The streets would suddenly clear, and in the silence, broken only by the skittering of a tumbleweed, the sheriff would stand alone, squinting toward the horizon to see his death approaching slowly, inevitably, toward Cross Plains, Texas, and he would watch as the riders drew closer and closer-four of them, in black hoods that hid their tiny, animal eyes and the slimy complexions of their inhuman…
Lovecraft blinked. What was he thinking? This was Cross Plains, Texas-his stop. There was nothing here but a terminal, a general store, clapboard buildings with paint long flaked away into the desert dust. He shook his head and stepped out of the street into the general store, where the sudden and comforting dimness made him pause momentarily to let his eyes grow calm.
“EXCUSE MY INTRUSION, but might you be the proprietor of this establishment?”
“Eh?” said the old man. He looked up, somewhat startled by the Yankee accent. The man by the entrance was tall and gangly, with a jaw that seemed to have grown ripe, almost to bursting, in the heat. He wore a white suit, rather soiled and rumpled, and a bow tie that was absurd, he thought, mismatched like the old leather suitcase and the cane, which seemed more decorative than necessary. “You ain’t from these parts, eh? Waddaya want?”
“I wish to inquire, kind sir, first, about the price of your pork and beans.”
“How many cans you want?”
“Three would be adequate.”
The old man named an inflated price, and the man in the white suit seemed to think it was fine. A Yankee who thought he was a Redcoat, no less, from that accent. He actually thumped the suitcase on the counter, kicking up a bit of trail dust, and opened it up like a salesman-he didn’t look clever enough to be a flimflam man. The old man expected him to produce some newfangled potato peeler or some new brand of axle grease, of which he already had plenty, but the man only put the cans of pork and beans in the case and shut it again.
“I would also appreciate, my dear sir,” he said, fastening the buckles, “directions to the abode of one Robert Howard. Robert E. Howard.”
“Bobby’s place, eh? He’s a published writer, you know.”
“I am cognizant of that fact, sir.”
“Ain’t you just?” said the old man, and he proceeded to give a set of directions designed to take the Yankee a few miles out of the way, on foot, through rattlesnake and scorpion country. “Sure you don’t need nothin’ to drink with them beans?” he asked when he was done. “You might be eatin’ them real soon.”
“That will not be necessary.”
“Maybe some boots? Those city shoes ain’t made for hard walkin’.”
“I assure you, sir, I have made all the purchases I require.”
“Well, good riddance to ya, then.”
“And to you, my dear old chap.”
DUSK APPROACHED MORE QUICKLY than Lovecraft had expected, and with it a cold wind from the west pushed by a front of dark clouds. Lovecraft had never been in a place so vast, so empty that one could watch the very weather roll across the heavens, a mass of clouds that stretched from horizon to horizon in a slow boil, moving forward in barely perceptible increments, which he knew was actually a fantastic speed; in the far west the sun still flickered a reddish orange and the clouds looked as if they were burning, the flames slowly dying out into maroon, deep purple, purple-gray, and then finally to a shade of not quite-black as the last of the sun extinguished itself and was gone. If this is how the light should ever die, thought Lovecraft, it is a beauty to which I would not object. If this be the final whimper, at the end, then it redeems us with its beauty. He paused to watch a while longer; by now he had the uneasy and somewhat annoyed realization that the old man had given him an unnecessarily circuitous route to the Howard house. Perhaps it was because the locals were accustomed to driving, or going by horseback, he thought, but more likely it was simply the old man’s unpleasant character.
From his long habit of wandering the alleys and back streets of Providence at night, Lovecraft had acquired an acute sense of direction, and now, although he was somewhat disoriented by the very openness of the landscape, he knew he had returned, for the third time, to the same bearing on which he had started. His feet hurt in his narrow shoes, which he had to admit, were not exactly designed for the rocky terrain. For a while he had been thirsty, but now, with his body heat siphoned, nearly torn from him by the wind, it was the cold that was beginning to make him truly uncomfortable. He scanned the sky, shivering involuntarily, watching the mass of clouds grow darker and approach like a mobile, alien landscape.
The wind grew fiercer, in gusts that had begun to pick up the sandy soil and fling it at him. Lovecraft squinted. There was the house as Howard had described it in his letters, in the confines of a picket fence. Lovecraft smiled and hunched his shoulders into the wind just as ‘the first jags of lightning flashed across the distant western sky. He counted, automatically—one, two, three, four-past fifteen before he heard the dull rumble of thunder, and then, shortly afterward, the closer hissing of approaching rain. He walked more quickly, squinting into the wind as the last grayish gap in the western clouds was blotted out and darkness fell so abruptly it seemed a curtain had suddenly fallen from the heavens.
There was something disquieting about the approaching storm, some lingering unease Lovecraft couldn’t help but associate with the odd man on the bus. The lightning skittered along the bottom of the cloud bank as if it were stones of flint skipping an inverted lake; not one flash seemed directed at the earth. And the wind, the clouds-they seemed to be coming from all directions, converging upon him. He thought it must surely be some optical illusion, since weather, he knew, always moved in colossal swirls about the globe. But was it mere coincidence or some preternatural force that made him the very epicenter of this mounting tempest?
The air was suddenly loud with the crackle of hail. White dots jittered madly, just barely visible in the distance before him. Lovecraft had scarcely the time to lift his suitcase over his head before the hailstorm reached him, so fierce that its buffeting of marble-sized ice balls nearly tore the case from his hands. He ran, as quickly as he could, through the open gate in the fence and up the steps of the porch as another flash of lightning, this one nearby, finally made its explosive connection with the earth.
THE THUMPING ON the door was barely audible after the explosion of lightning and the deafening thunder that followed. Howard was still blinking back the purple afterimages he saw projected on the page in the typewriter, his ears still numb and ringing, when he heard the banging, which was neither random nor regular enough to be the work of the wind. The electric lights flickered momentarily, and when they came on again, one of the bulbs remained dark.
“Poppa!” he called. “I think I hear someone at the door!”
Dr. Howard was already at the door, somewhat surprised to have a visitor at that hour in that weather. “I’ve got it, Bobby,” he said. He turned the knob, and suddenly the door was wrenched from his hand and pushed inward by a fierce gust of wind; it pivoted all the way around on its hinges and slammed violently into the wall just as another bolt of lightning cast a strange silhouette through the flimsy screen door. Dr. Howard took an involuntary step backwards. The figure in the door was at least seven feet tall, with a wide, rectangular thing where its head should have been. Some odd appendage or proboscis hung from the left side of its head, angled toward the ground in the middle of a pendulous swinging motion.