Shadows Bend

by David Barbour

  Howard smiled, reached into his pants pocket, and pulled out a small gift-wrapped package, which he placed ceremoniously on the table. “In that case, HP, happy forty-fifth birthday, ya old coot!”

  Lovecraft was visibly stunned, but he quickly resumed his usual aloofness. “So,” he said, “this is the reason for the painfully transparent subterfuge this afternoon.”

  “Yep.”

  Lovecraft picked up the thin package and turned it back and forth in his hand. “I did not even recall it was my birthday until I opened up my journal a few minutes ago.”

  “Go ahead and see what’s inside already!”

  Lovecraft carefully unwrapped the paper and opened the box. It was a state-of-the-art black fountain pen monogrammed in silver with the initials “HPL” on its shaft. He turned the black pen in his fingers, feeling its balance, watching the light glint off its glossy black finish, and he felt his throat go tight. It took a great effort to conceal the fact that his eyes were on the verge of tearing, and it was a moment before he was finally able to summon words to his lips. “This is most… fortuitous,” he said, “…particularly in light of the fact that I was about to discard this… poor excuse of a writing tool.”

  Howard smiled at his friend’s struggle to find the right words. He knew he’d succeeded with the gift and didn’t mind the palpable awkwardness that lasted the next few moments.

  Finally, Lovecraft rose. “Bob, I was about to go to the Western Union office next door to send Klarkash-Ton a telegram to let him know when we expect to arrive. I shall return momentarily.”

  “Good idea.” Howard buried his face in the menu in front of him. “I’ll go ahead and order for the both of us while you’re gone. What’d ya want?”

  “Actually, I was just going to have a bowl of vanilla ice cream.”

  “Go on, I’ll take care of it.”

  Lovecraft stood momentarily with his new pen in one hand and his old pen in the other. As he left, the turned back to Howard.

  “Oh, Bob.”

  Howard looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  Howard said nothing. He smiled and returned to the menu.

  Outside the restaurant, Lovecraft held his old pen the way he might have held a dagger. He looked up at the ominous banks of dark clouds, the distant flashes of lightning. “It is… finished,” he declared, and he did something so uncharacteristic he surprised himself. He flung the old pen as hard as he could into the night, and felt great relief tinged with foreboding when he heard its distant clatter. It reminded him of how he would drop pebbles into the well when he was a boy, how that hollow, wet echo would haunt him afterward.

  THE DISCARDED PEN lay on the pavement not far from the gutter. From around the corner, at the end of the block, a flat black sedan approached, gliding quietly over the dark tarmac. Through the windshield, on the driver’s side, one could see the silhouette of a man-so much a silhouette, in fact, that it seemed to be cut from black paper. In the passenger seat the other man seemed to be having some sort of seizure. His head and neck jittered as if the car were rattling over a cobblestone street, and he made clawing gestures with his thin, black fingers, making them appear even more slender. There was no noise from the car, but what happened next should have sounded like an explosion or the shattering of glass; the man’s figure scattered into a million pieces and then solidified again, with an unbelievable suddenness, into the form of a gargoyle like creature whose black wings were so wide they seemed to fill the interior of the car. The driver continued, nonchalantly, and the car stopped, without a sound, its front left tire exactly parallel to the pen. The driver’s side door of the car seemed’ to slide open-though by all rights it should have swung open-and from the shadow inside emerged another shadow, the tendril of a shadow, and it quietly looped itself, tentacle-like, around the shaft of the pen. And though the shadow did not move in any way, it seemed to leech away at the light that illuminated the writing instrument, turning it dim, and then dark, and then into nothing.

  LOVECRAFT STEPPED INTO the Western Union office and paused before he approached the counter. Seeing his confusion, the clerk pointed soundlessly to a stack of forms on a shelf along the far wall; he made writing gestures, indicating that Lovecraft should fill one out.

  “Thank you.” Lovecraft produced his new pen and began filling out one of the forms, relishing the texture of the point against the paper. It must have been an expensive pen, because it moved smoothly, without a scratch, across the cheap paper fibers. He filled out one form, then tore it neatly in two and wrote the same thing on a fresh one, just to practice his penmanship. When he slid the finished telegram across the counter to the clerk, the young man merely glanced at it out of the corner of his eye.

  “Probl’y won’t get it till tomorrow dusk.”

  “That’s an awfully long time, isn’t it, old Chap?”,

  The clerk made a dismissive gesture, tossing his head. Lovecraft’ noticed what was preoccupying all his attention: he was practicing one-handed cuts on a fresh deck of cards.

  “Well then, how much will it be?” asked Lovecraft.

  The clerk shuffled the deck, making a crisp fluttering noise, and he flipped over the first three cards to indicate the amount. A veritable cardsharp.

  Lovecraft frowned as he drew some coins from his breast pocket to pay. When he opened his palm, his eyes locked on to the image of the Indian head on a nickel. A single feather, pointed forward; an angular, aquiline profile. Aquiline-that was to be eaglelike, and the coin next to it was a quarter, tails up to reveal the eagle with its wings spread wide. Spread eagle. Lovecraft blinked, as if to clear his vision, but then suddenly he was jolted as if he had been struck in the face.

  The first image was simply the face of the old shaman framed in firelight. It was comforting, like the face of his dear grandfather Whipple Phillips. Imanito wore a serious but tranquil expression, as if he were thinking of something dire and yet remaining calm. The fire behind him flickered, and then it suddenly all surged in one direction and Lovecraft heard a voice-not Imanito’s voice, but also somehow certainly his: “Red horse woman is in danger. Go to her.” Lovecraft felt his eyes tremble in their sockets. The image went black, and then with every twitch of his eyes the same thing flashed again and again: Imanito’s face disintegrating, turning, in jagged steps, into the black silhouette of the Night Gaunt from his childhood nightmares. Lovecraft shuddered and lurched back in the face of his childhood terror. Involuntarily, he tore at the air in front of his face and turned his head to the side, craning his neck so suddenly he felt a sharp pain in the back of his head.

  “Hey, Mister, you okay?”

  The clerk’s question brought Lovecraft slowly back to the mundane world. He shook his head to snap himself out of the trancelike state he had lapsed into. “Fine,” he said. “I’m absolutely, perfectly fine.” He flung the offending nickel onto the counter and rushed from the office. He could hear the clerk cursing behind him.

  HOWARD WAS IMPATIENTLY DRUMMING his fingers on the tabletop, hungry and anticipating the arrival of his dinner. Lovecraft didn’t even bother to sit down. “Bob, we must find Glory immediately!”

  “What is it, HP?”

  “Now!” cried Lovecraft, his voice breaking.

  “Calm down, HP. We got time to eat, ain’t we?”

  “There is not a moment to lose!” Lovecraft grabbed Howard’s arm., and with surprising strength, yanked him out of the booth.

  11

  ENSHROUDED IN TWILIGHT, dust devils swirled and twisted about the hastily constructed homes that dotted the periphery of the unpaved road like the white negatives of shadows. The wind had picked up again-from all quarters, it seemed-and where they conjoined here and there the miniature twisters coiled, briefly, like living things, and vanished in a scattering of debris.

  The houses had spouted up here like those puffy, substanceless mushrooms one often finds after a rain; but in this case, the rain was a shower of cash from nearby Ve
gas. In time the homes would become more solid, to be sure, but now even in their flimsiness, they served their purpose well enough. At the tip of the cul-de-sac at the end of a row of such houses lurked a dead black sedan, clearly out of place though there were black sedans in several driveways farther up the street. This car was parked askew, as if the driver were drunk, but its windshield was pointed directly at the living-room window of the house across the street-the house of Glory’s sister, Beatrice.

  * * *

  THE LIVING ROOM was lit by one large imitation Tiffany lamp on an Art Deco end table at the end of a plush, poorly reupholstered sofa. Nothing in the house quite matched, and Glory wondered how and where her sister had gathered the odd assortment of furniture. It certainly couldn’t have been a matter of taste.

  Beatrice was on her seventh cigarette of the evening, sitting just out of reach of the overflowing ashtray so that she constantly had to scoot over to flick off her ashes and then scoot back into her easy chair. She was still prattling on about her no-good husband, who had run out on her that February and forced her to get the job at the club. Glory was playing Snakes and Ladders with her seven-year-old nephew, Archie, who sat on the floor next to her, rolling the die with a clatter onto the game board. “Six,” he announced. He clomped his playing piece over the squares and landed on a ladder. “Aw,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Now I gotta go back.”

  “No, Archie, you go up a ladder. Remember, the ladder is up and the snake is down.” She had had to explain this several times throughout the evening. Archie would remember for a while, and then, for no apparent reason, he would want to go down a ladder or go up a snake. Glory figured it was the same sort of confusion children had when they learned left from right, but it still puzzled her. Snakes and ladders were so entirely different, after all.

  Across the room, the illuminated dial of the radio flickered. Beatrice paused in her monologue for a moment and bent her head to listen to the ominous weather report-the impending dust storm was going to be more severe than originally anticipated.

  “Damn it,” said Beatrice. “The last big one about took half the shingles off the roof, and I still haven’t had those replaced.”

  “Well,” Glory said, “we’ll take care of that as soon as I can find a job.” Archie impatiently tugged at the hem of her dress. “Auntie Glory, it’s your turn.”

  Glory dutifully rolled the die and moved her game piece three spaces. Ladder. A long one. She rolled her eyes and slid her piece four levels down the board.

  “Auntie!”

  “What?”

  “Ladder is UP! SNAKE is down!”

  Glory laughed at her mistake. “See,” she said, “you did it so many times now you’ve got me doing it, too.” She mussed Archie’s hair and put her piece back. It didn’t make sense-the ladder was clearly at the bottom of her space. She should have known not to take it down, especially after explaining to Archie. She frowned.

  Beatrice gazed at her sister’s features for a long moment and smiled at the familiarity. “Glory, you don’t know how good it is to see you again. After Daddy ran you out of the house, I cried for a month of Sundays. You know Auntie and me begged him to let you come home.”

  “I couldn’t have-even if he apologized,” said Glory. “You can’t take back words like that. Not when you say them to your own daughter.”

  “He was angry. He was afraid of what the neighbors-the church would say. He hated himself for what he said up until the day he died.”

  “Who told you that? Auntie?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s a bigger goddamned liar than he was,” Glory said bitterly.

  “At least Daddy wasn’t afraid to say what he thought—” She noticed Beatrice looking at Archie at her feet, probably checking to see if he had caught the harsh tones. She reddened a bit, embarrassed that she allowed her anger to overcome her better judgment.

  Beatrice glowered. “Kindly watch your language around my son,” she said in a low voice. “He heard plenty enough gutter talk from his no-account father.”

  “I’m sorry, Beatrice.”

  Beatrice put out her cigarette and took a drink from her glass of lemonade. “So, did you ever go back and finish at Vassar?”

  Glory gave a deliberately curt response. “No.”

  Beatrice knew from her sister’s tone that there was no point in pressing for more. “That’s too bad. You would have been the first girl in the family to—”

  “I know, I know.”

  An awkward moment of silence lingered over them until Archie broke the spell again. “Aunt Glory?”

  Glory moved her game piece, thumping it down space by space on the board. “Sorry, Archie. Your mother keeps pestering me.”

  “Yeah, Daddy use to say so all the time.”

  “You watch that tongue, boy, or you’ll be out picking a switch off the weeping willow!” Beatrice’s tone made it clear that she was only half-kidding. Archie feigned a wide-eyed expression of mock fear and opened his mouth into a big O. It forced a smile out of Beatrice. Glory laughed.

  “And now that song you’ve been waiting to hear yet again,” said the voice on the radio. “Be nice to your shoe salesman. It’s The Inkblots! ‘Christmas in June’!”

  Archie jumped up from the floor, nearly knocking over the game board. “Momma, my song’s on! My song’s on!” He ran over to the radio and turned up the volume.

  Glory looked a question at her sister.

  “Yeah, he loves to sing along with it,” said Beatrice. “Must have giggled for a week the first time he heard it.”

  Outside the wind howled with increasing intensity. They could hear the clatter of shingles on the roof, and Glory was reminded of the night before, the sounds of the dazed desert animals on the roof of Howard’s car assaulting her senses.

  Archie listened intently to the chorus on the radio, and when it came again he clumsily sang along:

  Christmas in June, What a happy pause. Sing a Yuletide tune, Hello, Santa Claus.

  Oh, its Christmas in June,

  And its just because!

  Glory smiled at Archie’s determination. She was about to offer him some encouragement and praise when she was distracted by a loud flapping noise, an odd sound, that rose steadily in volume, as if some giant canvas sail were approaching.

  Glory looked up, concerned. “Beatrice, do you hear that?”

  “What?”

  They both heard a loud thud on the roof.

  “Oh, hell! If that’s another broken branch off Mrs. Appleton’s tree, I swear—” Beatrice stubbed out her cigarette and got up to go to the front door.

  Glory sensed something was very wrong. “Bea, wait!” She ran up to her sister and put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t go out there.”

  “Why not? I’ve got to see if there’s a hole or not.” She brushed Glory’s hand away, annoyed, but then she saw the genuine fear in her sister’s eyes. “Glory, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  Glory hesitated. She didn’t know where to begin, or whether she should even recount the weird things that had befallen her since her path had crossed with the odd couple of pulp writers back in Thalia. “Beatrice I—”

  The radio suddenly went dead, and Archie’s voice awkwardly trailed off into silence. He turned to give Beatrice a questioning look, but before she could reply, all the lights went out in the house, without even a flicker, and everything was pitch-black. And now, through the moaning wind, their ears more sensitive in the dark, they all heard the skittering sound on the roof-like giant clawed footsteps racing across the shingles.

  “Momma, where are you?”

  Beatrice took a few disoriented steps and bumped into the coffee table, knocking an ashtray halfway across the living room. “Damn!” She fumbled for her lighter and flicked it; sparks flew from the flint, but nothing happened. She flicked the wheel twice more before the wick lit and gave off a reddish yellow flame-barely enough to see by. “I’m over h
ere, Archie.” Guided by the faint light, Archie ran for the safety of his mother’s arms. Beatrice craned her neck to look up at the ceiling. “What in God’s name is that?”

  Glory quickly locked the front door. “Beatrice, where are your candles?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “Quick, let’s go there. It’ll be safer.”

  “Safer?” Beatrice said, guiding them through the dark hall with her lighter. “What do you mean?”

  The strange sounds on the roof seemed to follow them into the kitchen, somehow tracking their movement from above. Suddenly, they ceased.

  Beatrice found a few candles in a kitchen drawer as Glory picked up the phone. “I’m calling the police. Is the back door locked?”

  Beatrice lit one candle and set it on the kitchen table. She lit another for herself before shutting her lighter. “No, I’ll get it.” Candle in hand, she hurried over and locked the back door, which had a small curtained window in its upper panel. The swaying shadows of tree branches jittered and rippled against the fabric as distant lightning flashed outside. Beatrice thought she heard something other than the trees creaking outside, but the roll of thunder obscured the other sounds.

  Glory slammed the phone down. “The line’s dead.”

  “Phone’s always getting disconnected,” Beatrice said absently as she drew the curtain back to see if the Appletons’ power was also out. For a fraction of a second, the flickering candle illuminated something outside the window. Still blinded by the afterimages of the lightning, Beatrice couldn’t be sure what she had seen. She pressed her face closer, against her better judgment, and squinted to see past the glare of the candle flame on the glass. “Hello?” she said. “Is anyone out there?”

  Something moved. Beatrice thought it must be something blown by the wind, something like a textured piece of wet leather, but when it turned and she could make out its unmistakable shape, she let out a shrill scream. It was a featureless head, a head that looked as if its face had been removed, and it was directly behind the glass. Beatrice recoiled, screaming again in revulsion as much as fear, and the candle fell from her hand to snuff itself out on the floor.