At Fear's Altar (24 page)

The scream stunned me. It was too shrill to be dismissed as just another sprout from my imagination. I had no idea whether the woman had cried out because she had seen me, seen what I had left hanging from The Devil’s Finger, or seen something else entirely. Because of this confusion I found myself rendered stiff as a stone. I remained kneeling by the oak’s trunk, my eyes squinted shut from that childish equivocation of not being able to see with not being able to be seen.

“Oh, shit, Dianne, it ain’t a ghost.” The voice was sonorous and arrogantly male.

“Yes it is!” the woman returned. “Look!”

“It’s just a dummy, like a decoration.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a little fucking early for Halloween, don’t you think?”

While they bickered and stared up into the high boughs where I’d condemned my Gothic doll, I quietly scuttled into the bulrushes and sludge of Palemarsh, cringing as the iciness oozed through my runners, my socks.

“I thought it was a kid hanging there!” the woman admitted as she and her mate neared The Devil’s Finger. Both of them were fixated on the branch I’d affixed the noose to earlier. “You did this, didn’t you?” she shouted. I saw her actually shove her lover, who looked angry enough to shove her back.

“Don’t be so stupid! I was with you all day. Why would I .   .   . why would
anybody
do something as fucked up as this?”

They studied my work for a while, which I might have found more flattering had I not been shivering so intensely, or so frightened of being discovered.

“It’s probably racists,” the girl concluded. “You know, the Ku Klux Klan, people like that.”

“Here?”
The man began to chortle, but he immediately choked on his laughter.

Both of them started screaming .   .   . screaming because Capricorn had begun to convulse.

It shook on its noose end as one fresh off the scaffold’s ledge. Its newspaper innards tumbled free, raining down like heaven’s trash, like cranes that had been crippled mid-flight. Sloppy limbs lashed to and fro.

I watched helplessly as the spirit-trap was shaken loose from its bedding. It shot out of the figure’s shirt and came thudding down on the stony trail.

By this time the woman had spun on her heel and was tearing back up the path, her boyfriend close behind her shouting, “It’s a trick! It’s got to be trick! Wait, goddamn it!”

I remained footed in the mud and camouflaged by the wind-bent reeds until I heard the voices disappear completely. I kept my eyes locked on the cracked wooden box on the ground, barely able to bring myself to look upon the gutted clothing that now swung like a limp flag.

When I was confident that the lovers had fled, I scrabbled out and moved to The Devil’s Finger.

The spirit-trap was damaged but not destroyed. Though I knew I was no longer safe out there, I needed to know that Capricorn was still with me.

I lowered the noose and hastily re-assembled the scarecrow (which, because it was dressed in my clothes, was an unnerving double of me) and restored the creature’s fractured heart.

“Please,” I whispered hurriedly, my jaws chattering, “please let me know if you are still here.” I was cradling the figure like a parent comforting a wounded child.

The only noise to fill my ears was the wind clattering The Devil’s Finger. That dry vacant sound haunted me then, and it haunts me still.

I was on the verge of tears. I felt as eviscerated as my effigy had been, with my insides raked out and blown about by that low, lonesome wind. Only there was no one to repair me like that scarecrow, no caring hand to set my heart and lungs aright.

Not knowing what else to do, feeling on one hand that there
wasn’t
anything else to do, I reclined up against The Devil’s Finger and nuzzled up to my lynched companion. I muttered Capricorn’s name once or twice, then lay there eyeing the noose, wondering if I’d knotted it tightly enough to support my own neck.

In an instant Capricorn sprang up with such force that I was heaved to one side. My head snapped around in time to catch Capricorn looking at me with its eyeless face. It raised a crinkling arm, lowered it. Then it lay back down again, jerky with trepidation, like one trying to resume sleeping after experiencing a terrible dream.

Hindsight leads me to believe that it was my brief consideration of suicide that caused Capricorn to come back so dramatically. It needed me as much as I needed it.

I carefully dismantled the effigy and carried its parts home with me, including the frigid and vibrating spirit-trap.

Much later that night I dreamt of Capricorn.

It was a simple dream: I was lying in my bed and Capricorn emerged from the corner, just as the faceless girl had done, only this time it was the condemned effigy that stumbled at me, complete with the noose dangling from its neck. It crawled up onto my mattress, its papery joints crinkling, and pressed an impossible weight over my face. I was smothered until I saw great pink amoebas of light, like moth wings, like splayed heart-meat. These wings spread and carried me up and out.

I awoke choking on phlegm. I remained bedridden for three days. It was a grand time. The flu had no doubt been brought on by my sojourn to The Devil’s Finger, but I have always enjoyed bouts of illness, the way they would lilt form, transmute colour into shades almost unbearably kaleidoscopic. Years later I would learn that the word
influenza
originally meant ‘visitation, or influence, from the stars.’ And I knew
precisely
what this implied.

That particular illness, more than any other I’ve been afflicted with before or since, had real meaning to me. I believe beyond all doubt that those three days were ones of communion with Capricorn.

I tried to communicate as best I could with the effigy, propping it up at my desk with a pencil stuffed into its glove-hand. But its messages were always faint scribbles. More than once I tricked myself into seeing something of import in those graphite smudges and loops, but in the end they meant nothing.

Even my dreams seemed at the time never appeared to be anything but ink-blot vagaries. They were repetitive with their images: mouths, tongues, rooms filled with voices, tenements whose smashed windows couriered the wind like choir song.

Voices. It was always voices.

Before the stint of illness had fully passed I knew what was required of me, but I was very,
very
hesitant to accept the charge. The root of my hesitation was, for once, not confusion or guilt, but sheer dread.

Weeks tumbled past while I suffered through a push-pull of knowing what Capricorn needed, what
I
needed if I was ever to learn the next phase, and deciding the lengths I was willing to go in order to accomplish it. There were teachings to be passed on, keys to be granted. But their subtlety had to be expressed purely: our relationship could go no further until Capricorn had a mouthpiece. Pantomime and image had been exhausted.

I repeatedly offered myself to serve as Capricorn’s speaker, but Capricorn would not have it. Capricorn was not seeking to
be
me, and to be honest I was not interested in full union with it. We sought to meet as equals. There was no other byway we could travel. I still lugged a great millstone of guilt over abandoning this precious force for so long. The very idea of doing so again was unconscionable to me. At that time Capricorn was all I had. Yes, I had deliberately snubbed normalcy, but my life was as I’d wished it to be. The exchange could not remain petrified, trapped in a hopeless inertia. And the only backward traces were to utterly extinguish Capricorn.

In the end, I chose.

It took days of plotting, and then several more days before I stockpiled enough courage required to do that which so few, perhaps none, had the will to actually do.

Buttressed by schoolyard rumours and by the liminal power of campfire stories, the legend of the House of Shades had endured in my town’s folklore for at least two generations. Over the years many of my classmates had ridden their bikes along the dirt road that hemmed the property, eyeing the house from a good safe distance. But no one, not even I, ever had gumption enough to cross that property line. I had always suspected that the earth was not quite so solid on the other side of that fence.

The House of Shades did not look as though it had been built so much as plopped down onto its site. Picture a farmhouse with a noticeably lilting frame and bowing eaves, with cupolas and a pitched roof that was practically picked clean of its shingles.

The afternoon that I finally crossed that fence of sagging wire was bright and almost mockingly cheery. I had pedalled to the outskirts, aided by a temperate breeze and the sound of robins chirping their encouragement.

I concealed my bicycle behind some brush and then crossed the great field, slowly, carefully, perhaps even reverentially. Years of neglect had firmed the fallow crop rows into a stout labyrinth whose gutted lines all lured walkers to the same dead-end: the House of Shades. A few stubborn pockets of winter snow lingered in the rows where they sat like dislodged clouds, like the peaks of interred mountains.

‘If only they could see me now,’
I thought,
‘all those schoolyard worms. If only they could know what I was doing .   .   .’

As my steps pulled the House nearer, I heard the soft click-clatter of the windblown mobiles from the porch. My gaze followed those soft clacking sounds. I paused to consider the garden of crude crosses that hung from the porch roof by various lengths of frizzy butcher’s twine. Though one or two were proper crucifixes of pure-yet-tarnished silver, most of the dangling charms were nothing more than bits of intersecting fencepost, or sticks that had been hastily lashed together. Every one of them was crudely marred with scraps of sanctimonious graffiti:

JESUS SAVS

BLESS THIS HOUSE

SAYETH THE LORD!

CHRISTOURSAVEYOUR

The drooping porch groaned when I added my weight to it. I could feel the clouded glass of the windows, or rather something
behind
those windows, studying me. I ducked to avoid being hit with the swinging shrine and moved to the front door.

The toe of my runner snagged on something flabby, tripping me up. Dust billowed up from the porch beams, and I had to grab the railing to break my fall. Splinters bored into my palm. I shook off whatever had tripped me up, noticing it was a pile of pale fabric. I bent and plucked it free from the rocking chair runner that had kept it pinioned.

The rucksack was well worn, which made my task of biting a pair of eyeholes into it rather easy. I tried not to tug the fraying rips too forcefully; just enough to allow me to see once I’d pulled the sack over my head.

The mask was a bit too droopy for my liking. Its broad weave revealed too much of my face. As I examined my sallow reflection in one of the fractured, dust-fogged windows, it occurred to me that I had unwittingly transformed myself into the condemned man, the lynched scarecrow dangling but not dead from the rigid reach of The Devil’s Finger.

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.