The black sedan pulled out onto the road and turned silently eastward. In a moment the can flew out of the passenger-side window and landed at the roadside, crumpled and punctured as if it had been chewed by some large predator. The can lay in the roadside dust, glistening and wet, but not even a starving coyote would dare approach it.
AFTER A FULL TWENTY MINUTES on the road, Lovecraft finally broke the silence. “May I inquire,” he asked, “as to what finally prompted you to change your mind?”
A series of expressions formed and unformed across Howard’s face, as if he were trying simultaneously to reveal and yet mask his true feelings. “You said somethin’ about that damned thing maybe having healin’ powers, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t mean to involve your father in what is your affair.”
“Never mind it now.”
“Loveman was never able to unlock the Artifact’s secrets, Bob. And there is no guarantee that Klarkash-Ton will have any better luck with it. But I must assure you that it was no desperate stratagem on my part, knowing how both you and your father are devoted to your mother’s welfare.”
“I said never mind it, HP.” Howard grasped the wheel with more force, so tightly that the car actually swerved toward the right.
Lovecraft took this as a clear indication that it was time to change the subject, but even at the risk of his friend’s wrath, he had to finish what he had begun. “I sincerely beg your pardon, Bob. But there is one last thing I must mention regarding the Artifact and its possible healing powers.”
Howard’s glowering profile grew hunched, like the mass of muscle and gristle on a bull’s back, and a trickle of perspiration began to descend from where it had already beaded around his right temple.
“All right. You have your say, but make it quick. And that best be the end of it or by Sam Hill…”
“I understand.” Lovecraft worried the Artifact in his vest pocket, reminding himself, by light of day, that it did, indeed, exist outside his imagination. Now, choosing his words carefully, he cautioned Howard about the potential dangers of using the Artifact on his mother even if they were successful in learning how to tap into its powers. There was no way of knowing, except in retrospect, whether the Artifact was even made to be used by humans. It could just as well be some hellish machine whose purpose was to transform unwitting people into monsters. Lovecraft went on for a while-longer than he thought prudent, in fact-but Howard’s expression did not change at all, and he realized that he was not listening. He might as well have been some wooden Indian figurehead mounted over the wheel of his car.
This friend, he thought. This ally. He would not hesitate to unhinge the gates of Hell if only to add a single extra moment to his mother’s earthly sojourn. In their years of correspondence, he had never imagined Howard quite like this. A massive barbarian, a savage freeloader, even a naive but bullishly determined historian of his home state, but never a filial son. During his long bus ride, as he drifted in and out of the paranoid dreams, which shifted with the landscape outside the window, he had hoped against hope that someone would help him, and now that that ally was at his side, driving with reckless speed over the just-warming blacktop, he felt at last a measure of confidence.
“You figurin’ to bake somethin’, HP?”
“Eh?”
“It’s hot as Hell’s kitchen in here, man! Roll down your damn window.”
Lovecraft complied, but only halfheartedly. He had been enjoying the mounting warmth.
“Don’t ya sweat?”
“I rather like the heat,” said Lovecraft. “Perhaps I have some atavistic trait lingering from our reptile ancestors.”
“I figure you’re cold-blooded as a gila monster, though your color don’t match. No rattler’s gonna sidle up in your bag at night.”
“I fancy not,” said Lovecraft. “Would you mind maneuvering away from the obstructions and not toward them?”
“Uh-huh.”
They drove on for a while in silence, Howard intent on the road,
Lovecraft watching the landscape as it changed from minute to minute as the dew burned off the patchy grasses and the air grew parched. He could smell the tang of the land as it hovered in the air like a living vapor, the subtle bite of sage, grass, and dust. He wondered if it was possible to become so accustomed to this air that it faded into the dull regularity, the mundane familiarity, of a city’s atmosphere. But then he remembered the pleasant surprises of Providence, how rounding the block he would suddenly taste the salt of a sea breeze, or how a blast of cold through a patch of pine would wake him from a winter stupor. He scanned the horizon to the right of the car, playing with the disparity in apparent motion as the things nearer to his eye blurred by while the distance remained fixed and solid. There were few landmarks out here, he was thinking, when Howard let out a grunt.
“Breckenridge comin’ up. And it looks like nasty storm brewin’.” Lovecraft cast his gaze out across the horizon, following the span of the huge, billowing black cloud that stretched as far as he could see. It was no cloud, he realized, but a layer of black smoke not quite conjoined with the grayer overcast above it. He could smell the burning now as the dark plume enveloped the faint reddish glow of the sun.
“That’s no storm, Bob.”
“The smoke’s smoke, but that’s one hell of a storm above it. I don’t like the looks of it.” A shadow passed over Howard’s features as the sedan entered the darkness that now reached beyond them across the arid landscape.
“Nor do I like the looks of it myself,” Lovecraft mumbled under his breath. He looked toward the north, where the smoke seemed to be more lively, swirling very slowly in a current of wind and mixing rather unexpectedly with the cloud cover. It reminded him of the confluence of two rivers carrying different shades of sediment or, more likely, he thought, the whorling patterns in the bands of Jupiter. Swirls within swirls, signifying the dance of storms that could go on for centuries like the fury of the great crimson eye, the Red Spot.
Howard drove on, oblivious, in his own thoughts, but Lovecraft’s eyes’ suddenly went wide. There were faces in the chaos of clouds and smoke, indistinct at first, but more and more defined as he focused on them. They were palpitating with a force that seemed to push at them from some unearthly dimension, their features shifting ever so subtly across a spectrum of different visages that Lovecraft immediately recognized from his own descriptions in his dark fantasies. These were shoggoths, he knew, and they were mouthing soundless words, taunting him, trying to frighten him with warnings of death. He felt an electrical buzzing in the air, bitter with the tang of ozone, which he knew was more than the charge of lightning in the storm ahead; it was the very speech of the Old Ones’ minions, enfolding them like a cloud of angry hornets, pricking them with tiny injuries of the flesh as they seeped into their minds. You
will die a death of ten thousand agonies. Your friend will die a death of a thousand fragments. Be warned now and bring unto us what is rightfully ours.
“No,” said Lovecraft. He did not realize he had said it out loud. “What’s the matter?” Howard asked, glancing at him sidewise. “You look like you seen a ghost.”
Lovecraft knew that what he saw was invisible to his friend. He was thankful for that, though he knew that those forces would open Howard’s eyes soon enough. It would do no good to try to explain himself at the moment, he realized. They had to drive headlong into the monstrosities he saw before him and hope that they were mere portents or a flamboyant show to scare them off. “I have seen a ghost,” whispered Lovecraft, his throat dry with fear. “I am seeing the most horrific ghosts even as I speak, Bob, but you will reply that it is only my overactive imagination further complicated by the fatigue of a sleepless night and an overindulgence in coffee, which I could not help but watch you notice. So let us explain this away, for the moment, as a case of mild heatstroke, and continue on our way.”