At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  The meeting was held on the first Thursday in October. I actually left the office early that day to ensure I was there on time. It was still unclear why the holiday had become so fundamental to me, but I suspect it was because I had almost nothing else in my life beyond serving Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I was sheltered and fed, yes, but I was also hollow inside. Like a jack-o’-lantern, my smile was every bit as manufactured and equally mirthless.

  Halloween might have uncovered a smouldering ember in the ash-trap inside me, but spotting Jeannette at that meeting was what truly ignited the fire.

  She had lived in the building longer than I had. I’d occasionally see her in the laundry room or across the parking lot, but, being the way I was, I never said anything beyond a polite hello. Jeannette’s face was full and chalky. She wore her mahogany hair long and never to my knowledge tied it back. She didn’t seem the talkative type either.

  I doubt she’d ever noticed me at all, not even at the October meeting when there were no more than a half-dozen attendees. I paid more attention to Jeannette than to the majority of the business being discussed. Finally, fifteen minutes before the meeting’s close, the building manager opened the floor for suggestions on Halloween. My idea of opening the common room up for a children’s party was vetoed due to, as the manager phrased it, “the noise-and-muck factor,” and since door-to-door trick-or-treating was prohibited through the halls of the building, it was decided that two folding tables would be set up in the lobby for any costumed children that happened by. Candy would be donated by any willing tenants. When someone suggested the table be manned in order to avoid “the theft factor,” I volunteered my services.

  A thrill passed through me when Jeanette offered to join me.

  Although I fostered high hopes of planning sessions with her in the weeks leading up to the month’s end, they did not come to fruition. Instead I made due with resolving to wring the most out of our time together in the lobby.

  I took the 31st as a vacation day from work. That day I slept in and enjoyed a lazy breakfast while watching a documentary on the world’s most notorious haunted houses.

  The folding tables were waiting for me by the time I returned from the party shop that afternoon, where I’d spent entirely too much money on confections and a grave-robber costume for myself. I prayed that Jeannette would find my enthusiasm endearing and not pitiful. Imagine my delight when she emerged from the elevator at dusk, disguised as a Victorian ghost.

  For the first while our conversation was strained, but a steady influx of masquerading children disrupted the awkwardness and gave us something to talk about. During the lulls, Jeannette and I would share little anecdotes about our fondest Halloween memories, our favourite ghost stories. The evening went by all too quickly.

  I admit that my intentions were perhaps less than pure when I invited Jeannette back to my apartment. The CBC was airing a string of live radio dramas based on classic horror stories, and Jeannette seemed as eager to hear them as I was. I poured out two rye-and-gingers and we settled in. Listening to the broadcast meant both of us remaining mum for a fairly long time, but our silence was surprisingly comfortable and, as far as I could tell at least, acted as a bonding agent between the two of us.

  Sometime around midnight, the radio switched from full-cast dramas to a University of Toronto professor lecturing about the folk customs of All-Hallows Even, about the bonfires and the pickled heads of the dear departed and the gourds carved into ugly effigies. Jeannette moved closer to me on the sofa. I swallowed hard. Her head lolled to one side, and I hoped it was an expression of how relaxed she felt and not a sign of boredom. I rummaged for something to say, something that wasn’t too forward, something that wasn’t insipid.

  I managed to mumble “This is nice,” and was thrilled when Jeannette agreed. After a while I asked her what she was thinking about.

  “That I’m feeling completely relaxed,” she replied. “You don’t know how rare that is for me. I’m pretty adept at finding a few dozen things to fret about at any given moment of the day.”

  “Relaxed I like. I just hope you’re not bored.”

  She raised her head to look at me. “I’m not bored.”

  I leaned in to kiss her, but was startled by a knock on my door.

  “Trick-or-treaters at this hour?” she asked.

  “Clearly someone’s not paying attention to the building manager’s immutable Rules.” My thinking was that it could have been an emergency, but I checked through the peephole to see who would have been calling on at me at nearly one in the morning. Something was covering the lens. I pressed my ear to the door, but heard nothing. I got down on all fours and peered under the door. There were no visible shadows, no shapes, no retreating footsteps.

  When Jeannette asked what I was doing, I felt a bit paranoid and more than a little embarrassed.

  “It’s probably a prank,” I said before I pulled the door open. The stark light of the hall stung my eyes. (I’d not realized how low I’d set the lights in my apartment.) The corridor was vacant and, with the exception of various televisions warbling through the shut doors of the other apartments on my floor, completely quiet.

  I spotted it peripherally at first, and it stunned me. I turned to face it full on.

  The mask.

  It dangled from a pushpin in my door. It was a smallish, droopy thing. The blotchy russet-and-rust material it was fashioned from looked as malleable as soaked clay. Cracks and creases marred its entire complexion.

  My initial guess was that the mask was made from a swath of vinyl, and that whoever had made it was either lacking in craftsmanship or had fashioned the piece in haste, for it was definitely ugly, but not the manufactured ugly of commercial Halloween costumes. Its hideousness was ruddy and true.

  The mouth, for instance, was a frantic gash; neither upturned in a toothless grin nor bowed to show grief. It was a sloppy gape, a rude tear. And the eyes . . . the eyes were not apertures, but a pair of crisscrossed slashes; X-marks that would have rendered the wearer blind.

  A ghastly hand emerged from the gloom of my apartment to snatch the mask from its post.

  “What is this, leather?” Jeannette asked, turning the mask over in her hands.

  “The ghost make-up on your hand scared me,” I admitted. “Hey, I wouldn’t touch that if I were you. We don’t know who left it.”

  “Well, I don’t see an I.E.D., so I’m pretty sure we’re okay. A kid must have dropped it or something.”

  “It was just hanging there when I opened the door.”

  “Well, maybe somebody dropped it and one of your neighbours hung it up there so it didn’t get trampled. Phew!” she cried, her nose was wrinkled in displeasure. “Now I understand why it was left behind. This thing is rank.” She set it down on an end table. Then she eyed her watch. “Ooh, it’s later than I thought. I should probably get home. I have to work tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” I stammered, “well, if you’re sure.” I hoped my tone didn’t sound as sulky as it did in my head.

  “I am. But, um, what are your plans for tomorrow night?”

  “Friday? Not much of anything.” Too late, I wondered if I should have invented some fascinating-sounding prior engagement so that my life didn’t appear as dull as it actually was.

  “How about dinner at my apartment?”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Then it’s settled. Thank you for a lovely evening.”

  I chortled, unsure how to seal the evening. Jeannette extended her hand and I shook it.

  “Happy Halloween,” she said.

  The initial moments after Jeannette’s departure were doubt-laden, even a bit paranoid about her. I replayed every nanosecond of our evening together, assessing each word I’d spoken, every gesture I’d made; weighing them, wondering how she might have interpreted everything.

  The whole process was taxing and ultimately pointless. I rinsed out the wine glasses, switched off the radio, and prepared for bed.

 
The mask called to me as I was slipping my door’s security chain into place. It didn’t beckon through words, but by somehow amplifying the traces of its presence; luring my attention to its acrid smell, the awfulness of its complexion, the way it seemed to have swollen in size that it was lying half out of the light. In that semi-darkness, the crisscrossed lines of its eyes appeared as bright as freshly skinned bones.

  I grabbed a pencil and used it to scoop the mask up. I dropped both items into my kitchen trash bin.

  But it came back to me.

  The initial return came after I’d slipped out of the waking world. My dream had swollen like a great river breaching its shores. It spread out over a gulf of red clouds. Distant fires glimmered and shone below me, winking and pulsing like rubies whose determined lustre was barely muffled by dense smoke.

  I felt myself drop, to fall through what might have been hundreds of leagues of dull air. I could see the fires now, roaring in a great arid field, sending up great gusts of red smoke that stained the sky.

  There were a lot of cloying stenches in that angry red air. Two of them were unmistakable: burning hair and tooth decay. There were others, but none of them were identifiable to me.

  I was shocked when a silent blast from one of the pyres hit my face. At odds with its infernal shadings, the air chilled me worse than the harshest winter gale. My skin felt plasticized, my nerves practically shorted out.

  The next drop was sudden and drastic. I shot through the cold red cumuli until I found myself standing in a silent forest. The trees were tall and grey and boughless.

  I then realized that I was not alone.

  The others stepped out from behind the silvery trees that had perfectly camouflaged them. They were mute and colourless and featureless.

  And in a blink I became one of them. I stared at my dull hands and saw no fingerprints. Then a strange film of brownish frost began to distort my vision, and a few seconds later I was blinded.

  I twitched awake, but my eyes saw nothing.

  Petrified, I opened my mouth to scream but I had no voice.

  My hand instinctively shot up and wriggled the mask off my face.

  Discovering that I could still see brought a relief that almost compensated for my panic. The first object I observed frightened me.

  Short of somnambulism, I was at a loss as to how the mask could have escaped my kitchen trash bin to smother me while I slept. I hurled it against one wall and rushed to the bathroom.

  The scar above my eye was thin and fresh and would, I was quite sure, be permanent. It marred the flesh on my left eyelid and brow. The flesh around my right eye was tender, but it appeared as though the mask hadn’t had time enough to finish whatever branding ritual it had begun.

  When I condemned the mask a second time I bound the bag up tightly and immediately marched it down to the garbage chute at the end of the corridor.

  Sleep was impossible, so I prepared a pot of coffee and tried to find a chore that might keep me from thinking about the mask. Dawn eventually fed light into my apartment, and I dressed for work. Exhausted as I was, I knew that I had to check on the mask, lest my entire day be a tormented waste. I needed to know that it was bound.

  I took the elevator down to the basement, grateful that there was no one there who might spy me going into the garbage room. I carefully climbed up the side of one of the dumpsters, trying not to stain my work clothes. The bag from my kitchen was lying on top, which was a relief. My hands were trembling by the time I fished it out. It was still tied, but I could not tell if the mask was still inside or not. I fumbled with the knot, my gaze continually darting to the door.

  When a voice cried “Boo,” I actually shrieked.

  Jeannette apologized profusely for startling me, giggling all the while.

  “What are you doing down here?” she asked. I fabricated some excuse about the trash chute being jammed on my floor. It must have sounded plausible enough.

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” Jeannette assured me, holding up a pair of flattened pizza boxes. “I follow the rules. ‘All cardboard must be brought down to trash room and placed in compactor for recycling.’”

  We both tossed away our trash. Jeanette asked if we were still “on” for that night. I told her yes and she said, “We’d better be.”

  That I was distracted throughout the day goes without saying. But what surprised me was the fact that my thoughts were straying not to my nightmare of the mask, but to Jeannette. All morning long I wrestled with whether or not I should call her. Would it be too forward to phone her at work, too pathetic? For all I knew she was waiting by the phone. I ultimately devised compromise; phoning Jeannette just before I left work under the pretence of asking if she needed me to bring anything for dinner. The phone went right to her answering machine. I left a rambling message and ventured home.

  When she did not return my call I assumed it was because she was either stuck at work or was preparing for our date.

  But when my knocking on her apartment door went unanswered I began to worry. I loitered in the hallway for nearly half an hour before returning to my own apartment. I had to make an effort to not sound annoyed when I left Jeannette a second message, asking her to call me at home.

  By nine P.M. my annoyance over being stood up had boiled over into rage. At eleven o’clock I was scared.

  I slept in fits that night and tried to remedy my exhaustion by glutting on coffee. I called Jeannette just before lunchtime on Saturday but got her machine yet again. I mentioned that I was concerned, that I only wished to know that she was okay.

  That afternoon I ventured out to run unnecessary errands, unable to tolerate the sight of my apartment walls. Crossing the parking lot, I stole a glance toward Jeannette’s floor. The shape in one of the windows startled me. I was reluctant to count the windows to determine that the apartment was Jeannette’s.

  The shape was sitting at the large living room window that faced the building’s back lot. The sheer curtains made it appear positively spectral, vague, like a shop window mannequin. Its straight mane, which reached down to the midriff, made me certain it was Jeannette. She did not move. She didn’t even appear to be breathing. On a thoughtless impulse, I waved at her.

  The silhouette slid back from the window.

  I didn’t bother heading to the laundry mat, or the supermarket. Instead I holed up inside O’Bedlam’s Pub to sulk and sip a pint I didn’t really want. Exactly what was gnawing at me took me some time to figure out, but I eventually realized that it had less to do with Jeannette and a great deal to do with a profound loneliness I hadn’t even been aware I’d been harbouring. Spending time with Jeannette trawled this feeling up to the surface, and now that I’d been made aware of my pain I felt helpless to do anything but wallow in it.

  Downtown was smudged with dusk by the time I left O’Bedlam’s. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast but still had no appetite. The crowds were becoming more robust; everyone eager to commence their weekend Bacchanalias. I didn’t want to be out, and although I hardly relished the idea of being home, I knew that I could stew in peace there.

  Jeannette was back at her window. I spotted her as soon as I’d veered my car into the back lot. Her apartment was still unlit, but her living room was near enough to one of the lot’s standing lamps that I was able to discern a black human-like form that contrasted the ash-heap gloom of the apartment itself. She was as a statue hammered from black marble. Her face was even less visible than it had been that afternoon; it was now little more than a thumb-mark in kohl.

  I entered the building without waving to her, though I doubt Jeannette cared one way or the other.

  Once home, I shook out a handful of cereal from its too-bright box and stood in my kitchenette, munching and brooding. Had Jeannette simply been toying with me? Perhaps she was disturbed in some way? Imagining her as some drooling maniac was pettily gratifying, but the theory felt flawed to me. It was only after I’d begun to question whether she might be as lonely as I was that I ex
perienced a ring of truth, as though I’d deciphered some encrypted message from myself to myself.

  I resisted re-analyzing Jeannette’s every word and action from last night and instead decided to try one last time speak to her, face to face. Reasoning that I could not damage our relationship—assuming that’s what had been developing between us—any further, I resolved to put my heart on my sleeve: I would go to her apartment and tell her that I understood about isolation and feeling as though the world-bearings of everyone I met always felt to be just a few degrees off from my own. Connections almost never happened, but when they did, like last night, it can be a little frightening because one’s cocoon gets rent. It’s about exposure, and if she was hiding from me for fear of being exposed that was okay, but I had to tell her that I was frightened too.

  I had my speech well rehearsed by the time I knocked on Jeannette’s door. She did not answer, of course. So, in an act so bold it even shocked me, I turned the doorknob and found it unlocked.

  The light from the hall was just strong enough to provide a hint of the woman at the window but was not bright enough to define her. Her straight-parted hair hung like drapes of black wax, melting over the back of her chair.

  She muttered something to which I replied, “What?”

  “Close the door,” she said. Her voice was muffled, thin.

  I heeded her request, regretting it as soon as the darkness closed around me.

  “I . . . I came to see if you were okay.” The only sound in the apartment was my own breathing, which seemed to have quickened. “Jeannette?”

  She rose and pivoted to face me.

  Jeannette was obscured by the mask, which appeared to have grown more vicious since I’d discarded it. That white-red-greenish stew of mock flesh, the hectic rip of a mouth, the crisscrossed incisions of its eyes.

  “It reached me instead,” the shrill voice explained. Two facts became horribly apparent to me. One: the voice sounded distant—not merely faint, but very far away. And two: the speaker was not Jeannette.