At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  Ken stepped up behind me. His hands were clammy on my shoulders.

  “How do you feel?” he whispered.

  “I’m afraid . . .”

  “Good,” he replied, “good.”

  I felt fingers running down to my wrists and pulling my arms wide. I said Ken’s name, and when he replied I realized he was nowhere near me. What caressed me was the network of nerves, nerves that had elongated and twisted to reveal dried faces with mouths.

  Mouths that gaped.

  And sang.

  My arms reached, and with that, the gate swung silently open. I felt my hand pressing down onto the final candle. Its flame mashed into extinction, my own nerves, glutted on one hundred fears, began to sing like manipulated lyre strings.

  They sang; bristling, vibratory songs of dread.

  They sang.

  I sang.

  These are our songs . . .

  Chapel in the Reeds

  “The gods have become our diseases.”

  —Carl Gustav Jung

  Pick them up, and then all day long you’ll have good luck.”

  When neither granddaughter heeded his advice, Colin Best took the task of collecting upon himself; jabbing the footpath with the three-pronged end of his cane until he found what he hoped was a stable patch. Once bolstered, he hunched over to rescue the pair of coins that had a moment ago caught an August sunbeam in a rare way; casting off a glimmer bright enough to tempt his eye.

  “One for each you,” he mused, grunting as he righted himself. At first Colin had thought the pieces were quarters, but once he’d plucked them from the tangle of quack grass at the trail’s edge he noted that the coins’ size and heft were nearer to that of silver dollars. He thumbed the dirt off one, hoping to reveal some of the image that had been cast on its face, but he could discern no hint of Her Majesty in profile, nor any pounded text, nor numbers. The faces of both coins were as smooth and as generic as beach stones.

  Colin extended his treasure-laden palm toward the fallen log, where his two granddaughters were stationed, each with their arms crossed.

  “I don’t want to carry mine,” Toni said.

  “Haven’t you got pockets?” he asked her. The girl shook her head. Colin shook his as well, though only to express his dismay at the younger generation’s lack of forethought. He tugged at the pocket zipper on his puffer vest and secreted the coins inside.

  “Aren’t you hot with that thing on, grandpa?” asked Sara, her impish face twisted against the sunlight.

  “I’m not young and spry like you and your sister,” Colin explained with a wink. “We geezers have to give our circulation a helping hand sometimes.”

  “That’s weird,” Sara returned. “I’m hungry.”

  “But it’s not even noon. Why don’t we hike a little ways more? That way your mother will have lunch ready when we get back to the cottage.”

  The sisters huffed and lugged themselves off the toppled tree.

  “Sara, are you still our acting navigator?”

  “Yep!”

  “Well, lead on, young lady!”

  The younger sister brought her hand to her chin and emitted a dramatic “Hmmm” before suggesting they continue along the main path.

  Colin was not able to negotiate the sloping lane as nimbly as his granddaughters. More than once he had to call ahead for them to wait up while he hobbled along, praying that his cane would not twitch out from under him, that he would not get tripped up on the carpet of half-buried rocks.

  The deeper they went, the more the oaks and ash trees mangled the midday sun into a faint stippling of light. Though the boughs managed to deflect the brightness, they were unable to block the swelter. As Colin trudged along, he felt his collar dampening with perspiration. Perhaps wearing his puffer vest had unwise after all. He opened it and the two topmost buttons of his shirt. The girls were not straying far enough ahead to cause him alarm; just enough to daunt him. He caught up to them at the crossroads where, mercifully, they had stopped.

  “We want you to pick the next way!” Sara declared. Colin scanned the forked paths that bled off the main trail; one westbound, the other east.

  He lifted his cane. “That one should wind back around to the entrance; let’s go that way. When in doubt, always head east, I say.”

  Toni asked why.

  “That’s where the light comes from,” her grandfather replied.

  The girls let Colin take the lead this time, though it was obvious to him that his increasingly sluggish pace was exasperating to them.

  As their party jerked forward, hidden cicadas added their sine to the thumping of feet and the hush of foliage being tossed by the humid wind. One by one the mosquitoes began to appear. They hovered around Colin’s ears as if solely to irk him with their buzzing before perching themselves on his sweat-slick neck to feast. He smacked a few, but never quickly enough.

  When his cane thumped down on some buried obstruction, it buckled and nearly caused Colin to spill.

  “I’m all right, I’m fine,” he called back to quell the concerned cries. “Let’s keep moving.”

  But the panic had already begun to smoulder in his stomach. It had begun to chew on him when the trail seemed to take on alien bends and all his long-trusted landmarks began a game of hide-and-seek. Colin’s fear had caught on the kindling of his bones. It strengthened and spread until nerves began to burn like tangles of dry weeds. He pulled off his glasses to sweep rivulets of sweat from his nose and brow.

  “You sure this is the right way, Grandpa?”

  Colin let out a helpless wheeze. He squinted, as though distorting his vision could somehow squeeze the terrain into somewhere familiar.

  “It’s just a little ways further,” Colin lied, “d-d-don’t you worry, Paula.”

  “Who?” the girl snapped.

  Colin waved his hand as though he were still shooing bugs. “Sara, Sara, I meant Sara. Everything’s okay. I’ve walked this path a thousand times. This is the way back to the road. I’m sure of it.”

  Whether the shadows becoming swollen and denser was due to clouds scabbing over the sun or something else entirely, Colin was not quite so sure.

  The predicament was distorting his thought. His mounting confusion was now causing him to contest his long-cherished memories of watching his Paula toddling along these trails. Those images now felt as though they’d been borrowed from another person’s life. Had he really ever seen his daughter scampering through these woods? Had he ever really been here before?

  Colin had no recollection of copses like these.

  Nor did he remember a chapel like the one he suddenly spotted in his periphery. He halted to study the structure that was squatting at the base of the glade.

  It was stout, almost gnome-like in its design. Colin would have mistaken it for a cottage had the building not borne a steeple (though the cross on its peak was broken). A small iron bell hung within the belfry. Even at a distance Colin could see the cobwebs that festooned the corroding shell, indicating just how long it had been since the bell had summoned the faithful to prayer. Five steps of bowing wood led from the chapel’s arched door to the bulrushes and reeds that bearded its base. The walls were clapboard and looked to have once been stained barn-red, but the elements had bleached the hue to a lurid pink. The roof was shingled in cheap tarpaper, much of which was split and curling, wagging at him like playful tongues of coal.

  Colin wondered how long he had been holding his breath, for when he finally did exhale the air escaped in a dry, lingering rasp that scared him.

  There was coolness down here. Not a breeze per se, but something more akin to a frigid mist, as though a glacier was somewhere in the marsh, languidly radiating frost.

  “We’re not going in there,” Colin said, first to himself, then to his granddaughters, both of whom appeared shocked, if a little bewildered, by his words. “We are not. We are going to turn around and retrace our steps.”

  “What?” Toni protested. “That’ll tak
e forever!”

  But Colin’s astern journey had already begun. “Come on, slowpokes!” he called back, striving to sound gleeful, not terrified. His determination to correct whatever wrong turns he must have made steeled him against the hopelessness that Toni and Sara were wrestling with behind him. He kept his wits sharp, noting any and all landmarks that he recalled passing on the way in. For the first few minutes he actually began to feel as though they were making real progress. The unfamiliar chapel was long behind them, making the entrance to the trails, by logical extension, that much nearer.

  His fear worsened when Colin spied another crossroads in the fore. The three possible options felt less like a choice and nearer to a physics equation; something tedious and murky and impossible to navigate.

  Sara snivelled something to him. A plea most likely. Colin gestured to the left and continued to guide them.

  “This isn’t the way back!” Toni shouted.

  “Watch your tongue, young lady.” Colin’s reprimand was limp. He wondered what had happened to the stalwart figure he prided himself as being; the kind of man who could unfailingly strike a fine balance between inoculating the next generation to the rigors of life while simultaneously instilling in them a sense of wonder about the world.

  The woods became a knitted mess again, especially after the path that Colin had been so sure of wound them up in an impossible way.

  When he spotted the pinkish clapboards and the gently trembling reeds, Colin said “No.”

  “Oh my God! There’s that swamp again. I knew we got turned around back there. I told you we were going the wrong way!”

  Somehow they had circled the marsh completely, for they were now standing at the rear of the chapel. A plain wooden door was the only disruption to the uniform rows of old boards. This time they were much closer to the building. Colin wondered if he’d ever see home again.

  “That’s it, I’m going to find help!” Toni announced. Before Colin could even react, his eldest granddaughter was marching forward. He could hear her sloshing through the sludge.

  She craned her head back and screamed, “Hello! Is anyone out here? Help us! We’re lost!”

  As sparrows took startled flight from their hidden perches, a feeling of abstract menace seized Colin.

  “Wait!” he cried. “Toni, I said wait! Stop!”

  He went barrelling after her, oblivious to the fact that he had dropped his cane. Toni seemed to be edging more toward a footpath they had not yet taken, avoiding the chapel altogether for some reason, but Colin, still plagued by an inexplicable dread over seeing his granddaughter enter that church, lunged forward.

  Her bicep felt brittle in his fist. When he caught sight of Toni’s expression he realized just how overwrought his reaction must have seemed. Nevertheless, he was confident that keeping his granddaughter away from the gnomish building was genuinely prudent.

  “Go back on that path there,” Colin said, “and keep an eye on your sister. I doubt there’s anyone around, but I’ll go look for help, okay? Let me do it.”

  She turned on her heel and stomped back up the path, muttering something Colin could not discern but knew he did not like.

  That the church’s back door had been left unlocked was a fact that didn’t truly register with Colin until after he’d pulled it ajar and found himself standing within a room only nominally larger than a closet. His repeated attempts at holding the flimsy door open would have been amusing had Colin not felt so ill at ease. Desperate to admit as much daylight as possible, he braced the door with one hand while groping the gloom for anything that could serve as a doorstop. The unsanded walls held much grit in their grooves.

  When Colin’s hand met with garments hanging in a row, he concluded that this must be the vestry room. But the shapeless robes were not made of fabric. They were rubbery to the touch, like garments of leather, or perhaps only something like leather. Colin snapped his hand back.

  On the opposite side of the jamb there stood a small bookcase, and Colin tugged one of its volumes free. He hoped he would be forgiven for any potential sacrilege when he began to wedge the book with its faux-leather binding in between the door and its jamb.

  His ingress into the vestry was swift, not from fearlessness, but because of a childlike sense of being somewhere forbidden, of doing something taboo. It was distressing enough to cause the old man to grope frantically at the vestry’s far wall until he found the inner door.

  The nave was so stout, so stunted, that the whole temple bordered on the farcical. Colin stepped through the doorway, grateful for the influx of daylight, however dreary and thin, from the propped back door.

  There were no windows on either side of the nave, nor up at the chancel, whose shape was merely suggested in the vaulted shadows at the far end of the hall.

  Colin took another step out of the vestry. The floor was spongy under his boots. The moisture from the marsh below had warped and weakened the floorboards to such a degree that Colin was afraid to walk any further, envisioning the mouldy floor rending beneath him, like ice on a springtime lake. He stayed put.

  That the chapel was bereft of people had been obvious to Colin before he’d even witnessed its musty, unkempt main room. He had only entered to satisfy Toni’s desire for help, but also perhaps to clear his head. He had been secretly clinging to a wish that there was someone here—a minister, a caretaker, anyone who could lead his party back to safety.

  Colin called out, “Hello?”

  The way his voice thundered through the hushed hall chilled him. He felt like a ravenous giant bellowing a “Fee-foo-fum!,” shaking settled dust, scaring the inhabitants of some sleeping village. Up until Colin made this futile disruption, the only noises had been his blood rushing in his ears and the soft arhythmic pulse of the foul water dripping from the hem of his trousers.

  Colin glanced to his feet in embarrassment when he noted the small puddle of marsh water had collected beneath him. The liquid managed to lift the dust, making the image on the floor darker and more distinct. He hunched over to get a better look at the soaked area.

  When the rinsed image actually registered with Colin, a gust of burning shame rushed through him.

  It was a woman’s naked midriff. Her shapely legs were parted wide. The lacquered nails of her fingers parted her labia further still.

  Colin was ashamed. What kind of man was he, imagining that he was actually seeing visions like this in a church, a church?

  A sudden crash of wood-on-wood caused Colin to shout.

  The Bible had failed him. The back door had slammed shut, leaving him in the ugly dark.

  His hands were fluttery from shock, which made trying to free the keychain from his belt loop a protracted struggle. At last Colin unhooked the keychain and switched on the LED pen light it held. Beverly had given this to him for Christmas, her very last Christmas in fact.

  He sighed when the dazzling bluish beam pierced the black that had been suffocating him.

  Colin’s first instinct was to better illuminate the picture at his feet. He presumed that his imagination, which was evidently more sullied than he would have liked to believe, had interpreted a water stain as something impossibly lurid.

  Whatever self-hatred Colin had been housing faded when the light beam brought the photograph into sharp view. Its subject was irrefutable.

  More galling than this was the discovery of two more smutty images, which had been placed alongside the first. He gently kicked at the pictures with the toe of his boot, but they did not shift. These leaves from some pornographic magazine appeared to have been pasted to the chapel’s floor.

  And to its walls.

  And over all its pews, which had been tilted up against the far wall like a row of half-toppled dominoes.

  Each twitch of Colin’s light beam introduced images of such wanton, such animal abandon that he could almost feel his divine soul shrivelling like a salted slug.

  Everywhere there were curves and redness and bodies fused in positions th
at were almost insect-like. The pictures were all creased and viscid from moisture, but Colin could still discern women with men, women with women, men with men. Tacked scattershot amidst the magazine pages were a few Polaroid photographs. Colin advanced cautiously toward one pew, squinting to confirm that the man in one of the photographs was indeed wearing what looked to be vestments of battered leather.

  He wondered if the pitched ceiling had been defaced in a similar manner, a red-light-district twisting of the Sistine, but did not bother to confirm his suspicions.

  His light, and, briefly, his heart, halted at the sight of a hand reaching out at him from the back corner of the hall.

  Colin opened his mouth to shriek, certain that what was grasping for him was a cadaver.

  But then he saw the sacred wound in the palm.

  He hated the fact that his mind was so soaked with lasciviousness that it had smeared the sacramental blood and the nail into something phallic.

  The effigy of crucifixion had been left propped in one corner, relegated there like an unseasonal decoration. The ropy arms and red-weeping torso were greyed with dust, making the figure’s skin livid. The loincloth, grubby though it was, appeared to be made of real linen. Colin was grateful to see at least one figure inside the place that was chastely swaddled. The body was carved wood. Moths, aroused by Colin’s light, leapt from the grooves of the figure’s emaciated ribs. Colin traced the finger of light up along the chest, only to discover that the statue’s head was missing.

  The crucified form was capped in a great keen splinter—the only remnant of a head that likely bore a crown of thorns and an expression of tortured acquiescence, of ultimate acceptance. It appeared as though the head had been snapped off, bashed from the body in an act of concentrated fury. Bottle flies buzzed manically around the half-neck of jagged wood.

  It was all too much: the confusion, the alien church with its cumulative desecrations. Colin careened backward, whipping the light about until by some fluke he found the vestry door.