Lovecraft found himself getting teary-eyed as he went on. “And once again, after long labor, she found his every part excepting one, for which she created a substitute with her magic. She revived her reassembled husband with a kiss that taxed nearly all of her depleted strength. The vitality which she bestowed upon her husband nearly spent, they had only a short time to conceive their child, Horus, the winged one, the new sun, the avenger of his father and conqueror of Seth.”
“Hmm?” said Glory, apparently in her sleep.
“Osiris became ruler of the underworld,” said Lovecraft, “and to this day he is honored in the great monument whose shaft is aimed directly at his star in the constellation Orion.”
“Thanks, Lovey,” Glory mumbled.
“Good night,” said Lovecraft.
8
LOVECRAFT TOUCHED HOWARD’S SHOULDER. “Bob,” he whispered.
Howard mumbled something in his sleep, but then he was instantly awake, his hand automatically reaching under his improvised pillow for his pistol.
“It’s no emergency,” said Lovecraft. “I’ve been ruminating over the day’s events, and I merely wanted to tell you a few things. Important things to discuss before the night is any older.”
“What is it, HP?”
“I feel calm at the moment; but must confess to you that my trepidations grow ever more severe,” said Lovecraft. “Consider the peculiarity of this atmospheric phenomenon. It is consistent with the turns of weather that have followed us since yesterday.”
“Ain’t much we can do but wait it out now,” said Howard, rubbing his red eyes as he lay back on his bedroll. “We drive much farther and we’re bound to overheat. I ain’t got but a little spare water in the trunk, and we might need that to drink if we get stranded out here.”
“Well, perhaps your attitude is the best. Please sleep, Bob. My apologies for waking you unnecessarily. I shall keep vigil for wayward reptiles.”
“Mighty good of ya, HP. ‘Night,” he said, and he was snoring again within moments.
Lovecraft sat with his back against the front bumper and tilted his head back to look directly up into the night. The stars were out again, though they were enshrouded, in every direction, by the black dust. He realized it had settled over them like a tulle fog, like a cloud displaced from the heavens onto the earth. He wished he could sleep, but he was too agitated now in the quiet and he had promised to take the first watch. Earlier he had pretended to drift off to allow Howard and Glory a span of privacy together, and now he wished he could sleep as well as he had during that pretense.
He unscrewed the lid of the Thermos, then the top, and poured himself some coffee. He couldn’t smell it in the dry air until he had lifted it halfway to his face, but then it washed over him, and he felt suddenly at ease. A cautious sip. A frown at the bitterness. He reached into his pocket for the paper napkin in which he had folded away a few handfuls of sugar just for this purpose and very carefully trickled some into the Thermos lid. There was nothing to stir it with-he would have to retrieve his spoon from the car for that-so he stirred with his pencil, smelling the odd mix of cedar and sweet coffee, and took another sip. He smiled involuntarily, added a little more sugar, and leaned back once more to savor the night and the stars.
“Someday they will all be dissipated into feeble and uniform waves of radiant heat,” he whispered to himself, paraphrasing something else he had written years ago. “Too feeble to provide any perceptible warmth. It will be a terrible desolation, a vast and tomblike universe of midnight gloom and perpetual Arctic cold. And through this sepulchral universe will roll dark, frozen suns with their hordes of dead planets covered in the dust of those unfortunate mortals who will have perished as their stars faded from the skies.”
He took another sweet sip of coffee and smiled again, though his own words had made his sense of foreboding grow stronger. From his watch pocket, he removed the Artifact, which had been paining him all day, and he wasn’t surprised at all to see its eerie pulsing glow illuminate the darkness with its cold, nacreous light. Lovecraft felt strangely at ease now, not at all like the fearful man he really was; he felt like the protagonist in a story with a predictable and heroic outcome, confident that despite the trials ahead all would turn out well. Part of himself was alarmed by this lulling of his usual anxiety; he suspected that this confidence was a ploy by his pursuers designed to put him at ease, to make him vulnerable.
Lovecraft noticed the Artifact’s glow seem to diminish while the background light seemed to increase. He jerked his head around in alarm, then looked up to see that the moon had just emerged from a patch of dark clouds, its cold silver light washing out the glow of the Artifact. Compelled by some whim, he held the thing up, juxtaposing it with the orb of the moon, to compare the nature of the light. In front of his face, the Artifact was the same size as the moon, and its aura blended uncannily with the halo around the lunar disk until it appeared that they were emitting the same light. Lovecraft didn’t even have to shift his eyes back and forth to notice that the man in the moon was changing; its expression, usually a sort of tranquil melancholy, was distorting into a hideous grimace. Then the face lost its anthropomorphic qualities altogether. Squidlike tendrils crawled across the surface, forming a hideous chaos that slowly coagulated into the face represented on the Artifact clutched in his hand.
Lovecraft lurched to his feet and nearly stepped into the dying fire as he stumbled over to Howard and shook him. “Bob!” he said in a loud whisper. “Bob!”
Howard grunted, and then sat bolt upright, his pistol magically in his hand. “Where is he?” he said.
Lovecraft waited momentarily while Howard got his bearings, then he showed him the Artifact and directed his attention up at the moon.
Neither man could believe his eyes. It had changed again. They both stared, mesmerized by the bizarre and amorphous shapes that seemed to emanate from the very surface of the pockmarked satellite.
“Do you see them?” asked Howard.
“Yes. They are the children of Dagon, the elder god of the deep.”
“They’re coming out of the craters.”
“The mare. They are called seas in Latin. Now I understand the appropriateness of that appellation. The old astronomers must have known the truth.”
“I say we hightail it outta here, HP.”
“Where shall we go to hide from the moon?” Just then the moon vanished once more behind a bank of swift clouds, leaving the desert suddenly smothered in blackness illuminated only by the last red glow of dying embers and the cold pulse of the Artifact.
WHEN THEY HEARD the scream, Lovecraft and Howard were momentarily confused. They had all but forgotten that they had a woman with them; they thought, for an instant, that what they heard was the cry of some desert animal in the jaws of a predator. The sound lingered in the upper part of the register, part of it lost in a range beyond hearing; it cut through their spines like slivers of glass, and in the split second it took them to place its origin, they were on their feet, turning toward the car. But once again, they were disoriented, petrified now by what they saw.
Howard could make out tiny points of light, like distant fireflies, moving quietly across the darkness; when he turned his head he saw that they extended everywhere, from horizon to horizon, in small, moving clusters. He blinked, trying to adjust his vision, which had been blinded by the bright light of the moon. Lovecraft put the Artifact quickly back into his pocket, and to his eyes, which were naturally more acclimated to the night, the lights were far more numerous; they stretched into the distance, and what appeared as dispersed blobs to Howard resolved themselves into groups of glowing specks, large and small, slowly approaching. Some of the lights blinked on and off; others remained steady and grew as they approached.