Shadows Bend

by David Barbour

  For an instant, just before the hammer fell, then while the hammer took its quick course to the firing pin, Howard saw a veil of ocher dust pass before the car. He could see someone out there-no, two people-standing, hand in hand, silently watching him. It was Glory, her red hair billowing in the wind, and at her side the Indian boy he and Lovecraft had taken to Awonawilona. They were standing there, silently watching him through the veil of windswept dust, and they were happy. “They’re happy,” he thought. “God, I wish HP were here to see them.”

  The bullet entered his head above his right ear and exited out of the left side of his skull. In the last fleeting instant of consciousness-perhaps the residue of perception-Howard saw himself driving through a storm of powdered clay dust, driving swiftly until the sky cracked with lightning and roared with rain, and when the rain touched the ‘ dust it turned thick and red, and Howard’s last thought was to wonder why the red rain fell on the inside of the windshield.

  Monday, 15 March 1937

  The Jane Brown Memorial Hospital

  Providence, Rhode Island

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft closed the battered cover of his journal and struggled, amidst his sweat-soaked sheets, to sit up in bed. He winced again, out of habit, though such an act hardly did justice to the massive agony he felt in his bowels. It had all been a mystery to the doctors, but he himself knew that: the cancer had been brought on by the proximity of the Artifact too long in his watch pocket. That spot under his vest had been the origin of the tumor, they said. How it spread so quickly into his intestines was unknown to them, and they would not have believed his explanations.

  The last dose of morphine had worn off more than a day ago, but he had not reminded the nurses though the pain had become nearly unbearable. He had known for a while, even before being admitted to the hospital, that his last days were upon him. All his life, he had languished too long in the refuge of that twilight state between sleep and waking; it was time to move on.

  At first he thought the morphine they gave him for the pain would grant him visions of the kind he knew the opium eaters had enjoyed, but in his own waking visions he found little of the beauty he had imagined and longed for. It was not the morphine that helped him-it was the sleep the drug permitted, and in the coils of that sleep, the dreams. He had wandered through enchanted landscapes, in gentle perfumed breezes; he had gazed up at alien constellations breathtakingly beautiful; he had sailed rivers with names like poetry and water the color of the sky. And meanwhile, his times of waking had become less and less endurable because of the specter of pain circumscribed by the dull languor of a drug-induced haze. The days and nights all boring in their gray sameness-if this was waking, then he was ready to enter that dream country of which he had written so often, and once entering, he would not return.

  The journal felt heavy in Lovecraft’s emaciated grip. The weight of memory and experience, the recollection of his time with Howard and Glory, the news of Howard’s death, his visit back to Smith, his final confrontation with his nightmares at the Golden Gate. While he had the strength left he reached across to the night table, shuddering with the effort, and took hold of the matches. He lit one, startling at the sharp hissing explosion and the bitter smell of sulfur, and he put the yellow fire to the lower corner of the journal. He was trembling with the pain. He did not know if he could hold it much longer, and so he leaned to the side and dropped the flaming book into the wastebasket, where it made a single, hollow, metallic thump.

  He was ready for his morphine now. He would ask for a larger dose-the pain was worse, after all-and he knew that if he asked in the right tone, with that certain inflection in his voice, that certain hollow and pleading look in his eyes, the doctors would take pity on him to make the passage faster. They were eager for his last days to be peaceful, after all, and they had maintained him-sweet irony-in a state like that of conscious death. The cessation of all feeling with a sense of utter tranquility, perhaps the tranquility that came with the extinction of thought.

  They will smell the smoke soon enough and come to investigate, he thought, staring up at the flashes of pain-induced light he saw on the ceiling. He heard a loud rushing sound, like the roar of a waterfall. How odd, he thought, that I would hear the sound of water when I have just lit a fire. He turned his head, very slightly, until he saw the bright red flames fluttering in the corner of his vision. So that was the roaring. The fire, red fire, fire red, fiery red, fluttering like hair,

  Glory’s hair, in the wind. Lovecraft sighed and slumped back against his pillows, the flames filling more of his vision, blurring, clearing into the face of Glory McKenna, and at her side, the small boy he remembered from the town of red dust. They were smiling at him, and Lovecraft smiled back, the corners of his mouth only tentatively upturned, expecting another pang in his bowels, but the pain was gone. His smile beamed brighter, and he said, quietly, “Hello.” The word did not seem to come from his mouth. It echoed as if the world were hollow and it came from everywhere at once, and far away, so far he could barely hear, came the sound of voices in alarm. Lovecraft opened his eyes wider, gently, expecting to be consumed by the fire, but instead his vision grew paler-degree by degree-until everything faded into a beautiful, radiant white.

  AFTERWORD & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  According to L. Sprague de Camp, the biographer of both men, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard kept up a lively and voluminous correspondence for many years. They almost met in June of 1932, when Lovecraft traveled to New Orleans, but Howard, who lived in Texas, had no money and was unable to secure bus fare to visit his friend.

  As de Camp wrote in Dark Valley Destiny, his biography of Robert E. Howard, “Ever since, admirers of Howard and Lovecraft have thought it a pity that these two exceptional men failed to shake each other’s hands.” Indeed, it was these very words which formed the impetus for me to begin the long, tumultuous route to Shadows Bend.

  And just as Lovecraft could not have made the journey without Howard, I likewise would not even have attempted so massive an undertaking as this novel without my great friend and collaborator, Richard Raleigh. If not for his unflinching belief and enthusiasm in this story and his brilliant, lyrical prose skills… one shudders to think!

  I would like to extend special thanks to Kelley Jones for passing along his fascination for all things Lovecraftian, to S.T. Joshi for his recent biographical scholarship and annotations of Lovecraftian texts, and lastly (pun intended) to Larry McMurtry for writing The Last Picture Show.

  —David Barbour

  I confess that despite my many careers, my first true ambition was to become a pulp writer. My earliest meaningful readings were the works of c.S. Lewis and J.RR Tolkien, but it was not long before I discovered Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories struck chords in me on diametrically opposite ends of the spectrum. Their visions were-respectively-viscerally and metaphysically primal for my adolescent self, and though my opinion of their writing changed many times over the years, their works have an enduring place on the bookshelf of my imagination.

  I had only heard hearsay about the friendship of Howard and Lovecraft until David Barbour introduced me to the de Camp biographies and the premise that eventually became this book. Though it required much coaxing and encouragement on my part, I am glad I managed to convince him that it was possible to tell this story as a novel. It is his formidable storytelling skill and his insistence on accuracy that form the infrastructure for my fancy footwork.

  To Tori Amos I extend special thanks for lending a layer of meaning that would otherwise be missing from this book. It was by synchronicity that I heard her talk about her miscarriage and her visions of her Pueblo boy; though we had already written a red-haired Glory with a troubled family history and the loss of a half-blood child, it was ruminating on the meaning of the coincidence that made me determined to add certain layers of resonance that would mediate an otherwise male centered story line. A portion of our royalties will go to RA.I.N.N., the organi
zation that Amos cofounded for survivors of rape and incest.

  And to Leslie Marmon Silko, sincere and belated thanks for the sage advice you offered an aspiring pulp writer when you were Vassar’s first Writer-in-Residence. I have taken that advice to heart.

  —Richard Raleigh

  The authors would jointly like to extend their gratitude to the following people: James Merk for providing valuable commentary on the early chapters. Peter Quinones for sharing his knowledge of the life of Clark Ashton Smith. Boyd Pearson for his wonderful Clark Ashton Smith web site all the way in New Zealand. George Haas for invaluable details about the Smith cabin. Ted Naifeh for his early drawing. for the Shadows Bend proposal. Rick Klaw, for his continuing interest in the project and the veiled threats regarding misrepresentations of Texas, Texians, and Texicans. Joyce Carol Oates for adding literary cachet to the H.P. Lovecraft revival. Arkham House for keeping HPL’s memory and works alive. Frank Frazetta, Barry Windsor Smith, and Arnold Schwarzenegger for their representations of Conan the Barbarian. Tracie and Anne for their tolerance and patience (which we know grew thin many times). Susan Allison for the patience that made the quality of this final product possible. Regula Noetzli, for placing the manuscript, though she hardly knew what she was unleashing for the millennium. Meade, for her beautiful Tori Amos web site and for answering the odd late-night queries about Tori’s eyes. The Hopi Nation, whose tolerance we beg for the poetic license we’ve taken with the myth of the four worlds. The illustrious John Dee, whose fragmentary transcriptions of the Necronomicon have come to mean so much to those of us who don’t read Arabic or Greek. And finally, all you Cthulhuvians out there who keep the mythos alive—lA’ CTHULHU!

  The title of this book was discovered one night during a dreamquest.

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