David Barbour - Shadows Bend

The boy smiled, then reached into his pocket and removed two small wooden figurines. He held one out in each hand, one toward Howard, the other toward Lovecraft.

“Bob,” said Lovecraft, his eyes wide.

“Yeah?” Howard kept his eyes on the road as he carefully navigated around a patch of some particularly large potholes.

“Our young passenger has some rather interesting toys you might want to examine.”

Howard looked down, and when he saw what the boy held out for him, his foot grew momentarily heavy on the accelerator and the car surged. “What’s your mama’s name, boy?” Howard asked when he had recovered himself.

“Amma.”

“What’s her last name?”

Now the boy looked puzzled. “What is a last name?”

“Well, I’m Bob Howard, and this here is Howard Lovecraft. The second name is the last name. That’s the name we get from our father.”

Now the boy looked even more puzzled. “If Howard is the name you got from your father, then how did it become the first name of your friend? Are you brothers?”

Howard scratched his head, frustrated. “That’s just a coincidence,” he said. “HP?”

“We are not brothers,” said Lovecraft. “Many names are similar, and Mr. Howard’s last name happens to be the same as my first name. Perhaps in your culture it is the custom only to have a single name. Is that the case?”

“You injuns just have one name?” said Howard.

“Amma is Amma.”

“And what is your name?”

“Gabi. ”

“Gabi? Is that short for something?”

“Gabi is the name of a great winged spirit who is very brave, like the one on the front of your car,” said the boy.

“That’s a nice name,” said Howard. “No wonder you ain’t afraid of bein’ in a ghost town, huh?”

The boy looked up at Lovecraft and then looked back at Howard. “You are the only ghosts I have met, but I am not afraid of you,” said the boy.

“Well,” said Howard, “then I suppose there’s nothin’ for any of us to be afraid of.” He looked over the boy’s head at Lovecraft who was clearly not amused. “What’s the matter, HP?”

“Just my usual twinge of pain.” Lovecraft looked forward, then to the side, trying to make out any landmark in the swirling red dust. It was no longer a storm but something more like a fog-tulle fog as he recalled. The sky above looked perfecdy normal, but all around the air was thick and occluded, though there seemed to be no reason for the disturbance.

“Here we are,” said Howard as he passed the small sign that read:

“Awonawilona.”

“You sure this is the place?”

“Please stop here,” said the boy.

“But there ain’t nothin’ around,” Howard replied. “I don’t see no house or nothin’.”

“You can not see our home from here. The gas station is there.”

The boy sat up and pointed ahead and to the side.

“All right.” Howard opened his door and got out, though that hardly seemed the wise thing to do with such poor visibility on the road.

The boy climbed out, pausing for a moment to look back at Lovecraft. Howard reached to shake the boy’s hand.

“Here, these are for the two of you,” said the boy. He placed both of the figurines in Howard’s outstretched palm, and before he could refuse the gesture, the boy was already retreating into the red fog, waving good-bye.

” ‘Bye, kid!” Howard watched the boy fade into the dust and then he stepped back into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. He sat and contemplated the two wooden figures, holding them up against the steering wheel as Lovecraft looked on silently. “Well, I guess this one belongs to you,” Howard said, tossing one of them to Lovecraft.

“Why did you ask the boy what his mother’s name was?” Lovecraft turned the figure over and over in his hand. It was a fish carved from a pale wood made whiter with a chalky paint.

Howard carefully wedged his figurine-a bear made black with charcoal-between the windshield and the dashboard directly in front of him. “You know why, Pale Fish Man.” He shifted the car into gear and got back onto the road.

In a moment, the dust had cleared. Behind them, the landscape was entirely flat, but there was no sign of the boy. And where the road, curved slightly uphill, there was no sign of the town of San Robardo. Lovecraft and Howard both noticed these facts, and yet neither one of them said anything until they had arrived at the gas station in Awanawilona and slaked their thirst on Dr Pepper and Coca-Cola.

AT THE BUS STATION in San Angelo, they made their awkward farewells.

“Now that you ain’t carryin’ that thing no more,” Howard said, reaching out and patting Lovecraft on the watch pocket.

Lovecraft grimaced in pain.

“Sorry, HP. You really oughta get that checked by a doctor. You sure you don’t want to come by my place and have my father give you a once-over?”

“Thank you, but no. I must be on my way. And I’m afraid the situation would be much too awkward for me to endure. I had the sense that your father also had his hopes up for the possibility that something good would come of all this for your mother.”

“We don’t need to talk about that,” said Howard. “Look, what we need to figure out is what to tell Glory’s sister.”

“One or both of us shall have to write her a letter. And her purse l suppose that should be posted with it.”

“I ain’t very good at that sort of sensitive thing, HP.” Howard reached over into the backseat and brought Glory’s purse forward. He put the purse in Lovecraft’s lap. “You take it, okay? And you send it to her with a letter?”

“Don’t worry. I am soured to writing at the moment because I seem to have lost my pen in the cave, but I shall compose something. It will hardly suffice, I must say, but it will have to do.”

“Thanks.”

“It is my duty.”

“HP,” said Howard, “I got a question for you.”

“Yes?”

“Back in the cave when you shouted, ‘It’s true!’ What did you mean?”

Lovecraft was silent for a moment. “I had a realization. All my life I believed I was using my own imagination to create my weird tales, but that is not true. It was them all along-the ones I called the Night Gaunts. They were planting the images in my unconscious mind for me to discover and turn into tales to release into the world. I was part of their plan all along without an inkling of suspicion.”

“You really think so?”

Lovecraft had no answer now.

“You gonna keep on writin’?”

Lovecraft nodded, his face pinched with a half smile.

“Then I’ll be seein’ ya, HP.” Howard extended his large hand, wiping it first on the leg of his pants. “Here’s to better times, then.”

“To better times. Farewell, Bob.”

Howard got into the Chevy, started the engine, and sat for a moment just listening to the rumble. He did not want to go, and yet he did not want to stay. Something had drained him of all impetus at that moment, and he would have been content to close his eyes and sit there for some indeterminate amount of time until the will to live and move entered him once again. It was with conscious effort that he put the car in gear and glanced in the rearview mirror. Lovecraft was already hunched over his satchel, using it as a portable desk on which he was writing a note; he had opened Glory’s purse and was looking into it, taking inventory. A good final image, thought Howard, and he stepped on the gas.

Thursday, 11 June, 1936

The Howard House Cross Plains, Texas

IT WAS JUST after seven in the morning when Robert Ervin Howard left the two packets on the front porch for the mailman and went back into the house to stand at his mother’s bedside. It had been another long vigil, and his mother had not stirred from her coma the entire night. Howard had stayed awake, keeping the nurse company, then relieving her, giving her a few hours’ respite of sleep since he had long since lost the ability himself.