Tucking the spirit-trap under one arm, I clutched the corroded knob on the front door, unfazed at first by the fact that the door had (of course) been left unlocked for me.
The panic did not set in until I had crept in between the great mass of yellowed, water-ruined newspaper bundles that were piled along one wall and the wooden coat rack with its jutting fleur de lys hooks of wrought iron. I was inside the House. Visiting a tree on a rustic footpath was one matter. Breaching the House of Shades was something else again.
Every town has its reputedly haunted house, and the House of Shades was ours. It was said to be inhabited by not only a ghost, but also a ghoul; a husband and his wife, respectively. The man had died, and tragically—decapitation by a madman’s axe or a plasma-drenched thresher accident or consumed by the pigs in his barn whom he’d mistreated and starved; choose whichever legend best greases your aesthetics. Throughout this period of their being condemned to dwell on different planes, the old widow went about as though her husband was alive, cooking him meals, speaking in his voice, even rumbling into town behind the wheel of his rusted pickup while dressed in his clothes. Rural Canada’s answer to Norman Bates, yes, but a potent drug for kids like me, kids possessed of a certain hunger.
And so there I stood. My sojourn had nothing to do with courage. I was not on some hero’s quest to conquer a fear of ghosts. The whole ordeal was far less calculated, more akin to riding a subconscious undertow, to my attempting to submerge myself in a continuum that normal people only catch in flits and glimmers. Most grow up and leave the playground. Campfires always burn down to smouldering embers, to cold grey ash. Healthy folk follow marked trails out of the shadowy glens; they march until they reach the light.
I, on the other hand, had somehow found myself boring right into the worm-riddled heart of these grim legends. I wondered if one night I would look down to see spring-heels on my shoes or find myself squeezed snugly underneath a trembling child’s bed or inside their closet, waiting to grab tender young wrists, to cause little hearts to permanently seize from fright.
I stepped forward and peered through the French doors, into what had once been a dining room. Cobweb tufts were piled thickly within the carved grooves of the various hutches, rendering their detail work fuzzily vague. The great table, still heaped with the putrid leavings of the Shade-wife and her partner’s last supper, was coated with dust the colour of desert sand. The food had been festering there for so long that it no longer smelled of putrefaction. It was shrunken and desiccated; chicken legs like leathery talons, peas that were shrivelled white pearls.
When I returned to the main foyer, my fear rendered me paralyzed.
There was something in there with me.
Above my head came the low creak of floorboards bowing. This was followed by a trilling squeak.
I suspect that my terror might have taken me over completely had Capricorn not calmed me. It accomplished this by simply making its casket grow frigid in my hand. The chill alerted me to the fact that I had a Shade of my own.
With this skewed sense of security padding me, I moved to the great staircase and began to climb.
The steps were so aged that even my boyish weight was enough to cause them to pop. As I ascended, I heard a noise from behind one of the second storey’s shut doors. The cry was strangled. I would have thought it a kitten’s mewl had it not been speaking words—mangled words that were, to my ear, not in English.
An acrid stench crowded the air on the landing. It was even stronger in the second-storey corridor. The odour was leaking out from behind a bedroom door that was shut snugly in its jamb. Much of it was the pungency of excrement, but there was also another smell—one of illness, likely terminal.
The trap held snugly under my arm, I reached the doorknob, twisted it, pushed the door back.
The lady Shade was flesh, not aethyr. Her enormous body was piled upon an iron-rack bed whose springs screamed as she struggled to sit up. A whistling sound escaped the slack mouth as the Shade faced her intruder.
She was old, very old, and although her body was elephantine, the Shade appeared to be more bloated than obese, as if her sagging flesh had been inflated with noxious gases; ones that incessantly seeped out through the holes in her body. Whatever sickness she had been suffering from had caused most of her hair to fall out, for the top of the Shade’s scalp was spear-bald, gleaming with its own oils. One of her eyes was milky, irisless and likely useless. The other was vividly green. Both cheeks were soaked from the uncontrollable stream of tears that flowed down her face and dribbled down onto the brown-stained, tattered nightgown.
I stood in the doorway, my only movement being the shrinking of my skin around my bones as my fear mounted. I was so stunned by the sight of the Shade that I did not even feel my bladder voiding until my pant leg turned warm and began to drip.
The puffy face began to stretch, exposing black-pink gums that no longer held teeth. The dry groans and hacking sounds might have been her endeavour to scream.
I somehow knew that the Shade was just as scared of me as I was of her. It occurred to me that this fount of local horror had woken to hear her house being breached, and she was now looking upon a rucksack-faced stranger bearing a dirty box.
Our respective horror swirled between us in a ghost dance, the Shade and I basking in an unseen fog of reptile-brain emotion. It was a transcendental moment; each us of being both predator and prey at once. It was sacred.
Capricorn grew warm in my palm, then cold. It began to vibrate.
I crossed the room with a fresh and fiery determination.
When the Shade saw me crawling up onto her mattress, she fell backward with a pathetic whimper.
I hunched down on her enormous breasts like Fuseli’s incubus. I flicked the clasp on the box lid and pressed the spirit-trap against her face. I had to lean with all my weight just to keep the Shade still. I hoped her struggling would not shake Capricorn loose prematurely. I scrabbled upright and squatted down upon the box, using my legs to form a vice on either side of the trap. I had to clutch the greasy iron bed-frame to keep from toppling over.
As the old woman bucked and struggled, I hearkened back to when Capricorn had appeared to me as the faceless feminine, when I had been beneath the box. Capricorn had been grooming me from the very beginning for this day. I began to cackle.
I then pressed down very hard and felt things crunch and buckle beneath me. A moment later the pillow was being painted by two dark streams that were leaking out either side of the box.
The Shade tried to swat me with one of her jaundiced, waxy hands, and then her chest began to sink, pushing out a final stream of reeking gasses.
17
I lingered inside the Shade’s room as penance for my crime. I stayed pent up in the chamber with the cadaver and the stench and my own suffocating guilt. I remained there for hours. I was pressed up against the far wall, absentmindedly kneading the rucksack in my fist, staring at my victim and not truly believing what I was seeing.
The ugly truth of what I had done became achingly clear to me as soon as the life ran out of the old woman.
I had allowed myself to become lost in a myth, a schoolboy ghost tale. And this delusion had numbed me enough to murder a fellow human being. Only after I had pushed out what little life the old woman had within her did I understand that she was not some Halloween myth, but merely a hermit, a sickly old woman who’d been enduring a protracted, lonely death in a dilapidated farmhouse several kilometres from nowhere.
Dazed by the sickening possibilities of what my fate would be once my crime was discovered, I leaned to one side and brought up whatever was in my stomach. I began to cry, and while I sobbed I pressed my hands against my face, no longer able to look at my victim. Finally, in some gesture of penance, or perhaps mere masochism, I pulled myself to my feet and glared unflinchingly at her.
The barrel of the Shade’s leg was poking out from the covers. Her head was masked by the box, which was tented like a woo
den book over her mashed face.
I stood with my teeth set, my nails boring into the meat of my palms.
There was no transference of spirits here, only a diseased shut-in whose last sight was that of a hooded fiend squatting on her chest, blocking her airway, saying strange words all the while.
When I finally mustered the courage to peel the trap from the half-caved skull I don’t mind confessing that I had to look away. I dashed the spirit-trap to the floor. It broke into four fragments, which I then stomped into kindling.
I backed out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind me. I found the filthy wreck of a bathroom at the opposite end of the hall, and there I washed my jeans, draping them over the basin rim to dry.
I stayed in the bathroom until it was too dark to see. The sun must have been setting outside. I’d lost an entire day inside the House of Shades. Time, it seemed, had become illusory to me. I slipped the still-damp jeans back on and exited the room.
The Shade was standing in the tenebrous hall, waiting patiently for me. The gloom masked the details of her face; she was a puffy, indistinct outline, but she was unquestionably there. The body was not as rotund as it had been when I arrived. Death must have released many of its ballooning agents. There were also no more whistling sounds. There were in fact no sounds at all.
Until it finally spoke.
Michel . . . it said.
18
Our inaugural conversation there in the corridor was sparse; a back and forth of my awkward questions and Capricorn’s terse, cryptic replies. We eventually migrated to the living room and nestled into a pair of dusty armchairs that flanked a crumbling fireplace that had a rifle above its mantle.
My guilt was relinquished after Capricorn explained that it had been the one that had planted the idea of the Shade as a vessel. She was, after all, the most convenient one for a boy of my size to overtake. Her locale was nicely isolated, her reputation suitably eerie.
Capricorn then conveyed some deeply nuanced lessons to me, sermons on a great many things.
Gifted with a tongue and grey matter and limbs—however maimed—at last, Capricorn explained to me just what it was.
19
It seemed as though we had only been conversing for mere minutes when the light began bleeding in through the dirty panes.
“It’s dawn already,” I said.
Capricorn shook its head no, informing me that what I had just glimpsed was called the Greylight, and it was the final step in my initiation.
Capricorn then rose and offered its hand to me. Together we walked to the front door.
“Someone will see us! We’ll get caught!”
But Capricorn assured me that everything was different now. To enforce its point, Capricorn led me out into a frightening new world.
It explained to me that this land was a terrible place, a great vista of truly awful things. Capricorn also assured me that I had nothing to fear because this was where I’d come from.
20
Those who are forced (sometimes at birth, but often through years of condemnation) into the grubbier, dejected margins of life are gifted with a yearning for something they cannot define. It is a bittersweet hunger, a pang that hovers somewhere between magical nostalgia and an errant wish for tomorrow; an elegiac lust.
This feeling is a Calling from a different realm.
Sometimes those outsiders are able to snatch glimmers of this far-off realm in late-October glades, or in the cinema of dark delights. Perhaps they traipse through it briefly if they are fortunate enough to fall through the trapdoors of nightmare.
Capricorn taught me that this realm is called Autumnal by its faithful. Autumnal is not a place, but an eternal moment. It is a state of being where one’s innermost nature weds perfectly with some neglected corner of the natural world. Autumnal is smoke and damp air. It is illumed by a slaughtered sun whose rays are filtered through a perennial fog. This is the Greylight; the guttering fallow of the underworld glyphed in the natural world of matter and form.
Capricorn and I stepped off the porch of the House of Shades and into a boundless field carpeted with dead leaves. I followed Capricorn into an expanse of gnarled trees that must have sprouted overnight. We listened to the groaning of toads and to whippoorwills whose trilling throats were glutted with freshly claimed souls.
There were humming leylines and a small tarn that bubbled and fumed as though it were a brew and the dark framing soil its cauldron.
In a realm so redolent with terrible mystery, I lived for the first time.
I eventually felt the urge to sit, not for respite, but to collect myself, to perch and drink it all in.
Capricorn, wiping vicious fluid from its borrowed mouth, jutted a ragged-nailed thumb toward a clearing.
We settled on a pair of wind-smoothed obsidian slabs and I asked Capricorn whose graves they were. Capricorn said it didn’t matter. We took our time watching a Brown Recluse fashioning thin silver glyphs with its spinner.
“I should eat soon,” I remarked.
Capricorn asked me if I actually felt hungry. I did not, but for some reason I lied and said yes, I was.
I was guided to a great yew that fostered a strange fungus between its sturdy roots. Capricorn tried to pluck a few of these mushrooms free for me, but being unaccustomed to its arthritic digits, needed my assistance.
The mushroom caps were rubbery and tasted mouldy and bitter. Capricorn explained very matter-of-factly that their flavour was due to their toxicity.
I stopped chewing and felt the toadstools curdling in my stomach. “They’re poisonous?” I managed, wondering if the whirl in my head was psychosomatic or the first symptoms of the fungi’s fatal power.
Capricorn chortled a little, or tried to at least, then said I needn’t worry about them being poisonous because I was now too.
21
After supping on toadstools and nibbling nightshade for dessert, I allowed Capricorn to lead me through a boundless field of dull sludge. As we trudged under the Greylight, the landscape’s edges would seemingly come into focus, but only for a few steps before becoming lost in the bedding of fog once more.
“Doesn’t this place ever end?”
Capricorn’s silence spoke volumes.
The Greylight never waxed, but perpetually flickered like an old tallow candle on the verge snuffing out, an electric torch with dying batteries. This made gauging our journey futile. I asked Capricorn where we were going.
The Samhain Gate, I was told.
22
The Samhain Gate was little more than a toppled portion of a stone wall that stood only to my waist. The stones were chalk-white and smelled of sulphur. My merely pinching a smaller chip of one caused it to crumble to a powder.
Capricorn divulged that this Gate would be of great import to us, but not just yet. It was a risky place. The great veil was thinnest here, and there was no promise that whatever lurked beyond the wall would be held at bay, nor did the Gate guarantee one’s return.
When it saw me settling into the straw of the field with my hands pressed against my cranium, Capricorn asked if I felt all right.
“Dizzy,” I managed. “Head hurts, too. I think it might be the poison.”
I was assured that it was only the Greylight, that it can afflict those who are not acclimatized to it. This rang true with me. After all, the Greylight was the shade of a migraine headache, a nuclear winter glimmer.
Capricorn promised to find me some respite. This was for the best, as it was not wise to linger at the Samhain Gate.
We went into the woods, dark and deep, until we came upon a limestone plateau. We crossed the flat white expanse with great care, as though it were a frozen pond that threatened to crack at any minute.
Capricorn halted, as did I in turn. Capricorn waved its hands to push some of the fog away. Fog clung thicker here, and more coldly.
We were standing at a rip in the stone. Cold air that smelled of a deep glacial winter came gusting up from the rift,
itself so succulently dark and quiet.
No Greylight down there, Capricorn assured me.
I asked Capricorn to go lead, assuming that it knew where to step and grip, but Capricorn insisted that I make my own way down first.
The opening was more like a forged smoke-hole than a natural cave mouth, but it was wide enough to spore me. I crawled down and watched the Greylight vanish. Very soon my world was all wet rock and dark.
I hit bottom sooner than I’d expected. I took two or three blind backward steps to allow Capricorn some room. It joined me on the cave floor and together we negotiated the terrain that was pocked with little pools of water.
Everywhere was the sound of dripping; a vast mouth salivating over something delectable.
We hobbled through until we reached the heart of the cavern—a great amphitheatre of tinkling moisture, keen breath, chinking stone.
Capricorn said it was safe to lie there awhile, which I did. I did not sleep, but I still found myself dreaming. The darkness never shrank and the air was oddly fresh because of its coldness and its fragrance of minerals. It was good.
23
The darkness of the Below is truly rarefied. It is not subject to laws. It never rises, never falls. Instead it stays bottled in the subterranean and nourishes Autumnal above. This unsullied black is capable of many different shades. Some are beautiful, others are anything but.
That lustreless place managed to reach in and plant a garden of pins down the length of my neck and tended them until they shivered like a field of wind-struck reeds.
At Fear's Altar Page 23