“Must be some soda-pop,” said Howard, getting stiffly out of the car. Lovecraft opened his door and tried to get out, only to fall back into his seat as a sudden sense of vertigo came over him. He calmed his breath and tried again, swinging his feet out first the way he had seen women exit a taxi, and he was able to rise without the shooting pain in the side that had plagued him the past several days.
With Howard out of his immediate proximity, it seemed he could think more easily about what had happened in the cave. It had all transpired so quickly, he thought. There had been no time to be deliberate or rational, no time to make a decision the way a reasonable man should. Why was it that, at the instant when their doom seemed inevitable, the monster had balked? If Glory had been chosen by the odd men or by Cthulhu himself for vulnerability to possession, then why had she been able to resist at the most critical moment? The memory of his own weakness and what it took to bring him back from his infantile withdrawal left him feeling deeply ashamed, and with that, the burden of guilt for having lost Glory, of having possibly been the cause of her death, weighed heavily on his heart.
Howard emerged from the gas station scratching his head. “It’s a ghost town,” he said. “Nothin’, no people as far as I can tell.”
“Bob?”
“Huh?”
“I must confess that I do not understand what happened in those last moments at the portal. But even more seriously, I must confess that in my mind I had grossly misjudged Glory. To say I underestimated her would itself be an understatement.”
Howard looked away for a moment, and when he turned back, his expression was hard. “Why can’t you just say what the hell ya mean, HP? Why are ya always hidin’ behind your fancy sentences and big talk like a damn coward? I know you feel guilty ‘cause ya think you failed. God knows I feel guilty. If I could go back, I’d find ten ways to give up my life for her, ya know that? Now we’re alive and cursed rememberin’ how we failed the person who saved our hides and probably the whole wide world, too.”
“I admit I am prone to circumlocution,” said Lovecraft.
“There-you just did it again!” Howard grimaced in frustration and smacked his fist into the palm of his other hand, causing Lovecraft to wince involuntarily. “Admit you feel bad, dammit!”
“Bob, you cannot force me to express myself in a mode—”
Howard grabbed his friend by the lapels and drew his face up close so that they were eye to eye. Lovecraft could feel Howard’s breath, the dampness of sweat and the texture of grime on his forehead.
“Say it, HP,” Howard hissed, slowly relaxing his grip.
Lovecraft stood up from the hunched posture Howard had yanked him into. He began to nonchalantly straighten his jacket, but then he relented, and said, “I feel bad, Bob. I feel terribly guilty.”
Howard gave him a tired smile and patted him on the shoulder. Suddenly, Howard’s expression changed again. At first, Lovecraft believed his failure to respond had provoked another burst of irrational anger, but then he realized Howard was looking at something behind him. He turned around.
It was a young boy-perhaps seven years old from Lovecraft’s reckoning, though he knew he was a poor judge of children’s’ age, having taken great care to avoid them since his own awkward youth. The boy had the light brown skin of a half-blood, but his eyes were a strange green-and-yellow color, rimmed in blue. He stood halfway in the shadow of the empty garage, regarding them in an attitude that seemed oddly mature.
“Hey there,” said Howard with a crooked, wholly unconvincing smile.
The boy did not respond. He took a step forward and paused as if to assess them more fully.
“Hello,” said Lovecraft. “Can you tell us where we might purchase some petrol and soda pop… preferably of the Dr Pepper variety?” The boy blinked and said nothing, but then pointed with his left arm. “And where might that be?”
“Awonawilona,” said the boy.
“Well, thank you very much, son,” said Howard. He motioned Lovecraft to return to the car. He started the engine as soon as he heard the oddly muffled thud of Lovecraft closing his door, but before he could release the clutch the little boy was suddenly standing directly in front, extending a curious hand toward the silver-tinged figure on the radiator cap. “Don’t touch that!” Howard yelled, leaning out of the window. “It’s hot!”
The boy gave Howard an annoyed glance and firmly grasped the wings of the figurehead,
“No!” Howard swung his door open and bolted from the car to jerk the boy’s hand from the angel, expecting to find his fingers scalded by the heat from the overwrought radiator. “Hell, son! Don’t ya understand plain English?” He frantically examined the boy’s hand, looking for the telltale signs-redness, blistered skin-but was surprised to find he was perfectly fine. “What the hell…” Howard looked up quizzically, holding the boy’s hand outstretched so Lovecraft could see. Then he reached over, and with his index finger Howard lightly touched the face of the silver ornament for himself. He jerked his hand back with an involuntary yelp of pain when he felt the stab of heat. “Damn it!” He stuck his finger into his mouth.
“Mama,” the boy whispered to himself.
“What did you say?”
“Mama,” the boy said again, still looking at the radiator ornament.
“You don’t say.” Howard scratched his head and looked around at the deserted adobe huts, realizing that neither the boy nor anyone else could possibly live there. “I bet you live in Awanalon-Awanawilona, right? Is that where your mama is?”
The boy, still mesmerized by the shiny silver ornament, did not reply. “How ‘bout you hop in with us and we’ll give ya a ride back home?”
“Thank you,” said the boy.
“Don’t mention it, kid.” Howard motioned toward his open door and let the boy climb in first.
The boy sat quietly as Howard turned the ignition and started down the road, but Lovecraft felt rather ill at ease with the boy so close and he sat crushed against the armrest on his door to keep from touching him. There was some sort of aura around him-not altogether unpleasant, but both strange and familiar at the same time, like a word on the tip of the tongue. For Lovecraft it felt like something itching from inside, and he drew away lest the feeling become stronger, even more alien and familiar.
Howard sensed it too, but he tried to hide his mild apprehension at what had just happened by clumsily reaching out his free hand and tousling the boy’s dark brown hair as he spun the wheel of the car one-handed. For all appearances he had taken on the attitude of a young father on a Sunday drive with his son-and what did that make Lovecraft but an eccentric uncle.
“Now what’s your mama doin’ lettin’ ya go off so far from home all by yourself in a ghost town?” said Howard. “Ain’t you afraid at all?”
“No,” was the boy’s response. He looked up at Howard as if to check if that was the correct thing to say.
Stealing a look down, Lovecraft noticed the chest pocket on the boy’s overalls jutted out. The boy looked up at him in the same instant, and Lovecraft instinctively drew even further back against the passenger door, his complexion going a shade paler than its usual sheet white.
The boy smiled, then reached into his pocket and removed two small wooden figurines. He held one out in each hand, one toward Howard, the other toward Lovecraft.
“Bob,” said Lovecraft, his eyes wide.
“Yeah?” Howard kept his eyes on the road as he carefully navigated around a patch of some particularly large potholes.
“Our young passenger has some rather interesting toys you might want to examine.”
Howard looked down, and when he saw what the boy held out for him, his foot grew momentarily heavy on the accelerator and the car surged. “What’s your mama’s name, boy?” Howard asked when he had recovered himself.
“Amma.”
“What’s her last name?”
Now the boy looked puzzled. “What is a last name?”
“Well, I�
��m Bob Howard, and this here is Howard Lovecraft. The second name is the last name. That’s the name we get from our father.”
Now the boy looked even more puzzled. “If Howard is the name you got from your father, then how did it become the first name of your friend? Are you brothers?”
Howard scratched his head, frustrated. “That’s just a coincidence,” he said. “HP?”
“We are not brothers,” said Lovecraft. “Many names are similar, and Mr. Howard’s last name happens to be the same as my first name. Perhaps in your culture it is the custom only to have a single name. Is that the case?”
“You injuns just have one name?” said Howard.
“Amma is Amma.”
“And what is your name?”
“Gabi. ”
“Gabi? Is that short for something?”
“Gabi is the name of a great winged spirit who is very brave, like the one on the front of your car,” said the boy.
“That’s a nice name,” said Howard. “No wonder you ain’t afraid of bein’ in a ghost town, huh?”
The boy looked up at Lovecraft and then looked back at Howard. “You are the only ghosts I have met, but I am not afraid of you,” said the boy.
“Well,” said Howard, “then I suppose there’s nothin’ for any of us to be afraid of.” He looked over the boy’s head at Lovecraft who was clearly not amused. “What’s the matter, HP?”
“Just my usual twinge of pain.” Lovecraft looked forward, then to the side, trying to make out any landmark in the swirling red dust. It was no longer a storm but something more like a fog-tulle fog as he recalled. The sky above looked perfecdy normal, but all around the air was thick and occluded, though there seemed to be no reason for the disturbance.
“Here we are,” said Howard as he passed the small sign that read:
“Awonawilona.”
“You sure this is the place?”
“Please stop here,” said the boy.
“But there ain’t nothin’ around,” Howard replied. “I don’t see no house or nothin’.”
“You can not see our home from here. The gas station is there.”
The boy sat up and pointed ahead and to the side.
“All right.” Howard opened his door and got out, though that hardly seemed the wise thing to do with such poor visibility on the road.
The boy climbed out, pausing for a moment to look back at Lovecraft. Howard reached to shake the boy’s hand.
“Here, these are for the two of you,” said the boy. He placed both of the figurines in Howard’s outstretched palm, and before he could refuse the gesture, the boy was already retreating into the red fog, waving good-bye.
” ‘Bye, kid!” Howard watched the boy fade into the dust and then he stepped back into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. He sat and contemplated the two wooden figures, holding them up against the steering wheel as Lovecraft looked on silently. “Well, I guess this one belongs to you,” Howard said, tossing one of them to Lovecraft.
“Why did you ask the boy what his mother’s name was?” Lovecraft turned the figure over and over in his hand. It was a fish carved from a pale wood made whiter with a chalky paint.
Howard carefully wedged his figurine-a bear made black with charcoal-between the windshield and the dashboard directly in front of him. “You know why, Pale Fish Man.” He shifted the car into gear and got back onto the road.
In a moment, the dust had cleared. Behind them, the landscape was entirely flat, but there was no sign of the boy. And where the road, curved slightly uphill, there was no sign of the town of San Robardo. Lovecraft and Howard both noticed these facts, and yet neither one of them said anything until they had arrived at the gas station in Awanawilona and slaked their thirst on Dr Pepper and Coca-Cola.
AT THE BUS STATION in San Angelo, they made their awkward farewells.
“Now that you ain’t carryin’ that thing no more,” Howard said, reaching out and patting Lovecraft on the watch pocket.
Lovecraft grimaced in pain.
“Sorry, HP. You really oughta get that checked by a doctor. You sure you don’t want to come by my place and have my father give you a once-over?”
“Thank you, but no. I must be on my way. And I’m afraid the situation would be much too awkward for me to endure. I had the sense that your father also had his hopes up for the possibility that something good would come of all this for your mother.”
“We don’t need to talk about that,” said Howard. “Look, what we need to figure out is what to tell Glory’s sister.”
“One or both of us shall have to write her a letter. And her purse l suppose that should be posted with it.”
“I ain’t very good at that sort of sensitive thing, HP.” Howard reached over into the backseat and brought Glory’s purse forward. He put the purse in Lovecraft’s lap. “You take it, okay? And you send it to her with a letter?”
“Don’t worry. I am soured to writing at the moment because I seem to have lost my pen in the cave, but I shall compose something. It will hardly suffice, I must say, but it will have to do.”
“Thanks.”
“It is my duty.”
“HP,” said Howard, “I got a question for you.”
“Yes?”
“Back in the cave when you shouted, ‘It’s true!’ What did you mean?”
Lovecraft was silent for a moment. “I had a realization. All my life I believed I was using my own imagination to create my weird tales, but that is not true. It was them all along-the ones I called the Night Gaunts. They were planting the images in my unconscious mind for me to discover and turn into tales to release into the world. I was part of their plan all along without an inkling of suspicion.”
“You really think so?”
Lovecraft had no answer now.
“You gonna keep on writin’?”
Lovecraft nodded, his face pinched with a half smile.
“Then I’ll be seein’ ya, HP.” Howard extended his large hand, wiping it first on the leg of his pants. “Here’s to better times, then.”
“To better times. Farewell, Bob.”
Howard got into the Chevy, started the engine, and sat for a moment just listening to the rumble. He did not want to go, and yet he did not want to stay. Something had drained him of all impetus at that moment, and he would have been content to close his eyes and sit there for some indeterminate amount of time until the will to live and move entered him once again. It was with conscious effort that he put the car in gear and glanced in the rearview mirror. Lovecraft was already hunched over his satchel, using it as a portable desk on which he was writing a note; he had opened Glory’s purse and was looking into it, taking inventory. A good final image, thought Howard, and he stepped on the gas.
EPILOGUE
Thursday, 11 June, 1936
The Howard House Cross Plains, Texas
IT WAS JUST after seven in the morning when Robert Ervin Howard left the two packets on the front porch for the mailman and went back into the house to stand at his mother’s bedside. It had been another long vigil, and his mother had not stirred from her coma the entire night. Howard had stayed awake, keeping the nurse company, then relieving her, giving her a few hours’ respite of sleep since he had long since lost the ability himself.
His mother’s wheezing breath was growing weaker-even more shallow than before, if that was possible. The fluid in her lungs had drowned most of the tissue, and she lay there looking pale and bluelipped like a child just come out of a cold spring lake. Howard wanted to speak to her again, to have her say his name or at least glimpse him through her rheumy eyes and give him a final moment of recognition before passing into the next world. He had been thinking, obsessively, over the past few sleepless days, of what he would do without her, what his life with his father would be, what it would mean to stay here, in this house, silent of her harsh breath after all these years, and face the blank pages of his work. A strange calmness had come over him during the past evening, and now
that the nurse had examined her for the morning, he felt the confidence to ask his question bluntly.
“How is she, Mrs. Green? Any chance she’ll wake up again?” The nurse gave a wise and weary smile, and replied gently, “No.”
“None?”
Almost imperceptibly, the nurse shook her head.
Without a word, Howard walked to the door, and he stood there for a moment, looking back into the room at his mother breathing on the bed.
“Are you okay, Bobby?” said the nurse.
Howard nodded and walked away to his study, where he sat down at his desk and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into his battered typewriter. He sat there calmly for a while, in silence, as if he were surveying the lay of the land on the blank white page, and then he typed one line, then the next, while the air still shuddered with the sound of the carriage being shoved back for the next line.
He looked at the four lines:
All fled, all done,
so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over
and the lamps expire.
There was an expression on his face now. It might have been a smile, or just some wistful look as he thought about something. He rolled the paper up a third of the way, clicking the gears of the platen, and then, when he was satisfied with the way the quatrain looked displayed there, as if it were a caption to an exhibit, he left his desk. From his cabinet, he removed the .380 Colt automatic. He checked the action, though he didn’t check the chamber, because he had loaded it the night before.
Now, gun in hand, Howard walked outside into what would be a beautiful late-spring morning. He stepped down from the porch to his Chevy and gave it a fond pat on the fender as if it were a horse that had seen him through the adventure of the past year. Casually, as if he were going for a morning drive to enjoy the air, he got into the driver’s seat, snapped the door shut, and then put the gun to his temple. He paused only a moment before squeezing the trigger.
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