David Barbour - Shadows Bend

His mother’s wheezing breath was growing weaker-even more shallow than before, if that was possible. The fluid in her lungs had drowned most of the tissue, and she lay there looking pale and bluelipped like a child just come out of a cold spring lake. Howard wanted to speak to her again, to have her say his name or at least glimpse him through her rheumy eyes and give him a final moment of recognition before passing into the next world. He had been thinking, obsessively, over the past few sleepless days, of what he would do without her, what his life with his father would be, what it would mean to stay here, in this house, silent of her harsh breath after all these years, and face the blank pages of his work. A strange calmness had come over him during the past evening, and now that the nurse had examined her for the morning, he felt the confidence to ask his question bluntly.

“How is she, Mrs. Green? Any chance she’ll wake up again?” The nurse gave a wise and weary smile, and replied gently, “No.”

“None?”

Almost imperceptibly, the nurse shook her head.

Without a word, Howard walked to the door, and he stood there for a moment, looking back into the room at his mother breathing on the bed.

“Are you okay, Bobby?” said the nurse.

Howard nodded and walked away to his study, where he sat down at his desk and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into his battered typewriter. He sat there calmly for a while, in silence, as if he were surveying the lay of the land on the blank white page, and then he typed one line, then the next, while the air still shuddered with the sound of the carriage being shoved back for the next line.

He looked at the four lines:

There was an expression on his face now. It might have been a smile, or just some wistful look as he thought about something. He rolled the paper up a third of the way, clicking the gears of the platen, and then, when he was satisfied with the way the quatrain looked displayed there, as if it were a caption to an exhibit, he left his desk. From his cabinet, he removed the .380 Colt automatic. He checked the action, though he didn’t check the chamber, because he had loaded it the night before.

Now, gun in hand, Howard walked outside into what would be a beautiful late-spring morning. He stepped down from the porch to his Chevy and gave it a fond pat on the fender as if it were a horse that had seen him through the adventure of the past year. Casually, as if he were going for a morning drive to enjoy the air, he got into the driver’s seat, snapped the door shut, and then put the gun to his temple. He paused only a moment before squeezing the trigger.

For an instant, just before the hammer fell, then while the hammer took its quick course to the firing pin, Howard saw a veil of ocher dust pass before the car. He could see someone out there-no, two people-standing, hand in hand, silently watching him. It was Glory, her red hair billowing in the wind, and at her side the Indian boy he and Lovecraft had taken to Awonawilona. They were standing there, silently watching him through the veil of windswept dust, and they were happy. “They’re happy,” he thought. “God, I wish HP were here to see them.”

The bullet entered his head above his right ear and exited out of the left side of his skull. In the last fleeting instant of consciousness-perhaps the residue of perception-Howard saw himself driving through a storm of powdered clay dust, driving swiftly until the sky cracked with lightning and roared with rain, and when the rain touched the ‘ dust it turned thick and red, and Howard’s last thought was to wonder why the red rain fell on the inside of the windshield.

Monday, 15 March 1937

The Jane Brown Memorial Hospital

Providence, Rhode Island

Howard Phillips Lovecraft closed the battered cover of his journal and struggled, amidst his sweat-soaked sheets, to sit up in bed. He winced again, out of habit, though such an act hardly did justice to the massive agony he felt in his bowels. It had all been a mystery to the doctors, but he himself knew that: the cancer had been brought on by the proximity of the Artifact too long in his watch pocket. That spot under his vest had been the origin of the tumor, they said. How it spread so quickly into his intestines was unknown to them, and they would not have believed his explanations.

The last dose of morphine had worn off more than a day ago, but he had not reminded the nurses though the pain had become nearly unbearable. He had known for a while, even before being admitted to the hospital, that his last days were upon him. All his life, he had languished too long in the refuge of that twilight state between sleep and waking; it was time to move on.

At first he thought the morphine they gave him for the pain would grant him visions of the kind he knew the opium eaters had enjoyed, but in his own waking visions he found little of the beauty he had imagined and longed for. It was not the morphine that helped him-it was the sleep the drug permitted, and in the coils of that sleep, the dreams. He had wandered through enchanted landscapes, in gentle perfumed breezes; he had gazed up at alien constellations breathtakingly beautiful; he had sailed rivers with names like poetry and water the color of the sky. And meanwhile, his times of waking had become less and less endurable because of the specter of pain circumscribed by the dull languor of a drug-induced haze. The days and nights all boring in their gray sameness-if this was waking, then he was ready to enter that dream country of which he had written so often, and once entering, he would not return.

The journal felt heavy in Lovecraft’s emaciated grip. The weight of memory and experience, the recollection of his time with Howard and Glory, the news of Howard’s death, his visit back to Smith, his final confrontation with his nightmares at the Golden Gate. While he had the strength left he reached across to the night table, shuddering with the effort, and took hold of the matches. He lit one, startling at the sharp hissing explosion and the bitter smell of sulfur, and he put the yellow fire to the lower corner of the journal. He was trembling with the pain. He did not know if he could hold it much longer, and so he leaned to the side and dropped the flaming book into the wastebasket, where it made a single, hollow, metallic thump.

He was ready for his morphine now. He would ask for a larger dose-the pain was worse, after all-and he knew that if he asked in the right tone, with that certain inflection in his voice, that certain hollow and pleading look in his eyes, the doctors would take pity on him to make the passage faster. They were eager for his last days to be peaceful, after all, and they had maintained him-sweet irony-in a state like that of conscious death. The cessation of all feeling with a sense of utter tranquility, perhaps the tranquility that came with the extinction of thought.

They will smell the smoke soon enough and come to investigate, he thought, staring up at the flashes of pain-induced light he saw on the ceiling. He heard a loud rushing sound, like the roar of a waterfall. How odd, he thought, that I would hear the sound of water when I have just lit a fire. He turned his head, very slightly, until he saw the bright red flames fluttering in the corner of his vision. So that was the roaring. The fire, red fire, fire red, fiery red, fluttering like hair,

Glory’s hair, in the wind. Lovecraft sighed and slumped back against his pillows, the flames filling more of his vision, blurring, clearing into the face of Glory McKenna, and at her side, the small boy he remembered from the town of red dust. They were smiling at him, and Lovecraft smiled back, the corners of his mouth only tentatively upturned, expecting another pang in his bowels, but the pain was gone. His smile beamed brighter, and he said, quietly, “Hello.” The word did not seem to come from his mouth. It echoed as if the world were hollow and it came from everywhere at once, and far away, so far he could barely hear, came the sound of voices in alarm. Lovecraft opened his eyes wider, gently, expecting to be consumed by the fire, but instead his vision grew paler-degree by degree-until everything faded into a beautiful, radiant white.