“I’d rather not,” said Glory.
“They ate their two Injun guides first,” said Howard. “Started low on the totem pole, if ya know what I mean. Makes me wonder if they tasted any different since they eat different food and all.”
“One might infer that human meat tastes like pork,” Lovecraft replied thoughtfully. “This, I would gather from the similarity of diet one finds among humans and members of the porcine persuasion.” He snorted at his own sarcasm.
Glory saw the sign for Donner Pass and immediately lost patience with the men. “I don’t like what I’ve gotten myself into,” she said. “You boys had better give me a full explanation of what’s going on, or I’ll ask you to drop me off at the next town. Or at one of these campsites.”
“I wouldn’t recommend ya congregate with a buncha Oakies,” said Howard.
“And why not? They’re not making fun of your circumstances. They don’t get showered with scorpions or attacked by desert animals. Or kidnapped by strange men.”
“Sorry.”
“You boys were doing me a kindness, if I recall. Is ‘that still the case, or what?”
“HP, you tell her,” said Howard. “We owe her an explanation at least.” Howard braked momentarily to slow down for a group of ragged farmers crossing the road ahead with a deer carcass slung between two of them.
“I hardly know where to begin,” said Lovecraft.
“How about at the beginning?”
Lovecraft turned around to look at Glory. “I’m afraid the beginning may be untold millions of years in the past, so I shall begin with the present. Is that agreeable to you, Bob?”
“Yeah. We might as well tell her why we’re goin’ to see Smith.”
“Very well,” said Lovecraft. “As I have explained earlier, we are going to Auburn to visit a mutual friend, who, I believe, has obtained a translation of the Necronomicon. Each of our adventures-or misadventures-since we took you on as a passenger has been the attempt, by the forces of Cthulhu, to prevent said visit.”
“That’s not much of an explanation,” said Glory. “Visiting Clark Ashton Smith is one thing, but you think naming some ancient lost book explains all the weirdness? I feel like I must be in one of those god-awful stories you two write.”
“I assure you, the two of us have begun to feel the same way,” said Lovecraft. “And as for the ancient lost book-that explains things in a way more complicated than you would at first imagine. You see, the Necronomicon is a fiction. Or so I believed until this translation was found. And now this fictional book become real seems to be the key to explaining the other mystery, which is the true reason for this journey.”
“You said the Necronomicon,” said Glory. “That is a real book. I’ve read about it-back in college, I think. And wasn’t there even a biography or something about the insane Arab author-Abdul Alkazar or something?”
“Alhazred. The mad Arab Abdul Alhazred—it all flows from the tongue together with his unmentionable work, Al Azif It is all purely fabrication, tongue-in-cheek. Abdul Alhazred has a basis in reality, of course, but not in the way people imagine.”
“Oh?”
“I was given that name when I was five. By some relative who was taken with the fact that I had declared myself a follower of the prophet Mohammed. I had begun to gather artifacts even at that tender young age, I suppose, after reading The Arabian Nights.”
“So Al Azifwould be another joke-‘all as if’?”
“Exactly. You catch on quickly. I would have assumed you read of the book in one of Klarkash-Ton’s stories since you seem to know his poetry.”
“I never read his stories. But I’m sure I read about that book and the Arab in a reputable source. It wasn’t in some cheap magazine.”
“It all goes to show how cleverly and effectively we perpetrated our little hoax. And it certainly doesn’t speak to the intellectual credit of the stodgy old scholars who presume to know fact from fiction. They are all tantalized and seduced by the mere hint of something of which they might not know.”
Lovecraft gave Glory a brief summary of what had happened to him since he had received the Kachina doll. It was interesting for Howard to hear his friend tell the same story to someone else, because this time, even as Lovecraft emphasized the rationality of his actions, Howard found that the story seemed much less credible. If not for the series of bizarre and life-threatening things that had occurred since Lovecraft had appeared at his door, he would almost certainly have dismissed this man as an eccentric who had lost control of his imagination. Glory listened patiently-the way a doctor might hear out a madman’s tale before committing him, thought Howard-but when Lovecraft was done, she asked particular questions.
“So you think those horrid men are actually creatures from your childhood nightmares?” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to me. If these men are after you because you somehow exposed Cthulhu in your writing, what does your having the Kachina have anything to do with things? And why are they nightmares from before you even made up Cthulhu?”
It had not occurred to Howard to pursue this line of questioning himself, but he realized Glory had an excellent point. He himself had begun to accept Lovecraft’s story on the face of it-there certainly was enough to go on even on the surface-but the underlying logic was a little bit shaky.
At first Lovecraft seemed a bit put off by the cross-examination, but he, too, was patient. “It is not merely Cthulhu of whom we speak,” he said. “The list is long: Cthulhu, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub Niggurath.”
“And don’t forget Yeb and Nug,” said Howard.
“The ones with the less exotic names,” said Lovecraft. “Of course there is also Bob’s own Friedrich von Juntz and his Unaussprechlichen Kulten with the hideous Black Book and Klarkash-Ton’s Tsathoggua and The Book of Eibon.”
“But those hardly sound as real,” said Glory. “Where did you get the name for the Necronomicon?”
“It came to me in a dream,” Lovecraft replied. He added an “of course,” but by then his voice had taken on the tone of dark realization. There was a thick silence. They looked at each other, each recalling the horror and reality of their recent dreams.
“If I remember my Latin, it means something like ‘The Book of the Names of the Dead,’ ” said Glory. “I can’t help but think it’s the opposite of the book that Christ is supposed to have in His second coming, the book with the names of the saved.”
“To pose it as an unholy mockery of such a book was not my intention,” said Lovecraft. “But if it takes on that resonance, then all the more credit to my dreaming mind.” He paused. “Not that I had the sort of dreams I am wont to experience these days, thank God.”
“You haven’t answered my original question,” said Glory. “If you didn’t make up these demons until you were an adult, then what business do monsters from your childhood have in this story?”
“I have pondered that myself,” Lovecraft replied finally. “The conclusion at which I arrived after much thought is that my childhood imaginings were foreshadowings. I was a sensitive child, much isolated and taken to long bouts of vivid imagination. I am the first to admit that I do not believe in premonitions and the like, but that is the only conclusion that makes rational sense.”
“You’re forgetting another one,” said Glory.
A thin smile touched Lovecraft’s lips. “Yes. That I am mad. But then I must remind you that you and Bob are then participants in my vivid mania.”
Howard had been paying attention to the mountainous road, but he finally interjected himself. “You remember Jules Verne?” he said to Glory.
“Of course. I must have read all his books when I was a girl.”