted to do away with his brother and take his place as god of things fertile. He invited Osiris to a great feast and presented him with a wonderful and elaborately engraved sarcophagus with inlaid bands of gold and silver. ‘I have made this magnificent gift for you, my brother,’ Seth said to Osiris. ‘Won’t you honor me by confirming that I have made it the right size?’ Osiris could not refuse. Indeed, he was honored and flattered, and so he lay down in the sarcophagus, which Seth’s servants immediately sealed with bands of steel and threw into the Nile, down which it floated until it reached the sea.

  “At the conclusion of the feast, Osiris was nowhere to be found. Isis began a quest, seeking her vanished husband to the ends of the earth until, after long labor, she found him at last in the land of Mesopotamia, the place between two rivers. This is the fertile crescent, the place which we now call the birthplace of civilization. She found Osiris’s sarcophagus entangled in the roots of a tree that had grown over it. She released him from the roots and brought him back to life with her healing arts and magic, which she had learned from the great Thoth.

  “Upon hearing of Osiris’s return to the land of the living, Seth once again plotted his brother’s undoing, and this time he committed outright murder. He ambushed Osiris, killed him, dismembered the body, and scattered its parts across the four corners of the world. And once again Isis set out on a quest, this time to find all the parts of her dead husband’s body and to reassemble him.

  “When she found him, with the help of her sister Nephthys, she sang this lament, which comes to us from the Coffin Texts.” Lovecraft looked over at Glory and noticed she had already fallen asleep. He sighed, and concluded his tale only for himself.

  Oh, helpless one, sleeping one!

  Oh, helpless one, lying here

  In a place which you do not know.

  But I have found you, alas,

  Lying listlessly on your side.

  Oh, sister Nephthys, behold our brother.

  Come, let us lift his head;

  Come, let us assemble his bones;

  Come, let us join his limbs;

  Come, let us end his woe!

  Lovecraft found himself getting teary-eyed as he went on. “And once again, after long labor, she found his every part excepting one, for which she created a substitute with her magic. She revived her reassembled husband with a kiss that taxed nearly all of her depleted strength. The vitality which she bestowed upon her husband nearly spent, they had only a short time to conceive their child, Horus, the winged one, the new sun, the avenger of his father and conqueror of Seth.”

  “Hmm?” said Glory, apparently in her sleep.

  “Osiris became ruler of the underworld,” said Lovecraft, “and to this day he is honored in the great monument whose shaft is aimed directly at his star in the con
stellation Orion.”

  “Thanks, Lovey,” Glory mumbled.

  “Good night,” said Lovecraft.

  8

  LOVECRAFT TOUCHED HOWARD’S SHOULDER. “Bob,” he whispered.

  Howard mumbled something in his sleep, but then he was instantly awake, his hand automatically reaching under his improvised pillow for his pistol.

  “It’s no emergency,” said Lovecraft. “I’ve been ruminating over the day’s events, and I merely wanted to tell you a few things. Important things to discuss before the night is any older.”

  “What is it, HP?”

  “I feel calm at the moment; but must confess to you that my trepidations grow ever more severe,” said Lovecraft. “Consider the peculiarity of this atmospheric phenomenon. It is consistent with the turns of weather that have followed us since yesterday.”

  “Ain’t much we can do but wait it out now,” said Howard, rubbing his red eyes as he lay back on his bedroll. “We drive much farther and we’re bound to overheat. I ain’t got but a little spare water in the trunk, and we might need that to drink if we get stranded out here.”

  “Well, perhaps your attitude is the best. Please sleep, Bob. My apologies for waking you unnecessarily. I shall keep vigil for wayward reptiles.”

  “Mighty good of ya, HP. ‘Night,” he said, and he was snoring again within moments.

  Lovecraft sat with his back against the front bumper and tilted his head back to look directly up into the night. The stars were out again, though they were enshrouded, in every direction, by the black dust. He realized it had settled over them like a tulle fog, like a cloud displaced from the heavens onto the earth. He wished he could sleep, but he was too agitated now in the quiet and he had promised to take the first watch. Earlier he had pretended to drift off to allow Howard and Glory a span of privacy together, and now he wished he could sleep as well as he had during that pretense.

  He unscrewed the lid of the Thermos, then the top, and poured himself some coffee. He couldn’t smell it in the dry air until he had lifted it halfway to his face, but then it washed over him, and he felt suddenly at ease. A cautious sip. A frown at the bitterness. He reached into his pocket for the paper napkin in which he had folded away a few handfuls of sugar just for this purpose and very carefully trickled some into the Thermos lid. There was nothing to stir it with-he would have to retrieve his spoon from the car for that-so he stirred with his pencil, smelling the odd mix of cedar and sweet coffee, and took another sip. He smiled involuntarily, added a little more sugar, and leaned back once more to savor the night and the stars.

  “Someday they will all be dissipated into feeble and uniform waves of radiant heat,” he whispered to himself, paraphrasing something else he had written years ago. “Too feeble to provide any perceptible warmth. It will be a terrible desolation, a vast and tomblike universe of midnight gloom and perpetual Arctic cold. And through this sepulchral universe will roll dark, frozen suns with their hordes of dead planets covered in the dust of those unfortunate mortals who will have perished as their stars faded from the skies.”

  He took another sweet sip of coffee and smiled again, though his own words had made his sense of foreboding grow stronger. From his watch pocket, he removed the Artifact, which had been paining him all day, and he wasn’t surprised at all to see its eerie pulsing glow illuminate the darkness with its cold, nacreous light. Lovecraft felt strangely at ease now, not at all like the fearful man he really was; he felt like the protagonist in a story with a predictable and heroic outcome, confident that despite the trials ahead all would turn out well. Part of himself was alarmed by this lulling of his usual anxiety; he suspected that this confidence was a ploy by his pursuers designed to put him at ease, to make him vulnerable.

  Lovecraft noticed the Artifact’s glow seem to diminish while the background light seemed to increase. He jerked his head around in alarm, then looked up to see that the moon had just emerged from a patch of dark clouds, its cold silver light washing out the glow of the Artifact. Compelled by some whim, he held the thing up, juxtaposing it with the orb of the moon, to compare the nature of the light. In front of his face, the Artifact was the same size as the moon, and its aura blended uncannily with the halo around the lunar disk until it appeared that they were emitting the same light. Lovecraft didn’t even have to shift his eyes back and forth to notice that the man in the moon was changing; its expression, usually a sort of tranquil melancholy, was distorting into a hideous grimace. Then the face lost its anthropomorphic qualities altogether. Squidlike tendrils crawled across the surface, forming a hideous chaos that slowly coagulated into the face represented on the Artifact clutched in his hand.

  Lovecraft lurched to his feet and nearly stepped into the dying fire as he stumbled over to Howard and shook him. “Bob!” he said in a loud whisper. “Bob!”

  Howard grunted, and then sat bolt upright, his pistol magically in his hand. “Where is he?” he said.

  Lovecraft waited momentarily while Howard got his bearings, then he showed him the Artifact and directed his attention up at the moon.

  Neither man could believe his eyes. It had changed again. They both stared, mesmerized by the bizarre and amorphous shapes that seemed to emanate from the very surface of the pockmarked satellite.

  “Do you see them?” asked Howard.

  “Yes. They are the children of Dagon, the elder god of the deep.”

  “They’re coming out of the craters.”

  “The mare. They are called seas in Latin. Now I understand the appropriateness of that appellation. The old astronomers must have known the truth.”

  “I say we hightail it outta here, HP.”

  “Where shall we go to hide from the moon?” Just then the moon vanished once more behind a bank of swift clouds, leaving the desert suddenly smothered in blackness illuminated only by the last red glow of dying embers and the cold pulse of the Artifact.

  WHEN THEY HEARD the scream, Lovecraft and Howard were momentarily confused. They had all but forgotten that they had a woman with them; they thought, for an instant, that what they heard was the cry of some desert animal in the jaws of a predator. The sound lingered in the upper part of the register, part of it lost in a range beyond hearing; it cut through their spines like slivers of glass, and in the split second it took them to place its origin, they were on their feet, turning toward the car. But once again, they were disoriented, petrified now by what they saw.

  Howard could make out tiny points of light, like distant fireflies, moving quietly across the darkness; when he turned his head he saw that they extended everywhere, from horizon to horizon, in small, moving clusters. He blinked, trying to adjust his vision, which had been blinded by the bright light of the moon. Lovecraft put the Artifact quickly back into his pocket, and to his eyes, which were naturally more acclimated to the night, the lights were far more numerous; they stretched into the distance, and what appeared as dispersed blobs to Howard resolved themselves into groups of glowing specks, large and small, slowly approaching. Some of the lights blinked on and off; others remained steady and grew as they approached.

  “Glory!” Howard shouted.

  “Oh, God, I’m glad you’re alive,” came Glory’s voice. “I thought… Oh, my God!”

  “Glory, turn the headlamps on,” Howard instructed in a steady voice.

  As the specks of light rapidly closed on them, they heard a click and the headlights switched on, lancing through the darkness like a flash of lightning. In the twin beams, which shone blindingly bright to Howard and Lovecraft, they saw what lay behind the multitude of tiny lights: animals-large and small, predator and prey-all moving like automatons slowly toward the car. They were unnaturally silent; not a squeak or a hiss or a growl issued from them; the only sound, like the dry scratching of leaves, was the noise they made stalking, scrabbling, slithering across the dry earth. It seemed to echo in the distance, growing subtly louder each second.

  The two men moved slowly, lest they trigger something
in the animals, and they eased toward the car. “Roll the windows up,” Howard said to Glory. “Make sure the doors are shut. Do you know how to drive?”

  “Yes,” came the reply.

  “Crawl into the front and—” Suddenly the distant sounds were upon them-not at all the echoes of the terrestrial beasts, but the fleshy fluttering of wings. The thunderous chaos descended upon them first, and then, before they could respond, the air was full of black shadows darting madly, changing direction in mid-flight; and now they could hear the occasional cricket like shriek of the bats as they sounded out their targets and swooped to attack. Howard, in his hat, swatted more in annoyance than fear at the bats, but Lovecraft shrieked in almost the same pitch as he flailed his arms, not knowing whether to protect his face or the top of his head. As they clawed at the doors, the Chevy’s engine fired up, and in the momentary reprieve as the vibrations frightened the bats, Lovecraft and Howard leaped in.

  “Drive!” said Howard, contorted in the front seat, feeling the top of his head to confirm it was his hat and not an animal there.

  Glory threw the gearshift into first and turned the car toward the road, the headlights swinging in a wide arc that illuminated an unbelievable array of desert animals in their circumference. Just as they began to gain speed there was a sudden lurch, then a strong jolt as the rear of the car tilted at an odd angle and the headlights shone up, askew, into the dusty night. Howard began to curse their luck, but his voice was drowned out almost immediately by all manner of bumps and scratches against the car as the first wave of animals reached them en massé. They could hardly see through the front windshield, now obscured by the fleshy, membranous wings of bats that pressed themselves there, drooling, their thick saliva dripping down the glass.