The Altar

by James Arthur Anderson

  “So be it,” the presence said in his mind, almost regretfully. “Then we will meet in hell.”

  He did not realize how prophetic that statement would be at the time.

  Dovecrest couldn’t bring the cat back to life, but he couldn’t leave it on the altar either. He’d best return the body to the owners and fabricate some explanation. He certainly didn’t want them out there searching for their pet, and he knew that was exactly what would happen if the cat didn’t return home soon.

  Slowly, he trudged back to his house. The body of the cat stained his shirt and the laughter of the unseen presence slowly faded away in his brain.

  — 3-

  The Patriot Plaza was just up the road a half mile or so from Erik’s house where Farmington Road joined Route 102. He stopped several times along the way to post his “Lost Cat” posters to utility poles, and to stuff them into rural mailboxes. Then he pulled into the plaza, parking in front of Dockside Cleaners, his first stop.

  The brand new plaza was cut from the forest like a frontier fort, and contained four small stores, each with large front windows. Just behind the plaza on the Farmington Road, he noticed a small cemetery, also cut out of the forest, with what appeared to be a brand new sign: Rhode Island Historical Cemetery #6613, Cheponaug.

  He looked at the cemetery for a moment, then went into the dry cleaners where he hung up a poster. His next stop was the pizza shop. He decided to save the convenience store for last, since he needed a gallon of milk, so he went into Annie’s Antiques store next.

  The antique store looked out of place in the new plaza. A bell rigged to the door signaled his entrance. An old woman nodded to him from a rocking chair behind the counter as he quickly surveyed the assortment of collectibles that included everything from Victorian furniture to what claimed to be authentic Indian arrowheads.

  “Can I help you?” the woman asked?

  He looked around quickly and decided that he might like to browse around in the shop some day when he had more time. A large bookcase filled with old volumes caught his eye, and he wondered what treasures might be hidden there.

  “Ah…yes,” he said, still looking around the shop. “Could I please hang this poster in your window? I’m new in the area and our cat is missing.”

  The old woman got out of the rocking chair and hobbled over, leaning on a cane that looked even older than she was.

  “You’re welcome to hang it,” she said. “But I suspect more people would see it in the Dairy Mart next door.”

  “Thank you,” he said and taped it to the window. “I’d planned on hanging one there, too.”

  “Of course, I don’t expect it’ll do much good.”

  He looked at her curiously.

  “Why not?”

  She sighed. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone’s pet has disappeared into these woods. Strange things a-goin’ on. Ever since that guy got run over by his bulldozer about a year or so ago.”

  “What?” Erik was beginning to think this old woman was senile.

  She laughed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to spook you none. I’m just an old lady with too many memories and too many stories to tell. Name’s Annie Jacques.”

  “Erik Hunter,” he said, and shook her hand. It was cold, frail, and bony, but it radiated friendliness.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Hunter.”

  “You live in the area?”

  “Bout a mile up the road on route 102.”

  He nodded. “So, tell me this bulldozer story.”

  “Happened a little over a year ago,” she said. “Last summer. When they was putting this road through. Farmington Road didn’t exist last summer, you know.”

  “That’s what the real estate guy said.”

  “Anyway, they was clearing the wood and the dozer ran into something. The driver got out to see what it was. Then, somehow, the dozer ran right over him. Squashed him like a pizza.”

  “He must have left it in gear.”

  Annie shrugged. “I don’t know. But the darndest thing-the dozer’d hit a headstone-one of the ones just beyond the plaza,” she said, pointing in the direction of the historical cemetery. “There was a whole graveyard buried there in the woods and nobody even knew about it.”

  “Hmm,” Erik said. “That’s interesting. How old is it?”

  “Dates back to the 1700’s. Roger Williams’ time. The road was supposed to go right through here. But they had to change it because that was a historical site.”

  “I didn’t know this area was settled that long ago.”

  She nodded. “No one did, I think. Or at least no one wanted to remember.”

  He frowned. This woman was definitely strange.

  “But the darndest thing about the graves isn’t how old they are,” she continued.

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s the headstones themselves. One’s made out of real weird stone. One of them professors from the University was here studying it and he said it’s made out of a meteorite. A stone from outer space.”

  “That is interesting. A headstone made from a meteorite. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “It’s weird. But it ain’t the only weird thing.”

  “What else is there?”

  “The headstones. They all have strange markings. And some have weird sayings on them, too.”

  “Epitaphs,” Erik said. “Some of those old headstones have strange ones.”

  “And there were shells and Indian things all around the cemetery, too. The professors think the people in the graves might have been killed by the Indians.”

  “That’s quite a story.”

  She nodded again. “And the Indians surrounded the place with charms and things, quahog shells and other unusual things. The bulldozer disturbed a lot of it when it ran into the stone. See, I have a few here.”

  She went behind the counter and brought out a necklace of polished shells, streaked with blue-violet and white. It had a striking resemblance to the charm Dovecrest had given them, the one Vickie had hung on their back door.

  “Course the string was all rotted away,” she explained. “But the shells were like new.”

  “Interesting,” Erik said. “How did you wind up with it?”

  “I own the land,” she said. “Course I can’t use half of it because it’s a historical landmark. But I did pick up a few things that the professors and the historical guys missed.”

  “You’ve lived in the area for a long time?”

  “Lived in this town all my life and I’ll be 86 next month. When the road went in I built the plaza and opened my store. The store don’t make no money, mind you, but the other tenants pay the bills and it gives me something to do. The Dairy Mart does quite a business. And the pizza place, too. That’s where I’d hang my posters if I were you. ‘Course, like I said, I don’t suspect they’ll do much good.”

  “So you say strange things have been happening ever since they found the graves?”

  “That’s right. Pets disappearing. People hearing voices. Weird noises in the middle of the night.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “There’s a curse upon this place,” she said in a firm voice. “And the dozer done disturbed those graves and woke up the curse.”

  Erik laughed nervously but she cut him off immediately.

  “Don’t you laugh until you know what you’re laughing at, young man,” she said. “You just go look at the graves for yourself before you make fun of an old woman, and then you tell me if you don’t feel the hairs rise up on the back of your neck. You just go look, and then you tell me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Erik said. “I didn’t know if you were being serious or just joking with me.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  Erik nodded. “Thanks for letting me hang the poster, ma’am. And when I get a chance I will look at those graves.”

  “If I see your pet, I’ll be sure and let you know, Mr. Hunter. Maybe she just wandered off.”

&n
bsp; “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  The bell rang quietly as he closed the door behind him.

  4

  Melissa Jones frowned as the man hung the poster of the cat on the window of the Dairy Mart. He’d told her mother that the cat was lost, and that made her feel bad. She’d had a puppy once and it had run out into the road and had been hit by a dump truck. That was when she was just a little girl, but she still grieved.

  But that seemed like such a long time ago. Since then her parents had divorced and she’d been living with her Dad in Miami for the last two years. But she’d fallen for a boy in her class and her Dad had sent her back to New England as punishment. Now she’d be staying with Mom in the store. She was afraid it was going to be a long summer. There weren’t any kids her age in this hick town, let alone cute boys.

  It wasn’t even lunch time yet and she was already bored. She watched the man with the lost cat take a jug of milk out of the cooler. She felt bad about his cat. It looked really cute in the picture, like it was the kind that purred when you pet it. Maybe she could help and find the cat. That would be good. Anything would be better than staying here and waiting on customers.

  “Mom, can I go outside? Maybe I can look for the man’s cat.”

  “I don’t think so,” her mother said from her seat behind the cash register.

  “But I’m bored. And it’s a nice, sunny day outside.”

  “I’d rather you stayed here with me.”

  “Can’t I just go for a walk?”

  “Maybe later,” he mother said.

  Melissa knew what that meant. It meant it was going to be a long, boring summer spent inside the boring store and watching people buy bread and milk and ice. All of her friends in Miami would be outside now at the beach, or swimming in the pool.

  “It’s not fair,” she mumbled as she watched the man with the lost cat pay for his bread and milk.

  His eyes locked with hers for a moment, and, although he tried to smile, she saw that he looked scared, almost like the way her Mom had looked when her Dad had first left. She didn’t like it when adults looked scared.

  “That man must really miss his cat,” she said quietly after he had left.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  But she really would like to help the man find his lost cat. Maybe she’d get a reward. Or at least she’d get to pet the cat. She looked over at her mother and yawned. All the while, the gearbox of her mind was hard at work.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1

  Erik had lost just about all hope of finding Faith when he pulled back into his driveway. He’d left his computer-generated poster everywhere he could think of and, as expected, no one had seen any sign of his cat. He really didn’t think the posters would do any good, but he felt like he should do something. And hanging the posters did keep his mind off of his real fears.

  He supposed that Faith had wandered off into the woods in search of mice or birds-and after that, he didn’t want to think of what might have happened. The cat could still be out there, of course. But he didn’t believe that, not for a minute. Most likely, Faith had run into trouble of some sort. It had either become hopelessly lost-after all, she was a city cat-or had fallen victim to a larger predator in the woods. She might have been hit by a car, but he had been keeping an eye out on the side of the road in both directions, and hadn’t seen a dead cat. Or, the other possibility-that some weird cult had gotten hold of her. It was just too unsettling to even consider.

  He supposed he’d have to go and find Dovecrest and ask the man to go with him to search for the cat. He couldn’t very well go off into the woods again on his own. The idea chilled him to the bone, even now, in the noontime heat of a summer day. That wasn’t to say that Dovecrest didn’t unnerve him nearly as much. But at least the Indian was a known quantity, while the woods were totally alien. The whole thing was probably a product of his own imagination. He had gotten after Todd for letting his imagination run wild, and now he, a grown man, was doing the same thing.

  Slowly, he stepped out of the car, stalling for as long as he could as he walked towards the house. He wasn’t looking forward to coming back home without any news about the cat. Todd and Vickie probably expected him to have found Faith at the plaza, or wandering by the side of the road, and he knew his returning without her would be disappointing.

  Moving into the new house had not gone according to plan, he realized. First the incident with Todd, and now the cat. There were plenty of things to be unnerved about, as well. The radio talk show host and his story about the devil worshipper. Dovecrest. Then the lady at the antique store and her story about the graveyard. She had upset him more than he cared to admit.

  He would explore that graveyard for himself as soon as he had the chance, and follow up by doing a bit of research of his own. Finding out the real story would put an end to the wild speculations that were whirling about in his mind-speculations that weren’t doing him any good right now. Right now, he had an ominous feeling about that graveyard, without having even seen it. He could almost feel something wrong, now that he knew it was there across from the plaza.

  “I’ve been watching too many horror movies,” he mumbled.

  Suddenly, a voice called his name, startling him and embarrassing him at the same time.

  It was Dovecrest, who had appeared out of nowhere. Erik flushed, wondering if he had heard him talking to himself.

  “Sorry to startle you, Mr. Hunter,” the Indian said.

  “No…it’s nothing. You just sort of surprised me, that’s all.”

  Dovecrest shrugged and Erik almost imagined that the man was telling him he had every reason to be frightened.

  “I saw the posters about your missing cat. I think I might have found her.”

  “Oh, thank God. My son’s been….”

  But he could tell from Dovecrest’s expression that something wasn’t right.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Dovecrest winced like a doctor about to deliver bad news to a patient, and Erik immediately knew that Faith was dead.

  “I think it’s your pet. You’ll have to check it out for yourself. It is difficult for me to tell.”

  “What happened?”

  Dovecrest shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, and Erik knew he wasn’t telling the truth. “It looked like an animal got ahold of her. Maybe a fox. Sometimes a wolf or even a bear wanders into these woods.”

  He held out his hand in a gesture of helplessness.

  “Like I said the other night, these woods are dangerous. It might seem like you’re just a few minutes away from the city, but it’s a whole different world out there. Your little boy was lucky. Your cat wasn’t.”

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  He had no doubt now that the cat was his and he just wanted to get this over with now.

  “I’ve got her at my place. I didn’t want your boy to see.”

  Erik nodded. “Then let’s go.”

  It only took a couple of minutes to walk to Dovecrest’s place, a small log cabin that had existed long before the new road connected it to the rest of civilization. It was probably four rooms, Erik guessed, and a still-standing outhouse suggested that the place had only recently been connected to indoor plumbing, probably when the road was cut through.

  The house looked out of place in the neighborhood of green manicured lawns. It stood right in the middle of a wooded area, as if it had been built within the forest. Then Erik realized that this house had stood here long before this new suburbia had intruded into these parts. The place had no driveway; and Dovecrest didn’t seem to need an automobile. Erik guessed that, until the new road and the plaza, the man must have lived out here by himself, a hermit living off the land of the reservation.

  Dovecrest led him around to the back of the house to where a modern oak picnic table stood like an anachronism beside this frontier cabin, breaking the illusion that they had traveled back in time to th
e 1700s. Dovecrest further broke the illusion by opening a green plastic garbage bag and peeling it back to show its grisly contents.

  “I found her in the woods,” Dovecrest explained.

  It was Faith all right. Erik knew immediately when he saw the red collar around the cat’s twisted neck. His stomach churned as he looked at what remained of his pet. The head and neck had been bent backwards at an impossible angle and the animal’s chest and belly had been opened up like that of a specimen in a sadistic lab experiment. Organs and entrails spilled out like spaghetti and the cat’s eyes remained open-even in death the cat seemed to silently scream of unspeakable horror.

  “It’s her,” Erik said. “God help me. How am I going to explain this to my kid?”

  Dovecrest shrugged. “I would suggest you just bury her as quickly as you can and say a fox caught her.”

  Erik shook his head sadly. It was just a cat, but he felt like crying. Faith had been part of their family.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I can’t let him see her like that. It’s not right. How’d…her neck get twisted like that?”

  “That’s how a fox makes its kill. It goes for the throat and breaks its prey’s neck. At least it’s a quick death.”

  Erik nodded and wrapped the remains back up.

  Only later, after he had buried the cat in the corner of the back yard did he stop to wonder why whatever had killed Faith hadn’t bothered to eat its prey. But by then, Dovecrest was already gone.

  2

  Todd watched from his bedroom window as his father placed the plastic trash bag in the hole and covered it over with the freshly dug dirt. Todd knew he should cry about this. He’d cried over things that were far less important and much less sad. Like the time his Little League team had lost its first game. And the time his cousin had ripped one of his baseball cards by accident.

  But when he thought about Faith being gone, the tears just wouldn’t come, even though he wanted them to. He felt sad, all right. Terribly sad and lonely and let down, as if a part of him had been torn out and thrown into that garbage bag to be buried with his cat. Yes, there was an emptiness like he had never felt before since this was his first experience with death.