Shadows Bend

by David Barbour

  SHORTLY AFTER NOON, having driven through the night, they passed through the old part of Auburn, still hanging on from the days of the Gold Rush. A mile or so farther on, they crossed the railroad tracks that Smith had identified as the best landmark for finding the road to his house.

  “Here,” said Lovecraft. “Turn here.”

  “You sure this is the right road?” said Howard. “It don’t look like more than a trail.”

  “This is it, Bob. There’s no other turn. Klarkash-Ton was very clear.”

  Howard turned onto the rutted trail, up the forested hill, driving very slowly to avoid the loose rocks and pits. It was pleasant and quiet, the air punctuated only occasionally by the sound of a bird. “I’m glad we fixed the damned suspension,” he mumbled as he was jostled up and down. The forest on either side of the road seemed to converge as they continued uphill around a blind curve, and as they came around, the trees approached almost into the road itself, looming up on either side; where there were large branches, they laced together to form a tunnel of shade. Howard stopped momentarily, looking down the dark green throat under the trees. “I don’t see no road ahead,” he said.

  Lovecraft and Glory squinted forward. They, too, were suddenly suspicious and uncomfortable. “I believe the road bends,” Lovecraft concluded after a moment’s hesitation. “It only appears to come to an end.”

  Howard eased slowly forward. “Well, we either go all the way forward, or we back outta this place. Ain’t no room to turn around.”

  They had all expected a house on some side street of town, and after their recent misadventures, they found it difficult to relax despite the idyllic surroundings. The air was dry, having already taken on the afternoon heat, and there was a thick, somnolent silence everywhere, almost eerie.

  Just before Howard’s patience had expired, they saw the weathered old sign, lettered rather roughly in faded paint: Timeus Smith. Howard recognized the name, and for an instant he thought they had come upon the grave of Clark’s father. He was still slightly disoriented when they came through the weave of trees into a dry, grassy clearing, where they could see an old cabin.

  Howard honked the horn after they got out, and Smith appeared at the door, looking weary. He was neatly though casually dressed, probably because he was expecting them; his dark hair combed wide over his broad forehead gave him an especially intellectual air, and his heavy brows and slightly sunken eyes added a touch of the suffering artist. To Howard, Smith looked too feminine—like a lady’s man, but to Glory his asymmetrical features conveyed empathy, sensitivity, and soulfulness. She found him instantly attractive.

  Smith gave a broad, crooked smile and walked down the slope to greet them. “Welcome to my humble abode!” he called. “Always refuge for weary travelers here.”

  Howard and Lovecraft staggered up to the house, finally realizing how exhausted they were. Glory, feeling bloated and wretched from having slept in the heat, grudgingly followed them up the pathway.

  Smith said his manly hellos to his friends with much shaking of ‘ hands and patting of shoulders. At first Glory thought it had been a long while since they had all seen each other, but there was a strange awkwardness about the way they looked at each other, as if they were comparing the man before them to some former image. It was almost a kind °f suspicion, or disbelief, or maybe just simple disillusionment.

  She realized that this was the first time they had actually seen each other; though they had been corresponding for years, this was their first meeting in the flesh.

  “And who might this be?” Smith asked Lovecraft. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

  “Ah,” said Lovecraft. “Clark Ashton Smith, this is Miss Glory McKenna. And vice versa if you please.”

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss McKenna,” said Smith. He took her hand and planted a mock chivalric kiss on its back. “I hope Bob’s wild driving wasn’t too taxing on your nerves?”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Smith,” Glory replied. “I’ve enjoyed your poetry for years. And no, the driving wasn’t as wretched as you’d expect.”

  “Please call me Clark,” said Smith. “If HP had told me he’d be bringing a lady friend, I would have made better preparations.”

  “She ain’t no lady friend,” said Howard. “We were givin’ her a ride to Vegas, but now she’s in over her head.”

  Smith gave Howard a sidelong glance, then turned back to Glory. “Please, let’s go inside. You may want to freshen up before you join us for”-he pulled a watch out of his pocket-“ah, lunch. Miss McKenna?” Smith held the door open and motioned her in.

  “Thank you. Call me Glory.” She stepped into the cool shade of the cabin. “Clark?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Would you mind terribly if I called my sister first? She’s in the hospital and—”

  “Ah, I’m terribly sorry, but as you can see, we’re rather isolated and rustic out here. I’m afraid we have no telephone. Or electricity or running water for that matter.”

  “Goodness, how do you get by?”

  “We do fine. How did people get by before all the cluttered inventions of the modern age?” While Glory went into the kitchen, Smith ushered the others back outside to unload the car. He was surprised by how little they were carrying.

  “You’re hittin’ it off purty quick,” observed Howard. “I didn’t know you were such a skirt chaser.”

  Smith smiled. “Who is she? And do you mind my asking?”

  “She ain’t neither of our girlfriends, if that’s what you’re askin’,” said Howard. “I’ll leave it at that.”

  “It slipped my mind,” said Lovecraft.

  “Eh?” said Smith.

  “I forgot to mention that she was accompanying us. But let me assure you, she is now an important member of our party.”

  “Well, then, I’ll not compromise your professional relationship,” Smith said with a smile. “And by the way, you boys look like the cat dragged you in. And speaking of cats, perhaps you’d like a nap after lunch?”

  “Tell ya the truth, I wouldn’t mind hittin’ the sack right now,” said Howard. “You, HP?”

  “My energies are a bit more flexible, but I, too, would welcome a chance to visit the Land of Nod.”

  “Nod is where Cain went when he was banished,” said Smith. “East of Eden, into the Land of Nod.”

  “I have hardly committed fratricide,” Lovecraft replied quickly. “I was alluding to Winkin and Blinkin.”

  Smith smiled and didn’t bother to argue.

  “Just one thing,” said Lovecraft. “Since we have come this far in a state of high anxiety, let us at least confirm the existence of the book before we retire.”

  “This way,” said Smith.

  Howard didn’t look pleased, but he nodded his assent. He followed Smith and Lovecraft up the walk into the house, lagging slightly behind to hide his .45 strategically in his bag.

  Smith took the two men inside, where they laid their things down in the living room before proceeding into the kitchen. Glory was standing near the back door, smoking a cigarette. On the table lay an, oblong shape over which Smith had draped a red-silk scarf. For some’ reason the arrangement reminded Howard of a body laid out for cleaning before a wake. Smith pulled the scarf away with a flourish. Howard and Lovecraft expected to see the cover, but what they got instead was a thick rectangle of black velvet.

  Smith noticed their puzzled expressions. He had wrapped the book in the velvet first out of respect and now, more recently, out of uneasiness. He did not exactly fear the book yet, but lately his dreams had begun to take on a sinister quality infected by the scraps of ciphered Latin he had been able to decode: obscenities, incoherent rants, wholly illogical assertions. He did not know whether it was his translations that gave them their weirdness, but he was wont to suspect that the cause lay in the original Arabic of the mad Abdul Alhazred. “My apologies for the false drama,” he said as he unwrapped the bundle and there it was,
the mythic book come to life. The binding was a lightly tanned vellum like material, but clearly not vellum. It was stamped in a weathered crimson color, the letters embossed so long ago their depth was nearly gone NECRONOMICON and Abdul Alhazred. On the spine of the book were yellowed slivers of something, that must have been ivory, and bound into the spine itself was a long, coarse-woven ribbon of bleached white. Howard and Lovecraft stared at the book, mouths nearly agape, as If they had Witnessed the unveiling of a holy relic.

  “I recognized it immediately,” said Smith. “It wasn’t by sight, but by intuition. I swear to you it gave off a black aura that I could feel from across the store. When I saw the cover and the contents, that only confirmed my first impression.”

  Lovecraft ran his fingers over the book, tentatively stroking the cracked cover. “I still find its authenticity rather dubious. What did the dealer say?”

  “It’s bound in human skin. Slivers of bone in the spine, and the bookmark is made of bleached human hair.”

  Lovecraft quickly drew his hand away. “And how would an antiquarian bookseller establish all this?”

  “He happens to be the son of a prominent mortician, HP.”

  “Isn’t there some law against this sort of thing?” asked Glory.

  Smith shook his head. “The book is a relic. And the seller was happy to get rid of it while doing me a favor at the same time. He’s a great fan of Weird Tales and the like.”

  “So this is the big deal?” said Glory. “I thought you had a fancy pan of brownies under the cloth.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Lovecraft.

  Smith smiled. “Glory, if only a fraction of what HP imagined about this book is as real as this seems to be, then what we have here is one of the most gruesome products of human history.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Glory. “I guess I’m punchy from the trip.”

  “Thank you, Clark,” said Lovecraft. “But now that I’ve confirmed its existence, I find myself drained of all physical and mental energies. I now second Bob’s suggestion that we rest before proceeding.”

  “Come on,” said Smith, “I’ll show you where you boys can both get some sleep. My parents may be back by tonight, so that leaves only two rooms. We can all shack up in the living room together, or I have a better plan. It’s a bit hot for it now, but tonight we can sleep outside in my study, which is what I usually do unless it rains. I’m assuming that you boys will do the gentlemanly thing and let your lady friend have my room?”

  “She ain’t our lady friend,” Howard said again, looking at Glory out of the corners of his eyes.

  “Shall we proceed to the living room for now, where it’s cooler, while the lady finishes her cigarette?”

  Howard found both of the sofas much too soft to sleep on, so he let Lovecraft take the comfortable one and went back out to the car to get his bedroll. When he came back up, he found Smith standing awkwardly in the center of the living room with an armload of linen and pillows. Lovecraft was stretched out, still in his clothes, having only removed his shoes for comfort. Smith put his load down and gingerly covered Lovecraft as if he were a child.

  “Help yourself to the sheets and whatnot,” said Smith. He lifted Lovecraft’s foul-smelling shoes by the tips so as not to touch their sweat-soaked insides. “I’ll put these out to get some air.”

  “Here’s mine,” said Howard, sitting on the empty sofa to remove his boots. “I figure we’re gonna need a couple hours at least. Then we’ll wanna wash up and eat.”

  “I should be able to whip something up in the kitchen while you boys are out.”

  “That would be mighty hospitable of ya, Clark.” Howard said it with a touch of sarcasm, but Smith replied with a genuine smile.

  “It’s really good to see you after all these years, Bob. You’re not what I expected, actually, but it’s always like that when you meet the man behind the letters.” ,

  “You ain’t exactly what I expected, neither,” said Howard. “But then, neither was HP.” He chuckled at the memory of Lovecraft’s appearance as he knelt on the floor and spread out his bedroll. Smith tossed him a pillow, and he puffed it before placing it at the top. “I’ll be seein’ ya, then.”

  “Sleep well.” Smith turned and went to the kitchen; he could hear Howard snoring before he even reached the door.

  In the kitchen, Smith found Glory sitting silently at the table, ‘ smoking a fresh cigarette. She seemed both relieved and unhappy. There was an interesting plasticity about her features, slightly puffy and yet remarkably expressive, with the subtlest shifts of nuance.

  Smith found her face fascinating, and he paused at the door to observe her With a sculptor’s eye.

  Glory looked up. “Excuse me,” she said. “But I haven’t been able to shake this bad habit of mine.”

  “Then I’m both happy and sorry to hear that,” Smith replied. “Bob and HP are sleeping. Would you like to go freshen up? It must have been pretty unpleasant driving in that heat.”

  “It was.”

  “You also look like you could use a change of clothes. Shall I see what I can dig up?”

  Glory blew a plume of smoke. “You keep women’s clothes buried in your root cellar?”

  Smith laughed. “Not exactly. But clothes have a certain way of accumulating. My mother has things she hasn’t worn in most of my living memory, and she’d be more than happy to see them be useful.”

  “That’s very nice of her.”

  “You’ll have to make do with our primitive facilities. But there’s a tub out back, and in this weather, I think you won’t mind the cold water. When you’re done look on the other side of the partition. I’ll have some clothes laid out for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Smith went out with Glory, and after showing her the outdoor bathroom and the water buckets, he went back into the cabin, where he looked through his mother’s wardrobe, sorting through the stray pieces of clothing that she hadn’t worn in decades. He found a silk blouse and a pair of jodhpurs that would fit Glory. He had a keen eye for the sizes and shapes of things he could see her in those clothes, her curls of red hair wet and slicked back from her face. Yes, she would be lovely in those clothes. He went back out and laid them out on a stool in front of the partition to the tub; he heard Glory pouring water from a bucket, humming under her breath, and he paused for a moment, to listen to that quiet intimacy.

  .Smith went back into the kitchen. He rewrapped the book and took It Into his study, which was still in shade when he went there, the light gentle through the west-facing windows. He laid the bundle on his massive, mahogany desk, intending to leave, it alone, but some impulse made him want to look inside. How had this book entered Lovecraft’s mind, he thought, hefting the heavy tome in his hands and throwing back the black cloth. He said he had fabricated the whole thing, and yet some of the snippets Lovecraft had made up bore an uncanny similarity to the phrases he had managed to translate. Perhaps Lovecraft had run across this very volume or its counterpart at some time in the past and had forgotten. Perhaps his reference to the book was merely another example of the fantastic power of unconscious memory. Smith ran his fingers over the embossed cover, which always had a simultaneously dry and clammy quality to it. He sat down in his swivel chair and opened the volume to some random point in the middle and looked down at the neatly hand-printed text and the accompanying diagram, a line drawing that could have been taken from Bosch’s Hell panel in his “Garden of Delights” triptych.

  Here was something that looked like an octopus with its tangle of limbs and its gruesome parrot beak, and yet this was no octopus. The appendages flowed in a chaotic pattern reminiscent of something he had once seen on a Minoan vase, and yet within that chaos there was hidden some message his brain could not quite decipher. He felt it only as a kind of obscenity. Severed human limbs around the octopus thing’s beak, torsos in its tentacles. Instead of suction cups, it had barbed hooks on its limbs, and several of these had punctured the body of a naked girl, whose
mouth was obviously open in the shriek that would end her life. In the background, a pit, its great depth represented in a wash of solid black ink. Sprinkles and smears of red ink to represent blood and gore. On the recto page the text commented upon this image, and repeated several times in red, in the way Christ’s words were often highlighted in deluxe editions of the Bible, were the words CTHVLHV and FHTAGN. He could make out a few other Words, but their meaning was unclear to him.

  There was a light tapping sound at his door. Smith looked up and smiled. “’Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door,” he said.

  “Only this, and nothing more,” Glory finished. She was as beautiful as he’d imagined in the silk blouse and jodhpurs, both of which clung to her form as if they had been tailored for her. Her men’s cowboy boots didn’t quite match, but that added an exotic charm. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

  “I’ll have to compliment my mother for her good taste.”

  “I mean for interrupting your reading.”

  “No-by all means do come in and have a seat.”

  Glory walked in, her eyes lingering on the objects in the room, scanning the bookshelves for titles. She ran her finger across the spines of books as if she were rattling a stick across a white picket fence, but her attention was most keen on the group of grotesque sculptures Smith had laid out on one side of his desk. One unfinished piece, of what looked like an Easter Island head, lay on its side, an open jackknife next to it covered in white dust from the soft stone.

  “This is quite a collection. I didn’t realize you did carvings.”

  “Oh, I dabble in illustration and sculpture,” said Smith. “Something to idle away the time and make use of the rocks I get from my uncle’s mine.”

  “You know, I never imagined you living in a place like this.”

  “Oh?”

  “From your writing, I imagined you living in some bleak stone mansion like Rochester’s Thomfield. Dank corridors, studies with high ceilings, sealed-off rooms.”

  “Not very homey, those accommodations.”