David Barbour - Shadows Bend

“I can safely venture to say that I find her and Clark’s amorous activities even more distasteful than you do, but we have matters far more serious to attend to at present. Agreed?”

Howard had to admit that with all of the incredible happenings they had endured in the past few days, his jealousy was the very least of the problems confronting them. He was suddenly embarrassed by the thought, because, until that moment, it would not have occurred to him to think of himself as jealous of Smith and Glory. It would have been easier to keep his feelings in the realm of anger, but now that the idea had become conscious, he was left with an awkwardness he did not enjoy. “You’re right, HP,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Lovecraft tapped the inside of the passenger door twice in an odd gesture of triumph. “Good. Then let me welcome you back to the world of the sane. And I assure you, that as far as I am concerned, there is nothing more to be said about this issue.” He grinned and pantomimed a parched throat. “Now, I believe we could all do with a round of Dr Pepper.”

Howard reached for his wallet but Lovecraft waved his hand, gesturing for him to put it away. “Don’t trouble yourself, Bob. If you see to the automobile’s refreshment, I shall see to ours.”

Howard was at first surprised by his penny-pinching friend’s generosity, but then he realized how much more the gas was costing him. As Lovecraft walked over to the ice box full of sodas by the garage, he called after him, “Hey, HP! You sure you ain’t been possessed?”

Lovecraft looked back in mock indignation as he fished through his trouser pockets for change.

WHEN GLORY RETURNED from the rest room and defiantly opened the passenger door to return to her seat, she found Lovecraft and Howard loitering together at the back bumper, enjoying their bottles of Dr Pepper. She sensed that something had passed; the atmosphere was suddenly relaxed once again between the two men. While the attendant was rather ineffectively squeegeeing the dirty windows’ she joined them.

“Here, Glory,” said Howard, holding an open bottle for her as if it were a peace offering. “We saved you one.”

She hesitated, but then decided to take it in good faith. “Why, thank you kindly, Bob.”

Howard glanced back and forth between Glory’s piercing green eyes and Lovecraft’s somewhat smug expression. Lovecraft took it as some sort of signal and walked over to the ice box again to talk to the fat mechanic. It took a moment more for Howard to summon his resolve. “I’m-I want to apologize for my behavior today,” he said finally. “I know it ain’t my place to pass judgment…”

“Well, damned if you aren’t right about that.”

Howard left his sentence incomplete and paid the attendant’

Lovecraft returned with another round of sodas and passed them out. He sensed the remaining tension between Howard and Glory and decided to divert attention from it. “I’m given to understand from that rather loquacious gentleman in overalls that there is an establishment called Tandy’s Diner approximately two miles down the road. He claimed this establishment offers the ‘meanest chili east or west of the Pecos,’ and from his tone, I took it to be a rather meaningful boast.”,

Rising immediately to the backhanded slap at his home state as Lovecraft had anticipated, Howard started the car.

“Well, chili was invented where I come from,” said Howard. “And I sincerely doubt anybody from California can make a chili meaner than the one I had in San Antonio. I say I’ll just have to settle this for myself.” He tossed his empty Dr Pepper into a garbage can and opened the driver’s side door. “Anyone else hungry?” he asked, almost as an afterthought.

Lovecraft and Glory had been famished for the past several hours during their nonstop drive through the Central Valley. They both answered “Yes” in derisive unison as they got into the Chevy.

BY THE TIME they passed Barstow and rejoined Route 66, with dusk approaching and the sky a bright orange, Howard was suffering silently again; this time it was from the Tandy’s chili, which he had stubbornly insisted was not hot by Texas standards. His discomfort helped him stay awake as they crossed into Arizona, but as they turned south on Highway 89 toward Phoenix, he found himself beginning to drift off. He tried breathing more rapidly, blinking his eyes hard to clear the fog, biting the insides of his cheeks, even pinching himself, but as he grew more and more tired even the self-inflicted pain felt as distant as something happening to someone in a movie he was watching through the windshield of the car. By the time they passed Prescott, the faded white lines of the road, barely visible in the headlights, seemed like the flashing trails of arrows shot ,directly at his eyes, and he began to close them briefly to enjoy the relief.

“Bob?”

Howard eased the wheel slightly to make himself more comfortable. He could hear Lovecraft snoring quietly at his side. It was warm and pleasant.

“Bob?”

He mumbled as that pleasant sense of falling came over him. “Bob!”

Howard jolted awake and jerked the wheel, just avoiding the deep trench along the shoulder of the road.

“Uh, excuse me, Bob,” said Glory, “but did you see the ditch there?”

“Yes.”

“Then why the hell were you driving into it!”

Howard jerked his head angrily around to look at Glory, whose eyes grew suddenly wide with fear. Her face lit up with a sudden bright light, which Howard found shocking. For a split second, he thought some demonic force was taking her again, but then he realized the light was coming from outside, and he turned instantly back to face the road, just in time to swerve and miss the oncoming truck.

The loud blare of the horn and the violent jerk of the car jolted Lovecraft out of his sleep.

“That’s it!” said Glory. “I don’t care what you think about women behind the wheel! Pull over now before you get us all killed!”

Lovecraft blinked himself awake enough to concur with her, though he didn’t like the idea of a woman driving any more than Howard did.

“I’m sorry,” said Howard. “I’m awake now.”

“Yeah, nothing like the threat of instant death to perk you up,” said Glory. “Look, you’ve been nodding for a long time.”

“I said I’m awake now.”

Lovecraft interjected more for the sake of his own sleep than to be Glory’s ally. “Let her take the wheel while the road is good,” he said. “I suggest you take over when things are more challenging.”

They could nearly hear the sound of Howard seething, but he relented and pulled over. He got out, flooding the interior of the car with cool air, and stalked off into the night for a few moments before he returned and changed seats with Glory.

Soon, with a cigarette in her mouth and singing Billie Holiday’s “I Wished on the Moon,” Glory was driving. Howard had curled up in the backseat and fallen instantly asleep.

“Thank you,” said Lovecraft. “It would have been a shame to meet our doom through sheer carelessness when there are far more noble means of attaining the same goal.”

“I was just trying to save my own skin,” said Glory.

“You are, no doubt, aware of Bob’s intense jealousy regarding your behavior with Clark?”

“Yes.”

“Then I shall not trouble you with references to it in the future.”

Lovecraft hunched back into the most comfortable position he could manage, and for the next half an hour he remained half-awake, warily monitoring Glory at the wheel before once more succumbing to a troubled sleep.

HE DID NOT KNOW how long he had been asleep when he awakened and rubbed his eyes free of grit. He sat up to see the blurred white lines on the desert road drifting beneath the car. He glanced at Glory, who sat confidently behind the wheel, a fresh cigarette between her lips. A loose lock of her red hair obscured her face. He looked back at Howard, who was still sleep in the backseat, fetally curled like a giant prawn, mumbling something that sounded like it might be his mother’s name. He removed his watch from his breast pocket and squinted in the darkness to make out the time. Impossible, until the Artifact emitted a faint glow: 1:08. He winced at the pain that followed the Artifact’s next pulse of light and then he grimaced as he endured a series of sharp pains in his stomach. He reached into his watch pocket to pluck the Artifact out, to offer himself some relief, but what he drew out was not metal; it was pale and fleshy, and touching it caused a disquieting sensation in his bowels. Still, he pulled on the thing and produced something long and tubelike, like the siphon of a mammoth clam. It was textured like pink flesh and it was smooth. He pulled some more, and now an arm’s length stretched from his pocket. It caught for a moment, and then a mass of discolored stuff like rotting meat dangled from the long tube. He realized what he held before him was a length of his own intestine, and the hideous thing at the base was a cancer. He screamed before he could stop himself, shouting at Glory to pull over immediately, but she ignored him. He reached over, agonized by the pain, and tapped her shoulder. She turned, revealing her face to him, and now he realized that the red glow he had taken to be the tip of her cigarette was actually in her eyes. He wanted to say something, but she opened her mouth first, revealing long white teeth that grew longer as her mouth gaped wider. Her teeth were moving, swaying, growing into segmented tentacles that looked like elongated maggots. Lovecraft felt his gorge begin to rise; his voice caught in his throat as he tried to cry out to warn Howard. Glory laughed, a deep guttural laugh, as he recoiled in fear and tried to alert his friend by pounding his hand against the back of the seat. But his arm was all tangled in the coils of his own gut. No avail. They were approaching a sharp right-hand curve. To the sound of her own. hideous laughter, Glory spun the wheel, swerving off the road, crashing through a wooden guardrail, straight over a cliff into the black night. Lovecraft opened his mouth to scream again, but he felt himself choking.