At Fear's Altar (11 page)

Her name was Helma Kuefer. After washing the blood and dirt from her face, Josef discovered that she was quite pretty. He also learned that his estimation of her age was only off by a year.

Their courtship began respectably enough; with Helma’s teary, grateful father insisting that Josef join them for supper at the Inn where he was proprietor. Together, Helma, her father (a widower), and Josef enjoyed broiled beef, bread made heavy with butter, ale, and bitter chocolate.

During the meal Josef feared that Helma had grown smitten with him, for her narrow blue eyes were forever darting in his direction. His suspicions strengthened once Herr Kuefer began extolling the virtues of his daughter; her staunch work ethic, her culinary skills, her loyalty, and so on.

The only time Helma spoke was to ask Josef why he had selected “that particular flower” to wear in his lapel.

“Oh, I’m just rather fond of it,” Josef explained, running his finger over the tough shock of green and the silken red star that capped it. “It’s attached to happy memories of my Father.”

“An odd choice for that,” Helma returned. “Cypress flowers are associated with death.”

With this single specimen of occult knowledge, Josef felt his interest in Helma beginning to pique. By the time they said their farewells that night Josef resolved that he might as well propose marriage to Fraulein Kuefer. After all, he did not enjoy cooking, and he’d read many stories that spoke of the pleasures of companionship, especially in the autumn years of one’s life, which in his case were not as far off as they'd once been. To say nothing of the fact that Josef was unlikely to find another woman who could appreciate the manner in which death underpinned all things, including flora.

The pair became engaged just weeks after the war's end. It was a strange time for the country; filled with sadness and confusion, yet also with a noble drive to rebuild, to rise like a rarefied phoenix from the ashes of combat.

They were wed in the spring, in the great church where Helma and her father attended weekly mass. For a time the couple moved into one of the rooms in Herr Kuefer’s Inn, but they eventually purchased a small cottage near Dusseldorf, not far from the law office where Josef was employed as a clerk.

Their life was sedate but reasonably happy. Josef had to make an effort in order to keep his strange hobbies secret from his wife, but he believed that one can grow accustomed to anything, and thus he was at peace with his and Helma's tiny lakeside home.

The property they owned met with a small woodland, through which Josef enjoyed nightly walks. He would often pretend that strange creatures walked with him, stalking close at his heels, but in the end such reveries fostered only feelings of disappointment, of sadness. These emotions, though Josef was loathe to confess it, seemed to be dilating with each passing day that he played the pantomime of a kindly neighbour, a devoted husband, and a staunch employee.

Josef was absolutely sickened by the prospect that the King of Ugly Ecstasies had parted His gates for him on that fateful night, but Josef had declined that rarest of invitations. He'd allowed himself to become so dully human. It crippled him to mull the possibility that he'd traded exquisite devilry for the castrated tranquillity of home and hearth. His mother would have been ashamed of him.

Ultimately, however, even if such an ugly theory were true, Josef had grown far too fond of Helma to ever convey to her these deep feelings of sadness that he housed in his heart. And so he allowed these harsh feelings to eat at him from the moment he woke until he retired at night, at which time his pain strutted about his unconscious, costumed in mocking dreams.

Sometimes he would feel sharp pangs of resentment toward Helma, as if she, the broken victim of the air raid, was somehow to blame for his foolish choice. Whenever such venom began to taint him, Josef would re-align himself by indulging in his solitary walks.

These constitutionals became increasingly longer. With the war over it was difficult for Josef to make them as daring as they'd once been, but one evening Josef decided to make them more exotic. He trudged out to the small churchyard at the far end of the woods. After all, if the Devil did deem him worthy of a second chance, where else would he opt to appear than among the mighty dead? Perhaps this would be the key: to visit those places that other men instinctively shun. He could possibly find another infernal passageway there.

Josef was shocked when this simple deviation from his customary route yielded instant recognition from His Infernal Majesty.

There, lying on the ground before the mouth of the cemetery gates as if waiting for him, were freshly lopped cypress flowers. Their vivid petals were like embers upon the damp clay.

He raced into churchyard, his eyes wide and hopeful, but there was no Devil to be found. He settled down on one of the weather-smoothed markers and waited.

Dawn had nearly broken by the time Josef concluded that he would receive no further boons that night. Before making his way home, Josef collected the cypress flowers from the ground and placed them in his coat pocket. He hadn't been given a full view just yet, merely a glimpse. Josef knew he'd have to
earn
his access to the downward path.

Thus began Josef’s self-fashioned initiation. Nightly he began to feed his growing hunger for unnatural pleasures. He would spend moonlit nights among the graves, would whittle crooked creatures out of carefully selected wood, would use the head of a Lucifer match to scratch barbarous verses upon old stones.

Though the cypress-bearer had yet to appear, Josef always found the flowers waiting for him whenever he deliberately contradicted his conscience and forced himself to do things no respectable man would ever do. Whether inside caves or at the rim of an unused well, or among the tombs; the flowers were always there to evidence His passing through.

One auspicious night, Josef had gotten so swept up in the romance of a churchyard at midnight that he actually plundered one of the old mausoleums. He jimmied open an oblong box and plunged his bare hands into the beautiful, beautiful rot it held.

Whenever he was in the throes of his black feats, Josef never paused to question whether or not it was proper for a man to plunder graves, to keep company with the chimeras of his own creation, to chat with elementals.

In fact, it was only after the deeds were done—the casket re-shut, the charm concealed beneath the moss, the blasphemous drawings burned to ashes—that Josef
thought
at all.

As he would walk home, often just as the sun was rising, Josef would be tormented with guilt, with a fear that he was losing his mind. He questioned just how far he might take his activities. Would he one day feel impelled to butcher an animal, to murder a fellow human being? Would he eventually be unable or unwilling to make the distinction between molesting an ancient corpse and creating a fresh one?

Why, Josef wondered, did these questions never occur to him while he had the cadaverous chunks in his hands, the invocation on his lips? What force muted his conscience?

He eventually developed a theory that his nocturnal activities were in fact the will of the Devil. Of course! It was all so obvious; he was being influenced from the great Below. The King had not truly abandoned him. He was with Josef still, albeit in subtler forms.

For months Josef was nourished by this theory. He liked to imagine an infernal spirit being ensconced inside his skull. Sometimes he envisioned this Satanic perch as a great throne of black rock, other times it was a simple lattice of bones lashed together by cypress vines.
He
would remain there, silent and regal, until He felt impelled to act, at which time the man who was Josef Amsel would regress from reality like a snail into its shell in order to allow this nobler aspect full use of his body.

These reveries made domestic life much more tolerable, for a little while at least. Accepting his dualistic nature, Josef was able to move through this world proudly and happily; a smile on his face, sin in his heart, a fresh sprout of cypress jutting from his lapel.

Coming home from work one evening, Josef discovered a remarkable sight: a path of cypress flowers trailing up the steps to his cottage!

He went tearing up the stairs, and when he came stumbling through the doorway his wife stared at him as if she was unsure whether he was drunk, enraged, or both.

“Is He here?” Josef gasped.

“Who?” Helma returned.

Josef wiped the perspiration from his upper lip, craned his head back to the still-open door. The wind summoned the cypress flowers to a vertigo dance.

“I thought .   .   . someone had come .   .   .”

“Your supper is ready, Josef. Come and eat.”

As the months wore on, Josef began to feel a growing torment by the constant appearance of the cypress and the perennial absence of its bearer. His already thin hope of re-encountering the Horned One grew thinner still, and although he continued to make his nocturnal outings, the churchyard and the bones it held, the knotty wood effigies, and the Satanic verse all began to lose their import and appeal.

The problem of true Faith, Josef resolved, is that it requires constant expression. So when the all-too-human impulse to relax began to claim him, the ugly light of logic was only too eager to burn away his shadowy Faith. His practices began to seem sick, damaging not only to himself but to Helma.

And so, Josef abandoned his Faith. As if to spite the one who'd forsaken him (and perhaps to excuse the blasphemies he'd committed), Josef threw himself into becoming an even better neighbour, a more attentive husband, a more devout churchgoer.

He was pleasantly surprised at just how swiftly a man can give himself selective amnesia. In no time at all he'd managed to distance himself from his memories of those nocturnal escapades until they were no more tangible than a Grimm's tale, and that was how Josef preferred to keep them.

One of his acts as a cleansed, reformed man was to surprise Helma with an extended weekend in the country for St. John the Baptist’s Day. Together they spent the days walking, reading, and swimming in the great lake.

It was during this latter activity that Josef saw the cypress one final time.

He was quite far from the small pier where Helma was sunning herself. The flowers were floating upon the deep green waves. Josef couldn’t be certain, but to his eye it looked as though they were holding together in a ring-like pattern. He swam toward it, periodically peering into the water, half expecting to see a faceless head looking up at him from beneath the surface.

Josef swam carefully, for although he was eager to reach the flowers, he dared not stir the waters too much for fear of breaking the circle, of sending the flowers adrift on the current.

He was almost within reach of the ring when a sudden and crippling exhaustion overcame him. Josef didn’t realize how far he’d swum until he turned back and saw his wife as a mere speck in the distance. She was no longer lying on the pier, but was standing and staring out at him, shielding her eyes with her hands.

She was also no longer alone. Something large and dim was staring out from the nearby glade.

Josef screamed Helma’s name, pleaded for help, for now treading water was impossible for his drained body. As he slid down into the wet death, Josef kept thinking, ‘It’s not fair .   .   . I saved you, Helma .   .   .
save me
.   .   .’

Helma, grinning, trembling with delight, waited impatiently for the tide to carry Josef ashore.

His body washed up on the sands beside the pier, where the empty rowboats clunked together like sad wood chimes in the gloaming.

Helma raced to retrieve the cypress flowers that stuck to Josef’s soggy carcass. She peeled them from the water-corpse, which went
squish-squish
with every touch.

There was a soft rustle of leaves. Helma looked up to see Him coming back to her.

She knelt, held out the dripping cypress as an offering, which the Horned One accepted and instantly rendered into a tightly-woven ring. Helma wept when she felt this crown being placed upon her head.

After the many tedious years since she’d been blessed by a glimpse of Him among the bombed-out ruins, after so many failed attempts to beckon Him back by lying cypress around the ghoulish corners of the village, her undying Faith was finally bearing fruit. Unlike her husband, Helma had never wavered in expressing her devotion. Because of this, she was able to claim her throne at last.

—
Dedicated to Hanns Heinz Ewers