Shadows Bend Read online

  Howard and his father looked at each other. The Doctor’s expression suggested he thought they had an escapee from some asylum, but Howard’s eyes suddenly went wide, and his jaw swung open. “Lovecraft!” he said. “How did-What in the Sam Hill are you doin’ out here?”

  “I must speak with you immediately, Bob. It is a matter of the utmost importance, whose ramifications may be far more profound than we can guess.”

  Howard motioned for him to put his hands down with a wave of the pistol, then thought better of it and carefully uncocked it. “You’re dyin’ of consumption, man, come in! Father, this is my good friend, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. HP for short.”

  “Well, pleased to meet you,” said Dr. Howard, taking Lovecraft’s hand to give it a firm and rather quick shake. “My God, you’re cold as a snake in February! Get comfortable inside, and I’ll fetch you some hot coffee and a towel to dry off.”

  Lovecraft joined Howard in the dim interior of the living room, where, despite the storm still rumbling outside, the air had retained a musty quality. Howard put his .45 down on the coffee table and took a captain’s chair, motioning for his friend to sit on the davenport. Lovecraft removed his hat, tapping off the small beads of hail still trapped on the brim, and placed it on the cushion to his left. He could see, immediately, that Mrs. Howard had been incapacitated for a long time. The room was obviously in need of a woman’s touch; it was littered with the evidence of men making do without the requisite feminine supervision: medical journals, general magazines, and even a few issues of recent pulp journals lay haphazardly in piles at the sides of the chairs in which Howard and his father habitually read them. Every surface needed dusting, the curtains hung subtly askew, telltale traces of ash lingered where an ashtray had been hastily moved, a pair of boots stood at attention under a chair.

  “I apologize for the rude welcome, HP, but you can see for yourself that we weren’t exactly expectin’ guests.”

  “I quite understand.”

  “So what brings you to my neck of the woods? You say it’s important.”

  “I’ve journeyed here, Bob, because I believe you are the only mortal alive whom I can trust to assist me without condemning, me as a madman. The most horrific events have transpired, and I do sincerely believe that even more evil things are in store.” Lovecraft hugged himself and shivered.

  “Take off that wet coat, HP.”

  Lovecraft removed his jacket just as Dr. Howard returned with a towel draped over one arm, carrying a tray with a pot of coffee and a few mismatched pieces of a service. The aroma of fresh coffee made Lovecraft suddenly weak, and he slumped back on the davenport.

  “It was already brewin’,” said Dr. Howard. “I say you’ll need plenty of it. You’ve got the look of hypothermia about you, HP.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Lovecraft dried himself with the towel and hunched over the steaming cup of coffee the Doctor poured for him.

  “Sugar? I’m afraid we’re fresh outta cream.”

  “Thank you,” Lovecraft said again, and while the Doctor poured for himself and his son, Lovecraft spooned one, two, three, four, five spoonfuls of sugar into his cup as the two men watched, spellbound.

  “Like a little coffee with your sugar there, HP?”

  “I admit I do like it rather on the sweet side.”

  “You’ll have to excuse us makin’ do like this,” said Dr. Howard.

  “But I’m afraid…”

  “Father,” said Howard, “I already told HP about Ma’s condition. I don’t mean to be rude, but could you leave us alone for a while?”

  “Go ON, GO ON, then,” Dr. Howard said, getting to his feet. “I’ll step upstairs and check on your mother. Lightnin’ musta woke her up anyhow.”

  “How is she faring?” Lovecraft asked when the Doctor had left the room. “Your last report was laden with rather pessimistic sentiments.”

  “She hasn’t gotten any better, HP, but I’m still hopin’ to God that she’ll pull through in the end.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Lovecraft.

  They sat in silence for a moment, sipping their coffee. It suddenly grew quiet outside, and Lovecraft realized that he had grown so accustomed to the roar of the hailstorm that it was only now, as the hard sounds of the icefall turned to the more soothing hiss of rain, that he noticed it again. Outside, the storm seemed to lull, though the rain was a hard one and lightning continued to flash periodically, farther and farther away.

  “Flash floods,” said Howard. “There’ll be hell to pay when this freak storm’s over.”

  “Indeed.” The heat of the syrupy coffee made Lovecraft sigh with relief.

  “What is it, HP? You look like a harried man.”

  “I’m afraid my mental faculties have been diminished,” said Lovecraft, at length. “I’ve had the most unpredictable and irregular flights of paranoiac fancy of late. I daresay I might have begun to believe the fantastic contents of my own fiction, so do bear with me if my imagination seems to have gotten rather out of hand.”

  “All right,” said Howard. “Why don’t you start from the beginnin’?”

  “Well,” said Lovecraft, “my current plight originated in my abode in Providence.” He poured himself more coffee and added another surprising quantity of sugar before he took a preliminary sip and, satisfied, began his long narrative.

  2

  “As YOU KNOW from our long correspondence, I am a man of semi invalid constitution and therefore while away the vast majority of my time in the confines of my humble domicile. I am nocturnal by habit, though I will occasionally compromise my odd daily routines to fit the needs of my visitors or hosts.

  “A fortnight ago I received a package from my friend Samuel Loveman, whom I have mentioned to you on occasion. Periodically, he has presented me with various curios and artifacts for which he knows I will have some proclivity or fascination. Over the years he has given me such things as a Mayan statuette, an ushabti figurine from an ancient Egyptian tomb, and a wooden monkey from Bali. So it was with no surprise-indeed, it was with great delight-that I opened his most recent package to find, within, an item which I immediately recognized as a Kachina doll, a small rendition of one of the strange gods of the Hopi or the Navajo, I believe. I must confess that this particular type of Kachina was novel to me, but its stylized headdress and the features which had been depicted thereupon were startlingly familiar to my eye and would have been to anyone even passingly cognizant of my Cthulhuvian scribblings. This particular Kachina had the unmistakable squid like face and the distinct peripheral tentacles of one of the Old Ones of whom I write.

  “I was not alarmed at first. Indeed, my initial reaction was of amplified delight because I took the evidence before me to signify an unusually thoughtful gift. I believed Loveman had conspired with some regional Indian artist to mold the features of this particular Kachina to his specifications thereby to provide me with an amusing distraction in the guise of a folk artifact.

  “You can imagine, then, that it was with genuine eagerness that I unfolded the accompanying missive and began devouring its contents. Loveman is a pleasant and lively correspondent, always full of news and good cheer, so it was with profound alarm that I read the terse and tense lines of his letter. I cannot quote them to you, for I had occasion only to glance at them once with a haste born of urgency, but the gist of Loveman’s note was that the Kachina had, in fact, been delivered to him by a mysterious messenger who had mistaken him to be me. There was some confusion at first, owing to the fact that the messenger had mangled my surname into Loveman’s. But there was no mistaking the first two initials, HP, or the messenger’s particular knowledge of my weird writings, although he seemed to have read them in some other ghastly language.

  “Loveman wrote that this messenger’s master, a man even more mysterious, had possessed the artifact. for decades, suffering tragedy upon tragedy owing to its evil influence. The unholy thing had plagued him so with misfortune and otherworldly nightmares that now, suspecti
ng that some creature from one of those very nightmare realms had manifested itself in the flesh to stalk him from the shadows, and thus threaten not only his sanity but his very life, he had forwarded it to me, knowing that I, of all mortals, would know the proper means of its disposal. Moreover, this master wanted dearly to meet the author of the weird Cthulhuvian fantasies in the flesh to discuss some arcane lore about the Kachina’s miraculous healing properties, about which he hoped I would be able to illuminate him.

  “Of course, Loveman took this man to be another of the many crackpots who mistakenly believe my tales to be true, but there was something sinister about the messenger that made Loveman take the man more seriously. Loveman did not divulge to him my whereabouts, he said, for concern over my safety or at least to protect me from unwanted annoyance. But, he said, the messenger told him that his master was intent upon visiting me in the wee hours of August 8. Why this particular date was a mystery to him, but Loveman thought I should be made aware, just in case some lunatic took it upon himself to make good on the promise. He believed the man who portrayed himself as the messenger was, in fact, the master of whom he spoke-since this style of disingenuousness is common among irrational admirers of the weird bards-so he believed the man’s need for direct intercourse with me had been met through association, through him, and yet the lingering unease had compelled him to write to me. That was all.

  “Of the Kachina, I must tell you something else. It was a mere foot in height, depicting a figure in the midst of some unholy dance like contortion, and its head, or its headdress, was cylindrical, with a smaller cylindrical protrusion that served as a nose, holes for eyes or perhaps only the sockets of eyes, and a stylized collar of jagged scalloping. The painting on its face had been meticulously handled in red, black, and white.

  “I was, by turns, amused, repelled, and troubled by Loveman’s letter, but in the end I must say the amusement won out, leaving me to believe it all the melodramatic product, and perhaps the twisted generosity, of some obviously deluded reader. I placed the Kachina upon the mantel, betwixt a few like artifacts, some of them being the ones I mentioned, and returned again to one of my tedious revising chores for my pestilent and inarticulate client, de Castro, whose bad writing, I’m afraid, haunts me more annoyingly than any ghost. Even the troubling date of August 8 eventually dissolved from my consciousness by the end of the evening.

  “In the following three days I endured most vivid nightmares, far more disturbing than any I have ever suffered before-and as you well know, I have both enjoyed and suffered the most unearthly of dreams.

  These were singularly unique in that they seemed to correlate directly with the arrival of the Kachina, which now rested in a sinister light above my fireplace. I need not belabor a description of these nightmares, because you already know them well from my Cthuluvian tales.

  “Near twilight of the third day, as I was taking my customary stroll in the lengthening shadows of the trees that line the streets of my neighborhood, the subtle but persistent intuition came upon me that I was being watched by the unseen eyes of strangers. Several times I quickly turned my head and managed a half glimpse of some persons or some sinister beings peering at me from around the comers of buildings or around the trunks of the more ancient trees. I retreated in haste back to my home, and later, as I peeked nervously from behind the drapes of my bedroom window, I found my anxiety quickly overshadowing my rationality. I was certain, dead certain, beyond the palest shadow of a doubt, that the entities stalking me were connected to the presence of that blasphemous Kachina doll. I decided that even if it was a mere paranoiac fancy guiding me, I had endured more than enough. Quickly,. I approached the Kachina and lifted its unnatural weight with the intention of banishing it from my house. I learned, soon enough, that the material of the Kachina’s head was terra-cotta because, in my anxious state, I fumbled and dropped the unlucky thing upon the floor. It cracked neatly in two, almost as if it had had a seam, and when I bent to pick up the pieces, I perceived the raw coloring and texture of the inner surface.

  “But it was not the Kachina, ultimately, that drove me here, Bob. When I picked up the doll to make an attempt at reassembly, I noticed it was markedly lighter, as if something were missing. The balance of the missing weight might have been made up if the doll’s head had been filled with fine sand of the type the Hopi use in their ritual sand paintings or perhaps something even weightier, like pellets of buckshot. I curiously surveyed the floor to see if anything had fallen out, looking hither and thither, and just on the point of giving up, I let out a gasp of horror at the obscene thing I saw before me. It was nearly invisible upon the floor, for the light in my room was dim, but also because it was remarkably small and seemed, additionally, to have taken on both the coloring and the contours of the floor itself. At first, I pried at it with my thumbnail, thinking it had adhered to the wood, but then I quickly realized it was its deadweight that made it so. The Artifact, as I will call it, was a rounded triangle, exceptionally flat and only the diameter of a shirt button, but for its dimensions it was more massive than anything in this world has a right to be. As I weighed it in my palm, the thing became the color of my flesh and even mimicked the fine filaments of the lines on my skin. It was slightly warm to the touch. I lifted it closer to my eyes to examine its surface, and that is when I realized, with dire certainty, that dark and dangerous things were ahead.

  “For the image on the artifact was the face of Cthulhu, exactly as I have described it.

  “In my anxiety and apprehension, I do not know how it was possible for me to fall asleep that dawn, but later, shortly after the sky had just blued with the rising sun, I awoke, dripping in a gelid sweat, from a singularly horrific night terror.

  “In my childhood, as you know, I was constantly tormented by recurrent nightmares in which a monstrous race of entities I called Night Gaunts would clutch me by the stomach and bear me up through the black air over towers of the most horrible, dead cities. They would drop me through a gray void, down onto the needlelike pinnacles of mountains miles below, and in the midst of my relentless plunge to those jagged and tooth like peaks, I would start awake and have no desire ever to sleep again.

  “This night I had a similar dream it was the lean, black Night Gaunts, with their rubbery bat wings and barbed tails that visited me again. The flock of Night Gaunts tormented me like Harpies, and then, after their ritual tickling of my belly, the minions lifted me in their claws and flew with me high, following their master and his two captains, who flapped their way before us in a pointed V, toward some nameless range of precipices in the remote distance. But this time, unlike the other occasions, the dream ended differently-they did not drop me upon the jagged peaks below. The minions deposited me atop a bleak, oblong plateau, and then scattered to reconfigure themselves, flapping madly until they formed a black vulturous circle in the steely gray sky overhead. And the master of the Night Gaunts, with his two captains, alighted before my prostrate form, hideously folding their leathery wings and proceeding to approach me upon their scratchy claws.

  “The Night Gaunts are entirely faceless-indeed, that is one of the qualities that makes them so terrifying to me-but on this occasion, as the trinity loomed before me, they thrust forward the obscene blankness where their faces should have been, and though they were as featureless as ever, I had the sudden, disturbing intuition that I knew who they were. Some instinctual part of me recognized .their faceless faces, and the clutching terror of that realization was what woke me.

  “Two nights running, I had had this dream, each night the realization growing stronger and somehow more desperate. But on this third occasion, as the unholy trinity stood before me, their featureless faces took actual shape. I say the master of the Night Gaunts was a he, but in actually, as it loomed over me, leering at my helplessness, readying itself to utter its blasphemous words, its face was that of my deceased mother. And its two captains-they wore the guises of my aunts.

  “The terror those f
aces invoked within me was truly unendurable. There was something so uncannily accurate about their features, something so palpably evil, that I found myself teetering precariously on the very brink of madness. I was at the verge of a profound and unholy realization, the very thought of which would drive me forever into the other side of sanity as, simultaneously, it would drive me over the precipice to my death. I looked at this black trinity for that final clue, and the master opened his mouth and silently formed the syllables of the words that would be my final undoing. The lips moved, drawing closer to me until they filled my vision, and as the first wet syllable formed itself, I bolted upright in my bed, too terrified even to scream.

  “When I had gotten my wits about me, I realized I had been awakened by a rustling noise emanating from the sitting room. I rose quietly, and with my fire poker clenched in my trembling hands, I cautiously stepped. into the shadowy chamber, peering fearfully about. There, in the shadows, lurked. three dark figures with glowing eyes. The instant I perceived them, two of them blurred blackly inward to the left and right, vanishing. without a trace. The one in the center seemed to take on a darker visage, as if it had absorbed the other two, and its eyes glowed a brighter, nacreous green. I confess to you that my legs were trembling, and like so many of my own weak heroes, I was on the verge of swooning; but I somehow drew up the courage to lift the poker over my head and take an aggressive step forward. Then the black, hooded thing leaped at me, engulfing me, and I bolted upright in my bed, once again, covered in a cold sweat.

  “I had been dreaming. I had dreamt that first awakening, for when I paused, this time for a longer duration, to let my racing pulse grow reasonably calm, I heard once again the rustling noises from the sitting room. Now I did not know if I was still trapped in the world of dream, whether this waking was, itself, a false one. This time, I chose not the heroic course, but quickly dressed and packed my suitcase and travel bag.