“We don’t need to talk about that,” said Howard. “Look, what we need to figure out is what to tell Glory’s sister.”
“One or both of us shall have to write her a letter. And her purse l suppose that should be posted with it.”
“I ain’t very good at that sort of sensitive thing, HP.” Howard reached over into the backseat and brought Glory’s purse forward. He put the purse in Lovecraft’s lap. “You take it, okay? And you send it to her with a letter?”
“Don’t worry. I am soured to writing at the moment because I seem to have lost my pen in the cave, but I shall compose something. It will hardly suffice, I must say, but it will have to do.”
“Thanks.”
“It is my duty.”
“HP,” said Howard, “I got a question for you.”
“Yes?”
“Back in the cave when you shouted, ‘It’s true!’ What did you mean?”
Lovecraft was silent for a moment. “I had a realization. All my life I believed I was using my own imagination to create my weird tales, but that is not true. It was them all along-the ones I called the Night Gaunts. They were planting the images in my unconscious mind for me to discover and turn into tales to release into the world. I was part of their plan all along without an inkling of suspicion.”
“You really think so?”
Lovecraft had no answer now.
“You gonna keep on writin’?”
Lovecraft nodded, his face pinched with a half smile.
“Then I’ll be seein’ ya, HP.” Howard extended his large hand, wiping it first on the leg of his pants. “Here’s to better times, then.”
“To better times. Farewell, Bob.”
Howard got into the Chevy, started the engine, and sat for a moment just listening to the rumble. He did not want to go, and yet he did not want to stay. Something had drained him of all impetus at that moment, and he would have been content to close his eyes and sit there for some indeterminate amount of time until the will to live and move entered him once again. It was with conscious effort that he put the car in gear and glanced in the rearview mirror. Lovecraft was already hunched over his satchel, using it as a portable desk on which he was writing a note; he had opened Glory’s purse and was looking into it, taking inventory. A good final image, thought Howard, and he stepped on the gas.
EPILOGUE
Thursday, 11 June, 1936
The Howard House Cross Plains, Texas
IT WAS JUST after seven in the morning when Robert Ervin Howard left the two packets on the front porch for the mailman and went back into the house to stand at his mother’s bedside. It had been another long vigil, and his mother had not stirred from her coma the entire night. Howard had stayed awake, keeping the nurse company, then relieving her, giving her a few hours’ respite of sleep since he had long since lost the ability himself.
His mother’s wheezing breath was growing weaker-even more shallow than before, if that was possible. The fluid in her lungs had drowned most of the tissue, and she lay there looking pale and bluelipped like a child just come out of a cold spring lake. Howard wanted to speak to her again, to have her say his name or at least glimpse him through her rheumy eyes and give him a final moment of recognition before passing into the next world. He had been thinking, obsessively, over the past few sleepless days, of what he would do without her, what his life with his father would be, what it would mean to stay here, in this house, silent of her harsh breath after all these years, and face the blank pages of his work. A strange calmness had come over him during the past evening, and now that the nurse had examined her for the morning, he felt the confidence to ask his question bluntly.
“How is she, Mrs. Green? Any chance she’ll wake up again?” The nurse gave a wise and weary smile, and replied gently, “No.”
“None?”
Almost imperceptibly, the nurse shook her head.
Without a word, Howard walked to the door, and he stood there for a moment, looking back into the room at his mother breathing on the bed.
“Are you okay, Bobby?” said the nurse.
Howard nodded and walked away to his study, where he sat down at his desk and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into his battered typewriter. He sat there calmly for a while, in silence, as if he were surveying the lay of the land on the blank white page, and then he typed one line, then the next, while the air still shuddered with the sound of the carriage being shoved back for the next line.
He looked at the four lines:
There was an expression on his face now. It might have been a smile, or just some wistful look as he thought about something. He rolled the paper up a third of the way, clicking the gears of the platen, and then, when he was satisfied with the way the quatrain looked displayed there, as if it were a caption to an exhibit, he left his desk. From his cabinet, he removed the .380 Colt automatic. He checked the action, though he didn’t check the chamber, because he had loaded it the night before.
Now, gun in hand, Howard walked outside into what would be a beautiful late-spring morning. He stepped down from the porch to his Chevy and gave it a fond pat on the fender as if it were a horse that had seen him through the adventure of the past year. Casually, as if he were going for a morning drive to enjoy the air, he got into the driver’s seat, snapped the door shut, and then put the gun to his temple. He paused only a moment before squeezing the trigger.
For an instant, just before the hammer fell, then while the hammer took its quick course to the firing pin, Howard saw a veil of ocher dust pass before the car. He could see someone out there-no, two people-standing, hand in hand, silently watching him. It was Glory, her red hair billowing in the wind, and at her side the Indian boy he and Lovecraft had taken to Awonawilona. They were standing there, silently watching him through the veil of windswept dust, and they were happy. “They’re happy,” he thought. “God, I wish HP were here to see them.”
The bullet entered his head above his right ear and exited out of the left side of his skull. In the last fleeting instant of consciousness-perhaps the residue of perception-Howard saw himself driving through a storm of powdered clay dust, driving swiftly until the sky cracked with lightning and roared with rain, and when the rain touched the ‘ dust it turned thick and red, and Howard’s last thought was to wonder why the red rain fell on the inside of the windshield.
Monday, 15 March 1937
The Jane Brown Memorial Hospital
Providence, Rhode Island
Howard Phillips Lovecraft closed the battered cover of his journal and struggled, amidst his sweat-soaked sheets, to sit up in bed. He winced again, out of habit, though such an act hardly did justice to the massive agony he felt in his bowels. It had all been a mystery to the doctors, but he himself knew that: the cancer had been brought on by the proximity of the Artifact too long in his watch pocket. That spot under his vest had been the origin of the tumor, they said. How it spread so quickly into his intestines was unknown to them, and they would not have believed his explanations.
The last dose of morphine had worn off more than a day ago, but he had not reminded the nurses though the pain had become nearly unbearable. He had known for a while, even before being admitted to the hospital, that his last days were upon him. All his life, he had languished too long in the refuge of that twilight state between sleep and waking; it was time to move on.
At first he thought the morphine they gave him for the pain would grant him visions of the kind he knew the opium eaters had enjoyed, but in his own waking visions he found little of the beauty he had imagined and longed for. It was not the morphine that helped him-it was the sleep the drug permitted, and in the coils of that sleep, the dreams. He had wandered through enchanted landscapes, in gentle perfumed breezes; he had gazed up at alien constellations breathtakingly beautiful; he had sailed rivers with names like poetry and water the color of the sky. And meanwhile, his times of waking had become less and less endurable because of the specter of pain circumscribed by the dull languor of a drug-induced haze. The days and nights all boring in their gray sameness-if this was waking, then he was ready to enter that dream country of which he had written so often, and once entering, he would not return.