Torn as to what to do next, Josef ultimately opted for the Devil, but one glimpse of the half-house revealed that the horned thing was no longer there.
Cursing, crushed, Josef hung his head and almost wept.
Not knowing what else to do, Josef turned his attention to the poor girl. His conviction softened (slightly) when his eyes met with hers.
“Free me!” she whimpered. “Please. I think my leg is broken.”
With one last regretful look to the vacant doorframe across the lot, Josef made his way to the girl, muttering “All right, all right, I’ll try.”
Before heaving the first chunk, Josef wondered how effective his spindly arms would be in this task. He quickly gathered a few of the flowers from the ground and placed them gently in his coat pocket.
He assured the young woman that she would be all right.
2
Her name was Helma Kuefer. After washing the blood and dirt from her face, Josef discovered that she was quite pretty. He also learned that his estimation of her age was only off by a year.
Their courtship began respectably enough; with Helma’s teary, grateful father insisting that Josef join them for supper at the Inn where he was proprietor. Together, Helma, her father (a widower), and Josef enjoyed broiled beef, bread made heavy with butter, ale, and bitter chocolate.
During the meal Josef feared that Helma had grown smitten with him, for her narrow blue eyes were forever darting in his direction. His suspicions strengthened once Herr Kuefer began extolling the virtues of his daughter; her staunch work ethic, her culinary skills, her loyalty, and so on.
The only time Helma spoke was to ask Josef why he had selected “that particular flower” to wear in his lapel.
“Oh, I’m just rather fond of it,” Josef explained, running his finger over the tough shock of green and the silken red star that capped it. “It’s attached to happy memories of my Father.”
“An odd choice for that,” Helma returned. “Cypress flowers are associated with death.”
With this single specimen of occult knowledge, Josef felt his interest in Helma beginning to pique. By the time they said their farewells that night Josef resolved that he might as well propose marriage to Fraulein Kuefer. After all, he did not enjoy cooking, and he’d read many stories that spoke of the pleasures of companionship, especially in the autumn years of one’s life, which in his case were not as far off as they'd once been. To say nothing of the fact that Josef was unlikely to find another woman who could appreciate the manner in which death underpinned all things, including flora.
The pair became engaged just weeks after the war's end. It was a strange time for the country; filled with sadness and confusion, yet also with a noble drive to rebuild, to rise like a rarefied phoenix from the ashes of combat.
They were wed in the spring, in the great church where Helma and her father attended weekly mass. For a time the couple moved into one of the rooms in Herr Kuefer’s Inn, but they eventually purchased a small cottage near Dusseldorf, not far from the law office where Josef was employed as a clerk.
Their life was sedate but reasonably happy. Josef had to make an effort in order to keep his strange hobbies secret from his wife, but he believed that one can grow accustomed to anything, and thus he was at peace with his and Helma's tiny lakeside home.
The property they owned met with a small woodland, through which Josef enjoyed nightly walks. He would often pretend that strange creatures walked with him, stalking close at his heels, but in the end such reveries fostered only feelings of disappointment, of sadness. These emotions, though Josef was loathe to confess it, seemed to be dilating with each passing day that he played the pantomime of a kindly neighbour, a devoted husband, and a staunch employee.
Josef was absolutely sickened by the prospect that the King of Ugly Ecstasies had parted His gates for him on that fateful night, but Josef had declined that rarest of invitations. He'd allowed himself to become so dully human. It crippled him to mull the possibility that he'd traded exquisite devilry for the castrated tranquillity of home and hearth. His mother would have been ashamed of him.
Ultimately, however, even if such an ugly theory were true, Josef had grown far too fond of Helma to ever convey to her these deep feelings of sadness that he housed in his heart. And so he allowed these harsh feelings to eat at him from the moment he woke until he retired at night, at which time his pain strutted about his unconscious, costumed in mocking dreams.
Sometimes he would feel sharp pangs of resentment toward Helma, as if she, the broken victim of the air raid, was somehow to blame for his foolish choice. Whenever such venom began to taint him, Josef would re-align himself by indulging in his solitary walks.
These constitutionals became increasingly longer. With the war over it was difficult for Josef to make them as daring as they'd once been, but one evening Josef decided to make them more exotic. He trudged out to the small churchyard at the far end of the woods. After all, if the Devil did deem him worthy of a second chance, where else would he opt to appear than among the mighty dead? Perhaps this would be the key: to visit those places that other men instinctively shun. He could possibly find another infernal passageway there.
Josef was shocked when this simple deviation from his customary route yielded instant recognition from His Infernal Majesty.
There, lying on the ground before the mouth of the cemetery gates as if waiting for him, were freshly lopped cypress flowers. Their vivid petals were like embers upon the damp clay.
He raced into churchyard, his eyes wide and hopeful, but there was no Devil to be found. He settled down on one of the weather-smoothed markers and waited.
Dawn had nearly broken by the time Josef concluded that he would receive no further boons that night. Before making his way home, Josef collected the cypress flowers from the ground and placed them in his coat pocket. He hadn't been given a full view just yet, merely a glimpse. Josef knew he'd have to earn his access to the downward path.
3
Thus began Josef’s self-fashioned initiation. Nightly he began to feed his growing hunger for unnatural pleasures. He would spend moonlit nights among the graves, would whittle crooked creatures out of carefully selected wood, would use the head of a Lucifer match to scratch barbarous verses upon old stones.
Though the cypress-bearer had yet to appear, Josef always found the flowers waiting for him whenever he deliberately contradicted his conscience and forced himself to do things no respectable man would ever do. Whether inside caves or at the rim of an unused well, or among the tombs; the flowers were always there to evidence His passing through.
One auspicious night, Josef had gotten so swept up in the romance of a churchyard at midnight that he actually plundered one of the old mausoleums. He jimmied open an oblong box and plunged his bare hands into the beautiful, beautiful rot it held.
Whenever he was in the throes of his black feats, Josef never paused to question whether or not it was proper for a man to plunder graves, to keep company with the chimeras of his own creation, to chat with elementals.
In fact, it was only after the deeds were done—the casket re-shut, the charm concealed beneath the moss, the blasphemous drawings burned to ashes—that Josef thought at all.
As he would walk home, often just as the sun was rising, Josef would be tormented with guilt, with a fear that he was losing his mind. He questioned just how far he might take his activities. Would he one day feel impelled to butcher an animal, to murder a fellow human being? Would he eventually be unable or unwilling to make the distinction between molesting an ancient corpse and creating a fresh one?
Why, Josef wondered, did these questions never occur to him while he had the cadaverous chunks in his hands, the invocation on his lips? What force muted his conscience?
He eventually developed a theory that his nocturnal activities were in fact the will of the Devil. Of course! It was all so obvious; he was being influenced from the great Below. The King had not truly abandoned him. H
e was with Josef still, albeit in subtler forms.
For months Josef was nourished by this theory. He liked to imagine an infernal spirit being ensconced inside his skull. Sometimes he envisioned this Satanic perch as a great throne of black rock, other times it was a simple lattice of bones lashed together by cypress vines. He would remain there, silent and regal, until He felt impelled to act, at which time the man who was Josef Amsel would regress from reality like a snail into its shell in order to allow this nobler aspect full use of his body.
These reveries made domestic life much more tolerable, for a little while at least. Accepting his dualistic nature, Josef was able to move through this world proudly and happily; a smile on his face, sin in his heart, a fresh sprout of cypress jutting from his lapel.
Coming home from work one evening, Josef discovered a remarkable sight: a path of cypress flowers trailing up the steps to his cottage!
He went tearing up the stairs, and when he came stumbling through the doorway his wife stared at him as if she was unsure whether he was drunk, enraged, or both.
“Is He here?” Josef gasped.
“Who?” Helma returned.
Josef wiped the perspiration from his upper lip, craned his head back to the still-open door. The wind summoned the cypress flowers to a vertigo dance.
“I thought . . . someone had come . . .”
“Your supper is ready, Josef. Come and eat.”
4
As the months wore on, Josef began to feel a growing torment by the constant appearance of the cypress and the perennial absence of its bearer. His already thin hope of re-encountering the Horned One grew thinner still, and although he continued to make his nocturnal outings, the churchyard and the bones it held, the knotty wood effigies, and the Satanic verse all began to lose their import and appeal.
The problem of true Faith, Josef resolved, is that it requires constant expression. So when the all-too-human impulse to relax began to claim him, the ugly light of logic was only too eager to burn away his shadowy Faith. His practices began to seem sick, damaging not only to himself but to Helma.
And so, Josef abandoned his Faith. As if to spite the one who'd forsaken him (and perhaps to excuse the blasphemies he'd committed), Josef threw himself into becoming an even better neighbour, a more attentive husband, a more devout churchgoer.
He was pleasantly surprised at just how swiftly a man can give himself selective amnesia. In no time at all he'd managed to distance himself from his memories of those nocturnal escapades until they were no more tangible than a Grimm's tale, and that was how Josef preferred to keep them.
One of his acts as a cleansed, reformed man was to surprise Helma with an extended weekend in the country for St. John the Baptist’s Day. Together they spent the days walking, reading, and swimming in the great lake.
It was during this latter activity that Josef saw the cypress one final time.
He was quite far from the small pier where Helma was sunning herself. The flowers were floating upon the deep green waves. Josef couldn’t be certain, but to his eye it looked as though they were holding together in a ring-like pattern. He swam toward it, periodically peering into the water, half expecting to see a faceless head looking up at him from beneath the surface.
Josef swam carefully, for although he was eager to reach the flowers, he dared not stir the waters too much for fear of breaking the circle, of sending the flowers adrift on the current.
He was almost within reach of the ring when a sudden and crippling exhaustion overcame him. Josef didn’t realize how far he’d swum until he turned back and saw his wife as a mere speck in the distance. She was no longer lying on the pier, but was standing and staring out at him, shielding her eyes with her hands.
She was also no longer alone. Something large and dim was staring out from the nearby glade.
Josef screamed Helma’s name, pleaded for help, for now treading water was impossible for his drained body. As he slid down into the wet death, Josef kept thinking, ‘It’s not fair . . . I saved you, Helma . . . save me . . .’
Helma, grinning, trembling with delight, waited impatiently for the tide to carry Josef ashore.
His body washed up on the sands beside the pier, where the empty rowboats clunked together like sad wood chimes in the gloaming.
Helma raced to retrieve the cypress flowers that stuck to Josef’s soggy carcass. She peeled them from the water-corpse, which went squish-squish with every touch.
There was a soft rustle of leaves. Helma looked up to see Him coming back to her.
She knelt, held out the dripping cypress as an offering, which the Horned One accepted and instantly rendered into a tightly-woven ring. Helma wept when she felt this crown being placed upon her head.
After the many tedious years since she’d been blessed by a glimpse of Him among the bombed-out ruins, after so many failed attempts to beckon Him back by lying cypress around the ghoulish corners of the village, her undying Faith was finally bearing fruit. Unlike her husband, Helma had never wavered in expressing her devotion. Because of this, she was able to claim her throne at last.
—Dedicated to Hanns Heinz Ewers
King Him
Joelle felt a deepening pressure on her arm, which had been dangling over the mattress edge like a stray vine cadging to be cut. The squeezing sensation had been strong enough to wake her, and it quickly became vice-like, painful. She winced, opened her eyes to the dimness.
The casement window sat open, resembling a book with glass covers. March night winds took advantage of the aperture, gusting in to refrigerate the bedroom. Barbs of panic passed through Joelle as she gazed at what seemed to be evidence of a home invasion.
Something shook her. She jerked her head down and saw who the figure clutching her arm was. “Theo?”
He was crouched down at her bedside. His hand on her arm appeared grubby, stained. It sounded as though Theo was snivelling. “I need to tell you something,” he mumbled. “I can’t believe this is really happening . . .”
His voice was a strangled whimper. His body trembled as though there were live wires beneath the skin. Lengths of glistening secretions hung from his nostrils, his mouth.
“What happened?” Joelle pleaded. “Tell me!”
Theo pressed a finger to his lips, hushing her. He quickly looked to the parted window, peering into the black yard beyond it.
“Theo,” she said, quietly this time, “you’re scaring me.”
He turned back to face her briefly before flinging his arms around her blanketed legs. He pressed his head against her and began to sob. It was the first time Joelle had ever seen him cry.
“Christ, Joelle . . . I killed your baby.”
Her stomach flipped, her throat and tongue became desiccated. The shadows that surrounded her all seemed to be swaying.
“Oh, God! I wanna die!” he howled.
“You . . . you had a bad dream, Theo, that’s all. Maybe you walked in your sleep, staggered outside, got confused. But you know I don’t have a baby, right? That proves it was all a dream. Now . . . now stop this. Please.”
Theo’s eyes appeared lidless as he stared at the hook rug at the foot of the bed, studying it as though he were a yogi and it an ornate mandala.
“You were pregnant.” His voice was as flatline as his stare, as cold as the perennial gusts from the window. “You’ve been pregnant for weeks. I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t know how. I thought I was okay with it. I really thought I could let Him go through with it. But when He told me what the baby would be like, I couldn’t allow it to be born. I tore it out of you . . .”
She watched him flinch, double over, then vomit onto the floorboards.
“How could I do that, Jo? How? What kind of man can just rip out an unborn child as if he’s cleaning a turkey?”
“Stop!” Joelle’s reach for the lamp chain was fumbling, but she eventually found and yanked it.
The burst of light made her squint, and when she ultimately looked down at the q
uilt she noticed stains, ugly dark blotches. Some of these spots evaporated once her eyes grew accustomed to the lamp-glow, but those that remained became even blacker and uglier. She poked one. It was wet, and some of it came off, staining her flesh.
She flung back the covers, stood, gave her body a frantic inspection.
There were no visible injuries, no telltale reddish stains on her nightgown.
“It’s not your blood,” Theo explained, “it’s mine.” He turned his arms over to expose red-weeping divots in his flesh.
Joelle quickly yanked two T-shirts from the stack of laundry on her dresser and wound them over Theo’s forearms. She told him to get up, but Theo didn’t want to. He rose only after she forced her arm beneath his and attempted to yank him to his feet. She slapped the casement window shut before leading Theo out of the room.
Once inside the bathroom Joelle uncapped the peroxide bottle and began to clean his wounds; nearly a dozen jagged, angry-looking rings marred his forearms, palms, left wrist. The nail of his right thumb had been torn out at its root, exposing the delicate pulp beneath.
“Jesus, Theo, what did you do to yourself?” she managed before the lump in her throat dammed her voice.
“The baby did this, not me,” he said. “I didn’t think it’d be that strong or that big. And I didn’t expect it to have teeth. But once I managed to fight back with my silver hammer, the thing came apart so easily. It just crumbled in my hands . . . as if it was made of wet newspaper.” Theo rested his head against the tile wall.
“Your silver hammer?” Joelle asked thinly.
Theo nodded once. “Sleepy,” he whispered.
“That better?” she asked Theo as she lowered the quilt onto his trembling form.
“Yes.”
She’d transformed the sofa into a makeshift bed for him after he’d refused to leave the living room, claiming it was the only place he felt safe.
At Fear's Altar Page 10