David Barbour - Shadows Bend

“Help yourself to the sheets and whatnot,” said Smith. He lifted Lovecraft’s foul-smelling shoes by the tips so as not to touch their sweat-soaked insides. “I’ll put these out to get some air.”

“Here’s mine,” said Howard, sitting on the empty sofa to remove his boots. “I figure we’re gonna need a couple hours at least. Then we’ll wanna wash up and eat.”

“I should be able to whip something up in the kitchen while you boys are out.”

“That would be mighty hospitable of ya, Clark.” Howard said it with a touch of sarcasm, but Smith replied with a genuine smile.

“It’s really good to see you after all these years, Bob. You’re not what I expected, actually, but it’s always like that when you meet the man behind the letters.” ,

“You ain’t exactly what I expected, neither,” said Howard. “But then, neither was HP.” He chuckled at the memory of Lovecraft’s appearance as he knelt on the floor and spread out his bedroll. Smith tossed him a pillow, and he puffed it before placing it at the top. “I’ll be seein’ ya, then.”

“Sleep well.” Smith turned and went to the kitchen; he could hear Howard snoring before he even reached the door.

In the kitchen, Smith found Glory sitting silently at the table, ‘ smoking a fresh cigarette. She seemed both relieved and unhappy. There was an interesting plasticity about her features, slightly puffy and yet remarkably expressive, with the subtlest shifts of nuance.

Smith found her face fascinating, and he paused at the door to observe her With a sculptor’s eye.

Glory looked up. “Excuse me,” she said. “But I haven’t been able to shake this bad habit of mine.”

“Then I’m both happy and sorry to hear that,” Smith replied. “Bob and HP are sleeping. Would you like to go freshen up? It must have been pretty unpleasant driving in that heat.”

“It was.”

“You also look like you could use a change of clothes. Shall I see what I can dig up?”

Glory blew a plume of smoke. “You keep women’s clothes buried in your root cellar?”

Smith laughed. “Not exactly. But clothes have a certain way of accumulating. My mother has things she hasn’t worn in most of my living memory, and she’d be more than happy to see them be useful.”

“That’s very nice of her.”

“You’ll have to make do with our primitive facilities. But there’s a tub out back, and in this weather, I think you won’t mind the cold water. When you’re done look on the other side of the partition. I’ll have some clothes laid out for you.”

“Thanks.”

Smith went out with Glory, and after showing her the outdoor bathroom and the water buckets, he went back into the cabin, where he looked through his mother’s wardrobe, sorting through the stray pieces of clothing that she hadn’t worn in decades. He found a silk blouse and a pair of jodhpurs that would fit Glory. He had a keen eye for the sizes and shapes of things he could see her in those clothes, her curls of red hair wet and slicked back from her face. Yes, she would be lovely in those clothes. He went back out and laid them out on a stool in front of the partition to the tub; he heard Glory pouring water from a bucket, humming under her breath, and he paused for a moment, to listen to that quiet intimacy.

.Smith went back into the kitchen. He rewrapped the book and took It Into his study, which was still in shade when he went there, the light gentle through the west-facing windows. He laid the bundle on his massive, mahogany desk, intending to leave, it alone, but some impulse made him want to look inside. How had this book entered Lovecraft’s mind, he thought, hefting the heavy tome in his hands and throwing back the black cloth. He said he had fabricated the whole thing, and yet some of the snippets Lovecraft had made up bore an uncanny similarity to the phrases he had managed to translate. Perhaps Lovecraft had run across this very volume or its counterpart at some time in the past and had forgotten. Perhaps his reference to the book was merely another example of the fantastic power of unconscious memory. Smith ran his fingers over the embossed cover, which always had a simultaneously dry and clammy quality to it. He sat down in his swivel chair and opened the volume to some random point in the middle and looked down at the neatly hand-printed text and the accompanying diagram, a line drawing that could have been taken from Bosch’s Hell panel in his “Garden of Delights” triptych.

Here was something that looked like an octopus with its tangle of limbs and its gruesome parrot beak, and yet this was no octopus. The appendages flowed in a chaotic pattern reminiscent of something he had once seen on a Minoan vase, and yet within that chaos there was hidden some message his brain could not quite decipher. He felt it only as a kind of obscenity. Severed human limbs around the octopus thing’s beak, torsos in its tentacles. Instead of suction cups, it had barbed hooks on its limbs, and several of these had punctured the body of a naked girl, whose mouth was obviously open in the shriek that would end her life. In the background, a pit, its great depth represented in a wash of solid black ink. Sprinkles and smears of red ink to represent blood and gore. On the recto page the text commented upon this image, and repeated several times in red, in the way Christ’s words were often highlighted in deluxe editions of the Bible, were the words CTHVLHV and FHTAGN. He could make out a few other Words, but their meaning was unclear to him.

There was a light tapping sound at his door. Smith looked up and smiled. “’Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door,” he said.

“Only this, and nothing more,” Glory finished. She was as beautiful as he’d imagined in the silk blouse and jodhpurs, both of which clung to her form as if they had been tailored for her. Her men’s cowboy boots didn’t quite match, but that added an exotic charm. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

“I’ll have to compliment my mother for her good taste.”

“I mean for interrupting your reading.”

“No-by all means do come in and have a seat.”

Glory walked in, her eyes lingering on the objects in the room, scanning the bookshelves for titles. She ran her finger across the spines of books as if she were rattling a stick across a white picket fence, but her attention was most keen on the group of grotesque sculptures Smith had laid out on one side of his desk. One unfinished piece, of what looked like an Easter Island head, lay on its side, an open jackknife next to it covered in white dust from the soft stone.

“This is quite a collection. I didn’t realize you did carvings.”

“Oh, I dabble in illustration and sculpture,” said Smith. “Something to idle away the time and make use of the rocks I get from my uncle’s mine.”

“You know, I never imagined you living in a place like this.”

“Oh?”

“From your writing, I imagined you living in some bleak stone mansion like Rochester’s Thomfield. Dank corridors, studies with high ceilings, sealed-off rooms.”

“Not very homey, those accommodations.”

“No,” said Glory. “I’m pleasantly surprised, actually.”

“So what do you think?” asked Smith, feeling slightly uncomfortable despite himself. “Do you know that you happen to be in the same house as the Three Musketeers of Weird Tales? Three of the finest writers of the pulp genre ever to live? I’m only being partially facetious.”

“I’ve seen the magazine, but I could never get past the lurid covers,” said Glory.

“Then how do you know my work?” He rose and poured two glasses of sherry from the decanter he had left on his desk that morning and handed one to Glory, who took it gracefully between her fingertips.