At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  “I think we’ve been robbed! Look at Michel’s room!”

  “Stay here,” my father ordered. He crept down the hallway, squinted through the doorway to my bedroom, and grimaced.

  “What is it, Mama? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, darling.” She rubbed my shoulder but did not look at me.

  “It doesn’t look as though anyone broke in,” my father reported after investigating the entire house.

  “But Michel’s room!”

  “I know.”

  “What?” This time I directed my question at my father. He was rubbing his face, he was frowning. “Papa, what’s wrong with my room?”

  “It’s been turned upside down, that’s what’s wrong with it,” he answered.

  I took off down the hallway, impervious to my parents’ pleas to “wait, wait, wait!” to “Get back here!”

  Nearly every one of my belongings had been upset in some way. My dresser was lying on its side, all four of its drawers upturned and gutted of clothing, coins, the drawings I’d deemed worth keeping. Some of my toys had been stomped into plastic splinters, others had merely been flung. The posters on my wall had been reduced to shredded strips still impaled to the plaster by shiny brass tacks.

  My pillow was lying behind the door. There was no sign of the box it once concealed.

  I felt my parents moving up behind me as I stood in the doorframe.

  “Don’t touch anything!” my mother commanded, though in a tone that was too gentle to be commanding.

  “I did this . . .”

  “What?” my parents gasped in concert.

  I repeated my false confession, wondering just where it was coming from. I fabricated some admittance of being frustrated over not being able to find a certain toy just before I’d gotten in the car with my mother, and that my frustration had mushroomed into a tantrum.

  Though I was expecting wrath, my mother and father both wore masks of deep concern instead of rage. After exchanging a few glances with my father, my mother shook her head ruefully.

  “No,” she said, “that’s not true. I was in here packing just before we left for the cottage, and your room did not look like this!”

  “I know. I . . . the thing I was looking for was already packed, but I didn’t know that. I thought I’d lost it. I got mad.”

  The lie hewed so well with the situation that I knew it could not have come from me, at least not totally. As I noted earlier, I never really learned the art of lying, and certainly not at the age of seven. Thinking that swiftly and adeptly was alien to me, but somehow my parents believed me.

  “Well, you’re going to get it!” my father warned.

  “I’d make you clean up every inch of this room right now if you didn’t have school in the morning!” added my mother. “But I know what you’re doing as soon as you get home tomorrow afternoon! Now go to bed!”

  I pushed my way through the debris and heeded her.

  9

  It happened much later that night, well after I, and presumably both of my parents, were slumbering.

  Lying in bed, I felt my body spasm. (Since being here I’ve learned that the learnedly ignorant call this phenomena ‘hypngogic jerks.’) The movement was not violent, but was sufficient to nudge me just far enough out of sleep to regain an awareness of my body. The break was, however, not clean enough to allow me to describe my state as waking. I was in-between states.

  I lazily opened one eye, and when I caught an impression of what was standing in the corner, I was not startled. Instead I immediately managed to convince myself that my spasm had somehow dragged a vestige of my dream into the world.

  Though I do not remember dreaming of a girl, I must have been . . . and that dream must have been terrifying.

  A girl, or rather something like a girl, occupied the far nook of my bedroom, exactly where wall met wall, where shadow married moonlight. She was lanky and her sallow flesh looked smooth and slick, like a dolphin’s hide. Her naked skin practically glowed against the black patches of the room where the moon’s beams failed to reach. To my bleary eyes she appeared to be crowned with raven-wing hair, but I squinted and saw that much of this was the darkness that also masked the girl’s face.

  I was enthralled by the sight of her, and although I wanted very much to know who she was, I was unable to will my eyes away from the taboo brown spots of her undeveloped breasts, from the shockingly exposed crescent of her sex, which to me was new and terrifying and hypnotic.

  She gaited out of the corner with such suddenness that I actually gasped. Her movement startled my gaze upward, and when I discovered that the girl was lacking not only hair but also a face, I cried out, or tried to at least. Horror had claimed my voice, choking it down to a mangled peep.

  The faceless thing staggered toward me, her body moving in manic jerks and wobbles. Her feet kicked the debris on my floor. The head bobbed like a trapped balloon struggling to take flight. She resembled a sketcher’s dummy come to life by some grim spell, and before my brain’s message to flee could even reach my body, the girl-thing was upon me.

  Her weight pressed the air out of my lungs. She scuttled up to straddle my head, pressing her thighs on either side of my face. Her cleft smelled of old wood, of dust.

  I raised my arms to shove her off, but swatted only air.

  A heartbeat later the crushing bulk was off my prostrate body, yet the rank darkness was still covering my face. I clawed at the chunky mask, gasping with relief when the spirit-trap tumbled off my head and landed on the carpet with a padded thump. The image of the girl had vanished. Now there was only the box.

  I pounced on it.

  Hurriedly rummaging through the mess, I found a spool of kite string and wound its remaining length around the box, binding it with a dozen knots.

  No longer wanting the spirit-trap anywhere inside my house, I snuck out the back door to hide it beneath the cedar hedge in our back yard.

  The temperature of the music box suddenly spiked. I squealed and let the scalding thing drop to the ground. (This, and not a childhood bout of eczema, is the true cause of those ugly scars on my palms.) I peeled off my pyjama top and carried the spirit-trip inside it. I set it under the hedge, camouflaging it beneath the soft, fragrant limbs.

  The following afternoon, after cleaning my room as punishment, I took a gardening trowel and dug Capricorn a shallow grave.

  There, in the dull clay at the rear of a suburban yard, my uncanny companion remained interred for the next half-decade.

  10

  It boiled down to a form of slippage, a simple excision of Capricorn’s dark magic from my daily routine.

  Perhaps the ease of our divorce was just a symptom of my age at the time, I don’t know, but our severance came with neither pomp nor drama. A few shovelfuls of dirt and my companion—the sole being for which I’d ever felt anything nearing love—was gone.

  Throughout the weeks that followed, my attention was knotted up in guilt and a garrotting sense of panic as I imagined the unspeakable reprimand Capricorn would inflict upon me once it chose to slither up from the earth like crude oil, to come lurching across the backyard and into my bedroom.

  But the punishment never came. As the uneventful weeks stretched into months I developed a strange arrogance about the situation, reasoning that that much of Capricorn’s power was in fact my ability to project my desires. I came to question whether or not Capricorn was even a separate entity and not just an outgrowth of my own wants and dreams.

  Everything is always a matter of realization, isn’t it? We wrestle with the riddles of living until our brains shake the chaos into a pattern we can tolerate. We call these patterns knowledge. And upon the basis of this knowledge, we act. If enough of us act in a similar fashion, we call this action a reality.

  My wishes were powerful. I had wished for a spirit to be Curtained, and it came to pass. And when I wished that same entity be banished by just a bit of common soil, it also came to be.

  So I eventu
ally began to wish for different things, cheerier and safer things.

  Day by day the cycle of my adolescence lured me into brighter spheres, those of my peers and my family. I began to do quite well in school, developed a knack for softball, and even had two of my stories about schoolyard detectives published in the local newspaper.

  Christmases came and went. Even Halloween was more pleasurable, probably because the rift between my grimmer appetites and the simple celebration of the commercialized season was sizeable by then.

  By the time I turned twelve I had successfully tricked myself into believing that I had realized the Good Life. Before long I would be on my way to high school, an institution I was certain would hand me the keys to the kingdom of the world.

  But it was not to be. My wishes began to unravel.

  It all began to entropy in the late summer (the same time of year that Capricorn and I found each other). The rhythm of school and organized socializing on the blacktop had passed. I was at a party that a neighbourhood girl had thrown to say goodbye to summer and bid a begrudging welcome to our final year of junior high.

  One of the guests was named was Elena. I remember that much about her. The fate of a spinning soda bottle had elected Elena and me to be the next two kids to become a ‘couple,’ thanks to a sleazy pubescent game we called ‘Five Minutes Alone.’

  It was the first time I’d ever been forced to play this game, which involved little more than one boy and one girl being sent to a room where, behind closed doors, they presumably engaged in some kind of sexual act. I’d heard ridiculous rumours about classmates who had become lovers as the result of such a game, but I knew that their five minutes in isolation probably resulted in nothing more than the pair of them staring flush-faced at each other, praying for their time to be up, at which point the school rumour mill could begin to crank out its wares.

  Imagine my shock when Elena, who was a year older than I, did want to do something after the door was closed.

  We were only in the dim room for a few seconds before she began to remove her blue jeans and the white cotton underwear beneath them.

  I stood frozen with shock.

  She parted her legs, exposing a shocking pink.

  “Lick here,” was Elena’s whispered invitation. “It feels good.”

  I remember feeling a great sway, as though the room were a cabin on a storm-heaved ship. Everything around me began to shrivel, like flora ripped from its taproot.

  My thoughts reeled back, back, to the night of the horrid faceless thing smothering me in my bed.

  A voice in my head then said, ‘I don’t want this . . . I do not want this . . .’

  It is possible that I even uttered these words aloud.

  And then I ran.

  I remember shoving partygoers, all of whom were catcalling and cackling as I tore up the stairs. When I was on the landing I glanced back and saw Elena in the doorway of the bedroom. She was redressed and was glowering up at me, her face screwed up with hatred and, I believe, humiliation.

  The houses went past without my really seeing them. I was gasping but not really breathing. The world began to feel ominously huge, so vast that I had to tune it out. I reduced the city to a distant signal, a weak frequency. Everything was paling, softening, until the only thing left was the glassy sound of my own breath gusting in and hissing back, gusting in and hissing back.

  At one point I had to stop moving so that I could inspect my hands and my legs. I needed to make sure that I was still human and not the plaything for some other misfit, an entity that saw the world through the glaucoma of a plastic sheet.

  When I finally reached my home I went directly to my room, where I lay fully dressed on top of my bed for a long time. Every few minutes my mind would recreate the darkened room and the vibrant hue of Elena’s sex. I would convulse with shame. I stayed awake until dawn.

  I really hadn’t wanted that at all. Five Minutes Alone had felt barbed and ill-fitted to my inner self. Five Minutes Alone felt suffocating. Only my solitary games fit me properly.

  As I inventoried my life that night I tried to recall the last time I had felt slotted in the world. My feelings of humiliation and awkwardness distorted all the happy realizations I’d made during the five years I’d been divorced from my eldritch roots. I have no doubt that The Good Life I’d been living had been absolutely real, and probably could have been restored if I had just been patient enough to let my momentary setback pass.

  But that night I felt something inside me break. There was a marked shift, like plate tectonics, a world remaking itself. The world I had been running in—that of my peers—slid off its axis. I began to spiral backward, a lone star flung toward hopelessly strange climes.

  I then experienced the single harshest pain I’d known: a sense of utter aloneness. Everything was going grey again, but as quickly as it came, my anguish became anesthetised by a new scrap of knowledge, one that came flittingly, softly. And I was no longer afraid.

  The voice in my head rasped reassuringly that I was not, nor had I ever been, truly alone.

  11

  I didn’t dig it up right away. Fear was unquestionably a factor in my keeping Capricorn under soil, but it was not the only one. The dominant forces that held me back were guilt and shame.

  Nostalgia can be very powerful, and very toxic. The more I recollected that haunted summer when I was seven, the more idyllic it became. By December of that year I had managed to convince myself that my season with Capricorn had been the only true happiness I had known, that all the friendships and little triumphs I’d experienced since then were a kind of sick veil. How had I repaid Capricorn for its loyal fellowship? With abandonment when I went away with my parents and then finally with condemnation upon my return.

  I avoided Capricorn’s grave for months, grateful for the ever-thickening blanket of snow that masked it throughout the winter. During that long season when the frigid gloom was disrupted by only the thinnest glimmers of daylight, I went for a lot of long walks and thought a great deal and spoke very little.

  Elena had been popular enough to inflate our failed rendezvous at the Labour Day party into a breach of nature that resulted in my becoming a pariah at school. To be fair, the ostracizing I experienced that year would have likely faded over time had I been more willing to play the social game. But by then my introvert’s nature had already begun to reclaim its throne inside me, so I was only too happy to regress like a snail into its shell.

  I turned thirteen that spring, just as the weather was beginning to mellow. I had taken to drawing a great deal, and my parents gave me a large sketchpad and artist’s pencils as a birthday gift. One evening I reconfigured the furniture in my room so that my small desk was positioned before the window, affording me an unobstructed view of my companion’s grave.

  All told, I probably sketched twenty or thirty versions of Capricorn’s resting place. Throughout those long, wordless afternoons where I studied the far corner of the cedar hedge, I would mull over the best way to attempt to resume contact with Capricorn. I wondered how one extends the olive branch to something that is not, and in all likelihood never was, human.

  Finally one blustery afternoon, as I sat watching the rain forming small bogs under the hedge and the sky beginning to smudge with deepening nocturnal shades, I was struck with the thought that the reason I had remained immune to reprimand was because Capricorn was gone.

  An oily feeling passed through my insides. My shoulders slumped under an unseen burden. Why had I been so foolishly confident that Capricorn would have endured such neglect?

  Later that night I attempted, for the first time in nearly six years, to make contact.

  12

  The fog had lurched in as if on cue, as if the ceremonious acts of snapping off the ceiling light in favour of a lone wax candle, of flipping the art pad to a virginal page, of breathing in a series of slow purging gusts were all the rubrics to some ancient ritual that could muscle nature into heeding one’s will. The
elements seemed already to be acquiescing just to lend my reunion some pathetic fallacy.

  I set the pencil tip against the sheet and waited. I was still seeing the spirit-trap’s grave, but this time only in my mind’s eye. Not wanting to act prematurely, I waited until every detail of the music box was salient before I finally spoke.

  “Capricorn,” I whispered, “can you hear me?”

  My hand began to drag, leaving wayward black strokes in its path. It began to pass over the page faster, faster. I could feel my palm beginning to heat up. My breath decreased to the shallowest gasps.

  “Are you with me, Capricorn?”

  My mind was a still lake. Neither thought nor image intruded on that calm. Even when I attempted to summon the image of the spirit-trap back to the fore, it stubbornly dissipated.

  The séance lasted for hours. The result? Dozens of pages of pointless squiggles. Although I had experienced inklings of Capricorn’s appendage closing over mine during the sitting, in the end I knew that I had been playing, that my experiment had resulted in simply acting.

  Capricorn was gone. Part of me understood this, but another part was unwilling to resign myself to such a hideous truth.

  While lying in bed and staring absentmindedly at the ceiling I concluded that I needed to be certain.

  I would dig up the spirit-trap. If the Presence had indeed vacated it, if the Voice had fallen mute, I resolved that I would willingly put all these pursuits behind me. Perhaps I would try rebuilding a social bridge back to my peers.

  The following night was a Friday and my parents had gone out for their ‘date night’—a monthly ritual for rekindling whatever romance they’d once had. After they’d left for dinner or a trite film or whatever that week’s outing entailed, I crept out to the backyard and drudged up the box from the runny clay that covered it.

  Much of its lustre had eroded, but the trap itself was intact. I sat in the gloaming, the muddy case resting on my knees, fearing that it truly was as empty as it felt. I remembered the box having a detectable heft when Capricorn resided there, but of course this memory was just as susceptible to distortion as any other. I am the first to admit that I do not possess anything even nearing total recall. My memories are always patchwork things; fact cloaked in errant wish and fantasy.