David Barbour and Richard Raleigh
SHADOWS BEND
A Novel of the Fantastic and Unspeakable
For Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Robert Ervin Howard & Clark Ashton Smith — the three musketeers of Weird Tales
And for Tori Amos singing in the RA/I/N/N.
With special thanks to L. Sprague de Camp without whom this tale would still be lurking in the shadows.
Part One
1
Sunday, 18 August 1935
IN THE STIFLING CONFINES of the earthbound bus, Lovecraft was dreaming of the stars. Constellations beaming their lucid light through the cavernous blackness of space, and touching, ever so briefly, the eye and the soul of some hapless traveler in the night their light was ancient, millions and billions of years old. Even in his dream, Lovecraft had the lingering presence of rationality to know that the bright birth of a nova might come from the demise of an ancient star as old as time itself. The old and the new, beaming their brilliant lumens through the absolute cold of space, their rays piercing the dark silence like the birthing cries of an infant.
The baby four rows ahead was crying again, its high-pitched wail cutting through the rumble of the engine. The rattles and squeaks that had become a sort of steady, soothing background drone marking the bus’s progress through the desert suddenly seemed to drop away, and the wailing played rhythmically up and down the register; it became an oddly wet sound, with a guttural, almost gurgling quality behind it, as if the infant were slowly drowning in its own fluids, and it was the humanness of this noise-no, not the humanness, but the fleshy, animal quality-that was so disconcerting to Lovecraft. Disconcerting enough to puncture his sleep and wake him into a restless alertness.
He was certain that every one of the passengers was as disturbed as he was, and yet they seemed to ignore the crying. They sat in some dormant state, jostled rhythmically this way and that until they were occasionally bumped in some unexpected way and startled out of their semi consciousness. The heat felt good to him, but the other passengers all gleamed with a sheen of oily sweat that reminded him of the fat dripping from a capon on a rotisserie; their heads lolled, and even in their torpid faces he could read not so much the lack of consciousness as a lack of intelligence, a stupor.
Lovecraft himself was keenly awake now with anxiety. His discomfort with the infant’s crying made him suddenly aware of the movements in his own throat, and he swallowed and swallowed again to clear the dryness from his windpipe. The bus was crossing another patch of bad pavement, and with all the windows open because of the heat, the dust from the front tires rose high enough to waft in.
Lovecraft was uneasy, and he unconsciously fingered the contents of his watch pocket. He had almost tuned out the baby’s wailing with the force of his own awareness of it, but now he was convinced that his thoughts had become somehow too palpable. The quiet man who had gotten on at the last stop had been watching him rather too closely, and Lovecraft was certain now that the man could actually sense what he was thinking. He stole another quick glance over his left shoulder. There he was but was it a row closer now? Had he moved forward since the last time he’d checked? Lovecraft had never looked closely at the man’s face, since he had not wanted to meet his eye, but this time he seemed to be staring out the window, and Lovecraft examined his features a bit more attentively. There was something very wrong. Was it his vision, or the rattle of the bus? He couldn’t seem to. get the man’s face in focus. Each time Lovecraft blinked to clear his vision the man seemed to have abruptly tilted his head or made it tremble somehow, leaving an image as uncertain as a reflection on the surface of a rippling pool. Lovecraft turned away, quickly, as the man’s eyes suddenly shifted to the front of his face, although he had not seemed at all to move his head.
Sweat flowed with a sudden profusion down from Lovecraft’s hairline, and he tasted its acrid salt in the corner of his mouth. The thing in his pocket seemed to become suddenly heavier.
And the wailing—it went on even as the infant’s mother gave it a few token maternal thumps. As she lifted the baby so that it faced backwards, and continued to pat its back and its head, the crying infant suddenly saw the odd man at the rear of the bus and abruptly choked into silence. It sounded like a single hiccup, and the quiet that followed was soothing, but then suddenly ominous.
Lovecraft swallowed once again and tried to calm his racing thoughts, but now, as the infant’s dark eyes focused on his own, he was suddenly sure that the soul behind the gaze was not the child’s but that of the odd man whose reflection, he knew, was that tiny pinpoint in the infant’s alarmingly wide orbs.
The infant cried out again, opening its mouth wider than humanly possible-like a serpent, he thought-and Lovecraft suddenly saw that it was not an infant at all. The slimy pinkness of its throat dripping with threads of saliva and mucus, the wet, sucking noise that ran like an undercurrent through its wailing, the gurgly sound like black water in a cavern, the shrill echo ringing beyond the register of human ears-they were all the mark of Cthulhu’s spawn.
THEY WERE IN the middle of the town before he even realized it. Lovecraft started awake, jerking bolt upright in his seat. He had been asleep again, though he did not remember nodding off.
The infant and its mother were already outside, and both of them looked up at him through the open window, smiling quite innocently, the infant nearly radiant with the joy of being released from the hot confines of the bus.
Lovecraft stood, feeling the cramp in his lower back, and briefly checked the contents of his pockets under the guise of stretching himself before he stepped into the aisle and took a quick look back. The odd man was gone. Indeed, the bus had cleared out and the only one remaining on board was the ruddy-faced driver, who was slowly stuffing his pipe with tobacco.
“Beg your pardon, old chap,” said Lovecraft. “Would this humble town be Cross Plains, perchance?”
“Yessir,” the driver said rather smugly, “as plain as the nose on one’s face. Next leg is more of the same, so you might get out for a stretch and a drink. Word to the wise, sir.”
“Thank you. But I believe I have reached my destination.”
“Then I wish you well, sir.” The driver managed a successful draw of his pipe and blew his first plume of putrid smoke, his eyes opening wider in what seemed to be surprise. “May God go with you,” he said.
Lovecraft turned away and took the three steps down into Cross Plains, Texas, this unwitting way station. It wasn’t much of a town, just a place where some roads and power lines seemed to converge for no apparent reason. The few buildings-storefronts and professional addresses-all faced each other, as if to keep the reality of the empty landscape at bay.
A one-horse town if there ever was one, Lovecraft thought. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a hitching post outside the local bar, or a water trough outside a blacksmith and livery stable. He could imagine bowlegged cowboys in leather chaps strutting down the single dusty street, arms akimbo with their fingers twitching just over the handles of their pearl-handled six-guns. Out in the distance, beyond the last building, along the western horizon, there would be the silhouette of a black dust plume-bandits armed with Winchesters and shotguns, riding in to have their last shoot-out with the local sheriff, whose five-pointed star of justice sparkled like a diamond on his vest.