David Barbour - Shadows Bend

Glory slammed the phone down. “The line’s dead.”

“Phone’s always getting disconnected,” Beatrice said absently as she drew the curtain back to see if the Appletons’ power was also out. For a fraction of a second, the flickering candle illuminated something outside the window. Still blinded by the afterimages of the lightning, Beatrice couldn’t be sure what she had seen. She pressed her face closer, against her better judgment, and squinted to see past the glare of the candle flame on the glass. “Hello?” she said. “Is anyone out there?”

Something moved. Beatrice thought it must be something blown by the wind, something like a textured piece of wet leather, but when it turned and she could make out its unmistakable shape, she let out a shrill scream. It was a featureless head, a head that looked as if its face had been removed, and it was directly behind the glass. Beatrice recoiled, screaming again in revulsion as much as fear, and the candle fell from her hand to snuff itself out on the floor.

“Beatrice?” Glory ran forward with Archie and pulled her sister back. They quickly moved back into the living room.

“Oh, God,” said Beatrice. “What-who was that?” She was trembling violently.

Glory had an idea, but didn’t say anything.

“Momma, I’m scared.”

“I know, darling. Momma is, too.”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Glory. “Make a run for one of the neighbors’ houses.”

“But there’s someone out there!”

“I know, but—” Glory stopped in mid-sentence when she saw the dark shadow on the cheap white living room curtains. It was the silhouette of a large winged creature.

“What is it?” said Beatrice. She turned, and she and Archie could see what Glory saw. “Oh, my G—”

Just then another flash of lightning cast the black shadow starkly against the curtains, and in the deafening peal of thunder that followed, the living-room window exploded into a million pieces, scattering splinters of glass and wood. They all shielded their eyes and turned away, so it was only in the afterimages, at first, that they saw the thing that leaped in through the yawning hole in the wall. The wind dashed the curtains left and right, obscuring the thing’s face, and it ripped the fabric away from itself with a black claw, revealing not a face, but the eerie absence of one.

Glory stood there wide-eyed, like a stunned animal. No, she thought, no, never, could such a thing exist. If the earth had ended by some calamity that had produced the most horrid abominations, if the gods had played a game of chance to see which of them could most cruelly insult nature, then perhaps this thing could be. He stood there, looking like some huge, freshly killed thing, his coloring an odd, flat, lamp black, and yet his fur gleamed with the sheen of the bestgroomed Angus cattle. There was something oddly noble about him; she could not explain it, but he exuded authority. His bloodred tongue lolled down as he noticed her, undulating like an eel. He hissed at her and slowly approached.

The thing towered over Glory, even at that distance, and he radiated a cloud of foul odor-his hiss, as he stepped closer, sounded like a snake with the throaty undertone of a lion. The sound and the odor overwhelmed her, and Glory felt as if she were falling-she did fall. Down on her knees, she grabbed for the edge of an end table to raise herself and knocked over another one of Beatrice’s overflowing ashtrays. She knew, with an odd certainty, that she was going to die, and the tranquility of this knowledge soothed her. Death awaited her like a safe refuge that the creature could not enter, and a flood of memories from her past began to flash before her as if she were drowning. When she was ten, still a little girl, she’d had nightmares of standing on a high precipice. She would stand there and consider, too rationally, the cost of living versus the cost of dying. She must have been a philosophically minded girl, rather high-minded for a ten-year-old. She knew this to be true, even through the fog of confusion that overwhelmed her at the moment. On that precipice, she had decided to jump because, after all, there was no God, and if she were dead, she would simply cease to be conscious, and she would feel no pain and know no regret-know, in fact, absolutely nothing, as if she had never existed. But just before she stretched her arms out like wings of flesh, she had looked out into the distance—it was the east, and the faint rosy colors of the dawn were touching the horizon. And it was so breathtakingly beautiful, like nothing that could have come from the mind or the hand of man, and she had suddenly felt the kindness of some creative force. Suddenly she had remembered the beauty of the total eclipse of the sun she had seen in Nova Scotia, the calm quiet of the craters of the moon, the myriad colors of the stars that come out at night. She had decided to live then, if only to experience such beauty in order to divine whether some extrahuman power must have created it all. And she had awakened in a cold sweat in her bed, shaking with the lingering terror—not of having nearly leaped to her death, but of having compromised her faith in the absence of God. And now she was on this weird quest with two men who were little more than strangers to her; she had nearly been devoured, in the night, by desert animals that had surrounded their laughable one-wagon train. How the mighty are fallen, she thought. If she hadn’t fallen into hard times, she might have been someone like her sister, but after she lost Gabriel her heart had solidified into rock.

Glory snapped back into herself, too frightened even to scream, the fear frozen like something caught in her throat. She thought she must have drifted off for a while, but the creature had hardly moved. She heard a whimpering sound beside her-Archie. She grabbed him, pulling so hard he lost his balance and tore the candle from her hand as he tried to right himself.

Glory ignored the candle sputtering on the floor and raced blindly down the hallway. Beatrice followed just behind them, the fear moving her though she had no volition of her own.

They crowded into the small bathroom and locked the door behind them. In the flickering darkness, Beatrice finally began sobbing-great gulps of air and loud exhalations that made it impossible to hear anything else. She moved the candle away from her face before she blew it out inadvertently, and she shoved a hamper up under the doorknob and pushed it, jamming it there to barricade them in. Glory glanced around, left and right, undecided, and then she put Archie in the bathtub and began frantically rifling through the drawers. She yelped in pain and quickly drew back her hand—blood was welling up in the long cut along the palm, just beginning to drip. She saw a half-open straight razor in the drawer; she grabbed it with her other hand, unfolded the blade all the way, and turned toward the door.

Everything was dead silent outside. Not a rustle, not a scrape. Glory suddenly felt compelled to open the door to peek out. It was quiet, after all. The thing they saw couldn’t possibly be what she remembered—it was probably some wild dog or something, and it had probably run out of the house by now. She took a tentative step forward and reached for the hamper to pull it away.

Beatrice pulled her back. “Glory!”

As Glory turned to look behind her, a huge, gnarled fist smashed though the bathroom door as if the wood were mere veneer. A long scaly arm thrust through the jagged hole in the door, grabbing for Beatrice as if it could see her. Beatrice pressed herself as far back as she could go, shielding Archie in the bathtub with her back.

Through the hole and just behind the silhouetted creature, Glory saw flames crawling along the wall in the corridor. The candle, she thought. The house is burning down. She had to wrench her eyes away from the flames with an act of will, just in time to see the creature dig its talons into Beatrice’s shoulder and jerk her forward. Beatrice was too frightened even to make a sound; her mouth merely twisted open in a horrible expression. Glory scrambled to her, but there was nothing she could do. Beatrice was pulled up against the door, and the black talons were so forceful there was a sickening sound, and then her clothing and flesh tore away from her shoulder and the pain made her scream.