At Fear's Altar (14 page)

M
y friend Austin’s distress was apparent to me before I even reached our table. His twitchy mannerisms and his mask of worry troubled me a great deal, since I knew the tragedies he’d recently endured. He was stationed in the corner, where the only light-source was the dwarfish lamp on the table. This meek, fever-yellow glow made every furrow in Austin’s brow seem gorge-deep and hazed his flesh in a ghoulish pallor. I extended my hand.

“Happy Christmas,” I said, hoping that my somewhat saccharine tone might lift Austin’s spirits. He gave my hand a limp shake and bade me to sit. “What are you drinking tonight?”

“Nothing,” Austin replied.

I ordered a pint of pale for myself and nagged Austin jovially until he finally caved and requested some Darjeeling. Through the mounted speakers tabla drums tapped as rapidly as rainfall. I found myself bobbing my head to the rhythm. Austin, by contrast, seemed pained by the music. He screwed up his face and pressed his fingers into his ears.

“Should I ask them to turn down the volume?” I asked. Austin shook his head. “Are you feeling ill?”

“No” he returned. “Something .   .   . something’s happened .   .   .”

“What’s happened?”

Austin reached for his coat, which was hanging next to a framed painting of triple-eyed Shiva dancing raptly while he obliterates the world. From the inside pocket Austin produced a slim item.

“I found this lying in the centre of my living room when I got home from work this afternoon.” He slid the item across the table.

A Tarot card. Card XVI, The Tower. The colourful illustration depicted a pair of figures falling headlong from an ominous keep whose summit was ablaze from the kiss of dead-white lightning bolts.

“I haven’t used my deck in years, Elliot. It’s a message”—he now spoke
sotto voce
—“a message from my cousin.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“My cousin’s been dead for years.”

The waiter’s timing was impeccable; his request for my dinner order gave me a few seconds to absorb the shock of my friend’s statement. I was woefully unfamiliar with Indian fare, having chosen to have my and Austin’s annual pre-Christmas dinner at The Lotus Room only to appease my friend’s growing interest in Eastern Mysticism. Yoga, I knew, had been one of the few pursuits he’d taken up in recent months that seemed to bring him any pleasure. I was extremely relieved that Austin undertook a discipline in order to cope rather than crawling inside a bottle—something that, if there is any truth to genetic disposition, was a sharp possibility.

I glanced over the menu and on impulse requested curried goat and another pint of pale ale. Austin asked only for saffron rice.

Once our area was again free of intruders I told Austin that he was obviously mistaken. “That card could have been lying around your room for months and just got kicked to the middle of the room. I wouldn’t take it too seriously.”

He was massaging his ears again. I then noticed how heavily he was perspiring. “It’s him,” Austin said, “no question.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“The Tower,” he rasped. “Only he and I knew what it means. No one else.”

“And what does it mean?”

He laughed, but more from exasperation or resignation than mirth. “A long story .   .   .”

At my request, Austin then told me his tale.

“It won’t come as any surprise to you that I used to spend as much time as I could out of my folks’ house,” he began. Having listened to Austin’s occasional intimations about his mother’s rampant alcoholism and his father’s old-world ornery nature, I was able to acknowledge this sincerely. “My mother’s sister and her husband were really surrogate parents to me. Every summer, as soon as school was finished, they would invite me to stay on their farm for as long as I wanted, which was usually the whole summer. I don’t think I’m being too blindly nostalgic when I say that their farm was a true sanctuary for me. I think it was the year my cousin and I both turned thirteen that things began to change. That summer I only spent a few weeks on the farm, then the summer after that; just one week. Then I stopped going altogether.”

“What changed?” I asked.

Austin raised his fingers to pause so that he could cradle his head in his hands.

“Maybe we should get you to a doctor,” I suggested.

“No,” he said, his voice meek and breathless, “it’s passing. It comes in waves.”

“The pain?”

“The noise. It’s the same thing that plagued my cousin. That’s what changed that summer, since you asked. When we were twelve or thirteen my cousin began to suffer from terrible earaches and migraines. My aunt and uncle, as you can imagine, took him for every kind of test imaginable. It took a team of specialists to finally guess that his problem was an acute form of somatic tinnitus.”

“A ringing in the ears.”

“Precisely. I gather the clinicians opted for somatic tinnitus because they couldn’t find the problem area in the actual ear, so they assumed that the problem was somewhere else in my cousin’s head or neck. It became steadily worse as he got older. He tried moving to Calgary to attend university, but it was a disaster. He collapsed on campus one morning. After that he promptly dropped out of school and moved back to his parents’ farmhouse in the country. He took his own life there two years later.”

I cleared my throat to crack a long silence. “Forgive me, Austin, but I’m not really seeing what any of this has to do with you feeling out of sorts tonight because you found an old Tarot card.”

He exhaled sharply. “That final summer, the last time I went out to my cousin’s farm, he told me that he’d heard something on the roof of the old silo, late at night.”

“What did he hear?”

“The Word of God, he said. He said he’d taken the Word inside him and had taught himself how to speak it. And then that last night .   .   . he proved it to me .   .   .” He shook his head suddenly, as if breaking a trance. I prodded for more details, but all Austin said was that he simply had to go back there.

“To your cousin’s farm?”

He nodded.

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“I think he’s trying to tell me something with the Tower card. I think he’s trying to get me back to that old silo.”

A proposal, or rather a gesture of goodwill, leapt into my head, but rather than offer it straightaway I found myself wrestling with the notion, unsure whether or not I wanted to commit myself.

One look at Austin’s mounting anguish inspired me to ask if he would like me to accompany him on the trip.

“Are you serious?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t want to drive out there after dinner or anything like that. Tomorrow is Saturday. Why don’t I pick you up at around nine?”

“The village is nearly a three-hour drive from here, even if traffic’s kind,” he advised me.

I told Austin he could consider the trip my Yuletide gift to him.

Austin almost smiled at this. Almost.

The next morning’s sun brought much brilliance but no warmth. I left my house just after eight and the streets were already bustling. The growing throngs of holiday shoppers made me glad for Austin’s and my exodus from the city.

When my first few knocks on his townhouse door went unanswered I feared that my friend had overslept, but when he finally did manage to get to the door and open it, it was obvious that he hadn’t slept a wink. Dressed only in his housecoat, Austin requested I give him a moment to get cleaned up, encouraging me to sit in the dank cube that served as a living room while he went down the hall to shower and shave.

There was only the suggestion of a sofa beneath a mountain of twisted laundry, so I opted to stand.

Mingling with the room’s dominant smell of a dirty furnace was the sickly-sweet perfume of incense. An end table stood in the far corner, draped in green silk and bracing a lone white taper in a brass base, a brazier, and a framed photograph of Liz holding a newborn William. The picture’s background was undulating drapes of white gossamer. I remember when Austin had taken these photos of his much-adored wife and their infant son. At the time, the background had suggested purity, renewal. Seeing it now, framed within a black border, it was but a reminder of the pallor-pale face I’d seen reposing, and the second casket that sat next to it, no larger than a hope chest.

Austin emerged from the washroom with surprising suddenness. He handed me a sheet bearing what looked to be awfully scrawled directions before donning his coat.

“Let’s go,” was all he said.

The attempted cheer of the decorations that crowded store windows and bulged around the streetlight poles failed to pierce the morose mood within the cab of my car. Austin and I chatted intermittently about nothing in particular, and I wondered how I would survive this marathon trek with so lugubrious a passenger.

But as the city gave way to the town, and the town to a quilt of snow-padded rural expanse, I felt myself relaxing slightly, but not totally: Austin’s reluctance to have even a polite chat tensed the atmosphere in the car.

The sky was beginning to darken, portending snow. I flicked on the headlights, sighed, and allowed for the mum tension for as long as I could. Eventually the tension became unbearable, so I deliberately decided to detonate the bomb we’d both let go on ticking between us for too long.

“Can I ask you something?”

Austin shrugged.

“How have you been doing, with everything I mean?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Yes, actually, it is. But I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think Tarot cards or play-forts from your childhood are the issue here. Don’t you think you feel the way you do because you are still raw from a massive loss? I mean, Christmastime can be one of the worst times for people in pain. I think you should talk about the accident, Austin, because as far as I’m concerned,
that
is what’s really tearing you up inside, not anything supernatural.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Elliot,” he mumbled.

“No, I’m afraid you’re the one who’s not seeing things clearly. That car accident tore your life out by the roots. You lost Liz, the woman you loved more than life. And you lost William, your only son.”

My gaze flickered between the road ahead of me and trying to gauge Austin’s reaction; but no reaction came. I inhaled slowly and deliberately cushioned my tone:

“Look, I’m not going to pretend for one moment that I can relate to what you’ve been put through. Your loss is .   .   . well, it’s almost unthinkable. And maybe that’s why you’ve not been able to face it. Yoga isn’t going to heal your wounds.”

Austin remained stoic. “Turn right here,” he said.

A few moments later, the property from which my friend had drawn what might be the only august memories of his youth slouched into my field of vision. Its house and barn looked every bit as grey and spent as a pair of elephants nestling down to expire on their chosen burial grounds. A few stray splints of wood indicated where a fence had been back in the time when the land was worthy of distinguishing. Bales of soggy hay sat in loose lumps upon the dirty snow of the field. The barn door hung open, advertising the depressing absence of livestock.

I slowed the car and looked at Austin, who appeared to be holding his breath. He ran a hand over his bristly face, muttering something that sounded like “God.”

I turned my head and knew precisely what had mesmerized my friend.

Whether the silo had always cast off the glamour of a castle keep or whether it had been modified over the years I of course couldn’t say, but its presence was incongruous—a high Gothic set-piece in an otherwise agrarian environment.

He lowered his hand and began fishing through the pocket of his pea coat. He held up the Tower card. The similarity between its image and the structure before us was strong enough to make Austin laugh, but not smile.

“I’m going in.” Austin’s tone was uncharacteristically steely. “You can stay in the car if you want.”

“Shouldn’t you check at the house, see if anyone’s home?”

“The property’s abandoned,” he said before exiting the car.

I watched, mute and, admittedly, timid, as Austin stepped between two crooked fence posts, long deprived of their wires, and undertook the trepid journey into his yesterdays. My fists tightened on the steering wheel as a sickening feeling overcame me, as though my gullet had suddenly been lined with grease. Intellectually I knew that Austin should be fetched back from his quest, but a strange obstruction had moved between my better judgment and my will-to-action.

My sense of unease was devoid of reason; a vague funk of disquiet. Seeing Austin stepping across the barren cropland made me regret ever carrying him out here to face his old ghosts.

Nothing good would come of this. Nothing.

At last my hand found the door handle. But before I’d even opened the door I saw Austin drop.

I stumbled out of the car and bolted across the field. The wind lashed cold and fierce. Snow swirled about me like stirred gravel. As I neared Austin I discovered that he hadn’t passed out; he was curled into a foetal position, snow collecting on his hair and in the creases of his clothes. Not until I crouched to help him up did I see how agony had mangled his face.

I uttered a few consoling words and scooped him up off the earth. His legs were rag-doll-limp and he weighed much more than I’d expected.

“Don’t listen!”
Austin cried.
“Don’t listen!”
He was pushing against me, butting me like a bull, shouting all the while.
“Focus on me! Just listen to me! Get to the car! Run! Go!”

Austin’s incessant shouting and the roar of the wind must have been muting whatever it was that Austin had been so afraid I’d hear. We reached the road and piled back into the car. No sooner had I started the engine when Austin snapped on the stereo and spun the volume dial to its limit. A blast of voices transformed the cab of my car into Babel. I slammed it into reverse and began to drive. I peered out in the hope of seeing whoever had startled Austin so, but the figure appeared to be gone.