Shadows Bend

by David Barbour

  Now the Artifact in Lovecraft’s pocket began a slow, rhythmic pulsing, as if in response to the proximity of their destination. He looked down at his watch pocket and started momentarily, taken aback by the light, so intense it was visible even in the bright daylight. By all reason, the thing should have burned through his clothes right into his flesh, but the light was cool. What he felt instead of heat was a soreness deep within his body, and that pain pulsated in time to the light. “Bob,” he whispered.

  Howard grunted.

  “Bob, I believe we are close by.”

  “I don’t see a damned thing, HP. And I don’t think we’re gonna be seein’ much at all if the weather turns the way it looks.”

  Indeed, now that they had come over the ridge, they could see the storm front rolling toward them-directly toward them, moving slowly in its boiling motion as if it were searching them out. If they had not been so anxious, they might have stopped to watch the spectacle and its awe-inspiring beauty.

  “I feel funny,” said Glory.

  “So do I,” Howard replied, glancing at Lovecraft.

  Glory shifted her position to take some pressure off the ropes. “My hair’s standing on end, like it does before a thunderstorm.”

  “We should. then be wary of lightning,” said Lovecraft. “I believe we are safe in the confines of the car, since it has rubber tires, and its metal body will act much like a Faraday cage.” He felt a little more at ease now that he was able to expound upon something, but the fear in his core was growing, just as it was in the others. “Bob, I believe the Artifact is behaving like a homing device and perhaps simultaneously a beacon. It will surely lead us to our destination, but it also seems to be drawing the storm into our proximity. I suggest we continue downhill. ”

  “Ain’t no other way to go now,” Howard said sarcastically. Then he sobered. “I think we’re headed for that box canyon down there. Road don’t have no business goin’ anywhere else.”

  Soon the interior of the car was bitter with the odor of burning brake pads, and they rolled the windows all the way down. Even with the repaired suspension, it was a rough ride. Howard drove as quickly as he could to evade their pursuers even though he realized there was only this single road out here in the Godforsaken badlands. If they didn’t catch them going in, they would certainly be waiting for them on the way out. He decided that there would only be one more confrontation between them, and at the risk of driving off the edge, he bent awkwardly down to check his two pistols under his seat.

  A mile or so after they reached the base of the mountain, they passed the mouth of the box canyon. Lovecraft called out to turn around when the Artifact suddenly grew dim. Howard backed up and drove off the road onto the windswept surface of scorched reddish earth. The storm-borne wind blasted them with a fine red dust, and they put the windows up again, glad that the weather had dampened the heat.

  In a little while, they could no longer see anything behind them. If they were being pursued, now it was the blind chasing the blind. Howard worried that the Chevy would choke in the dust; he tried to drive more reasonably, but then he had no choice but to slow down because of the poor visibility. On the right side of the car, the red dust had begun to cake the windows; drifts of it were forming on the lefthand edge of the windshield.

  Without warning, they were all thrown forward and to the right. There was a terrible crunch, and then a muffled thud. Howard braked hard and skidded to a stop, his stomach suddenly hollow with the feeling of doom. If that was the front axle, then they were as good as dead.

  Howard parked the car and momentarily rested his sweaty brow against the steering wheel, his eyes closed. He was too tired to curse and too afraid to get out. They were all silent, listening to the roar of the wind and the intermittent misfiring of the Chevy’s laboring engine.

  “Bob?” said Lovecraft.

  “Sometimes, HP, I wish to God I had never written back to you. I should be home takin’ care of my Ma and now I’m out in the middle of the God damned desert about to be meat for some coyote. What the hell came over me that night, huh?”

  “We have no choice now, Bob. And wasn’t it you who wrote first to me?”

  Howard looked up and laughed. “We’re about to die, and you’re sittin’ there nitpickin’?”

  “The truth is the truth in any circumstance.”

  There was a thump from the back. Both men turned to look. “Look outside,” said Glory.

  Lovecraft’s face fell. “I think we’re here,” he said.

  The wind had abated for a moment. Through the windshield they could see an ancient formation of adobe brick. It was impossible to tell how large it was, or how far away, but from photos he had seen of the old pueblos, Lovecraft guessed that they were within a few hundred yards of a massive structure only partially visible to them.

  It was a city, or a giant dwelling built halfway into the stone of the cliff that formed the western valley wall. From under the broad stone lip that hung over the stone dwellings, other structures of adobe walls, embankments, buildings-spread out in half circle formations until they eroded into the barren red clay of the valley floor. A few of the low circular buildings beyond the shadow of the overhang were still standing, the largest of them still imposing though its contours had softened over the centuries.

  “Unless y’all want to choke to death out here, we oughta hightail it to one of them houses,” said Howard. “Grab whatever you can carry, and let’s sit out the storm.”

  They had to tie wet handkerchiefs around their faces to keep the swirling vermilion dust out of their lungs. Glory also wore a makeshift scarf, which she tied like a pirate’s headwrap to keep her hair under control. They gathered up what they could and marked out the direction to the pueblo. The light was waning rapidly under the storm clouds-there wouldn’t be much time before it grew too dark to see.

  “I’m tempted to say something,” said Glory. “That if I could go back to Thalia on the day I met the two of you, I’d accept the ride just the same.” She tucked a folded piece of paper into her purse. “But that’d just be me being nice.”

  Howard grunted something unintelligible.

  “There is no turning back now,” Lovecraft said. Though he knew he was stating the obvious, the declaration seemed almost a ritual necessity.

  Glory smiled, almost wistfully. “Well, here I am, fellas.”

  “I’m leadin’,” said Howard. “We don’t want to get separated, so you hold on to my belt here, Glory. And HP, you tie yourself to Glory, too. You take up the rear till we get to the ruins, then ya can lead with the Artifact.” He pulled his belt off, then looped it back through the back loop on his pants. He handed the end to Glory.

  Lovecraft also took off his belt and pulled it through the back loop of Glory’s pants. “I feel like I’m on some mountain-climbing expedition, all roped together,” she mumbled.

  “Let’s go.”

  It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred yards to the first ruins, but in the dust that blotted out everything more than a hand’s width in front of them, the walk seemed interminable. Lovecraft found himself drifting in and out of a nostalgic reverie, though he knew it was inappropriate. The obscuring dust made the world small and intimate, and though the wind was cold, he was still warm enough in his clothes to feel a sense of misplaced comfort. There was an ordeal to endure ahead-he knew that with certainty-and perhaps he had already begun to withdraw as he was wont to do. under stress. He remembered languorous summer days when he never bothered to change out of his pajamas, when he lay in bed into the middle of the afternoon and let his aunts bring him warm milk for the stomach ailment they thought he had. Pleasant days of reading and drowsing between passages, lapsing over the threshold of sleep so that what he had read became immediately real in the world of dreams. Perhaps that was why he was so preoccupied with sleep, and dreaming, with Hypnos and Oneiros, with mythic histories and men gone over into the kingdom of madness. As he squinted his watering eyes and coug
hed under his wraps, he wondered what would happen if he simply stopped and let the world fade into a dark and comfortable cloud would he awaken in bed somewhere in some other time, this day but a dream of the future or of the past?

  “Ouch!” said Glory.

  Lovecraft quickly mumbled an apology and took a step backwards.

  The wind had died down. They were on the leeward side of an eroded mud-brick wall.

  Howard looked back over his shoulder, pulling his mask away from his face. “HP, let’s see what your old friend has to say?”

  Lovecraft was momentarily confused, but then he came to his senses and produced the Artifact, which was glowing more brightly than ever. Now it threw a halo of light that pulsed brighter along one arc to indicate the direction in which they should continue. “There,” he said, indicating one of the pueblos.

  “Your turn to lead, HP.”

  Lovecraft stretched out his hand as if he were taking a reading on a compass. He looked over his shoulder at Glory and Howard, then took a tentative step forward into the wind. It was only a dozen paces to the shelter of the next wall. Lovecraft motioned that they had arrived at what appeared to be their destination-the light from the Artifact began to glow more evenly. Howard took the flashlights from his satchel and distributed them, and then, holding their breaths, they stepped through the jagged opening into the dark pueblo.

  The wind abated immediately, but now they had to contend with the eerie moaning through the windows and holes in the adobe walls. They had not been able to tell from the outside, but the inside walls were curved-they were in a low, circular chamber that gave Lovecraft the uneasy feeling of being inside the cylindrical head of a giant Kachina doll. The wall was interrupted at odd intervals by windows and niches whose function he could not determine.

  “What is this place?” said Howard. “It’s like a bull ring with a roof over it, ain’t it?”

  “It’s a kiva,” said Glory. “It’s a holy building.” She shifted the beam of her light and noticed that nothing happened, so she pointed it up at herself to confirm that the bulb was working. “Boys, we might as well save the batteries.”

  “What?”

  “I think the Artifact is brighter than our torches.”

  The men switched their beams off and discovered that they could see just as well in the cold illumination that seemed to hang in the air like a mist. Lovecraft began to move around the chamber, watching how the Artifact’s intensity responded to his position. It seemed brightest toward the center of the room where the top rungs of an ancient ladder jutted out of a black pit.

  “Glory is correct,” said Lovecraft. “This is a kiva, a sacred ceremonial chamber where the Anasazi tribesmen would perform their ancient rites.”

  “I thought you were going to say ‘unholy rites,’ ” Glory joked. Lovecraft didn’t get the humor. “It is quite likely that they were unholy and primitive,” he said. He moved cautiously to the lip of the pit, watching the Artifact glow more brightly, and he pointed silently downward along the ladder.

  “I ain’t goin’ down that thing,” said Howard. “Wood must be three hundred years old.”

  “You should know that wood remains remarkably well preserved in the desert, Bob. Objects in the tomb of Tutankhamen were perfectly preserved over thousands of years.”

  “Well, why don’t you test it then? We’ll follow you if it takes your weight.”

  “But there is no assurance that once I am—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Glory. Before the men could reply or stop her, she grabbed the ladder with one hand and stepped down into the black pit, pointing the flashlight ahead of her as she moved out of the Artifact’s light.

  “Glory!” Howard rushed forward and stopped abruptly, afraid of unbalancing the ladder. He could hear the rungs creaking under her weight.

  There was a gasp from the pit. Silence.

  “It’s fine,”’ came Glory’s voice. “Just watch the seventh step. It’s broken.”

  “Dammit, Glory! You shoulda let HP go down first!”

  “Lower your voice, Bob! It’s like a cave down here. You wouldn’t want it collapsing, would you?”

  Howard sullenly quieted himself. He motioned for Lovecraft to go next. “I’m the heaviest,”’ he said.

  “Then you should go next,”’ Lovecraft replied.

  “What?”

  “Assuming, for argument, that there may be no way out from that nether region, Bob. If your weight should break the ladder, then I would still be up here to go for help. If, on the other hand, I am already down in the pit, then we would all be stranded should the ladder collapse under you.”

  “Well, maybe we should have Glory come back up and I go down then. That way, both of ya would be safe if I broke the damn ladder.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Why?”

  “What’s taking you two so long?” came Glory’s voice. “Why?” Howard asked again.

  “Should you be injured, say with a broken limb, it might be necessary to have someone to nurse yon. Glory would be a better candidate for that than would I.”

  “And what if the person underneath were to catch me, huh?”

  “I am taller than you, Bob, but I’m afraid I am too frail to catch a body of your mass. Not all men enjoy the benefits of your constitution.”

  “Boys? It’s getting awful lonely down here.”

  Howard grunted and descended the ladder, and Lovecraft followed a few moments later to no ill effect.

  “What took you two so long?” said Glory. “I thought you boys decided to abandon me down here.”

  “We were discussing the logistics of this ladder,” said Lovecraft. “And while we are on the topic, I recommend we pull it down after us, thereby leaving our pursuers with no mean of following us.”

  Howard was already pulling the ladder down. “I doubt it’s gonna make any difference,” he said. “But ya never know.”

  They were in a smaller, rough-hewn cylindrical pit that had yet another ladder protruding from a dark hole in its center.

  “This must be the second level,” said Lovecraft. “I would presume four levels in keeping with the Anasazi mythos if we follow the logic of this symbolism to its conclusion.” They decided to take the first ladder down with them another level. The masonry’ diminished with each level until, at the fourth, the circular room wasn’t much more than a hole hewn out of the rough stone of bedrock. This was the fourth , underworld according to the myth of the Anasazi-this was where they; had originated before climbing up onto the surface of the earth.

  By the light of the Artifact, now brighter than ever, they looked around the cold stone chamber and found nothing. Just a few shards of pottery and moldering scraps of what looked like coarse fabric. The chamber appeared to be a dead end, and while they’ bemoaned their luck, they heard sounds from above that were clearly not the windstorm.

  19

  “IT’S THEM,” SAID GLORY. “I can feel it.”

  Howard drew his .45 and handed his .38 to Lovecraft, who simply held the pistol and stared down at it as if he had never seen a gun before.

  “I don’t know what the hell those things are, but I don’t know of nothin’ that’s immune to hot lead,” said Howard. “If we gotta corner ourselves like this, we go out fightin’.”

  “I’m afraid these weapons may do little more than fortify our egos,” said Lovecraft.

  “If you won’t use it, HP, give it to Glory.”

  Lovecraft handed the .38 to Glory and then fumbled in his satchel until he produced a small flint dagger, no larger than a letter opener. Howard rolled his eyes.

  Above them, the sounds of the wind grew muffled, then loud again.

  A trickle of sand fell from one of the levels above them.

  “What do we do now?” said Howard.

  “I suggest we attempt something with the Artifact. It has led us this far. It only stands to reason that it would not merely strand us in some Godforsaken stone chamber.”
/>   Glory stuck the .38 in her waistband and leaned back against the stone wall, feeling its pleasant coldness through her blouse. She pulled out a cigarette and her pack of matches, but the moment she struck the match, a gust of air extinguished it. Frustrated, she turned toward the wall to block the last match she had from being blown out. She lit the cigarette and was about to toss the still-burning match away when she noticed a very faint pictograph of a stone circle on the wall. Above the pictograph was a spiked outcropping of rock that cast a dim shadow from the illuminated Artifact, indicating a small depression in the pattern. “Look!” Glory called. “There’s something important here.”

  Lovecraft arrived first and pointed the beam of his flashlight at the petroglyph. It was badly eroded by time—far older than many of the other carvings on the walls. He thought at first that it was the image of the sun with long curlicue rays extending outward, but then he recognized the stylized splay of curls. They were the limbs of Cthulhu. At that instant Lovecraft felt an intense pain in his side. He doubled over, clutching at his watch pocket. He dropped his flashlight, and yet the light seemed to get brighter.

  “HP?”

  Lovecraft tried to answer. Suddenly he was blinded by beams of light shooting out of his side-it was the Artifact, glowing so brightly it seemed about to explode. The pulses of light seemed almost sentient; they illuminated the depression at the center of the graven Cthulhu image, and now with their faces partially averted they could all see the shape of that depression. It was the outline of the Artifact, exactly to scale.

  “It’s the key,” said Howard.

  Glory helped Lovecraft back to his feet. He seemed unusually light for such a large man, she thought. There was something ephemeral about him, as if half of him did not really exist, as if he were half-gone in the ether.