David Barbour - Shadows Bend

Howard coughed involuntarily and brought himself back to his senses, jerking the wheel quickly back before he swerved. The car was drifting and Lovecraft-damn him-wasn’t doing his job. Howard looked at his companion, who had his head turned outward to gaze out the window at the dim landscape under the moon. He saw the bald dome of a mountain in the distance. “Hey, HP,” he said.

Lovecraft turned, surprised, blinking those fishy eyes of his. Howard’s momentary anger dissolved. “Now here’s a bit of cheery place-naming,” he said. “We’re passin’ through the Specter Range at the moment, and that hill over there is called Skull Mountain.”

Out in the distance, under patchy clouds through which the blue white light of the moon shone down, Skull Mountain glowed like a bald dome on a thinly haired head. The light above the mountain had an eerie quality to it; it was palpable, hanging over the dome like a mist or a pall of pale smoke. Glory and Lovecraft were both watching the mountain when they heard a dull explosion from the back of the car.

“Bob?”

“Shit!” said Howard, grabbing the wheel more firmly to keep control of the steering. “We just blew out a back tire.”

“Do you have a spare?” said Glory.

“You kiddin’ me?”

“Well, do you?”

“Course I do. What Idiot would go on a road trip Without a spare?” Howard eased the car off to the shoulder and came to a slow stop where the road was at a shallow grade.

“One might have expected Mr. Imanito to have anticipated this and prepared us for it, as well as for other things,” Lovecraft said with mild sarcasm. “I find myself disillusioned with his acute auguries of the future.”

“Pipe down, HP. This ain’t gonna be no fun.” He opened the door and stepped out into the cold night air. “Hey, you two get out. Can’t jack up a car with a passenger inside.”

While Howard popped the trunk and got the spare and the jack out, Lovecraft occupied himself with the other flashlight, making a journal entry with his new pen. “Skull Mountain in the Spectre Range,” he wrote, enjoying the way the nib of his new pen glided over the surface of the paper.

What an appropriate appellation for a domed patch of barren rock in a forsaken landscape! Had I seen this region in the stylized shadings of a relief map, I wager the shapes of the parallel ridges in this range would take on the appearance of ribs jutting out under the wasted flesh

of an emaciated body; and Skull Mt., most naturally, would take its position above. The remnants of ancient lakes, long dry, for eye sockets, perhaps. Exposed granite faces for teeth. A roughly triangular gorge to represent the sunken remains of a nose, and the picture would

be complete. Now, I wager, we are parked somewhere on a spinal protrusion roughly halfway between the rib cage and the pelvic girdle.

Lovecraft quickly reread what he had written. These were images familiar to him-the stock of his writerly trade-but suddenly this anthropomorphized landscape, this lingering on death, seemed repulsively morbid to him. He quickly drew a large X through the paragraph and closed the journal.

Glory was smoking again, cigarette in one hand and flashlight in the other, illuminating the back fender well of the car for Howard. She stood in a tired pose, one hip thrust out, her head hanging slightly, her hair in her eyes. She seemed hardly to have the energy to hold the cigarette between her two fingers, let alone the heavy electric torch.

Howard propped the spare against the running board. He loosened the lug nuts with his long-handled lug wrench before he jacked up the back wheel to change the flat. The rear end went up with annoyingly loud clicks and shrieks of fatigued metal that resonated through the night. As he was kneeling, loosening the lug nuts one by one, then turning them by hand because it was faster, Howard was preoccupied; in the poor illumination of the flashlight beam, he didn’t notice that the flat tire was slowly swelling along the bottom.

Pulling her hair away from her eyes, Glory leaned slightly forward to watch what Howard was doing. “Can you see?” she said, leaning even closer.

Howard turned his head to face her. Under her flannel shirt, which she wore loose and unbuttoned like a jacket, Glory wore only the T-shirt she had taken from her sister’s house; it was a little small for her, and it pressed revealingly against her breasts. Howard didn’t fail to notice that, or the scent of her hair, or the warmth of her body so close.

Glory smoothed her hair away from her face, revealing the pale flesh of her neck, the dark hollow of her collarbone. She smiled and watched Howard frown and turn away. Over his shoulder, she thought she saw something odd about the tire, so she leaned even closer, touching his shoulder as she angled the beam of the flashlight. Several large bumps were beginning to form along the bottom edge of the tire. “You should have a look at the tire,” she said.

Cocking his head around, Howard answered, annoyed. “Oh, I’m havin’ a look all right,” he said. He wondered what his mother would say about this-a harlot sidling up to him at night in the middle of nowhere, making such a flagrant pass at him. He felt the blood still hot in his face, so he turned his attention elsewhere; careful not to lose track of them, he began laying the lug nuts down in the dirt. “Kaput,” he said.

“What did you say?”

“Kaput. It’s German for broke.”

“There’s something very strange about the tire. Should it be—”

Glory screamed, grabbing Howard with her free hand and yanking him backwards.

From his awkward kneeling position, Howard instinctively turned away from the tire and fell on his back. Utterly confused, he looked up at Glory, only to be blinded by the flashlight as he heard the strange double sound of the tire exploding. Crack! Kraak!

The black rubber had burst from the internal force that had engorged it, spewing a mass of bright red skittering things that made a hideous crackling noise as they fell in the dirt. Howard scrabbled back in shock, his limbs all contorted. “Scorpions!” he cried. “Glory, get; back!”

Standing there still disoriented from her own scream, Glory hesitated until she turned the beam of the flashlight down between her legs. There were hundreds of them, some longer and thicker than her fingers, their hard, segmented bodies scattered in the dirt, their tails arched and rigid, and the poison tips of their needle-sharp stingers probing the air, quivering with anticipation for something to pierce. One scorpion had already found her boot, and it jabbed its armored tail into the side, hardly puncturing the thick leather but squirting a tiny drop of venom from its hypodermic tip. Glory jerked her foot away, parting her legs wider, only to hear a sickening crunch as she stepped on another scorpion.

Lovecraft stepped around the front of the car, his journal fluttering. “Glory?” he called.

“Stay back!” Howard shouted, scrabbling to his feet and stomping wherever he could, crunching the hard arachnids under his bootheels. It was difficult to see exactly how many there were; they had scattered everywhere from the exploding tire. Glory aimed the beam of her light at her own feet, and with involuntary shudders at the sight of the creatures coming at her, she gritted her teeth in concentration and stepped hard, pushing with her hips for force. The things under her boots cracked and splintered, only to make room for others to crawl at her with their sharp stings upraised and twitching.

From the front of the car Lovecraft contributed his own flashlight beam, aiming at Howard’s feet. With the help of the light, Howard flicked several of the remaining scorpions off his pant legs and casually stomped them into the ground before striding over to Glory. He lifted her into his arms and walked back past the car, grunting with the surprise of her weight. As he put her on top of a rock, he noticed a movement in her hair—yet another scorpion, tangled there, almost invisible in the waves of red. He pinched it by the tail and jerked it away from her, flicking it into the darkness even before she was able to protest with a loud “ouch” of pain.