Shadows Bend

by David Barbour

  of an emaciated body; and Skull Mt., most naturally, would take its position above. The remnants of ancient lakes, long dry, for eye sockets, perhaps. Exposed granite faces for teeth. A roughly triangular gorge to represent the sunken remains of a nose, and the picture would

  be complete. Now, I wager, we are parked somewhere on a spinal protrusion roughly halfway between the rib cage and the pelvic girdle.

  Lovecraft quickly reread what he had written. These were images familiar to him-the stock of his writerly trade-but suddenly this anthropomorphized landscape, this lingering on death, seemed repulsively morbid to him. He quickly drew a large X through the paragraph and closed the journal.

  Glory was smoking again, cigarette in one hand and flashlight in the other, illuminating the back fender well of the car for Howard. She stood in a tired pose, one hip thrust out, her head hanging slightly, her hair in her eyes. She seemed hardly to have the energy to hold the cigarette between her two fingers, let alone the heavy electric torch.

  Howard propped the spare against the running board. He loosened the lug nuts with his long-handled lug wrench before he jacked up the back wheel to change the flat. The rear end went up with annoyingly loud clicks and shrieks of fatigued metal that resonated through the night. As he was kneeling, loosening the lug nuts one by one, then turning them by hand because it was faster, Howard was preoccupied; in the poor illumination of the flashlight beam, he didn’t notice that the flat tire was slowly swelling along the bottom.

  Pulling her hair away from her eyes, Glory leaned slightly forward to watch what Howard was doing. “Can you see?” she said, leaning even closer.

  Howard turned his head to face her. Under her flannel shirt, which she wore loose and unbuttoned like a jacket, Glory wore only the T-shirt she had taken from her sister’s house; it was a little small for her, and it pressed revealingly against her breasts. Howard didn’t fail to notice that, or the scent of her hair, or the warmth of her body so close.

  Glory smoothed her hair away from her face, revealing the pale flesh of her neck, the dark hollow of her collarbone. She smiled and watched Howard frown and turn away. Over his shoulder, she thought she saw something odd about the tire, so she leaned even closer, touching his shoulder as she angled the beam of the flashlight. Several large bumps were beginning to form along the bottom edge of the tire. “You should have a look at the tire,” she said.

  Cocking his head around, Howard answered, annoyed. “Oh, I’m havin’ a look all right,” he said. He wondered what his mother would say about this-a harlot sidling up to him at night in the middle of nowhere, making such a flagrant pass at him. He felt the blood still hot in his face, so he turned his attention elsewhere; careful not to lose track of them, he began laying the lug nuts down in the dirt. “Kaput,” he said.

  “What did you say?”

  “Kaput. It’s German for broke.”

  “There’s something very strange about the tire. Should it be—”

  Glory screamed, grabbing Howard with her free hand and yanking him backwards.

  From his awkward kneeling position, Howard instinctively turned away from the tire and fell on his back. Utterly confused, he looked up at Glory, only to be blinded by the flashlight as he heard the strange double sound of the tire exploding. Crack! Kraak!

  The black rubber had burst from the internal force that had engorged it, spewing a mass of bright red skittering things that made a hideous crackling noise as they fell in the dirt. Howard scrabbled back in shock, his limbs all contorted. “Scorpions!” he cried. “Glory, get; back!”

  Standing there still disoriented from her own scream, Glory hesitated until she turned the beam of the flashlight down between her legs. There were hundreds of them, some longer and thicker than her fingers, their hard, segmented bodies scattered in the dirt, their tails arched and rigid, and the poison tips of their needle-sharp stingers probing the air, quivering with anticipation for something to pierce. One scorpion had already found her boot, and it jabbed its armored tail into the side, hardly puncturing the thick leather but squirting a tiny drop of venom from its hypodermic tip. Glory jerked her foot away, parting her legs wider, only to hear a sickening crunch as she stepped on another scorpion.

  Lovecraft stepped around the front of the car, his journal fluttering. “Glory?” he called.

  “Stay back!” Howard shouted, scrabbling to his feet and stomping wherever he could, crunching the hard arachnids under his bootheels. It was difficult to see exactly how many there were; they had scattered everywhere from the exploding tire. Glory aimed the beam of her light at her own feet, and with involuntary shudders at the sight of the creatures coming at her, she gritted her teeth in concentration and stepped hard, pushing with her hips for force. The things under her boots cracked and splintered, only to make room for others to crawl at her with their sharp stings upraised and twitching.

  From the front of the car Lovecraft contributed his own flashlight beam, aiming at Howard’s feet. With the help of the light, Howard flicked several of the remaining scorpions off his pant legs and casually stomped them into the ground before striding over to Glory. He lifted her into his arms and walked back past the car, grunting with the surprise of her weight. As he put her on top of a rock, he noticed a movement in her hair—yet another scorpion, tangled there, almost invisible in the waves of red. He pinched it by the tail and jerked it away from her, flicking it into the darkness even before she was able to protest with a loud “ouch” of pain.

  “What did you do that for?” said Glory, smoothing her hair.

  “Sorry. My watchband musta got caught.”

  “Well, thank you, kind knight.” Glory planted a quick kiss on his cheek and Howard turned away, his face fiercely red, only to catch a glance from Lovecraft.

  Howard wondered if his blush had been visible in the moonlight.

  He checked the surface of his boots, which he had been fortunate enough to wear. The stingers had left droplets of venom, which had discolored the leather to a darker hue, but none had penetrated the thick leather. Howard checked Glory’s boots, helping her wipe away some of the wet dripping gore on their soles, and then he went back to attend to the tire. He cautiously finished with the spare, cursing when he realized he had lost a lug nut in the excitement. He had to pause at least a dozen times to squash an errant scorpion that had gotten too close for his comfort.

  Lovecraft and Glory sat together on the rock like people stranded

  <…>tiously into the backseat and Lovecraft stretched out in the front after checking inside with his flashlight. “Just a moment,” said Lovecraft, sounding somewhat annoyed. “If you don’t mind, I must… ahem.”

  “Go ahead,” said Howard. “Just watch where ya step.”

  Lovecraft opened the door and stepped out again. A pale creature was skittering toward him in the dirt-a ghastly albino scorpion. Lovecraft lifted his foot with a sneer of disgust and brought it down, hard, on the thing, crushing its erect tail down onto its own body until its smashed appendages oozed out from under his shoe sole. He shook his foot to clear it of the splintered shell and the sticky gore, but it clung there until he scraped his foot again and again on a rock, smearing its surface with the sickening mess. He averted his face and stepped back into the car. “Never mind, Bob,” he said. “Let’s go. I shall never endeavor to eat lobster again. Well, not that I did in the first place.”

  13

  THEY HAD JOINED Highway 40 at Reno, and now they were in the Sierras, passing clusters of beat-up old cars and homemade trucks that had pulled off the road to form campsites. Through the back window Glory could see a rusted old Model A that had been rigged with a wooden platform to look almost like a covered wagon; an entire family’s possessions-pots, pans, farm tools-were roped to the sides or hanging from hooks; beyond the truck she could see the haggard faces of the poor farmers and their families gathered around makeshift fires sharing what little food they had with their fellow travelers. Even in her current circumstances,
Glory knew she was far happier than they-she hadn’t lost a farm to the sun; she hadn’t seen her life and her land literally burned away and dried into dust that blew for hundreds of miles across the barren prairie.

  “Lots of them must have broke down or overheated on the grades,” said Howard, noticing her expression in the rearview mirror. “Thank God I ain’t a farmer. Just look at ‘em.”

  “At least it’s not winter,” said Glory.

  From the front seat, Lovecraft began his own musings. “Winter,” he said. “Ah, if this were winter, then those wretched souls would be in the same predicament in which the Donner Party found themselves. Imagine eating the flesh of your own fellow travelers in the madness of hunger.”

  “I’d rather not,” said Glory.

  “They ate their two Injun guides first,” said Howard. “Started low on the totem pole, if ya know what I mean. Makes me wonder if they tasted any different since they eat different food and all.”

  “One might infer that human meat tastes like pork,” Lovecraft replied thoughtfully. “This, I would gather from the similarity of diet one finds among humans and members of the porcine persuasion.” He snorted at his own sarcasm.

  Glory saw the sign for Donner Pass and immediately lost patience with the men. “I don’t like what I’ve gotten myself into,” she said. “You boys had better give me a full explanation of what’s going on, or I’ll ask you to drop me off at the next town. Or at one of these campsites.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend ya congregate with a buncha Oakies,” said Howard.

  “And why not? They’re not making fun of your circumstances. They don’t get showered with scorpions or attacked by desert animals. Or kidnapped by strange men.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You boys were doing me a kindness, if I recall. Is ‘that still the case, or what?”

  “HP, you tell her,” said Howard. “We owe her an explanation at least.” Howard braked momentarily to slow down for a group of ragged farmers crossing the road ahead with a deer carcass slung between two of them.

  “I hardly know where to begin,” said Lovecraft.

  “How about at the beginning?”

  Lovecraft turned around to look at Glory. “I’m afraid the beginning may be untold millions of years in the past, so I shall begin with the present. Is that agreeable to you, Bob?”

  “Yeah. We might as well tell her why we’re goin’ to see Smith.”

  “Very well,” said Lovecraft. “As I have explained earlier, we are going to Auburn to visit a mutual friend, who, I believe, has obtained a translation of the Necronomicon. Each of our adventures-or misadventures-since we took you on as a passenger has been the attempt, by the forces of Cthulhu, to prevent said visit.”

  “That’s not much of an explanation,” said Glory. “Visiting Clark Ashton Smith is one thing, but you think naming some ancient lost book explains all the weirdness? I feel like I must be in one of those god-awful stories you two write.”

  “I assure you, the two of us have begun to feel the same way,” said Lovecraft. “And as for the ancient lost book-that explains things in a way more complicated than you would at first imagine. You see, the Necronomicon is a fiction. Or so I believed until this translation was found. And now this fictional book become real seems to be the key to explaining the other mystery, which is the true reason for this journey.”

  “You said the Necronomicon,” said Glory. “That is a real book. I’ve read about it-back in college, I think. And wasn’t there even a biography or something about the insane Arab author-Abdul Alkazar or something?”

  “Alhazred. The mad Arab Abdul Alhazred—it all flows from the tongue together with his unmentionable work, Al Azif It is all purely fabrication, tongue-in-cheek. Abdul Alhazred has a basis in reality, of course, but not in the way people imagine.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was given that name when I was five. By some relative who was taken with the fact that I had declared myself a follower of the prophet Mohammed. I had begun to gather artifacts even at that tender young age, I suppose, after reading The Arabian Nights.”

  “So Al Azifwould be another joke-‘all as if’?”

  “Exactly. You catch on quickly. I would have assumed you read of the book in one of Klarkash-Ton’s stories since you seem to know his poetry.”

  “I never read his stories. But I’m sure I read about that book and the Arab in a reputable source. It wasn’t in some cheap magazine.”

  “It all goes to show how cleverly and effectively we perpetrated our little hoax. And it certainly doesn’t speak to the intellectual credit of the stodgy old scholars who presume to know fact from fiction. They are all tantalized and seduced by the mere hint of something of which they might not know.”

  Lovecraft gave Glory a brief summary of what had happened to him since he had received the Kachina doll. It was interesting for Howard to hear his friend tell the same story to someone else, because this time, even as Lovecraft emphasized the rationality of his actions, Howard found that the story seemed much less credible. If not for the series of bizarre and life-threatening things that had occurred since Lovecraft had appeared at his door, he would almost certainly have dismissed this man as an eccentric who had lost control of his imagination. Glory listened patiently-the way a doctor might hear out a madman’s tale before committing him, thought Howard-but when Lovecraft was done, she asked particular questions.

  “So you think those horrid men are actually creatures from your childhood nightmares?” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to me. If these men are after you because you somehow exposed Cthulhu in your writing, what does your having the Kachina have anything to do with things? And why are they nightmares from before you even made up Cthulhu?”

  It had not occurred to Howard to pursue this line of questioning himself, but he realized Glory had an excellent point. He himself had begun to accept Lovecraft’s story on the face of it-there certainly was enough to go on even on the surface-but the underlying logic was a little bit shaky.

  At first Lovecraft seemed a bit put off by the cross-examination, but he, too, was patient. “It is not merely Cthulhu of whom we speak,” he said. “The list is long: Cthulhu, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub Niggurath.”

  “And don’t forget Yeb and Nug,” said Howard.

  “The ones with the less exotic names,” said Lovecraft. “Of course there is also Bob’s own Friedrich von Juntz and his Unaussprechlichen Kulten with the hideous Black Book and Klarkash-Ton’s Tsathoggua and The Book of Eibon.”

  “But those hardly sound as real,” said Glory. “Where did you get the name for the Necronomicon?”

  “It came to me in a dream,” Lovecraft replied. He added an “of course,” but by then his voice had taken on the tone of dark realization. There was a thick silence. They looked at each other, each recalling the horror and reality of their recent dreams.

  “If I remember my Latin, it means something like ‘The Book of the Names of the Dead,’ ” said Glory. “I can’t help but think it’s the opposite of the book that Christ is supposed to have in His second coming, the book with the names of the saved.”

  “To pose it as an unholy mockery of such a book was not my intention,” said Lovecraft. “But if it takes on that resonance, then all the more credit to my dreaming mind.” He paused. “Not that I had the sort of dreams I am wont to experience these days, thank God.”

  “You haven’t answered my original question,” said Glory. “If you didn’t make up these demons until you were an adult, then what business do monsters from your childhood have in this story?”

  “I have pondered that myself,” Lovecraft replied finally. “The conclusion at which I arrived after much thought is that my childhood imaginings were foreshadowings. I was a sensitive child, much isolated and taken to long bouts of vivid imagination. I am the first to admit that I do not believe in premonitions and the like, but that is the only conclusion that makes rational sense.”

  “You’re forgetti
ng another one,” said Glory.

  A thin smile touched Lovecraft’s lips. “Yes. That I am mad. But then I must remind you that you and Bob are then participants in my vivid mania.”

  Howard had been paying attention to the mountainous road, but he finally interjected himself. “You remember Jules Verne?” he said to Glory.

  “Of course. I must have read all his books when I was a girl.”

  “Well, think of him. He was just a fantasy writer back then, but he wrote about submarines and airships and airplanes, all before those things came true. Now a rational man would say that what he wrote helped those things come true. Or if you’re inclined to believe in the supernatural, then maybe you’d say he predicted those things.”

  “You have a point there,” Glory replied. “I guess plenty of people believe in predictions and prophecies. The Bible’s full of it, after all.” ,

  Lovecraft looked pleased to be compared, even indirectly, to a classic writer and the biblical prophets. “We are all in agreement that many weird phenomena have been following us. Correct?”

  “Yes,” said Glory.

  “Then even though I am inclined to be skeptical, let us view these things the way Charles Fort views such things as rains of fishes or strange lights in the sky-with an open mind. And let us proceed pragmatically from there. I myself have adopted the outlook of Sherlock Holmes: Once the impossible has been ruled out, then what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” He sounded very pleased with himself.

  “Fine,” said Glory. “But I would still rather not be with you two. You can consider me a hostage of circumstances beyond my control. The ride to Vegas was plenty for me.”

  That ended conversation for a while. Howard attended to the road, and Lovecraft scribbled furiously in his journal. Glory gazed out of the window at the soothingly real landscape.