At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  Lighter or not, I carried the box down to the basement, wiped it down with an old rag, and draped it in a clean bed sheet.

  Once it was concealed I reached under and carefully undid the corroded clasp. It was as though I was handling hazardous materials, or defusing a bomb by touch alone. I flipped the lid open and stepped back, praying that the sheet would fill and rise, but it did not.

  I waited, watching the covered trap until the basement window welled up with the headlight beams of my father’s car. Quickly re-closing the trap, I wound the box back in the sheet and carried the bundle to my room, restoring it to its proper niche beneath where I would lay dreaming.

  A year or two prior my father and I had watched a television documentary about voodoo. Among the many strange facts that appealed to me was the tradition of ‘feeding the loa,’ which consisted of the voodoo practitioner leaving sweets and drink as offerings to attract spirits. That night I put this into practice, surrounding Capricorn’s casket of scuffed wood with thickly frosted cupcakes, an antique silver dollar that had been a gift from my great-aunt, and a paper cup brimming with some of my father’s best brandy. I even muttered a queer little prayer of calling before going to sleep that night, imploring Capricorn to accept my offerings and come back to me.

  I remain convinced that my companion devoured my placations that night, for Capricorn digested them and passed their leavings back through me in the form of a prescient dream.

  It was a brief nightmare, set in a location I’d not thought about since that glorious haunted summer.

  The horrors of this setting flung me back into my body, which jolted up panicked and moist and pitifully shaken and frail. It was still dark when I sat reeling from what I’d seen. By sunrise one point had become glaringly important to me: I had dreamt not of some invented Eden, but a real place, a location in this world; near this very city no less.

  It was no ordinary location, having long been a borderland, an interstitial place that blurred the boundaries between our world and another.

  My investigation of the shrine beneath my bed that morning revealed the cakes unbitten and stale (the slather of icing bore no imprint of phantom fingers), the paper cup soaked through but the liquor unlapped by spirit-tongue. But the gesture had clearly been enough, for as my fingers pressed against the spirit-trap’s side it once again felt marvellously cold to the touch, for the first time in years.

  My heart was in turn warmed. As I walked to school that day I found myself steeled against the snide little jeers in the halls, I was impervious to the askance glances of my teachers, because something was now swimming within me: a plan.

  By noontime my fate was so clear to me I could barely stay inside my own skin.

  13

  Back then (things may be different now), if one traipsed due north on Lockhart Street, which begins right at the lakeshore, one would pass through the swanky residential nooks where the city’s upper crust cloistered themselves, and would then venture beyond the garden of little boutiques and mom-and-pop stores that comprised the downtown shopping district. Beyond this retail zone were several blocks of very average houses and low-rise apartments that were occupied by the city’s very average families. Lockhart Street ascended on an ever-steeping incline. By the time one reached its peak, the houses would be scattershot, with great fields, instead of narrow yards, distinguishing one property from another. Further still, the houses sat obscured by woodlands, and then there was only nature.

  I spent the following Saturday treading this very course until at last I reached my secluded destination. The unwieldy bulk of my backpack pressed achingly on my shoulders. It was well into the afternoon by the time I finally let the pack drop at the edge of Palemarsh Pond and tore into my packed lunch.

  The weather was quite temperate for mid-March. As I sat chewing my sandwich, I stared out across the pond, toward The Devil’s Finger.

  Even set against the cloudless azure of the afternoon sky, The Devil’s Finger still cast an ominous glamour.

  Every town has a similar site—a place so steeped in urban legend that, regardless of how embellished the tale may be, the location manages to sweat out a menacing atmosphere. My hometown was blessed with two such places: The Devil’s Finger and The House of Shades.

  The Devil’s Finger was a great old oak that loomed over a footpath at the edge of Palemarsh Pond. The tree had supposedly earned its sinister title in the days of Frontier Justice, when wrongdoers had been condemned to hang from its limbs as a warning to those passing through the village.

  But this form of savage punishment turned against the local lawmakers. It was rumoured that the souls of those who’d been condemned to hang were held in the Devil’s palm. Neither sinking to hell nor sailing up to the sweet hereafter, the hanged men’s ghosts became ensnared inside the oak tree like insects in amber, attacking anyone who was fool enough to pass by The Devil’s Finger after sunset.

  I never did figure out the root of that legend. But, to the best of my knowledge, people still evoke it; primarily mothers who try to scare their daughters chaste, or boyfriends who try to use the tale to scare these same girls closer and closer, until they may forget all about their pledged chastity.

  I’d made the pilgrimage to The Devil’s Finger not only because I hoped that Capricorn might feel more forthcoming among other spirits (assuming there were ever any there to begin with), but because this was the place I’d seen in my dream, and thus I assumed it was an auspicious site, a zone of power. I set about recreating my dream as accurately as possible. This, I guardedly hoped as I began to empty my backpack, would bring Capricorn back to me.

  The effigy was the nearest approximation I could manage to the one I’d witnessed in slumber. In the dream I believe the figure of Capricorn had been garmented in a man’s clothes, whereas mine were of boyish size and consisted of a pair of my old jeans and a sweater. I duct-taped a pair of gardening gloves to the end of the sweater sleeves and runners to the denim hem. The head was a threadbare pillowcase. The whole figure was plumped with wadded newspaper. I nestled Capricorn’s box in the centre of the chest, roughly where the figure’s heart would be.

  Properly lacing up the noose was the longest and most tedious aspect of the process, but I managed to have the dummy lynched by dusk.

  After that, it was simply a matter of waiting, waiting.

  Every so often I would be tricked into hearing false voices or sounds of movement tumbling up the footpath, but this was just a conspiracy of jangled nerves and rampant hope.

  I stayed crouched under the effigy as it gently twisted in the breeze. The rising moon steadily drew the warmth away from Palemarsh Pond, and my breath began to spill out in white wisps. I longed for the sweater I’d sacrificed for my creation.

  I had almost deemed my attempt at nightmare replication a failure when I heard a woman shriek.

  14

  The scream stunned me. It was too shrill to be dismissed as just another sprout from my imagination. I had no idea whether the woman had cried out because she had seen me, seen what I had left hanging from The Devil’s Finger, or seen something else entirely. Because of this confusion I found myself rendered stiff as a stone. I remained kneeling by the oak’s trunk, my eyes squinted shut from that childish equivocation of not being able to see with not being able to be seen.

  “Oh, shit, Dianne, it ain’t a ghost.” The voice was sonorous and arrogantly male.

  “Yes it is!” the woman returned. “Look!”

  “It’s just a dummy, like a decoration.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a little fucking early for Halloween, don’t you think?”

  While they bickered and stared up into the high boughs where I’d condemned my Gothic doll, I quietly scuttled into the bulrushes and sludge of Palemarsh, cringing as the iciness oozed through my runners, my socks.

  “I thought it was a kid hanging there!” the woman admitted as she and her mate neared The Devil’s Finger. Both of them were fixated on the branch I’d af
fixed the noose to earlier. “You did this, didn’t you?” she shouted. I saw her actually shove her lover, who looked angry enough to shove her back.

  “Don’t be so stupid! I was with you all day. Why would I . . . why would anybody do something as fucked up as this?”

  They studied my work for a while, which I might have found more flattering had I not been shivering so intensely, or so frightened of being discovered.

  “It’s probably racists,” the girl concluded. “You know, the Ku Klux Klan, people like that.”

  “Here?” The man began to chortle, but he immediately choked on his laughter.

  Both of them started screaming . . . screaming because Capricorn had begun to convulse.

  It shook on its noose end as one fresh off the scaffold’s ledge. Its newspaper innards tumbled free, raining down like heaven’s trash, like cranes that had been crippled mid-flight. Sloppy limbs lashed to and fro.

  I watched helplessly as the spirit-trap was shaken loose from its bedding. It shot out of the figure’s shirt and came thudding down on the stony trail.

  By this time the woman had spun on her heel and was tearing back up the path, her boyfriend close behind her shouting, “It’s a trick! It’s got to be trick! Wait, goddamn it!”

  I remained footed in the mud and camouflaged by the wind-bent reeds until I heard the voices disappear completely. I kept my eyes locked on the cracked wooden box on the ground, barely able to bring myself to look upon the gutted clothing that now swung like a limp flag.

  When I was confident that the lovers had fled, I scrabbled out and moved to The Devil’s Finger.

  The spirit-trap was damaged but not destroyed. Though I knew I was no longer safe out there, I needed to know that Capricorn was still with me.

  I lowered the noose and hastily re-assembled the scarecrow (which, because it was dressed in my clothes, was an unnerving double of me) and restored the creature’s fractured heart.

  “Please,” I whispered hurriedly, my jaws chattering, “please let me know if you are still here.” I was cradling the figure like a parent comforting a wounded child.

  The only noise to fill my ears was the wind clattering The Devil’s Finger. That dry vacant sound haunted me then, and it haunts me still.

  I was on the verge of tears. I felt as eviscerated as my effigy had been, with my insides raked out and blown about by that low, lonesome wind. Only there was no one to repair me like that scarecrow, no caring hand to set my heart and lungs aright.

  Not knowing what else to do, feeling on one hand that there wasn’t anything else to do, I reclined up against The Devil’s Finger and nuzzled up to my lynched companion. I muttered Capricorn’s name once or twice, then lay there eyeing the noose, wondering if I’d knotted it tightly enough to support my own neck.

  In an instant Capricorn sprang up with such force that I was heaved to one side. My head snapped around in time to catch Capricorn looking at me with its eyeless face. It raised a crinkling arm, lowered it. Then it lay back down again, jerky with trepidation, like one trying to resume sleeping after experiencing a terrible dream.

  Hindsight leads me to believe that it was my brief consideration of suicide that caused Capricorn to come back so dramatically. It needed me as much as I needed it.

  I carefully dismantled the effigy and carried its parts home with me, including the frigid and vibrating spirit-trap.

  15

  Much later that night I dreamt of Capricorn.

  It was a simple dream: I was lying in my bed and Capricorn emerged from the corner, just as the faceless girl had done, only this time it was the condemned effigy that stumbled at me, complete with the noose dangling from its neck. It crawled up onto my mattress, its papery joints crinkling, and pressed an impossible weight over my face. I was smothered until I saw great pink amoebas of light, like moth wings, like splayed heart-meat. These wings spread and carried me up and out.

  I awoke choking on phlegm. I remained bedridden for three days. It was a grand time. The flu had no doubt been brought on by my sojourn to The Devil’s Finger, but I have always enjoyed bouts of illness, the way they would lilt form, transmute colour into shades almost unbearably kaleidoscopic. Years later I would learn that the word influenza originally meant ‘visitation, or influence, from the stars.’ And I knew precisely what this implied.

  That particular illness, more than any other I’ve been afflicted with before or since, had real meaning to me. I believe beyond all doubt that those three days were ones of communion with Capricorn.

  I tried to communicate as best I could with the effigy, propping it up at my desk with a pencil stuffed into its glove-hand. But its messages were always faint scribbles. More than once I tricked myself into seeing something of import in those graphite smudges and loops, but in the end they meant nothing.

  Even my dreams seemed at the time never appeared to be anything but ink-blot vagaries. They were repetitive with their images: mouths, tongues, rooms filled with voices, tenements whose smashed windows couriered the wind like choir song.

  Voices. It was always voices.

  Before the stint of illness had fully passed I knew what was required of me, but I was very, very hesitant to accept the charge. The root of my hesitation was, for once, not confusion or guilt, but sheer dread.

  Weeks tumbled past while I suffered through a push-pull of knowing what Capricorn needed, what I needed if I was ever to learn the next phase, and deciding the lengths I was willing to go in order to accomplish it. There were teachings to be passed on, keys to be granted. But their subtlety had to be expressed purely: our relationship could go no further until Capricorn had a mouthpiece. Pantomime and image had been exhausted.

  I repeatedly offered myself to serve as Capricorn’s speaker, but Capricorn would not have it. Capricorn was not seeking to be me, and to be honest I was not interested in full union with it. We sought to meet as equals. There was no other byway we could travel. I still lugged a great millstone of guilt over abandoning this precious force for so long. The very idea of doing so again was unconscionable to me. At that time Capricorn was all I had. Yes, I had deliberately snubbed normalcy, but my life was as I’d wished it to be. The exchange could not remain petrified, trapped in a hopeless inertia. And the only backward traces were to utterly extinguish Capricorn.

  In the end, I chose.

  It took days of plotting, and then several more days before I stockpiled enough courage required to do that which so few, perhaps none, had the will to actually do.

  16

  Buttressed by schoolyard rumours and by the liminal power of campfire stories, the legend of the House of Shades had endured in my town’s folklore for at least two generations. Over the years many of my classmates had ridden their bikes along the dirt road that hemmed the property, eyeing the house from a good safe distance. But no one, not even I, ever had gumption enough to cross that property line. I had always suspected that the earth was not quite so solid on the other side of that fence.

  The House of Shades did not look as though it had been built so much as plopped down onto its site. Picture a farmhouse with a noticeably lilting frame and bowing eaves, with cupolas and a pitched roof that was practically picked clean of its shingles.

  The afternoon that I finally crossed that fence of sagging wire was bright and almost mockingly cheery. I had pedalled to the outskirts, aided by a temperate breeze and the sound of robins chirping their encouragement.

  I concealed my bicycle behind some brush and then crossed the great field, slowly, carefully, perhaps even reverentially. Years of neglect had firmed the fallow crop rows into a stout labyrinth whose gutted lines all lured walkers to the same dead-end: the House of Shades. A few stubborn pockets of winter snow lingered in the rows where they sat like dislodged clouds, like the peaks of interred mountains.

  ‘If only they could see me now,’ I thought, ‘all those schoolyard worms. If only they could know what I was doing . . .’

  As my steps pulled the House nea
rer, I heard the soft click-clatter of the windblown mobiles from the porch. My gaze followed those soft clacking sounds. I paused to consider the garden of crude crosses that hung from the porch roof by various lengths of frizzy butcher’s twine. Though one or two were proper crucifixes of pure-yet-tarnished silver, most of the dangling charms were nothing more than bits of intersecting fencepost, or sticks that had been hastily lashed together. Every one of them was crudely marred with scraps of sanctimonious graffiti:

  JESUS SAVS

  BLESS THIS HOUSE

  SAYETH THE LORD!

  CHRISTOURSAVEYOUR

  The drooping porch groaned when I added my weight to it. I could feel the clouded glass of the windows, or rather something behind those windows, studying me. I ducked to avoid being hit with the swinging shrine and moved to the front door.

  The toe of my runner snagged on something flabby, tripping me up. Dust billowed up from the porch beams, and I had to grab the railing to break my fall. Splinters bored into my palm. I shook off whatever had tripped me up, noticing it was a pile of pale fabric. I bent and plucked it free from the rocking chair runner that had kept it pinioned.

  The rucksack was well worn, which made my task of biting a pair of eyeholes into it rather easy. I tried not to tug the fraying rips too forcefully; just enough to allow me to see once I’d pulled the sack over my head.

  The mask was a bit too droopy for my liking. Its broad weave revealed too much of my face. As I examined my sallow reflection in one of the fractured, dust-fogged windows, it occurred to me that I had unwittingly transformed myself into the condemned man, the lynched scarecrow dangling but not dead from the rigid reach of The Devil’s Finger.