.Smith went back into the kitchen. He rewrapped the book and took It Into his study, which was still in shade when he went there, the light gentle through the west-facing windows. He laid the bundle on his massive, mahogany desk, intending to leave, it alone, but some impulse made him want to look inside. How had this book entered Lovecraft’s mind, he thought, hefting the heavy tome in his hands and throwing back the black cloth. He said he had fabricated the whole thing, and yet some of the snippets Lovecraft had made up bore an uncanny similarity to the phrases he had managed to translate. Perhaps Lovecraft had run across this very volume or its counterpart at some time in the past and had forgotten. Perhaps his reference to the book was merely another example of the fantastic power of unconscious memory. Smith ran his fingers over the embossed cover, which always had a simultaneously dry and clammy quality to it. He sat down in his swivel chair and opened the volume to some random point in the middle and looked down at the neatly hand-printed text and the accompanying diagram, a line drawing that could have been taken from Bosch’s Hell panel in his “Garden of Delights” triptych.
Here was something that looked like an octopus with its tangle of limbs and its gruesome parrot beak, and yet this was no octopus. The appendages flowed in a chaotic pattern reminiscent of something he had once seen on a Minoan vase, and yet within that chaos there was hidden some message his brain could not quite decipher. He felt it only as a kind of obscenity. Severed human limbs around the octopus thing’s beak, torsos in its tentacles. Instead of suction cups, it had barbed hooks on its limbs, and several of these had punctured the body of a naked girl, whose mouth was obviously open in the shriek that would end her life. In the background, a pit, its great depth represented in a wash of solid black ink. Sprinkles and smears of red ink to represent blood and gore. On the recto page the text commented upon this image, and repeated several times in red, in the way Christ’s words were often highlighted in deluxe editions of the Bible, were the words CTHVLHV and FHTAGN. He could make out a few other Words, but their meaning was unclear to him.
There was a light tapping sound at his door. Smith looked up and smiled. “’Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door,” he said.
“Only this, and nothing more,” Glory finished. She was as beautiful as he’d imagined in the silk blouse and jodhpurs, both of which clung to her form as if they had been tailored for her. Her men’s cowboy boots didn’t quite match, but that added an exotic charm. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said.
“I’ll have to compliment my mother for her good taste.”
“I mean for interrupting your reading.”
“No-by all means do come in and have a seat.”
Glory walked in, her eyes lingering on the objects in the room, scanning the bookshelves for titles. She ran her finger across the spines of books as if she were rattling a stick across a white picket fence, but her attention was most keen on the group of grotesque sculptures Smith had laid out on one side of his desk. One unfinished piece, of what looked like an Easter Island head, lay on its side, an open jackknife next to it covered in white dust from the soft stone.
“This is quite a collection. I didn’t realize you did carvings.”
“Oh, I dabble in illustration and sculpture,” said Smith. “Something to idle away the time and make use of the rocks I get from my uncle’s mine.”
“You know, I never imagined you living in a place like this.”
“Oh?”
“From your writing, I imagined you living in some bleak stone mansion like Rochester’s Thomfield. Dank corridors, studies with high ceilings, sealed-off rooms.”
“Not very homey, those accommodations.”
“No,” said Glory. “I’m pleasantly surprised, actually.”
“So what do you think?” asked Smith, feeling slightly uncomfortable despite himself. “Do you know that you happen to be in the same house as the Three Musketeers of Weird Tales? Three of the finest writers of the pulp genre ever to live? I’m only being partially facetious.”
“I’ve seen the magazine, but I could never get past the lurid covers,” said Glory.
“Then how do you know my work?” He rose and poured two glasses of sherry from the decanter he had left on his desk that morning and handed one to Glory, who took it gracefully between her fingertips.
“English 300,” said Glory. “My Romantic and Lake Poets course junior year. Professor Brismann had us read Coleridge, De Quincey, and then you.”
“‘Kubla Khan,’ Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and obviously my ‘Hashish Eater’? That’s quite an honor to be placed in such fine company. I’ll have to thank your Professor Brismann.”
“She didn’t like ‘The Hashish Eater’ all that much. She called it an enjambment of Keats and Coleridge. Her point was that the tradition was getting watered down, but I disagreed. Always thought De Quincey was a windbag and Coleridge… well, I guess ‘Kubla Khan’ was his best mostly because he never finished it.”
“Or so the story goes.”
“You’re not an opium addict, are you?”
In answer to that, Smith took a gulp of sherry. “Should I be taken aback? Or should I explain the long trajectory of poetry dedicated to the idea of dreams and hallucinations? I see myself as growing out of the British influence on Americans like Hawthorne and Poe. I’ve had my sips of absinthe and laudanum, but they could never rule my life the way imagination has.”
“I envy you.” She quoted a few lines from “The Hashish Eater,” but then recalled something more immediate. “I kiss thy mouth, which has the savour and perfume of fruit made moist with spray from a magic fountain,” she recited, “in the secret paradise that we alone shall find; a paradise whence they that come shall nevermore depart, for the waters thereof are Lethe, and the fruit is the fruit of the tree of Life.”
She paused. “That’s how the world seems to me sometimes on the brighter days.”
“For me, at all times. Here’s to the milk of paradise.” He threw back the rest of his sherry, spilling a little on his collar, where it stained the fabric like lipstick. “Tell me,” he said. “How is it that you joined this party?”
Glory swirled her sherry around in her glass before taking another sip. “Bob rescued me from some ruffians, and then the two of them offered me a ride to Vegas to my sister’s place,” she began. It took a while and a few more glasses of sherry to give Smith all the details of the trip and answer his sometimes pointed questions. “And what are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” she asked when she was done. “I would have expected someone like you to be living in San Francisco or Chicago or New York.”
“This is where I belong,” said Smith. “I find the seclusion does me good, and I would never think of leaving my parents in their old age. The quiet and the physical work suit me, and it allows me to enjoy company like yours.”
“Oh, you are so shameless.”
“And you?”
“I lost my shame a long time ago,” said Glory. When she turned to give him her femme fatale look, Smith was standing behind her on her right side. All she had to do was lean her head back and open her lips to his warm, sherry-soaked kiss.
The Necronomicon still lay open on the desk.
IT WASN’T UNTIL nearly dinnertime that Howard and Lovecraft woke from their thick sleep. Each had had restless nightmares, and their rise into consciousness seemed instant and simultaneous, accompanied by an odd thumping sound like the slamming of a door. Fortunately, they recalled nothing of their dreams, their senses overwhelmed by the smell of cooking from Smith’s rustic woodstove.