At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  The figure took a step forward, and the must of wet earth and tooth decay and an acrid scorched scent hit me so palpably I almost choked.

  “Take it off,” I said, and the thinness of my voice surprised me. “Take off the mask.”

  The thing said, “I already have.”

  Then it reached out to me.

  “It was left for you. You didn’t let the process finish.”

  I fumbled backward, nearly falling over Jeannette’s coffee table.

  “It’s not too late,” it trilled, “you can still join me. But we have to go now.”

  Those were the last words the mask could manage before its mouth grew too distorted to speak. The gaping hole began to dilate like a birth canal, widening and deepening, exposing the vastness that the Jeannette-thing housed within her head.

  I could see an ember-like glimmer, all red and orange and blue. This glowing brightened and became more defined as the mouth expanded to the size of a small cave.

  The pyres from my dream now blazed inside Jeannette’s throat, and that forest of dull trees whose bark was the grey of headstones stood there too. Cold stars winked in the night sky that stretched across the roof of her mouth.

  By now the jaws of the leathery mask were pressing against the living room walls and were pressing into the plaster in a struggle to grow larger still.

  I had managed to reach the apartment door, but still felt compelled to stare in dumb awe at the mutation before me.

  Featureless figures stepped out from behind the trees and began the uphill climb upon Jeannette’s tongue, which was now as mangled and coarse as a great mandrake root.

  The drab forms trudged up toward the mouth’s rim. Their ropy white arms were extended. I heard one of them step onto the living room with a slight thump. I wrenched the doorknob and stumbled out into the hall.

  My last memory of Jeannette was seeing her fumbling to reach her hand over the top of her masked face as one of the pale things clutched her and began to pull her into the world within her.

  I slammed the apartment door shut and fled.

  I suppose the child never really escapes us; at least mine stayed within me somewhere, like the acorn from which the oak grew. The timid boy in me kept me cowering inside my apartment until the light came back to the world. Then and only then did I creep back down to Jeannette’s apartment. My steps were slow and hesitant.

  I’m not sure what I was expecting to find when I finally pushed the door back from its frame. Probably I was hoping for evidence of the miracle, some clue that would make it all undeniable. But, aside from some scoring in the plaster of the living room walls, the only incongruity was the mask lying face-down on the carpet.

  It took me the better part of an hour to muster courage enough to touch it, to grip it, to turn it over and witness the change to its features.

  The mouth had vanished. Its passage to the otherworld was sealed with the same whitish X as the eyes. I sat cross-legged on Jeannette’s floor and held the mask and wondered if I should cry for her. But after a while I simply left. I took the mask with me.

  I have it still. I kept it after I moved out of that building, which I did only after the investigation into Jeannette’s disappearance went cold. Her apartment was voided of its furniture and eventually rented out to a new couple.

  By then I had already put in the winning bid on a townhouse downtown. Over the years I had nothing to do but work, so I put in more energy and devotion to my job and received two decent promotions. The spike in income allowed me to buy comfort.

  I kept the mask on a shelf in my bedroom closet, wrapped in a plastic trash bag. I would take it out and study it, sometimes even put it on and wait for the cold fire to come, but it never did. I did this quite often right after Jeannette vanished, but less so as time wore on.

  My life was sedate, rote, almost flatline. The only exception was Halloween, which I celebrated with a vague hopefulness that somehow something might shift. I don’t know if I thought Jeannette would return to me, or if I would find another clue as to what I had squandered by not letting the mask finish its task. All I knew was that an invitation that had been intended for me, but that Jeannette had accepted.

  Tonight brought another round of trick-or-treaters to my door. I tossed fistfuls of candy into their open pillowcases, told them corny knock-knock jokes involving monsters. But in the end it was a hollow ritual.

  Then came the last trick-or-treater; a plump boy of about ten. He stood on my stoop, dressed as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One side of his face was kempt and clean, the other was marred by ghastly makeup. His plastic tuxedo smock was shredded on the Hyde half. His furry hand clutched a plastic test tube.

  But it wasn’t his costume that impacted me, it was his eyes. If windows to the soul they were, then what shone through this child’s was a sadness so profound I could feel it pushing into me, squeezing my heart until it ached. The boy looked at me for only a second before his gaze dropped back down to his perforated canvas runners.

  “Trick-or-treat,” he mumbled.

  I cleared my throat. “You look awesome,” I said. The boy did not react.

  “HURRY THE HELL UP, DANNY! I’M SURE THE MAN’S GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN TALK TO YOU.”

  The man who shouted this was standing on the sidewalk. He took a pull from the beer can he was clutching, then spat on my lawn.

  “That your dad?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Did he help you with your costume?”

  The boy shook his head. “He thinks I’m too old for Halloween. I made it myself.”

  “C’MON, DAMMIT!”

  I raised my hand to the hand to the man as politely as possible, indicating that everything was fine.

  “Well, you did a great job. I used to make my own costumes when I was a kid. You like monsters?”

  This raised the boy’s face. “I love them.”

  “So do I. That’s what I always liked best about tonight; you got to be the monster for a little while, you know what I mean?”

  The child half-smiled.

  I dumped all the candy I had left into his grocery bag.

  “That’s a pretty cool decoration there,” he said. He was pointing over my shoulder.

  “Which?” I asked, craning my head back.

  The mask was hanging from the stair-head in my foyer, dangling as though I had placed it there to frighten the children with its cross-lash eyes.

  The strange thing is that I was not shocked to see it there, not even slightly. Just as I was not surprised to see that its mouth had been restored to the hungry gash that it had the night it had been left for me.

  “You like it?”

  “Yeah, it’s creepy.” There was an enthusiasm in the boy’s voice that my gut told me was probably very rare for this child.

  “Would you like to keep it?”

  “Sure! Thanks!”

  “LET’S GO, DANNY! THE LAST THING YOU NEED IS MORE CANDY!”

  I lifted the mask from my banister and held it out to the boy. “Enjoy.”

  He grinned and took it and bade me a Happy Halloween before he turned and walked away.

  Perhaps it was some protective instinct, but the boy was wise enough to stash the mask in his bag before his father spotted it.

  I stood and watched as the boy shuffled off down the otherwise vacant street. The gourd lamps on the porches had been extinguished, all the doors were shut; all but the one I had given to the child.

  I felt good about what I’d done. Jeannette had taught me a lot about myself, about all the Outsider kids. I had given the finest gift one can offer an Outsider—passage out of the world.

  The Eldritch Faith

  1

  Nothing remains unfathomable forever. No matter how remote the impulse or how empyreal the dream, we are always able to codify our visions, to tether our impulses by naming them. We inter the uncanny beneath the silt of cosily acceptable forms.

  Yet there will always be flashes when the seam
s of life begin to show. You might have tasted yours during a bout of fever, or through a vicious trauma—the source does not matter. In the end, every last one of us must glimpse the Minotaur in the maze. None of us glides through the world uninitiated.

  Of course, most people are only too eager to avoid or outright discard these flashes of the panic-inducing All. These individuals try to make sense of the whole messy ordeal, crutching themselves against other people, using the concepts of love and fellowship and a lust for life as harnesses that just might keep everything reined in.

  Opposed to this group is a band of misfits who tend to deify those flashes when the screen frays and the unfenced gulf of Beyond starts seeping in. They invent words of power and knock-on-wood rituals in the hopes of forming a ligature between the terror in the pit of their hearts and the Otherness that sprawls so far beyond them.

  If there is any fundamental difference between me and you it is that you are one who spends your life scrambling to make all the pieces hew again, whereas once my shell cracked I was only too happy to pick and pull at the rift.

  We are human beings, and human beings fashion faiths. It is the schema of our being, as innate to us as breathing.

  I say this as one whose impulses always seemed to pour in from the farthest margins, one whose childhood was a storm of anxieties during the day, asphyxiating panic-dreams after the light fled.

  The conditions of life have always been incomprehensible to me. In fact, the moment I became aware of the world I began hunting for a portal out of it. It’s taken me many years to be able to admit this fact to myself. It seems I’m simply not hardwired to process the din and dynamism of humankind. And so I withdrew my membership. I stepped out of line and let the hunt rush past me, contenting myself with nestling down among the bones your tribe left in its wake. I made myself very small in the world and welcomed those faint and far-off impulses to come stealing in as they pleased.

  I forfeited the tangible for the spider-graze of some far phantom realm.

  And yet it was I who found the Real.

  This is no Gothic romance. I will not taint my account with poetic delusions. I’ll strive to write earnestly.

  Let me begin by trouncing the fantasies that you might be expecting: No, I was not conceived under auspicious conditions. The stars did not align to herald my eruption from the womb. I was born of an average man and woman, and I came into the world with neither a seer’s caul nor a head heaped with memories of past incarnations. I was ordinary in every way. My life was one whose tedium was blessed with rare disruptions of the uncanny; intrusions that were magnificently terrifying.

  Instead of shunning these experiences, I cultivated them, served as a cultist to them. I wanted to impress the world’s dull clay with crooked signs, and I did so. It all boiled down to my paying attention to remote impressions, chanced glimpses of an Otherworld, and then training myself to take in a little more the next time, to reach a welcoming hand to the Other.

  Understandably, neither the import nor the impact of what I was doing was apparent to me at the time, for my faith was realized at the tender age of seven.

  And it came to me in the guise of a game.

  2

  The game was born in the manner appropriate to all noteworthy things: in darkness. In this instance, it was the dull matte of a lustreless cellar; my sanctuary from the summer above.

  As a boy, one of my greatest pleasures was sleeping in the basement of my parents’ home where it was cool and ruddy and dim. The walls down there were stacked cinderblocks that met at weird angles, and the corners were always clouded with cobwebs and mounded dust. The unfinished ceiling stood just high enough to allow the damp air to lazily swirl and keep the mustiness from becoming cloying. Silence held fast in that basement; an anticipatory quiet, sharp and tenuous, like an undying hiss, as though I was trapped inside an iron lung that had malfunctioned mid-breath, a machine that was forever threatened to suddenly resume its function and erupt with a heart-stopping gasp.

  During sweltering afternoons I liked to envision myself as skulking around the bottom of a great cistern that had long been exhausted of the libation it had been designed to house; a lidded pit where only the weakest glimmer of sunlight pierced the grime-fogged windows, sunlight that was never strong enough to sully my chthonic playground.

  In the late evening I would watch the shadows lengthen across the battered, cast-off furnishings, stretching like the skeletal boughs of a great misshapen tree.

  My father had fashioned a crude pantry beneath the zigzag beams of the basement stairs; a primitive larder of pickled vegetables, glinting tins of meat. I would swathe myself in a fraying blanket and eat in that pantry, pretending I was the lone survivor of some life-purging holocaust, huddled snugly in my secret bomb shelter, waiting for the ghosts to come slithering down from an irradiated wasteland.

  And in time a ghost came; not a toxic one, but a segment of some great outer Dark. It came by way of a self-fashioned game I called Curtains.

  Curtains was a simple amusement and, like all those that were in any way meaningful to me, it was a solitary one. Should you ever wish to open the way yourself, I urge you to experiment with Curtains. The tools are basic, consisting of nothing more than an old bed sheet or tarp; anything that can be transformed into a shroud with the merest nudge. I employed a length of plastic sheeting that my father kept waded up beneath his workbench.

  To play Curtains I would simply hold the sheet before me and slowly pace the unlit basement, as though the floor was a great Ouija board and I was a living planchette being yanked along by a force both within and beyond me. Roaming, often with my eyes instinctively squinted, I would wait for some propitious moment to fling the sheet in hopes of covering something.

  But with a lone fabulous exception, Curtains always ended in disappointment; the thrown sheet cascading down to crumple flat and empty upon the unswept cement floor. Even when my head was brimming with ghost glossolalia, the end result would be failure.

  Yet the anticipation that preceded these failures—those breathless seconds of watching mute and saucer-eyed while the potential of an apparition tainted the basement’s atmosphere—was narcotic enough.

  Even my failed experiments caused me to tear up the basement steps and out into the sunlit world. The paradisiacal afternoon would gush past me in an indistinct smear until I eventually found some shady patch of lawn to slump down upon. There I would push out short, panicked breaths and yoked that dread-drunk state for all it was worth. Even then, as a boy still relatively fresh from the womb, I grasped the rarity and the magnificence of the panicked state.

  Sharing the richness of these failed games of Curtains does, I hope, convey just how potent a successful game would have been to me, how precious. Spirits move mercurially, you understand. To actually Curtain one while it is whispering? I know of no rarer accomplishment in this life.

  I was granted just such a blessing one sweltering July afternoon.

  The soundtrack to that particular game was a discordant blend of the murmurs bubbling in my skull and the peals of neighbourhood children playing in the yards above me. The high noon sunlight was reduced to its usual fever-and-flu haze as the window-wells became lantern domes, giving my game an ambient glow rather than direct beams of harsh light.

  From its commencement, I knew that particular game was going to be special. I roamed the unswept floor, clinging to a guarded optimism that I might just succeed. I followed the mouthless voices over to a cold corner whose bricks were haired with dust tufts. A pressure struck my chest, pressed down to my loins. The back of my head began to swell, as though a pressure valve had been wrenched loose, freeing whatever had been holding manic congress inside my skull.

  I held my breath and flung the Curtain, stared in a taut eagerness as it began to drop.

  One edge crinkled as it hit the ground. For an instant my heart sank.

  I was so distraught over thinking that I had lost the game yet again that I doubted th
e shape that began to form beneath the cloudy sheet.

  The peak of a head was the first detail to become visible. Beneath this egg-like lump, the cragged arch of misshapen shoulders began to placidly mould themselves.

  The Curtained thing was breathing, its frame heaving like wind-bullied laundry on a line. Condensation beaded the plastic where the shape’s mouth might be. Its breath formed minute diamonds of moisture on the tarp’s underside.

  An exquisite cold shot down my back. It planted a garden of ice needles down the length of my neck.

  “Who are you?” I asked, though I had no real voice.

  The shape spoke not in words, but through gesture.

  It reached out its veiled arms and grabbed me, pulling me until my face was pressed against its dense chest.

  I remember this encounter as an eternal moment, though it likely only lasted a few panicked beats of my heart. I was held firm against something that felt like little more than a pocket of dense air, a vacuum of nothingness that somehow had shape and heft and power.

  A mitten-like hand pressed against my back, and then everything began to lilt together into something soft and amorphous and so awfully distant.

  3

  I don’t remember fainting, or even falling backward once the thing released me from its grip. All I can recall is lying on the floor, staring up at the beams of the basement’s crude ceiling. I was sickened by the thought that the spirit I’d Curtained might have slipped out from beneath its sheet and fled back to the Beyond while I had been lying dazed.

  Crackling sounds like the static of a detuned radio brought an eerie reassurance that I was not alone down there. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked ahead, simultaneously craving and dreading what I might find there.

  The shape was crouched low. I would say that it was studying me if the thing had possessed eyes, but it was a shallow featureless grey lump that gently rocked to and fro like a willow. I could not tell whether the force beneath the shroud was struggling to free itself or merely to coax its covering into a new shape.