“This may sound rather unfeeling,” Lovecraft said, as Howard pulled out into the street, “but I have been wondering why the Night Gaunt only toyed with you instead of simply killing you outright when it had the opportunity.”
“I don’t know,” Glory answered flatly. “And you’re right—it’s an unfeeling question, you bastard.”
“Then I beg your pardon.”
“You’ve got a lot of pardon to beg. You’re the one who’s gotten all of us into this.”
Lovecraft was silent.
“But I wanted to know, anyway,” Glory said in a moment. “How did you know I was in danger?”
Lovecraft didn’t reply, so it was Howard who answered. “HP had one of them weird visions. I wouldn’t have believed him, but he insisted.”
“Thank you,” said Glory. “You have my pardon.” She leaned forward and kissed Lovecraft on the cheek as Howard watched in the rearview mirror.
Lovecraft quickly turned red, simultaneously embarrassed and touched by Glory’s sincere and natural display of affection and gratitude. He mumbled a reply and turned his face toward the window. “Bob,” he said finally, “it is absolutely urgent that we reach Klarkash-Ton as soon as possible. I have the terrible presentiment that things will go very ill otherwise.”
“Yeah, HP. You and Glory just keep me awake, even if ya have to take turns pinchin’ me. I think we can hit his place in one long shot.”
“Thank you, Bob.”
THE TRAFFIC WAS LIGHT that evening, and by the time they had left the outskirts of Vegas and entered the empty desert, hardly a car was to be seen on the road. They drove on, making small talk, each of them not wanting to bring up the topics that would cause them to ‘ remember their fear or dwell on things unpleasant. Hours passed, and they began to climb the foothills of the range that separated the desert from the California Central Valley.
Howard checked the rearview mirror frequently, anxious that they , were being followed. He was relieved not to see the telltale headlights behind them, but then again, he knew that the odd men would hardly need to use headlights at night. For all he knew, their automobile was as weirdly constructed as the fabric of their suits. Did it even have an engine? Did it roll? Or was it some sort of organic monster that slithered its tire like belly across the pavement in mockery of a car?
Each time he thought of the black-clad men-and they appeared to him unbidden now-what came to Howard’s mind was the image of undertakers in a hearse. But these undertakers did not deal with the mortal bodily remains of a man; they had some greater sinister purpose behind them; they were probably the stealers of the human soul, waiting within a breath’s reach to snatch away a man’s spirit with a puff of air from his lungs. What was the word? The one that meant a sound with a puff of breath? The one that connected the air with speech and the soul? Lovecraft would know it-probably used it in a story recently.
Howard began tapping rhythmically at the wheel, blinking hard to keep awake. Soul, he thought. That’s a synonym for spirit. His father had told him again and again that what Ma needed was to keep her spirits up. The clogging in her lungs wasn’t getting any better, all that fluid and mucus building up. She could hardly breathe at night, and she had to sleep sitting up so high he didn’t see how she could get any rest. She had to stay happy, keep her spirits up, not give up her spirit. His mind was beginning to wander. A spirit was like a soul. A spirit. Aspirate. Aspiration-that was it! What a great word, full of lots of meanings. He had aspirations; he talked with aspirated sounds about his aspirations. He aspired to being the greatest writer of pulp fiction ever to live. A spire, like a tower. A tall, dark, spiral tower reaching up into the stars; a needlethin minaret scraping the belly of heaven. That was an image worth remembering for a Moorish story. A needlethin… and the image of the tower dissolved into a quick glimpse of a long, steel needle protruding from the shaft of what looked like a bicycle pump. An aspirator. That’s what it was-the horrible thing his father was using in his nightmare. His mother lying in bed with that needle jammed through her breast, shriveling as the stuff got sucked out of her clogged lung.
Howard coughed involuntarily and brought himself back to his senses, jerking the wheel quickly back before he swerved. The car was drifting and Lovecraft-damn him-wasn’t doing his job. Howard looked at his companion, who had his head turned outward to gaze out the window at the dim landscape under the moon. He saw the bald dome of a mountain in the distance. “Hey, HP,” he said.
Lovecraft turned, surprised, blinking those fishy eyes of his. Howard’s momentary anger dissolved. “Now here’s a bit of cheery place-naming,” he said. “We’re passin’ through the Specter Range at the moment, and that hill over there is called Skull Mountain.”
Out in the distance, under patchy clouds through which the blue white light of the moon shone down, Skull Mountain glowed like a bald dome on a thinly haired head. The light above the mountain had an eerie quality to it; it was palpable, hanging over the dome like a mist or a pall of pale smoke. Glory and Lovecraft were both watching the mountain when they heard a dull explosion from the back of the car.
“Bob?”
“Shit!” said Howard, grabbing the wheel more firmly to keep control of the steering. “We just blew out a back tire.”
“Do you have a spare?” said Glory.
“You kiddin’ me?”
“Well, do you?”
“Course I do. What Idiot would go on a road trip Without a spare?” Howard eased the car off to the shoulder and came to a slow stop where the road was at a shallow grade.
“One might have expected Mr. Imanito to have anticipated this and prepared us for it, as well as for other things,” Lovecraft said with mild sarcasm. “I find myself disillusioned with his acute auguries of the future.”
“Pipe down, HP. This ain’t gonna be no fun.” He opened the door and stepped out into the cold night air. “Hey, you two get out. Can’t jack up a car with a passenger inside.”
While Howard popped the trunk and got the spare and the jack out, Lovecraft occupied himself with the other flashlight, making a journal entry with his new pen. “Skull Mountain in the Spectre Range,” he wrote, enjoying the way the nib of his new pen glided over the surface of the paper.
What an appropriate appellation for a domed patch of barren rock in a forsaken landscape! Had I seen this region in the stylized shadings of a relief map, I wager the shapes of the parallel ridges in this range would take on the appearance of ribs jutting out under the wasted flesh
of an emaciated body; and Skull Mt., most naturally, would take its position above. The remnants of ancient lakes, long dry, for eye sockets, perhaps. Exposed granite faces for teeth. A roughly triangular gorge to represent the sunken remains of a nose, and the picture would
be complete. Now, I wager, we are parked somewhere on a spinal protrusion roughly halfway between the rib cage and the pelvic girdle.
Lovecraft quickly reread what he had written. These were images familiar to him-the stock of his writerly trade-but suddenly this anthropomorphized landscape, this lingering on death, seemed repulsively morbid to him. He quickly drew a large X through the paragraph and closed the journal.
Glory was smoking again, cigarette in one hand and flashlight in the other, illuminating the back fender well of the car for Howard. She stood in a tired pose, one hip thrust out, her head hanging slightly, her hair in her eyes. She seemed hardly to have the energy to hold the cigarette between her two fingers, let alone the heavy electric torch.
Howard propped the spare against the running board. He loosened the lug nuts with his long-handled lug wrench before he jacked up the back wheel to change the flat. The rear end went up with annoyingly loud clicks and shrieks of fatigued metal that resonated through the night. As he was kneeling, loosening the lug nuts one by one, then turning them by hand because it was faster, Howard was preoccupied; in the poor illumination of the flashlight beam, he didn’t notice that the flat tire was slowly swelling along the bottom.