David Barbour - Shadows Bend

“Actually, I was just going to have a bowl of vanilla ice cream.”

“Go on, I’ll take care of it.”

Lovecraft stood momentarily with his new pen in one hand and his old pen in the other. As he left, the turned back to Howard.

“Oh, Bob.”

Howard looked up. “Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

Howard said nothing. He smiled and returned to the menu.

Outside the restaurant, Lovecraft held his old pen the way he might have held a dagger. He looked up at the ominous banks of dark clouds, the distant flashes of lightning. “It is… finished,” he declared, and he did something so uncharacteristic he surprised himself. He flung the old pen as hard as he could into the night, and felt great relief tinged with foreboding when he heard its distant clatter. It reminded him of how he would drop pebbles into the well when he was a boy, how that hollow, wet echo would haunt him afterward.

THE DISCARDED PEN lay on the pavement not far from the gutter. From around the corner, at the end of the block, a flat black sedan approached, gliding quietly over the dark tarmac. Through the windshield, on the driver’s side, one could see the silhouette of a man-so much a silhouette, in fact, that it seemed to be cut from black paper. In the passenger seat the other man seemed to be having some sort of seizure. His head and neck jittered as if the car were rattling over a cobblestone street, and he made clawing gestures with his thin, black fingers, making them appear even more slender. There was no noise from the car, but what happened next should have sounded like an explosion or the shattering of glass; the man’s figure scattered into a million pieces and then solidified again, with an unbelievable suddenness, into the form of a gargoyle like creature whose black wings were so wide they seemed to fill the interior of the car. The driver continued, nonchalantly, and the car stopped, without a sound, its front left tire exactly parallel to the pen. The driver’s side door of the car seemed’ to slide open-though by all rights it should have swung open-and from the shadow inside emerged another shadow, the tendril of a shadow, and it quietly looped itself, tentacle-like, around the shaft of the pen. And though the shadow did not move in any way, it seemed to leech away at the light that illuminated the writing instrument, turning it dim, and then dark, and then into nothing.

LOVECRAFT STEPPED INTO the Western Union office and paused before he approached the counter. Seeing his confusion, the clerk pointed soundlessly to a stack of forms on a shelf along the far wall; he made writing gestures, indicating that Lovecraft should fill one out.

“Thank you.” Lovecraft produced his new pen and began filling out one of the forms, relishing the texture of the point against the paper. It must have been an expensive pen, because it moved smoothly, without a scratch, across the cheap paper fibers. He filled out one form, then tore it neatly in two and wrote the same thing on a fresh one, just to practice his penmanship. When he slid the finished telegram across the counter to the clerk, the young man merely glanced at it out of the corner of his eye.

“Probl’y won’t get it till tomorrow dusk.”

“That’s an awfully long time, isn’t it, old Chap?”,

The clerk made a dismissive gesture, tossing his head. Lovecraft’ noticed what was preoccupying all his attention: he was practicing one-handed cuts on a fresh deck of cards.

“Well then, how much will it be?” asked Lovecraft.

The clerk shuffled the deck, making a crisp fluttering noise, and he flipped over the first three cards to indicate the amount. A veritable cardsharp.

Lovecraft frowned as he drew some coins from his breast pocket to pay. When he opened his palm, his eyes locked on to the image of the Indian head on a nickel. A single feather, pointed forward; an angular, aquiline profile. Aquiline-that was to be eaglelike, and the coin next to it was a quarter, tails up to reveal the eagle with its wings spread wide. Spread eagle. Lovecraft blinked, as if to clear his vision, but then suddenly he was jolted as if he had been struck in the face.

The first image was simply the face of the old shaman framed in firelight. It was comforting, like the face of his dear grandfather Whipple Phillips. Imanito wore a serious but tranquil expression, as if he were thinking of something dire and yet remaining calm. The fire behind him flickered, and then it suddenly all surged in one direction and Lovecraft heard a voice-not Imanito’s voice, but also somehow certainly his: “Red horse woman is in danger. Go to her.” Lovecraft felt his eyes tremble in their sockets. The image went black, and then with every twitch of his eyes the same thing flashed again and again: Imanito’s face disintegrating, turning, in jagged steps, into the black silhouette of the Night Gaunt from his childhood nightmares. Lovecraft shuddered and lurched back in the face of his childhood terror. Involuntarily, he tore at the air in front of his face and turned his head to the side, craning his neck so suddenly he felt a sharp pain in the back of his head.

“Hey, Mister, you okay?”

The clerk’s question brought Lovecraft slowly back to the mundane world. He shook his head to snap himself out of the trancelike state he had lapsed into. “Fine,” he said. “I’m absolutely, perfectly fine.” He flung the offending nickel onto the counter and rushed from the office. He could hear the clerk cursing behind him.

HOWARD WAS IMPATIENTLY DRUMMING his fingers on the tabletop, hungry and anticipating the arrival of his dinner. Lovecraft didn’t even bother to sit down. “Bob, we must find Glory immediately!”

“What is it, HP?”

“Now!” cried Lovecraft, his voice breaking.

“Calm down, HP. We got time to eat, ain’t we?”

“There is not a moment to lose!” Lovecraft grabbed Howard’s arm., and with surprising strength, yanked him out of the booth.

ENSHROUDED IN TWILIGHT, dust devils swirled and twisted about the hastily constructed homes that dotted the periphery of the unpaved road like the white negatives of shadows. The wind had picked up again-from all quarters, it seemed-and where they conjoined here and there the miniature twisters coiled, briefly, like living things, and vanished in a scattering of debris.

The houses had spouted up here like those puffy, substanceless mushrooms one often finds after a rain; but in this case, the rain was a shower of cash from nearby Vegas. In time the homes would become more solid, to be sure, but now even in their flimsiness, they served their purpose well enough. At the tip of the cul-de-sac at the end of a row of such houses lurked a dead black sedan, clearly out of place though there were black sedans in several driveways farther up the street. This car was parked askew, as if the driver were drunk, but its windshield was pointed directly at the living-room window of the house across the street-the house of Glory’s sister, Beatrice.

THE LIVING ROOM was lit by one large imitation Tiffany lamp on an Art Deco end table at the end of a plush, poorly reupholstered sofa. Nothing in the house quite matched, and Glory wondered how and where her sister had gathered the odd assortment of furniture. It certainly couldn’t have been a matter of taste.

Beatrice was on her seventh cigarette of the evening, sitting just out of reach of the overflowing ashtray so that she constantly had to scoot over to flick off her ashes and then scoot back into her easy chair. She was still prattling on about her no-good husband, who had run out on her that February and forced her to get the job at the club. Glory was playing Snakes and Ladders with her seven-year-old nephew, Archie, who sat on the floor next to her, rolling the die with a clatter onto the game board. “Six,” he announced. He clomped his playing piece over the squares and landed on a ladder. “Aw,” he said.