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  Shadows Bend

  David Barbour

  Richard Raleigh

  This unique and original debut novel casts two real-life legends of fantasy fiction—the creator of Conan and the inventor of the Necronomicon—in a nightmare of their own making…

  H.P. Lovecraft was a writer who would one day become famous for his eerie tales of the macabre—filled with ancient beings who ruled the world millions of years before the appearance of the human race.

  Robert E. Howard was also a writer whose barbarian character Conan would become a literary legend—a lone hero in a primitive world overrun by humankind’s oldest enemies.

  But few know the real story that inspired these masters of pulp fiction. The story that begins on a dark and stormy night. A night tortured by the cries of an inhuman infant child. A child who would open the gates to the most dangerous force in the cosmos—the ancient god Cthulhu… And only two men—two eccentric writers—can stop him.

  David Barbour and Richard Raleigh

  SHADOWS BEND

  A Novel of the Fantastic and Unspeakable

  For Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Robert Ervin Howard & Clark Ashton Smith — the three musketeers of Weird Tales

  And for Tori Amos singing in the RA/I/N/N.

  With special thanks to L. Sprague de Camp without whom this tale would still be lurking in the shadows.

  That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die.

  — Abdul Alhazred, Necronomicon

  Part One

  1

  Sunday, 18 August 1935

  IN THE STIFLING CONFINES of the earthbound bus, Lovecraft was dreaming of the stars. Constellations beaming their lucid light through the cavernous blackness of space, and touching, ever so briefly, the eye and the soul of some hapless traveler in the night their light was ancient, millions and billions of years old. Even in his dream, Lovecraft had the lingering presence of rationality to know that the bright birth of a nova might come from the demise of an ancient star as old as time itself. The old and the new, beaming their brilliant lumens through the absolute cold of space, their rays piercing the dark silence like the birthing cries of an infant.

  The baby four rows ahead was crying again, its high-pitched wail cutting through the rumble of the engine. The rattles and squeaks that had become a sort of steady, soothing background drone marking the bus’s progress through the desert suddenly seemed to drop away, and the wailing played rhythmically up and down the register; it became an oddly wet sound, with a guttural, almost gurgling quality behind it, as if the infant were slowly drowning in its own fluids, and it was the humanness of this noise-no, not the humanness, but the fleshy, animal quality-that was so disconcerting to Lovecraft. Disconcerting enough to puncture his sleep and wake him into a restless alertness.

  He was certain that every one of the passengers was as disturbed as he was, and yet they seemed to ignore the crying. They sat in some dormant state, jostled rhythmically this way and that until they were occasionally bumped in some unexpected way and startled out of their semi consciousness. The heat felt good to him, but the other passengers all gleamed with a sheen of oily sweat that reminded him of the fat dripping from a capon on a rotisserie; their heads lolled, and even in their torpid faces he could read not so much the lack of consciousness as a lack of intelligence, a stupor.

  Lovecraft himself was keenly awake now with anxiety. His discomfort with the infant’s crying made him suddenly aware of the movements in his own throat, and he swallowed and swallowed again to clear the dryness from his windpipe. The bus was crossing another patch of bad pavement, and with all the windows open because of the heat, the dust from the front tires rose high enough to waft in.

  Lovecraft was uneasy, and he unconsciously fingered the contents of his watch pocket. He had almost tuned out the baby’s wailing with the force of his own awareness of it, but now he was convinced that his thoughts had become somehow too palpable. The quiet man who had gotten on at the last stop had been watching him rather too closely, and Lovecraft was certain now that the man could actually sense what he was thinking. He stole another quick glance over his left shoulder. There he was but was it a row closer now? Had he moved forward since the last time he’d checked? Lovecraft had never looked closely at the man’s face, since he had not wanted to meet his eye, but this time he seemed to be staring out the window, and Lovecraft examined his features a bit more attentively. There was something very wrong. Was it his vision, or the rattle of the bus? He couldn’t seem to. get the man’s face in focus. Each time Lovecraft blinked to clear his vision the man seemed to have abruptly tilted his head or made it tremble somehow, leaving an image as uncertain as a reflection on the surface of a rippling pool. Lovecraft turned away, quickly, as the man’s eyes suddenly shifted to the front of his face, although he had not seemed at all to move his head.

  Sweat flowed with a sudden profusion down from Lovecraft’s hairline, and he tasted its acrid salt in the corner of his mouth. The thing in his pocket seemed to become suddenly heavier.

  And the wailing—it went on even as the infant’s mother gave it a few token maternal thumps. As she lifted the baby so that it faced backwards, and continued to pat its back and its head, the crying infant suddenly saw the odd man at the rear of the bus and abruptly choked into silence. It sounded like a single hiccup, and the quiet that followed was soothing, but then suddenly ominous.

  Lovecraft swallowed once again and tried to calm his racing thoughts, but now, as the infant’s dark eyes focused on his own, he was suddenly sure that the soul behind the gaze was not the child’s but that of the odd man whose reflection, he knew, was that tiny pinpoint in the infant’s alarmingly wide orbs.

  The infant cried out again, opening its mouth wider than humanly possible-like a serpent, he thought-and Lovecraft suddenly saw that it was not an infant at all. The slimy pinkness of its throat dripping with threads of saliva and mucus, the wet, sucking noise that ran like an undercurrent through its wailing, the gurgly sound like black water in a cavern, the shrill echo ringing beyond the register of human ears-they were all the mark of Cthulhu’s spawn.

  THEY WERE IN the middle of the town before he even realized it. Lovecraft started awake, jerking bolt upright in his seat. He had been asleep again, though he did not remember nodding off.

  The infant and its mother were already outside, and both of them looked up at him through the open window, smiling quite innocently, the infant nearly radiant with the joy of being released from the hot confines of the bus.

  Lovecraft stood, feeling the cramp in his lower back, and briefly checked the contents of his pockets under the guise of stretching himself before he stepped into the aisle and took a quick look back. The odd man was gone. Indeed, the bus had cleared out and the only one remaining on board was the ruddy-faced driver, who was slowly stuffing his pipe with tobacco.

  “Beg your pardon, old chap,” said Lovecraft. “Would this humble town be Cross Plains, perchance?”

  “Yessir,” the driver said rather smugly, “as plain as the nose on one’s face. Next leg is more of the same, so you might get out for a stretch and a drink. Word to the wise, sir.”

  “Thank you. But I believe I have reached my destination.”

  “Then I wish you well, sir.” The driver managed a successful draw of his pipe and blew his first plume of putrid smoke, his eyes opening wider in what seemed to be surprise. “May God go with you,” he said.

  Lovecraft turned away and took the three steps down into Cross Plains, Texas, this unwitting way station. It wasn’t much of a town, just a place where some roads and power lines seemed to converge for no apparent reason. The few buildings-storefronts and profess
ional addresses-all faced each other, as if to keep the reality of the empty landscape at bay.

  A one-horse town if there ever was one, Lovecraft thought. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a hitching post outside the local bar, or a water trough outside a blacksmith and livery stable. He could imagine bowlegged cowboys in leather chaps strutting down the single dusty street, arms akimbo with their fingers twitching just over the handles of their pearl-handled six-guns. Out in the distance, beyond the last building, along the western horizon, there would be the silhouette of a black dust plume-bandits armed with Winchesters and shotguns, riding in to have their last shoot-out with the local sheriff, whose five-pointed star of justice sparkled like a diamond on his vest.

  The streets would suddenly clear, and in the silence, broken only by the skittering of a tumbleweed, the sheriff would stand alone, squinting toward the horizon to see his death approaching slowly, inevitably, toward Cross Plains, Texas, and he would watch as the riders drew closer and closer-four of them, in black hoods that hid their tiny, animal eyes and the slimy complexions of their inhuman…

  Lovecraft blinked. What was he thinking? This was Cross Plains, Texas-his stop. There was nothing here but a terminal, a general store, clapboard buildings with paint long flaked away into the desert dust. He shook his head and stepped out of the street into the general store, where the sudden and comforting dimness made him pause momentarily to let his eyes grow calm.

  “EXCUSE MY INTRUSION, but might you be the proprietor of this establishment?”

  “Eh?” said the old man. He looked up, somewhat startled by the Yankee accent. The man by the entrance was tall and gangly, with a jaw that seemed to have grown ripe, almost to bursting, in the heat. He wore a white suit, rather soiled and rumpled, and a bow tie that was absurd, he thought, mismatched like the old leather suitcase and the cane, which seemed more decorative than necessary. “You ain’t from these parts, eh? Waddaya want?”

  “I wish to inquire, kind sir, first, about the price of your pork and beans.”

  “How many cans you want?”

  “Three would be adequate.”

  The old man named an inflated price, and the man in the white suit seemed to think it was fine. A Yankee who thought he was a Redcoat, no less, from that accent. He actually thumped the suitcase on the counter, kicking up a bit of trail dust, and opened it up like a salesman-he didn’t look clever enough to be a flimflam man. The old man expected him to produce some newfangled potato peeler or some new brand of axle grease, of which he already had plenty, but the man only put the cans of pork and beans in the case and shut it again.

  “I would also appreciate, my dear sir,” he said, fastening the buckles, “directions to the abode of one Robert Howard. Robert E. Howard.”

  “Bobby’s place, eh? He’s a published writer, you know.”

  “I am cognizant of that fact, sir.”

  “Ain’t you just?” said the old man, and he proceeded to give a set of directions designed to take the Yankee a few miles out of the way, on foot, through rattlesnake and scorpion country. “Sure you don’t need nothin’ to drink with them beans?” he asked when he was done. “You might be eatin’ them real soon.”

  “That will not be necessary.”

  “Maybe some boots? Those city shoes ain’t made for hard walkin’.”

  “I assure you, sir, I have made all the purchases I require.”

  “Well, good riddance to ya, then.”

  “And to you, my dear old chap.”

  DUSK APPROACHED MORE QUICKLY than Lovecraft had expected, and with it a cold wind from the west pushed by a front of dark clouds. Lovecraft had never been in a place so vast, so empty that one could watch the very weather roll across the heavens, a mass of clouds that stretched from horizon to horizon in a slow boil, moving forward in barely perceptible increments, which he knew was actually a fantastic speed; in the far west the sun still flickered a reddish orange and the clouds looked as if they were burning, the flames slowly dying out into maroon, deep purple, purple-gray, and then finally to a shade of not quite-black as the last of the sun extinguished itself and was gone. If this is how the light should ever die, thought Lovecraft, it is a beauty to which I would not object. If this be the final whimper, at the end, then it redeems us with its beauty. He paused to watch a while longer; by now he had the uneasy and somewhat annoyed realization that the old man had given him an unnecessarily circuitous route to the Howard house. Perhaps it was because the locals were accustomed to driving, or going by horseback, he thought, but more likely it was simply the old man’s unpleasant character.

  From his long habit of wandering the alleys and back streets of Providence at night, Lovecraft had acquired an acute sense of direction, and now, although he was somewhat disoriented by the very openness of the landscape, he knew he had returned, for the third time, to the same bearing on which he had started. His feet hurt in his narrow shoes, which he had to admit, were not exactly designed for the rocky terrain. For a while he had been thirsty, but now, with his body heat siphoned, nearly torn from him by the wind, it was the cold that was beginning to make him truly uncomfortable. He scanned the sky, shivering involuntarily, watching the mass of clouds grow darker and approach like a mobile, alien landscape.

  The wind grew fiercer, in gusts that had begun to pick up the sandy soil and fling it at him. Lovecraft squinted. There was the house as Howard had described it in his letters, in the confines of a picket fence. Lovecraft smiled and hunched his shoulders into the wind just as ‘the first jags of lightning flashed across the distant western sky. He counted, automatically—one, two, three, four-past fifteen before he heard the dull rumble of thunder, and then, shortly afterward, the closer hissing of approaching rain. He walked more quickly, squinting into the wind as the last grayish gap in the western clouds was blotted out and darkness fell so abruptly it seemed a curtain had suddenly fallen from the heavens.

  There was something disquieting about the approaching storm, some lingering unease Lovecraft couldn’t help but associate with the odd man on the bus. The lightning skittered along the bottom of the cloud bank as if it were stones of flint skipping an inverted lake; not one flash seemed directed at the earth. And the wind, the clouds-they seemed to be coming from all directions, converging upon him. He thought it must surely be some optical illusion, since weather, he knew, always moved in colossal swirls about the globe. But was it mere coincidence or some preternatural force that made him the very epicenter of this mounting tempest?

  The air was suddenly loud with the crackle of hail. White dots jittered madly, just barely visible in the distance before him. Lovecraft had scarcely the time to lift his suitcase over his head before the hailstorm reached him, so fierce that its buffeting of marble-sized ice balls nearly tore the case from his hands. He ran, as quickly as he could, through the open gate in the fence and up the steps of the porch as another flash of lightning, this one nearby, finally made its explosive connection with the earth.

  THE THUMPING ON the door was barely audible after the explosion of lightning and the deafening thunder that followed. Howard was still blinking back the purple afterimages he saw projected on the page in the typewriter, his ears still numb and ringing, when he heard the banging, which was neither random nor regular enough to be the work of the wind. The electric lights flickered momentarily, and when they came on again, one of the bulbs remained dark.

  “Poppa!” he called. “I think I hear someone at the door!”

  Dr. Howard was already at the door, somewhat surprised to have a visitor at that hour in that weather. “I’ve got it, Bobby,” he said. He turned the knob, and suddenly the door was wrenched from his hand and pushed inward by a fierce gust of wind; it pivoted all the way around on its hinges and slammed violently into the wall just as another bolt of lightning cast a strange silhouette through the flimsy screen door. Dr. Howard took an involuntary step backwards. The figure in the door was at least seven feet tall, with a wide, rectangular thing whe
re its head should have been. Some odd appendage or proboscis hung from the left side of its head, angled toward the ground in the middle of a pendulous swinging motion.

  “Bobby!” Dr. Howard grabbed the door, which had knocked chips out of the wall, and was about to slam it shut again when the figure in the doorway removed its rectangular head and revealed itself to be a tall man in a white suit carrying a suitcase and a cane.

  “How do you do?” said the stranger. “Howard Phillips Lovecraft. And you must be Dr. Isaac Howard.”

  “W-what did you say, Mister?”

  “I am a friend of your son, though I’m afraid only in epistolary fashion. I am here to see Robert E. Howard, if I may.”

  “Why, come in,” said Dr. Howard, gathering his wits.

  “My sincerest apologies for my uncivilized appearance,” said Lovecraft as he opened the screen door and stepped inside, scattering tiny beads of melting hail around him. “I’m afraid I’ve had the misfortune…” He dropped his suitcase and walking stick and, as they thumped to the floor, very slowly raised his hands.

  “Who are you?”

  Dr. Howard turned to see his son in the doorway of the study, cocking the hammer of the old single-action .45 he kept for occasions like this one. “Bobby, this stranger here says he’s a friend of yours,” said Dr. Howard.

  “I asked you who you were,” said Howard. “I suggest you answer while you can, Mister.”

  The man’s flesh seemed nearly blue against his soiled white clothes, and he seemed to have been out in the storm for quite a while, or perhaps he was terrified of the gun, because he was shivering so violently it seemed unlikely he could keep his hands up. He had an odd expression on his face, but Howard couldn’t tell if it was terror or some weird and maniacal amusement. His lips moved hesitantly for a split second, and then, in an entirely unconvincing attempt at a Southern drawl, he said, “Howdy there, Two-Gun Bob.”