David Barbour - Shadows Bend

Lovecraft quickly put the Artifact back into his watch pocket.

“When it comes time to rid yourself of it, you will find that you can not let go,” said Imanito. He turned to Howard, and said, solemnly,

“You, black-hatted bear man, must help take it from him.”

“Sure,” said Howard. “Whatever you say.”

Imanito now laid out a surface of black sand, and on it, in lighter colors, he began to trace an oddly disorganized pattern of lines and shapes that looked nothing at all like the other sand painting, which was beautifully structured and symmetrical. As he created a shape with the sand in one palm, he would connect it to another shape with the sand in the other, and with each shape he pronounced what sounded like the name of a place: “where the earth is chalky, where the water is clear as air, where the upper teeth are large, where the foul breath comes.”

Lovecraft suddenly realized that the old man must be diagramming an underground labyrinth. It was a map he had drawn. He pointed this out to Howard.

“Looks like it could just as well be an animal’s guts,” said Howard. Imanito finished and wiped his palms. “You must remember this map,” he said. “This is where you will enter the lower world.” He moved his finger across the intricate network of joined shapes passing a symbol that looked like a stylized letter H. “And here is where you will lock the gate with the evil thing.”

Howard and Lovecraft both looked closely at the map, but they hardly bothered to memorize it. Imanito solemnly continued, giving them instructions about what dangers to avoid, finally explaining how to place the Artifact in a certain receptacle. “Now I am done,” he said. “All this I can speak but once.”

“And what if we don’t know what the hell you’ve been talkin’ about?” Howard asked rhetorically.

“You will.”

“You’ve provided us with more information than can reasonably be absorbed in such a short span of time,” said Lovecraft. “Why not allow me to make a sketch of these rather elaborate patterns?”

Imanito smiled. He parted his arms, palms up, to indicate the two very different paintings, then he looked up toward the smoke hole in the center of the ceiling and began to chant something the others could not understand. He closed his eyes, leaned forward, and passed his hands back and forth in front of him, smearing the sand so thoroughly that the paintings were irreparably destroyed. And at that moment, outside, the wind began to moan with an ominous force, its sound climbing up and down the register until it was so loud they could hear the sand particles it carried beating against the outside wall of the hogan.

As the sandstorm began to build, they heard whip-cracking bursts of dry heat lightning, and through the smoke hole in the center of the roof, they could see veins of blue-white light jagging across the sky. In moments the air was filled with the smell of brimstone; their hair stood on end, and they heard the wind’s volume grow to the roar of ten thousand voices in the darkness. When Imanito finished sweeping the grains of colored sand and reached over for his pipe, electric sparks crackled between his fingertips and the stem.

“You will remember,” said Imanito. “I know you do not believe this thing I have told you, but you will in time. And when you need the map I have shown you, you will simply return here, to this time, now, to see it once again.”

“Do. I infer correctly that what you mean to say, in this figurative fashion, is that we will attempt to remember the map?” Lovecraft asked.

“No,” said Imanito. “I do not speak figuratively.” Lovecraft shook his head-sadly, Howard thought.

“And now the dawn is coming, and you must go,” said Imanito, and as if on cue, the wind abated outside. There was a scratching sound at the door of the hogan, and when Imanito opened it, his dog entered with a whimper. He dropped what appeared to be a piece of black fabric at Imanito’s feet and curled up in front of the fire.

“The creatures of blackness are near,” said Imanito. He knelt and picked up the material. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, as if testing its texture, then handed it to Howard.

It was not fabric. Howard could not determine what kind of material it was. Obviously, it was the cloth that the odd men’s suits were made of, but it was a material with no threads. The texture of the black substance reminded Howard of the fleshy surface of a wet mushroom; it smelled faintly of mold or mildew. Howard gave the black patch to Lovecraft and absently wiped his hand on his pants.

“Remarkable,” said Lovecraft. “One would never guess from the appearance. ”

Suddenly a shrill scream came from behind the partition. Howard instantly leaped up and yanked the blankets away, expecting something dire and horrible, but it was just Glory, sitting up, wide-eyed and covered in sweat.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was just a bad dream.”

“At least you’ve awakened at an opportune time,” said Lovecraft.

“We are making preparations to leave.”

Howard helped Glory to her feet.

THEY WERE SPEECHLESS when they saw the car. The wind had sandblasted it so thoroughly that there was hardly a sign of the dried blood and gore and scraps of fur that had made the Chevy appear to be not so much a black horse as Imanito’s father had said, but the huge, skinned carcass of one. Only a few spots in the leeward side of the car still showed a few dark stains and threads of animal hair. The other side had been buffeted so violently that patches of paint had eroded away, revealing the raw metal. underneath. Small areas of the glass were pockmarked with tiny craters.

“I suppose we shan’t need to be washing the automobile,” said Lovecraft. “But I hazard the guess that perhaps the windshield will need replacing instead.”

Glory walked up to the Chevy and ran the tips of her fingers along the rear fender. “It’s amazing,” she said. “I’m glad we were inside. ”

Now Imanito came out of the hogan carrying what looked like a dead black snake in one hand and a pair of crescent wrenches in the other. “Let us repair your car,” he said to Howard.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Howard. “The guts of my iron horse! How in the hell did you know what kinda hose to get?”

“I’m a medicine man. Magic.” Imanito laughed and Howard joined him. They preoccupied themselves at the front of the car, replacing the damaged water hose, and afterward, Imanito re-dressed the wound on Howard’s arm with a foul-smelling herbal salve.

In the last layer of the dressing, he placed what looked like a poker chip. When Howard looked puzzled, Imanito merely waved his hand as if to assure him that it had some sort of healing property. Howard rolled his eyes and humored him.

“Remember these words sung by the man who was helped by the eagle people,” Imanito told the travelers as they got into the car. When Howard pulled away, the old shaman chanted a few lines from a version of the Bird Nester’s song:

“I shall await you on the island of birds, pale fish man,” he said quietly. The old Indian and his dog stood silhouetted in the red dawn light of the vermilion desert, and soon they were lost in a fog of dust.

AS THE MORNING drew on and the temperature in the car grew to a comfortable level of nearly oppressive heat, Lovecraft halfheartedly attempted to dismiss the old shaman’s intimations of death. He held forth about savage superstitions and parlor tricks; he brought up Harry Houdini’s campaign to expose spiritualists and charlatans who performed such deceptions, then drifted off into a digression about ghost-writing a story for him set in the pyramids of the Giza plateau. “I find myself unable to take seriously anyone, even a man who appears to be a reputable noble savage like Imanito, who believes in the existence of Atlantis,” Lovecraft said finally. “I must confess I was impressed at first by his seeming keen knowledge about us, but upon reflection I am inclined to think the way Houdini thinks about such deceptions.” But much to his surprise, he could get no corroboration from Howard, whom he knew to have similar sentiments. At least they’d had occasion in the past to argue rationally about the existence of lost continents like Atlantis and Mu. But now his friend seemed too seriously disturbed by recent events to support his criticisms of Imanito. Lovecraft was much relieved when Howard finally made light of things.