At Fear's Altar (22 page)

Stunningly enough, it took less than twenty-four hours for me to all but forget about the spirit-trap.

Were this a fiction, I would wax here about how I longed for my spirit-trap throughout that entire week away, how I crept out of our rented cottage in the dead of night to howl my pain to a gibbous moon, confident that my cries would somehow reach my boxed companion back in the city.

But life is never that rich nor that tidy. It is a messy, multitudinous thing, rife with calls for the attention of a young boy. And when all is said and done, that is just what I was that summer: a seven-year-old boy, a child, one just as susceptible to the temptations of summer afternoon swims and ice cream as you were in your formative years. I make no apologies for this.

On the second night of our stay, my father took me down to the pier where a band of teenagers were lighting off fireworks. Watching those tadpoles of sulphurous light squiggling down and dissolving just above the black lake water was miraculous to me. I stood with my hand inside my father’s, my head reclined to drink in all those artificial shooting stars, and I felt
right
. It might have been the first time I had ever felt truly slotted into the world, ever known a sense of belonging.

That night set the tone for the remainder of my holiday. The entire week was a kaleidoscope of bright, simple pleasures. I did think about Capricorn now and again, usually at night while lying alone in my rustic bedroom. At first my thoughts would be tinged with homesickness, but after a day or two of rural exploring and playing my attitude toward Capricorn began to shift. Curtains and the thing born of it were no longer as important to me.

Perhaps it was the degree of my divorce from my haunted home life, or the new sense of acceptance that I felt when actually
talking
to my folks instead of scuttling up inside my own head, but I began to worry over what I had done. I actually came to view Curtains and Capricorn not as accomplishments, but as aberrations. They started to feel wrong. Even the once-loathed prospect of returning to school had assumed a more appealing lustre.

But our holiday came to an end, and my parents delivered me back into the underworld I’d so eagerly bored my way into earlier that summer.

Not until my father took the highway cut-off nearest to our street did my appropriate feeling for Capricorn return: fear.

As my mind conjured palpable memories of just what I had waiting for me beneath my pillow, panic wrung my throat dry, my blood began to roar in my ears.

Our front lawn was overgrown and our mailbox brimming over with bills and advertisements. The porch light had burned out. (As I write this, a part of me is there on that porch as my mother sardonically reprimands my father for being too slow while he fumbles with his house key in the dark.)

My mother let out a sigh of relief once we crossed the threshold.

“I’ll take these bags,” she said. “You go help your father with the others.”

I moved down the driveway, glancing over my shoulder, watching the lights go on inside my house one room at a time. The warm glow brought a measure of comfort.

“You excited about school tomorrow?” my father asked as we lugged the last of our baggage into the foyer.

Before I had a chance to answer, my mother called out, “Jean? Jean, call the police!”

“What’s wrong?” my father returned, letting the suitcases drop.

“I think we’ve been robbed! Look at Michel’s room!”

“Stay here,” my father ordered. He crept down the hallway, squinted through the doorway to my bedroom, and grimaced.

“What is it, Mama? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, darling.” She rubbed my shoulder but did not look at me.

“It doesn’t look as though anyone broke in,” my father reported after investigating the entire house.

“But Michel’s room!”

“I know.”

“What?” This time I directed my question at my father. He was rubbing his face, he was frowning. “Papa, what’s wrong with my room?”

“It’s been turned upside down, that’s what’s wrong with it,” he answered.

I took off down the hallway, impervious to my parents’ pleas to “wait, wait, wait!” to “Get back here!”

Nearly every one of my belongings had been upset in some way. My dresser was lying on its side, all four of its drawers upturned and gutted of clothing, coins, the drawings I’d deemed worth keeping. Some of my toys had been stomped into plastic splinters, others had merely been flung. The posters on my wall had been reduced to shredded strips still impaled to the plaster by shiny brass tacks.

My pillow was lying behind the door. There was no sign of the box it once concealed.

I felt my parents moving up behind me as I stood in the doorframe.

“Don’t touch anything!” my mother commanded, though in a tone that was too gentle to be commanding.

“I did this .   .   .”

“What?” my parents gasped in concert.

I repeated my false confession, wondering just where it was coming from. I fabricated some admittance of being frustrated over not being able to find a certain toy just before I’d gotten in the car with my mother, and that my frustration had mushroomed into a tantrum.

Though I was expecting wrath, my mother and father both wore masks of deep concern instead of rage. After exchanging a few glances with my father, my mother shook her head ruefully.

“No,” she said, “that’s not true. I was in here packing just before we left for the cottage, and your room did
not
look like this!”

“I know. I .   .   . the thing I was looking for was already packed, but I didn’t know that. I thought I’d lost it. I got mad.”

The lie hewed so well with the situation that I knew it could not have come from me, at least not totally. As I noted earlier, I never really learned the art of lying, and certainly not at the age of seven. Thinking that swiftly and adeptly was alien to me, but somehow my parents believed me.

“Well, you’re going to get it!” my father warned.

“I’d make you clean up every inch of this room right now if you didn’t have school in the morning!” added my mother. “But I know what you’re doing as soon as you get home tomorrow afternoon! Now go to bed!”

I pushed my way through the debris and heeded her.

It happened much later that night, well after I, and presumably both of my parents, were slumbering.

Lying in bed, I felt my body spasm. (Since being here I’ve learned that the learnedly ignorant call this phenomena ‘hypngogic jerks.’) The movement was not violent, but was sufficient to nudge me just far enough out of sleep to regain an awareness of my body. The break was, however, not clean enough to allow me to describe my state as waking. I was in-between states.

I lazily opened one eye, and when I caught an impression of what was standing in the corner, I was not startled. Instead I immediately managed to convince myself that my spasm had somehow dragged a vestige of my dream into the world.

Though I do not remember dreaming of a girl, I must have been .   .   . and that dream must have been terrifying.

A girl, or rather something
like
a girl, occupied the far nook of my bedroom, exactly where wall met wall, where shadow married moonlight. She was lanky and her sallow flesh looked smooth and slick, like a dolphin’s hide. Her naked skin practically glowed against the black patches of the room where the moon’s beams failed to reach. To my bleary eyes she appeared to be crowned with raven-wing hair, but I squinted and saw that much of this was the darkness that also masked the girl’s face.

I was enthralled by the sight of her, and although I wanted very much to know who she was, I was unable to will my eyes away from the taboo brown spots of her undeveloped breasts, from the shockingly exposed crescent of her sex, which to me was new and terrifying and hypnotic.

She gaited out of the corner with such suddenness that I actually gasped. Her movement startled my gaze upward, and when I discovered that the girl was lacking not only hair but also a face, I cried out, or tried to at least. Horror had claimed my voice, choking it down to a mangled peep.

The faceless thing staggered toward me, her body moving in manic jerks and wobbles. Her feet kicked the debris on my floor. The head bobbed like a trapped balloon struggling to take flight. She resembled a sketcher’s dummy come to life by some grim spell, and before my brain’s message to flee could even reach my body, the girl-thing was upon me.

Her weight pressed the air out of my lungs. She scuttled up to straddle my head, pressing her thighs on either side of my face. Her cleft smelled of old wood, of dust.

I raised my arms to shove her off, but swatted only air.

A heartbeat later the crushing bulk was off my prostrate body, yet the rank darkness was still covering my face. I clawed at the chunky mask, gasping with relief when the spirit-trap tumbled off my head and landed on the carpet with a padded thump. The image of the girl had vanished. Now there was only the box.

I pounced on it.

Hurriedly rummaging through the mess, I found a spool of kite string and wound its remaining length around the box, binding it with a dozen knots.

No longer wanting the spirit-trap anywhere inside my house, I snuck out the back door to hide it beneath the cedar hedge in our back yard.

The temperature of the music box suddenly spiked. I squealed and let the scalding thing drop to the ground. (This, and not a childhood bout of eczema, is the true cause of those ugly scars on my palms.) I peeled off my pyjama top and carried the spirit-trip inside it. I set it under the hedge, camouflaging it beneath the soft, fragrant limbs.

The following afternoon, after cleaning my room as punishment, I took a gardening trowel and dug Capricorn a shallow grave.

There, in the dull clay at the rear of a suburban yard, my uncanny companion remained interred for the next half-decade.

It boiled down to a form of slippage, a simple excision of Capricorn’s dark magic from my daily routine.

Perhaps the ease of our divorce was just a symptom of my age at the time, I don’t know, but our severance came with neither pomp nor drama. A few shovelfuls of dirt and my companion—the sole being for which I’d ever felt anything nearing love—was gone.

Throughout the weeks that followed, my attention was knotted up in guilt and a garrotting sense of panic as I imagined the unspeakable reprimand Capricorn would inflict upon me once it chose to slither up from the earth like crude oil, to come lurching across the backyard and into my bedroom.

But the punishment never came. As the uneventful weeks stretched into months I developed a strange arrogance about the situation, reasoning that that much of Capricorn’s power was in fact
my
ability to project my desires. I came to question whether or not Capricorn was even a separate entity and not just an outgrowth of my own wants and dreams.

Everything is always a matter of realization, isn’t it? We wrestle with the riddles of living until our brains shake the chaos into a pattern we can tolerate. We call these patterns knowledge. And upon the basis of this knowledge, we act. If enough of us act in a similar fashion, we call this action a reality.

My wishes were powerful. I had wished for a spirit to be Curtained, and it came to pass. And when I wished that same entity be banished by just a bit of common soil, it also came to be.

So I eventually began to wish for different things, cheerier and safer things.

Day by day the cycle of my adolescence lured me into brighter spheres, those of my peers and my family. I began to do quite well in school, developed a knack for softball, and even had two of my stories about schoolyard detectives published in the local newspaper.

Christmases came and went. Even Halloween was more pleasurable, probably because the rift between my grimmer appetites and the simple celebration of the commercialized season was sizeable by then.

By the time I turned twelve I had successfully tricked myself into believing that I had realized the Good Life. Before long I would be on my way to high school, an institution I was certain would hand me the keys to the kingdom of the world.

But it was not to be. My wishes began to unravel.

It all began to entropy in the late summer (the same time of year that Capricorn and I found each other). The rhythm of school and organized socializing on the blacktop had passed. I was at a party that a neighbourhood girl had thrown to say goodbye to summer and bid a begrudging welcome to our final year of junior high.

One of the guests was named was Elena. I remember that much about her. The fate of a spinning soda bottle had elected Elena and me to be the next two kids to become a ‘couple,’ thanks to a sleazy pubescent game we called ‘Five Minutes Alone.’

It was the first time I’d ever been forced to play this game, which involved little more than one boy and one girl being sent to a room where, behind closed doors, they presumably engaged in some kind of sexual act. I’d heard ridiculous rumours about classmates who had become lovers as the result of such a game, but I knew that their five minutes in isolation probably resulted in nothing more than the pair of them staring flush-faced at each other, praying for their time to be up, at which point the school rumour mill could begin to crank out its wares.

Imagine my shock when Elena, who was a year older than I,
did
want to do something after the door was closed.

We were only in the dim room for a few seconds before she began to remove her blue jeans and the white cotton underwear beneath them.

I stood frozen with shock.

She parted her legs, exposing a shocking pink.

“Lick here,” was Elena’s whispered invitation. “It feels good.”

I remember feeling a great sway, as though the room were a cabin on a storm-heaved ship. Everything around me began to shrivel, like flora ripped from its taproot.

My thoughts reeled back, back, to the night of the horrid faceless thing smothering me in my bed.

A voice in my head then said,
‘I don’t want this .   .   . I do not want this .   .   .’

It is possible that I even uttered these words aloud.

And then I ran.

I remember shoving partygoers, all of whom were catcalling and cackling as I tore up the stairs. When I was on the landing I glanced back and saw Elena in the doorway of the bedroom. She was redressed and was glowering up at me, her face screwed up with hatred and, I believe, humiliation.

The houses went past without my really seeing them. I was gasping but not really breathing. The world began to feel ominously huge, so vast that I had to tune it out. I reduced the city to a distant signal, a weak frequency. Everything was paling, softening, until the only thing left was the glassy sound of my own breath gusting in and hissing back, gusting in and hissing back.

At one point I had to stop moving so that I could inspect my hands and my legs. I needed to make sure that I was still human and not the plaything for some other misfit, an entity that saw the world through the glaucoma of a plastic sheet.

When I finally reached my home I went directly to my room, where I lay fully dressed on top of my bed for a long time. Every few minutes my mind would recreate the darkened room and the vibrant hue of Elena’s sex. I would convulse with shame. I stayed awake until dawn.

I really
hadn’t
wanted that at all. Five Minutes Alone had felt barbed and ill-fitted to my inner self. Five Minutes Alone felt suffocating. Only my solitary games fit me properly.

As I inventoried my life that night I tried to recall the last time I had felt slotted in the world. My feelings of humiliation and awkwardness distorted all the happy realizations I’d made during the five years I’d been divorced from my eldritch roots. I have no doubt that The Good Life I’d been living had been absolutely real, and probably could have been restored if I had just been patient enough to let my momentary setback pass.

But that night I felt something inside me break. There was a marked shift, like plate tectonics, a world remaking itself. The world I had been running in—that of my peers—slid off its axis. I began to spiral backward, a lone star flung toward hopelessly strange climes.

I then experienced the single harshest pain I’d known: a sense of utter aloneness. Everything was going grey again, but as quickly as it came, my anguish became anesthetised by a new scrap of knowledge, one that came flittingly, softly. And I was no longer afraid.

The voice in my head rasped reassuringly that I was not, nor had I ever been, truly alone.