At Fear's Altar (7 page)

“It’s called The Abject,” Charlie began. He paused long enough to fish two bottles of Corona out of the cooler. He uncapped them and handed one to Petra. “The legend about this place, which supposedly goes back to before the Paleoindians, is that the Creator who shaped this world had forged a thousand planets before it. He was totally indifferent to the worlds he made and would destroy them on a whim. But whenever the Creator made a new world he would send four alien beings called the Watchers to keep an eye on that planet’s life-forms while he went off to keep building.

“These Watchers were omniscient. They floated around Earth, observing us puny humans as we fumbled our way up the food chain, but there wasn’t really much of interest down here to a starry being. The early tribes eventually stopped roaming and began to put down roots. Then for eons the Watchers saw nothing more than people planting in the spring, harvesting in the fall, popping out a few kids and teaching them the same song-and-dance. Over and over and over.

“Well, one of the Watchers got sick and tired of this. He wanted people to start looking up at the stars instead of just keeping their eyes on the soil year in, year out. He wanted to show them how deep this rabbit hole really was, so he broke the rules and flew down to Earth. He hid out in a desolate mountain.” Charlie nodded to The Abject. He was staring intently at Petra, as if trying to gauge how well he was managing to ratchet up the legend’s tension. “Once he was there this Watcher began sending out strange dreams to the people, visions of alien worlds and horrible cities that the Creator had laid to waste over the eons.

“Most of the early proto-humans didn’t think much of those dreams, or maybe they just didn’t understand them. But one man became utterly obsessed with them, so much so that after a while he couldn’t take the life of
Homo sapiens
any longer. He went off to live like a hermit, far away from boring old civilization. Naturally he chose the most remote mountain he could find to live his solitary life. Lo and behold, if this guy didn’t come upon the Watcher.

“The Watcher offered to teach this man some very special things, which he did. The man learned how to cross the wall of sleep, and how to speak to the dead souls in all the ruined cities that are buried somewhere out there.

“So things were going good—depending on your definition of good—for this man. But then the Watcher told him that their relationship was give and take. Since the man had been given a taste of the otherworldly, the Watcher wanted to get a better foothold in the worldly.

“He’d developed an interest in changing us humans, you see. An interest in giving us powers we weren’t meant to have. So the Watcher instructed his devotee to bring women to the cave for the purposes of .   .   . well, procreation. The Watcher wanted to create a species that looked human, but had monstrous souls. This race would have the best of both worlds; souls that could roam the stars and bodies that allowed the Watcher the use of opposable thumbs, taste-buds, emotions.

“The student obeyed and brought the Watcher women, probably against their will. In time a little colony of these half-human, half-Watcher beings began to grow within the mountain cave.

“Well, eventually the other Watchers got nervous about not hearing from their brother, and they decided to check in on this corner of the world. When they saw what was happening they immediately reported it to the Creator. He was so outraged that he cleaved off part of the world and filled the divide with water. He banished the fallen Watcher to his cave and cut off his followers from the rest of the world. He then transformed them into ghouls, hideous things.

“From that night on the Creator said that this cliff we’re standing on would be the actual end of this world, and that mountain over there would be known as The Abject, the Hell where all the blasphemers were imprisoned. He vowed not to destroy this planet, not because he cared about humanity, but because he wanted to eternally punish The Abject.”

“That’s quite the fairytale,” Tad said.

Charlie chortled. “It’s just an old spook story, Tad, nothing to get nervous about. Now, who wants another drink?”

By then Earth’s End had begun slipping into the gloaming. The group laid out blankets upon the cold, puddle-laden rock. Wine bottles were uncorked, steak sandwiches and brie and apples were served and gobbled.

In the sky just beyond the needle-like pinnacle of The Abject, the sky was studded with the first eager stars.

A few weeks before she’d received Douglas’s invitation, Petra had gone with Tad for a late lunch at an English-style pub on Hope Street. She had stopped the waitress immediately after Tad had ordered them two rye-and-gingers, their customary drink. As the waitress had been leaving their table, Petra had gently gripped the woman’s elbow and requested that the bartender hold the rye from hers.

With that, Tad had looked at her and he’d known. He’d known. For a long spell he’d merely stared at her, not saying anything. When he did finally speak, his choice of words (“We can correct this”) had motivated Petra to spring to her feet and hurl her drink in his face. It was the first time she’d ever done such a thing, the first time she’d even
seen
such a thing done, save for the movies.

She’d stormed out of the restaurant, into the bustling crowd on the sidewalk.

And all at once Petra had felt the world disintegrate. Providence had paled to an indistinct grey haze. Everything slowed to a crawl. The people that milled about her all sounded as though they were speaking behind glass.

Things stayed that way for some time. Somehow, while in that cumulus state, Petra must have reconciled with Tad, must have considered what he’d had to say about the situation.

Somehow she must have consented to have the issue “corrected.”

The problem was fresh enough that the remedial action was but a day procedure. When it was over, Tad had come bearing white orchids. Petra had slept a lot and tried not to think about the fact that her longstanding desire to carve a niche for herself, to create
someone
who was like her in some way, had been eradicated.

The nightmares returned almost immediately afterward, with unmatched relentlessness and ruthlessness. In this new batch, the stairs that Petra tried frantically to run down would dissolve like soaked sugar, and her father’s following cries were no longer in English (
“N’gai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y’hah .   .   .”
).

In her most recent nightmares, Petra’s father found her.

Nightly she would feel herself being clutched, choked. But not by human hands.

How effective the children’s telescope would be at discerning constellations Petra had yet to learn, but she’d discovered that it did serve as a very effective spyglass for studying the mountain of forbidden things. The encroaching nightfall smudged a great many of the mountain’s finer details, but as she stood panning the telescopic lens up and around The Abject, Petra was able to see great cragged rocks that were bearded with sun-bleached weeds. Some of the mountain’s indentations held stagnant rainwater, like natural libation-bearers. With its barrenness and its isolated locale, The Abject might as well have been an alien planet.

When she panned upward and discovered the great cave entrance, Petra almost gasped. It was a granite hole that held the ugliest blackness. She truly was terrible at measuring things, yet she still had the undeniable impression of the cave’s vastness. She could almost understand why people decorated a place like this with a legend of fallen Watchers and barbarous cults. Almost.

“I recommend using one of these for the actual eclipse,” Charlie called.

Petra lowered the eyepiece and turned in Charlie’s direction. He was seated on the cooler, struggling to assemble a small cardboard contraption.

“These things are designed for eclipses. I gather they’re safer.”

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Tad rebutted. He was reclined beneath a poplar at the forest’s edge, his mind and his thumbs enthralled with his Blackberry’s Sudoku program. “Solar eclipses are the only dangerous kind.”

“Well, better safe than sorry, right?” Douglas said. Petra recognized it as yet another expression of his peacekeeping nature. It was a quality she’d always admired about him,
loved
about him in fact.

Petra accepted the plastic cup of white wine Douglas offered her.

“Should be soon,” she said.

“Yes. Oh, hey, if you walk a bit this way you can get a really good view of the tree line.” Once they were out of earshot, Douglas said to her, “Okay, now tell me everything.”

Petra’s response (“What do you mean?”) was so insincere an attempt to sound bewildered that even she didn’t buy it. She looked at Douglas and saw him looking at her, the way he used to, the way he always had, the way Tad never did. She pressed a hand to her mouth and began to sob.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped. She leaned against Douglas and repeated, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do this. I’m ruining the whole night.”

“To hell with the night,” Douglas replied as he gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze. “Talk to me.”

“I would if I could. But I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know where to begin.”

“So start at the middle.”

“I’m lonely,” she blurted. The words sounded odd as she spoke them, almost like a fib she was feeding Douglas to stave off his prying. She hadn’t thought of herself as feeling
lonely.
She lived with Tad, after all. But somehow this pair of words also felt true; a simple summation of her innermost workings.

“I could tell.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him about all the rest; about the abortion and the sickening hollow feeling she’d had in her heart ever since, about her occasional desire to check out of the world, about the unbearably horrific dreams. There was so very much to tell.

“Hey, you two!” Charlie shouted. “It’s almost time!”

Petra craned her head upward to see a lightless disc slipping over the moon.

The blackness sleeved the moon at a pace so gradual it was almost unbearable, or so it seemed to Petra, like watching a crab crossing a white desert. She and her three companions stood on Earth’s End, watching the umbra claim the lunar light.

She momentarily allowed her eyes to drop to where The Abject was, or had been before the masking had camouflaged it utterly. She raised her flashlight, strangely bemused by the feebleness of its beam. The light was but a skeletal finger poking into the great gulf of space. It scarcely seemed to reach beyond the cliff’s edge before being smothered completely.

As the eclipse reached its zenith, Petra silently marvelled at just how richly varied the Night could be, how the dark could splay and flaunt itself in so very many textures and shades. She wondered if it was always this way, or if tonight’s rare celestial contingency caused these rare visions. Either way, she could not help but be awed by the sights. And the sounds.

Upon first hearing it, Petra dismissed the noise as merely a forest sound distorted by distance and echo. Perhaps it was a drunken holler let out by Charlie or Douglas, both of whom were brandishing empty wine bottles like clubs. The sound certainly hadn’t come from Tad, for he was, as a quick pan of the flashlight revealed, too busy exhibiting his boredom.

As the noise persisted, Petra realized that her assumptions about animals or her companions had been foolish, for the faint wail was clearly coming from somewhere in the blackness before her.

Her repeated attempts to find the source of the sound were as futile as her first, but now Petra was frightened, panicked. Somewhere in the night, with its buried moon and its dead stars that were unable to pierce the heavy fleece of clouds, an infant was screaming. It was the thinnest possible sound, but was unmistakably the cry of a babe lost in some unreachable nook of the night. Petra felt heartsick. The mewling was so forlorn. It was the howl of something unwanted, something abject.

She only became aware that she had stepped off the cliff’s edge after she’d glanced down and saw nothing but blackness beneath her feet. Perhaps she was dreaming, or was already dead. But if this was annihilation, it was exhilarating. Petra felt unbounded, as open as the night itself.

Petra began to walk and the shadows felt downy beneath her, as soft as thunderheads. Perhaps she was projecting, but Petra felt that every step seemed to calm the unseen infant. She walked on, across a bridge that was formed in darkness and of darkness.

She wondered what the poor babe might look like after being flung from the end of the world. Her mind conjured the image of a bat-wing bassinet set beside a fire that wept Hell-glow and smoke.

Petra could not even hear the cries of her companions behind her, so complete was her enchantment.

She looked up and she Saw.