At Fear's Altar (27 page)

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.

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.

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.

If you can train yourself to think ‘otherly,’ even perversely, you will see how this internal elsewhere is in fact a root, a root that binds you to Autumnal. It comes down to learning how to figure out just where one was and what one was doing during those absentminded commutes to work and so forth.

Begin with that and the Samhain Gate will draw nearer and nearer.

Anyone can crash the Gate, but so few choose to do so. Autumnal’s splendours are too ruddy for most. It is Hell to some, but home to Others.

I realize how difficult this must be to digest. That is why I’ve written it down, so that you can reflect upon it as often as you need to. Or you may hand it down to your child, if you choose.

Not once have I attempted to explain this, and certainly not to my keepers here. They are of a new mind, whereas I am of a decidedly old one. The ancients thought like me. But the rules of reality changed a long time ago and we can no longer find our Old Dark Ones out among the stars or in the wood. Our logic has toppled their palaces. The light of reason burned Summerland into a dead grey Autumnal, but it did not eradicate it completely. The light did not slaughter the darkness. It wounded it, yes. But those of cunning can still cross the Samhain Gate. The whole ordeal is just a little trickier than it was in ancient times.

The key to the gate can only be found when one understands their true place in the world. When you find home, the place you’ve always seen in your most decadent fantasies, somewhere in the physical world, then your nature and true Nature are in harmony. Harmony opens doors, opens gates.

Meditate on that while you may.

If you believe what these men and women here tell you, then this really was a boyhood fugue, one that was broken the moment I murdered an elderly woman named Jacquelyn Henderson. They tell me this act is what caused a “fatal break,” and that I hadn’t even thought about Capricorn for many years. I’d buried the old woman in her fallow field and had then gone about living my life as though the ugly crime had never happened.

They tell me I probably only thought about Capricorn again when I learned about the baby. This was enough to cause something to snap, to hurl me back into a fantasyland. Somehow I do not think this situation is that tidy, do you?

I hope they allow you to get this notebook, Ms. Etienne. (How convenient that you share my last name.) I hope you can read these pages for yourself so that maybe you can understand what I went through. You will not see yourself mentioned until the end because, frankly, if I ever truly did experience a “fugue state,” it was with you, for I do not believe I ever even finished grade school, let alone go on to college where we met and courted and married.
That,
Ms. Etienne, is the break with reality. Those photographs they showed me are doctored figments, a conspiracy to lure me further from the Gate.

However you choose to view this record is out of my hands. But know this: the baby that is growing inside you did cross the Samhain Gate, even if it was still in your womb at the time. No matter how fledgling that life is, it tasted Autumnal and I believe it will know gruesome things, that it will be an acolyte of an eldritch faith.

The reason I know this is simple: Capricorn has left me. From the time I was dragged back into the day-bright cities and condemned to this cell, I lost all ties to Autumnal. At night I find I merely sleep. I am no longer able to dream.

For months this tortured me as I longed for a trapdoor back to my heritage, my home. But it is not to be.

Then one night a thought crept into my brain. It was so coolly smooth that it felt implanted; a transmission if you will. It is my belief that this thought was a final message from Capricorn, because the thought came in the image a foetus rapt in Dreaming.

You are now carrying Autumnal inside you.

I suppose in some way my being ripped from the eternal moment that is Autumnal was a blessing. My appreciation for that continuum has only grown, erupting into something that cannot be contained. Even now, as my body lies in a room that has a complex lock on the door and steel mesh between the window glass, there is a part of me that is still growing, reaching.

Not long ago, in the lower corner of this room, just above the baseboard heater, where the north wall meets the east, a hair-thin fissure began to form. I have been watching it very closely, studying it as it creeps, glacially, almost imperceptibly, up and up. Last month this split sprouted four squiggling appendages, one of which now reaches all the up to the ceiling. A nurse has noticed it and has assured me that she will report it so that a caretaker can smother it with plaster; my secret passage. The repair has yet to take place. I
thought
the nurse out of my life; the very next day she was transferred to another ward.

The passage continues to grow. When it rains, the cold autumn water seeps in, making the plaster swell like yoni walls. The liquid bubbles out like chilly lava, carrying with it fresh echoes from the Below.

Have you noticed that the sun is having more and more trouble pushing its beams through the steel-shaded clouds these days?

As the passages broaden, there will be further signs.

One day you may come across your precious little one playing a strange game in an ill-lit basement, or drawing an almost uncontrollable bliss from a simple ghost story. Its fresh eyes have likely already begun to scour the city for churchyard markers or gnarled copses.

Last Tuesday, if I’m not mistaken, was marked by the appearance of two carrion crows just outside my ugly window. I watched them arc and cascade, those little shards of midnight cawing out an October fanfare.

Their presence told me that the world in bloom was just beginning to wither irretrievably through the gutters of the undivided Real. Summer shall sluice down into Autumnal.

It is the immutable nature of things.

There will always be Others, always be new games for children to play.

There will always be one who is willing to keep the Faith.