At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  This sense of the awesome left me prostrated and held me there for what felt like years. But of course I had no real sense of time at all. All was an edgeless night.

  Sitting up, I stretched my arms with a curious trepidation. My uprising was slow. The utter lack of light made everything twirl. I spread my legs in order to widen my base, give myself a firmer centre of gravity.

  My walk was more like a toddle, a prudish kind of shuffle due to an utter lack of equilibrium.

  Stretching my palms outward, they smacked against a slick stone barrier. The slapping sound detonated like a bomb inside the chamber.

  When the noise finally died it was immediately replaced with a new one—a piercing clash that repeated again and again.

  Then all at once there was a searing flash. The burst of light stirred bats from their resting place among the stalactites. They went rocketing out through a cleft somewhere in the darkness above me, screaming and flapping. I envisioned them fluttering out like flue ash.

  In between sparks and sounds, Capricorn advised me to shut my eyes, which I did, but I could still see the flint sparks through my eyelids. Eventually the sparks became a flicker, a glow.

  I opened my eyes, slowly, and only after I was told to do so.

  Capricorn was standing near a corridor that led to another of the cave’s chambers. Capricorn held an antique lantern in one fist. The lantern’s globe was cobalt, and I hoped that it was only this bluish filter that made Capricorn’s shell look as putrefied as it did, but I doubted this was the case. Capricorn waved me over and I followed it through the stout passage.

  The antechamber was far more cramped than the main hull, but its tight walls were fabulous. Capricorn passed the lantern’s sputtering flame over these drier rock slabs, illuminating the murals that had been smeared there in ochre. It was a bestiary of sorts, a pictographic fable that could only have been captured and conveyed in that thin seam where one world overlaps with another.

  I studied those shaped stains until the lantern’s flame began to wane. As the light died, I scrambled to commit as many of the grotesques to memory as I could; intuiting that they were somehow my heritage.

  24

  Dreaming without the millstone of sleep is something I had not truly experienced until my time Below.

  There I dreamt long and vividly. I dreamt of myself leaving Autumnal and returning to school. Years tumbled past me as I lay envisioning myself maturing and experiencing all the tedious routines of education and courtship, marriage and career. The woman I saw as my mate was pretty, if a little plain. I saw her smiling a great deal, and I was bemused to notice how often this woman made my dream-self smile in return.

  But then there came a vision of an ugly discussion in a living room. I was standing facing this woman, listening to her but not truly hearing what she was saying.

  That picturesque living room began melting into the shadows, and soon the woman was submerged too. In the end there was only me, me lying in the all-embracing dark of the Below.

  The whole dreaming process is very different in the Below. Down there dreams could come at any time, eyes closed or open, it did not matter. They came costumed as they willed; sometimes in impossible opulence, other times in realism so gritty that I was able to grope and taste and smell every detail. The scenes of far-off places had less impact on me down there, likely because Autumnal was itself a liminal space, an interstitial paradise where I could shed my human costume like all the foliage that had grown too brittle for the bough and was now grounded. I was not required to immediately disguise myself in fresh mummery. I could be myself there. I could simply be.

  The mechanics of dreaming Below were nearer to a feeling of ‘slippage’ than of being pulled through a set of pictures in the brain. This slippage was a burst of absolute freedom. Whenever I’d enter those Below dreams I would feel as though my entire existence up until that time had been weighted. In life I had grown so numb to this burden that I had managed to trick myself into believing that trudging as a kind of third-rate Atlas was the natural condition of reality. But in the Below, every so often, I would feel my psyche slip and stumble down into a great free dark open hole. The weight would roll off my shoulders. I would bound about freely, clearing leagues with a mere breath.

  I’m unsure how many dreams I’d been born into and subsequently shorn before I noticed a detail that, to my mind at least, seemed significant: I would always experience these dreams from behind. No matter what the scene, I would invariably enter the dreamscape from some backstage hem, would study everything from behind-the-scenes, seeing the phenomena unfolding without being really affected by it. It was the image before the chemical burned it onto the photograph paper, the negative of the movie, the unseen dress rehearsal of the drama.

  There were a number of dreams I disliked intensely, and a few that I loved purely and completely.

  I very much loved the dreams of that plain, pretty woman. She had a supple body, and hair that smelled of spices, of rain. She talked to me. I might have spoken to her too, but I cannot remember what I said.

  On a plain of twisted sheets and scattered pillows I would touch her and wait for her to stop me. She never did. These dreams were not aggressive ones. Sometimes I would bite down on the rubbery tips of her breasts. Often the dream would culminate with the dampness of her cleft, dark and wondrous as the Below itself.

  And there was life in that place too.

  I would emerge from such dreams with a sense of sorrow, of longing. But the Below unfailingly managed to wring these feelings from my heart by reminding me (though never in words) that it was Female undivided.

  The Below did not need to shard itself in the disguise of skin and hair. It was the pure undivided dark of the Real. And it had taken me in as one of its own.

  25

  “I think I’m ready to see more of Autumnal,” I said. Capricorn and I were squatted in the painted chamber.

  Capricorn said this was acceptable.

  We reached and scrabbled and pushed our way back up, until the Greylight was visibly glimmering above our heads. We found a slight perch and Capricorn urged me to stop. There it told me that there were some things I needed to know before we finished our ascent.

  Capricorn warned me that its shell would look very different up there, and that mine would too. The darkness of the Below takes as well as provides. We’d been fed upon, Capricorn apprised me, but such a feeding was necessary in order for Autumnal to sustain itself.

  I told Capricorn I could handle this, and together we finished the climb.

  The changes in Capricorn were drastic. Its shell had decayed terribly.

  As for me, the most appreciable change was that I was larger. I detected it in my hands at first. They were still thin, but the fingers were visibly longer, the flesh tougher, more weathered. I used these slender appendages to touch my face and I found my cheeks bristly. The hair on my head was thicker and shaggier. I implored Capricorn to describe any changes it saw in me in detail, but Capricorn refused to comply.

  I spent some time wandering Autumnal in search of a puddle or pond in order to inspect my reflection, but unfortunately, even after I did manage to locate a semi-clear tarn, when I pushed the reeds out of the way I discovered that I no longer cast a reflection upon the water. Part of me was horrified by the implications of this. But another accepted this new development gracefully, even gratefully.

  26

  We made many pilgrimages around Autumnal, to those nooks I had not yet experienced. Capricorn allowed me to witness many things. We talked a great deal too, Capricorn and I. Beyond the occasional totemic beast or fowl, we encountered no other life-forms during any of our wanderings through the mist.

  The Greylight no longer bothered me.

  Once we passed a familiar toadstool-rich yew in the grove and Capricorn made a joke about how I had not been eating and I told it I longer had any hungers. Capricorn told me that was good and as it should be.

  27

  We
’d been uprooting mandrake because the rains had washed up those screaming roots to where the surface of the crossroads scarcely covered them. Those knotty roots with their frayed silk transformed the terrain into something woefully lumpy. By then I was well versed in the tongue of the fell and the fey, and so this task was simple for me, and rather pleasant, actually.

  At one point during our labours Capricorn asked if I minded if it sat down to rest. I could see it cradling one arm in the folds of its sheer gown. It sat down on a log. When I asked what was wrong, Capricorn revealed that it had lost a hand.

  “What can I do?” I asked.

  Just sit, was what I was told. I did, and I listened as Capricorn explained to me that the Below had taken a great deal, probably more than a normal, natural share.

  The Shade’s shell was no longer useable. Another host was needed, or we would have to part ways there and then.

  I told Capricorn this could not happen and demanded it tell me more about the alternative.

  28

  On our journey back to the House of Shades we discussed what needed to be done.

  Although I knew in some corner of my being that we had been away from the House for some time, its condition was still a great shock to me. It had been aged when I arrived, by the time we returned to it from Autumnal, the House of Shades was scarcely standing at all.

  I assured Capricorn that everything would be fine as I laid its withered host back upon the very bed where it had died, where it had been reborn.

  Capricorn instructed me that all the goods I would need could be found inside the House.

  They were not only in the House, but had in fact been collected inside my rucksack mask, which sat like a bulging stocking of gifts on the upper landing.

  I made a brief stop in order to see myself at long last.

  Standing before the Shade’s scuffed and cracking bathroom mirror, I saw a man where there had once been a boy. I spent a long time studying my face. I became so lost in the reflection that I began to daydream about my life as a ‘normal’ man. A man with a wife and house; a man like my father and his father before him.

  I shook off the dream and returned to the important task at hand.

  Venturing back to the Samhain Gate was much more difficult without Capricorn there to guide me, but I eventually found it. I dumped out the contents of my sack onto the ground and then set them out around the gateway as artistically as I could.

  There was a pumpkin that had been carved with a saw-tooth grin and angular eyes. (How the gourd had stayed ripe for so long was just one of Autumnal’s many mysteries.)

  I found the candle and the book of Lucifer matches.

  A collection of tiny animal bones and twisted metal nails had been strung together in grisly garland.

  There was a bottled potion and a rag.

  There was also a small key of copper.

  I donned the garland and lighted the lamp. Then I slid the rucksack over my adult head and I waited.

  Capricorn had insisted that I crash the Gate, yet I was reluctant to do this, fearing not only what I might find on the far side, but what I might permanently leave behind.

  Steeling myself with the knowledge that there were certain tolls to be paid if I wanted to maintain my relationship with Capricorn, I stepped through the Gate.

  29

  I found myself standing on a paved path that was swarming with smaller denizens of Autumnal; cackling goblins and wraiths running amok in a great game of Curtains. The air was redolent with sickly-sweet offerings, with libations. All around me, rustic temples watched the procession of ghouls with solemn, patient eyes. The temple steps were alight with gourd lamps blazing like jewels in the night, as if to mark the birth of some new Hallowed king.

  The temple gates opened and shut. I fingered the cold copper key and started along the smooth path. My gourd lamp glowed under my arm as I strolled past all the temples, all of which stood in rows, each of which bore their own baubles of Samhain. Unsure which temple I was to enter in order to enter the next phase of Capricorn’s plan, I opted to do as I have always done: I allowed my primal instincts to guide me. I would know when the time was right.

  And indeed I did.

  A small grey-and-black cottage sat with its windows glowing warmly. There were no seasonal accoutrements whatsoever. Hoping that my stomach’s pit and my spine had served me appropriately, I crept up to the door, inserted my key. I had to stifle a giggle when the lock gave and I was able to push the door ajar.

  It was here that I found you all curled up like a housecat on the sofa, sleeping the kind of sound slumber I don’t think I’ve ever known.

  Not until after I had secured you and administered the potion did I recognize both you and the living room from my visions in the Below.

  30

  You know the rest of the story.

  I took you back through the Samhain Gate. I dragged you all the way to the House of Shades, but was horrified to discover that the House was no longer standing. Capricorn had always told me that time moved differently in the Autumnal, but I was nonetheless bewildered by what I saw, and petrified at how this shift would impact my plan. The foundation was all that remained of the House, that and some halved bricks scattered across the dead field.

  Sickened at the thought of what could have happened to Capricorn, I dragged you toward the Below. I had trouble finding its mouth, but that was only because everything was moving too quickly and it was getting me confused. For one thing, I was moving by the light of a harvest moon. I was horribly confused as to where the Greylight had gone.

  I started screaming out for Capricorn, but my words echoed limply through the starlit woods, which seemed so thin, so woefully empty.

  The plan was lost. Everything was starting to spiral, to charge without reins. I was so panicked that I hadn’t even noticed that you were screaming.

  I frantically checked the garland around my neck until I found the sharpest nail on my necklace. This I plucked free and placed just above your crotch. I took up a rock, preparing to hammer it down. I was so close to completing the ritual. I cared not that I was in open territory and not in the secure Below.

  I might have been able to finish everything had you not said my name.

  “Michel!” you’d shouted. Do you remember? “Please! Please don’t! Please don’t kill our baby!”

  You probably thought I didn’t hear you cry out those words, because I remember so very few things, but I do remember.

  Those words confused me so much that I momentarily forgot what I was doing. Then my trembling hand faltered and I dropped the faith-nail. And in the heartbeat that I scrabbled to get it, you got up and tried to run. You didn’t run far, but it was enough to bring the lights.

  And the voices.

  Soon those harsh lights were glaring directly at me. Those voices began shouting my name.

  31

  Do I even bother recounting how things unfurled from there? The doctors are still trying to convince me that what I went through after you, my ‘wife’ as they claim, told me about the pregnancy was a ‘fugue state.’ If I am to believe the doctors, I had experienced many of these ‘fugue states’ since I was a young child.

  This is the explanation I’ve been given by my keepers; that Autumnal was merely a symptom of a fugue. That it only seemed as though I’d slipped out of the world for years, when in fact it had only been a handful of days in my adulthood. The news of your pregnancy, the prospect of my becoming a father, had been the tipping point that caused me to regress to the cellar-womb of my boyhood; “you know, where you felt safe,” as one of the doctors here once mused.

  Safe.

  Part of me envies them, is a bit jealous of their tidy model of reality. Inside one box is the objective world, things that are distinct from you. Inside this other box is your subjective world, your memories, dreams, and most importantly, your perceptions of the objective world.

  My perceptions are, according to this model, fouled up. Now these fine
experts on the unseen are dedicated to pinpointing the cause of my malady. They spend hours every day calmly trying to scoop the tainting fly out of my mental ointment. They attempt to do this in many ways.

  The most common method is to try and corner me with logic, asking me to explain how I could have slipped out of the waking life as a teenager unnoticed. Why had my parents not contacted the police? And where were my mother and father now? How is it that people like you not only recognize me but have mountains of evidence to prove our life together?

  This is where the issue becomes tangled and thorny, but I shall do my best to explain.

  If you were to take a good look, a cold and honest look, at how you live out your life, you would notice how we spend most of it inside our heads. For instance, have you ever arrived at work one morning and realized that you have absolutely no memory of driving there? Where were you exactly for those twenty or thirty minutes? You were obviously behind the wheel of your car, driving at just the right speed, taking all the proper turns, et cetera. And yet there was another aspect of you, perhaps another you altogether, that was elsewhere.

  My life has been spent in that elsewhere. I’ve always allowed the mundane world to slough away and made no attempts to reassemble it.

  This principle has nothing whatever to do with ‘missing time’ or ‘alternate universes’ or any other such idiocy. It is something much more primordial, something rawer than any complicated theory.

  You have an ‘elsewhere’ inside you. But I promise you, it is not some imaginary land that exists only in your grey matter, nor is it a dead space that results in blackouts and lost hours (or, as in my case, lost years). It can be those things, but only if you allow your brain to perceive it as such.