At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  “The Watcher offered to teach this man some very special things, which he did. The man learned how to cross the wall of sleep, and how to speak to the dead souls in all the ruined cities that are buried somewhere out there.

  “So things were going good—depending on your definition of good—for this man. But then the Watcher told him that their relationship was give and take. Since the man had been given a taste of the otherworldly, the Watcher wanted to get a better foothold in the worldly.

  “He’d developed an interest in changing us humans, you see. An interest in giving us powers we weren’t meant to have. So the Watcher instructed his devotee to bring women to the cave for the purposes of . . . well, procreation. The Watcher wanted to create a species that looked human, but had monstrous souls. This race would have the best of both worlds; souls that could roam the stars and bodies that allowed the Watcher the use of opposable thumbs, taste-buds, emotions.

  “The student obeyed and brought the Watcher women, probably against their will. In time a little colony of these half-human, half-Watcher beings began to grow within the mountain cave.

  “Well, eventually the other Watchers got nervous about not hearing from their brother, and they decided to check in on this corner of the world. When they saw what was happening they immediately reported it to the Creator. He was so outraged that he cleaved off part of the world and filled the divide with water. He banished the fallen Watcher to his cave and cut off his followers from the rest of the world. He then transformed them into ghouls, hideous things.

  “From that night on the Creator said that this cliff we’re standing on would be the actual end of this world, and that mountain over there would be known as The Abject, the Hell where all the blasphemers were imprisoned. He vowed not to destroy this planet, not because he cared about humanity, but because he wanted to eternally punish The Abject.”

  “That’s quite the fairytale,” Tad said.

  Charlie chortled. “It’s just an old spook story, Tad, nothing to get nervous about. Now, who wants another drink?”

  By then Earth’s End had begun slipping into the gloaming. The group laid out blankets upon the cold, puddle-laden rock. Wine bottles were uncorked, steak sandwiches and brie and apples were served and gobbled.

  In the sky just beyond the needle-like pinnacle of The Abject, the sky was studded with the first eager stars.

  7

  A few weeks before she’d received Douglas’s invitation, Petra had gone with Tad for a late lunch at an English-style pub on Hope Street. She had stopped the waitress immediately after Tad had ordered them two rye-and-gingers, their customary drink. As the waitress had been leaving their table, Petra had gently gripped the woman’s elbow and requested that the bartender hold the rye from hers.

  With that, Tad had looked at her and he’d known. He’d known. For a long spell he’d merely stared at her, not saying anything. When he did finally speak, his choice of words (“We can correct this”) had motivated Petra to spring to her feet and hurl her drink in his face. It was the first time she’d ever done such a thing, the first time she’d even seen such a thing done, save for the movies.

  She’d stormed out of the restaurant, into the bustling crowd on the sidewalk.

  And all at once Petra had felt the world disintegrate. Providence had paled to an indistinct grey haze. Everything slowed to a crawl. The people that milled about her all sounded as though they were speaking behind glass.

  Things stayed that way for some time. Somehow, while in that cumulus state, Petra must have reconciled with Tad, must have considered what he’d had to say about the situation.

  Somehow she must have consented to have the issue “corrected.”

  The problem was fresh enough that the remedial action was but a day procedure. When it was over, Tad had come bearing white orchids. Petra had slept a lot and tried not to think about the fact that her longstanding desire to carve a niche for herself, to create someone who was like her in some way, had been eradicated.

  The nightmares returned almost immediately afterward, with unmatched relentlessness and ruthlessness. In this new batch, the stairs that Petra tried frantically to run down would dissolve like soaked sugar, and her father’s following cries were no longer in English (“N’gai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y’hah . . .”).

  In her most recent nightmares, Petra’s father found her.

  Nightly she would feel herself being clutched, choked. But not by human hands.

  8

  How effective the children’s telescope would be at discerning constellations Petra had yet to learn, but she’d discovered that it did serve as a very effective spyglass for studying the mountain of forbidden things. The encroaching nightfall smudged a great many of the mountain’s finer details, but as she stood panning the telescopic lens up and around The Abject, Petra was able to see great cragged rocks that were bearded with sun-bleached weeds. Some of the mountain’s indentations held stagnant rainwater, like natural libation-bearers. With its barrenness and its isolated locale, The Abject might as well have been an alien planet.

  When she panned upward and discovered the great cave entrance, Petra almost gasped. It was a granite hole that held the ugliest blackness. She truly was terrible at measuring things, yet she still had the undeniable impression of the cave’s vastness. She could almost understand why people decorated a place like this with a legend of fallen Watchers and barbarous cults. Almost.

  “I recommend using one of these for the actual eclipse,” Charlie called.

  Petra lowered the eyepiece and turned in Charlie’s direction. He was seated on the cooler, struggling to assemble a small cardboard contraption.

  “These things are designed for eclipses. I gather they’re safer.”

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Tad rebutted. He was reclined beneath a poplar at the forest’s edge, his mind and his thumbs enthralled with his Blackberry’s Sudoku program. “Solar eclipses are the only dangerous kind.”

  “Well, better safe than sorry, right?” Douglas said. Petra recognized it as yet another expression of his peacekeeping nature. It was a quality she’d always admired about him, loved about him in fact.

  Petra accepted the plastic cup of white wine Douglas offered her.

  “Should be soon,” she said.

  “Yes. Oh, hey, if you walk a bit this way you can get a really good view of the tree line.” Once they were out of earshot, Douglas said to her, “Okay, now tell me everything.”

  Petra’s response (“What do you mean?”) was so insincere an attempt to sound bewildered that even she didn’t buy it. She looked at Douglas and saw him looking at her, the way he used to, the way he always had, the way Tad never did. She pressed a hand to her mouth and began to sob.

  “I’m sorry,” she gasped. She leaned against Douglas and repeated, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do this. I’m ruining the whole night.”

  “To hell with the night,” Douglas replied as he gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze. “Talk to me.”

  “I would if I could. But I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know where to begin.”

  “So start at the middle.”

  “I’m lonely,” she blurted. The words sounded odd as she spoke them, almost like a fib she was feeding Douglas to stave off his prying. She hadn’t thought of herself as feeling lonely. She lived with Tad, after all. But somehow this pair of words also felt true; a simple summation of her innermost workings.

  “I could tell.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him about all the rest; about the abortion and the sickening hollow feeling she’d had in her heart ever since, about her occasional desire to check out of the world, about the unbearably horrific dreams. There was so very much to tell.

  “Hey, you two!” Charlie shouted. “It’s almost time!”

  Petra craned her head upward to see a lightless disc slipping over the moon.

  9

  The blackness sleeved the moon at
a pace so gradual it was almost unbearable, or so it seemed to Petra, like watching a crab crossing a white desert. She and her three companions stood on Earth’s End, watching the umbra claim the lunar light.

  She momentarily allowed her eyes to drop to where The Abject was, or had been before the masking had camouflaged it utterly. She raised her flashlight, strangely bemused by the feebleness of its beam. The light was but a skeletal finger poking into the great gulf of space. It scarcely seemed to reach beyond the cliff’s edge before being smothered completely.

  As the eclipse reached its zenith, Petra silently marvelled at just how richly varied the Night could be, how the dark could splay and flaunt itself in so very many textures and shades. She wondered if it was always this way, or if tonight’s rare celestial contingency caused these rare visions. Either way, she could not help but be awed by the sights. And the sounds.

  Upon first hearing it, Petra dismissed the noise as merely a forest sound distorted by distance and echo. Perhaps it was a drunken holler let out by Charlie or Douglas, both of whom were brandishing empty wine bottles like clubs. The sound certainly hadn’t come from Tad, for he was, as a quick pan of the flashlight revealed, too busy exhibiting his boredom.

  As the noise persisted, Petra realized that her assumptions about animals or her companions had been foolish, for the faint wail was clearly coming from somewhere in the blackness before her.

  Her repeated attempts to find the source of the sound were as futile as her first, but now Petra was frightened, panicked. Somewhere in the night, with its buried moon and its dead stars that were unable to pierce the heavy fleece of clouds, an infant was screaming. It was the thinnest possible sound, but was unmistakably the cry of a babe lost in some unreachable nook of the night. Petra felt heartsick. The mewling was so forlorn. It was the howl of something unwanted, something abject.

  She only became aware that she had stepped off the cliff’s edge after she’d glanced down and saw nothing but blackness beneath her feet. Perhaps she was dreaming, or was already dead. But if this was annihilation, it was exhilarating. Petra felt unbounded, as open as the night itself.

  Petra began to walk and the shadows felt downy beneath her, as soft as thunderheads. Perhaps she was projecting, but Petra felt that every step seemed to calm the unseen infant. She walked on, across a bridge that was formed in darkness and of darkness.

  She wondered what the poor babe might look like after being flung from the end of the world. Her mind conjured the image of a bat-wing bassinet set beside a fire that wept Hell-glow and smoke.

  Petra could not even hear the cries of her companions behind her, so complete was her enchantment.

  She looked up and she Saw.

  10

  Tad had kept his intentions of returning to British Columbia to himself. He had no friends to share these plans with of course, but even when he booked off the last week of August he told his supervisor it was to catch up on some renovations around the house; a plausible excuse as his home had fallen into disrepair since Petra’s demise. Tad had never realized how warm and full the house had felt when they had shared it. But now it was cold and dirty and hollow, like an old warehouse, like an excavated tomb.

  The weather during the flight was pacific, as though nature was speeding him along to face that which he’d previously been unwilling to face.

  He spent the first night holed up in a motel, trying not to think about the close proximity of Earth’s End, of The Abject, of Petra’s watery grave.

  The following morning was dull and dim and rainy. Tad partially hoped that his rental car would skid out on the mountain road. He was actually nourished by morbid visions of himself being impaled on a tree. But, after several wrong turns, he ultimately arrived at the neglected entrance to The Crawlspace. He’d been dreading the possibility of finding Douglas’s jeep parked along the side of the road. Perhaps he and Charlie had thought of marking the tragic anniversary in the same manner. But the area was as vacant as it had been last summer, perhaps the way it had always been.

  It was late afternoon, but the sky was so heaped with grey that it felt like evening. Tad remained slumped behind the wheel, watching the raindrops splatter on the windshield. At last he reached over and dragged the .38 from the glove compartment. Tucking it into the front of his jeans, he exited the car and disobeyed the NO TRESPASSING sign for the second time in his life.

  The Crawlspace went past in a green blur. Every so often Tad thought he saw Petra just ahead of him, racing once more toward her death under an eclipsed moon.

  The ocean roared and crashed in great tumults at the base of Earth’s End. The atmosphere was hazed with mist. The Abject was little more than an onyx pin swathed in fog.

  Tad’s gaze went downward, his mind raced backward.

  He hadn’t wanted to relive the night, and certainly not with such vivid, lacerating clarity, but the interred memories began to claw their way back to the surface.

  Tad imagined himself as once again standing under the occulted moon. The white wine and beer had made him feel that the cliff he stood upon was on a pitch, for he swayed to and fro, listening to the two queers yammering and tittering like schoolgirls. Petra was standing aloof, shining her flashlight ahead of her, into the darkness. She’d been leaning forward, had been shielding her eyes with her hand as if this action would somehow enable her to see.

  What had she seen?

  The question had been gnawing at Tad for a full year. On those rare nights where he was able to snatch some REM sleep, that image would bloom in the grey haze of sleep, wrenching him into a panting, twitchy wakefulness. He would see Petra taking that lone fatal step over the edge, would see her being instantly subsumed by the night.

  Had he been the one who’d inspired Petra to jump? What had driven her to drop so casually, so easily?

  Tad pulled the revolver from under his belt and examined it. He began to sob. It was the first time he had cried over Petra.

  He’d been downright stoic through the long investigation that came once that rare darkness ebbed and the moon returned, and later the sun. He had stood wrapped in a fibrous grey blanket that one of the emergency workers had given him. Douglas had been given a sedative to calm him. Charlie had wept and snivelled while he’d insisted over and over that he’d had no clue as to how Petra had fallen.

  The boats had bobbed across the ocean for three full days afterwards. They’d dragged the same area again and again but turned up nothing. Tad had been warned that the chances of recovering Petra’s body in these waters were slim.

  11

  Perhaps there was some corner of Tad’s soul that was sanctimonious after all, for despite many repeated attempts at placing the .38’s nub against his temple, he was unable to squeeze the trigger. So he remained seated, his legs dangling over the edge of Earth’s End, his body shivering from the cold shower that continued to fall upon him. He looked out at The Abject, and in a weird way he felt it was he who was being looked at, watched.

  The rain eventually lightened, but by then the sky had grown dark.

  “Petra . . .”

  He spoke her name quietly, almost sibilantly. He was exhausted in every sense of the word, too drained to speak in anything above a whimper.

  It must have been this destroyed state of mind that caused the optical illusion of the fog swirling into a great funnel; the chute that afforded Tad a clear view of The Abject.

  There was a fire in the great cave, or so it looked to Tad. He scrabbled back from the ledge and rose to his feet. He could see plump sparks of light glowing like flung embers against the ancient dark. These flint-sparks enabled Tad to see that the rim of the cave was eroding, quickly. Its stone edges were peeling back to reveal . . .

  Teeth.

  And then the cave was no longer a cave, but a crooked grin.

  The face that pulled up and out of the rock was immense, with a glacier-pale complexion and eyes like stagnant tarns.

  Tad’s vision blurred, wavered. The cliff fe
lt like pudding beneath him. He glared dumbly as The Abject sprouted an arm, another. And as the vast thing shook off the crust of its deosil hibernation, it fanned its limitless wings, hiding the cloudy sky behind a veil of black plumage and dangling tufts of rot. Each heave of the thing’s scaly chest choked the air with stench and embers.

  Its howl shook Earth’s End and dropped Tad to his knees.

  The Watcher turned its dead gaze to the cliff. It reached, as though it could grasp the escarpment with ease. Tad’s mouth worked frantically, forming silent pleas.

  ‘She saw this . . .’

  And then Tad saw Petra.

  She was walking on night air, or so Tad thought until he looked down and discovered that the hideous thing from within the rock had stretched one of its wings across the water, forging a bridge between its Outer realm and the world of man. There were other figures perched on various ridges of The Abject, human in size if not altogether in shape; just as The Abject itself had been mountainous in scope, but not in composition.

  Petra, looking feral, black-stained, yet regal in her madness, treaded upon the feathery arch. Most of her body looked positively ossified, save for the belly, which was swollen with fledgling life.

  She held something in her spindly, filthy arms.

  Something that shifted and mewled.

  Something that she freed.

  Something that came scuttling at a great speed toward Earth’s End.

  Tad saw the thing pushing itself along on unnumbered flabby claws. Its eyes were like the suckers on a deep sea creature’s tentacle. Its mouth was nothing but tongue.