At Fear's Altar (9 page)

S
omething placed that land outside nature. Long before the Narragansett tribe forged a symbiotic home in the hills, it was there, and it was waiting.

Little if anything was remarkable about the rustic lot that cowered on the shadier slope of Meadow Hill. It was a thin clearing, a ribbon of stony mud rich only in detritus. Although it was framed by austere elms and beeches, nothing sprouted from its soil. Despite the ample nourishment of the nearby brook that carried clear waters from the sound, the land remained stubbornly parched and barren.

Even during the Narragansett’s most forlorn harvests, the years when desperation prodded them to try planting in what they came to call “the naked place,” the land refused to allow their seeds to hatch and put down roots.

Only after the first bloody battle that depleted their numbers did the first tribe determine that the only thing deemed acceptable for planting by the naked place was mortal remains.

The black earth seemed to part with ease, and silted around the punctured meat and the bones like embracing arms.

Fresh forms are continually interred there.

Pilgrims, who all but eradicate the tribes that called the woodlands home, settle there and make of the naked place a “proper” burying ground, rife with stone symbols they believe may lode celestial forces and banish evil ones.

The pilgrims christened the town Arkham. They relied enough on their hunches to erect their temple on the far side of Meadow Hill. For years the only residents of that patch of land were the mighty dead. The bereaved scarcely ventured to place flowers on the markers of their beloved; those that did, did so only at midday. The fact that flowers always seemed to wither to brittle husks much faster in that burial ground was an observation well known but seldom uttered.

In every tribe or village, in any era, there have always been those who cannot or will not mesh their affinities with those around them, thus they spend most of their lives adrift until they ultimately resign themselves to their isolation, and through this world-weary position of resignation there blossoms a peculiar loving acceptance. Those with no arms around them often nestle into the cold dry embrace of their separateness.

The firmer this embrace, the further they are spun away from civilization.

Such was the case with this man, who found no kin around the tables of Arkham folk. Instead, the sour isolation of the burial ground that repelled so many chimed with this man. He felt a sense of Place. It was a peculiar sensation, one that made his blood sing.

Finding a niche for himself at last—despite the fact that this place was populated only with remains and with trees whose limbs bend like a Pharaoh’s crook—the man cloisters himself there.

And before the snows could silt him in under their pallor-pale drifts, the man labours long and hard to fashion for himself a house; a humble one, to be sure, but one whose wooden walls met firm and true. He laboured diligently as a farmhand until he’d earned enough to purchase window glass for his home. And in time the house was ready.

Within there was a rocker and bed and a womb of rocks and mortar where the man could cook and be warmed.

His fortress! It stood near a lonely footpath; the sole ligature between his beloved burial ground and the town that bustled and swelled with each passing day on the sunnier side of Meadow Hill.

At the house’s humble summit was an attic with roof beams that stabbed together at queer angles. It was here, in this elevated cloister, that the man spent most of his time, squatting in the dark, listening to the low cold winds squeezing the frame of his home, making it creak like old bones.

Dust piled and cobwebs plumped and spread across the rafters and the beams, until the attic ceiling became suggestive of a ghostly chandelier; arms of tender webbing fanning out to flaunt its gems of old wooden splinters, of the long-lifeless insects that had become ensnared in its tangles, of the ash the man would sometimes sprinkle from his pipe onto the filth like a dull reeking pollen.

All through the fierce and lingering winter the man enjoyed his invisibility from the world. His meals were meagre, often consisting of a handful of the mushrooms he had picked in the woods and dried the previous autumn, or some heated chestnuts of which he had deprived Arkham’s squirrels. This rodent’s fare was, as far as the man was concerned, wholly apt.

‘Yes,’ he would think to himself as he munched and rocked back and forth in his temple of disuse and mad-angled wood, ‘yes, this is good. This is all very fine indeed.’

And so it was. In fact, his solitude was so complete that the simple act of recalling his Christian name eventually became something of a chore. This, as were all his other symptoms of regression into the lunar mind, was immediately shaped into an amusing pastime. The man would rechristen himself with the most outlandish names imaginable, tittering like a schoolboy all the while. Sometime later, how long he could not say, the man decided that he would be known in his house simply as the Unnamed. Having all but disappeared from the world of men—a blessing for which the Unnamed was overwhelmed with gratitude—this was a fine choice.

It was while he was dozing off during his first night as a wilfully identityless entity that the Unnamed came to realize that he was no longer alone.

He knew by the way his skin suddenly shrivelled cold and tight around his bones, by the manner in which flowers of frozen pins instantly blossomed along the garden of his spine.

Something else was up there in the darkness with him.

The hand of the Unnamed scrabbled about the floor in a blind search for his tinderbox. His breathing was thin and manic. He called out “Who is there?” but stillness was the only reply.

Even after the stump of the tallow candle was lighted and the Unnamed lunged it forward to gleam the shadows clean off the attic’s narrow corners, no trace of the invader could be found .   .   . yet its presence remained palpable. The Unnamed could feel it creeping past him like a thin draft of winter air leaking through a fissure, graceful as a feline with glass paws.

The Unnamed waited, but the presence refused to fade. He pictured it crouched in the attic’s high peak, at the nexus where all the strange angles converged into a singularity. Perhaps it was there, scrutinizing him like a cathedral grotesque.

As if heeding some primordial instruction, the Unnamed moved to the shuttered attic window. Blood roared his ears, his grubby hands began to tremble. Whatever was near him, the Unnamed was suddenly certain, had concealed itself behind the splintery boards of the shutters.

Although part of him wanted to muster courage enough to unveil the shuttered thing, the Unnamed found that his arm refused to obey. His fingers would not grasp the shutter’s latch.

Unexpectedly, a thin wisp of thought crept into the mind of the Unnamed; an insight, an understanding:
he
was the one who frightened, who watched and skulked and haunted. He was not the one seen, he was invariably the Seer.

Buttressed by this revelation, the Unnamed unlatched the shutters and flung them back from the pane.

The revealed shape was an abomination; a shaggy, wide-eyed thing that was both immediately present and impossibly distant. For a moment the Unnamed wondered if his own madness had managed to imbue some long-neglected nightmare with shape, bulk.

Clearly the apparition was not of nature, not completely, for the Unnamed noticed that he could see through this visitor. The snow-softened contours of the headstones below were visible, resembling the peaks of a miniature mountain range. The moon too shared a portion of its lustre with the sallow flesh of the night-hag’s face, gleaming upon her cheek like an omniscient eye.

To speak? To flee? To banish the haunter with squinted eyes or prayers? The Unnamed could not select his fate, for wonder and dread had gushed up from within him. There was a consummation; a kind of chemical wedding that rendered him as dull and as rigid as petrified wood.

‘Death,’ the Unnamed thought, ‘now .   .   . unstoppable Death has come .   .   .’

But a new sensation quickly made it clear that the Unnamed had not expired. Not yet.

He felt himself being encircled by a whirling ring of great force. It spun wildly around him, and around, and around. The Unnamed began to swoon as a sickly vertigo mounted within him. He opened his mouth to scream, halting only when he saw the horror in the glass aping his action; its mouth stretched to an almost absurd degree. This flawless mimicry alerted the Unnamed to the fact that the awful thing in the glass was, naturally, his own reflection.

Whatever relief this realization provided was fleeting. What usurped it was a greasy, upsetting curiosity as the Unnamed began to question if the hag in the pane was an accurate reflection; and if it was, how had he allowed himself to degenerate so drastically during his hibernation? The Unnamed realized how long it been since he had glimpsed himself in water, in a pane of glass, how long since he’d felt the desire to do so.

The balance of that night was spent in a bewildered and prolonged meditation, not only upon the reflection in the glass but also of its many implications. The Unnamed dragged a wobbly pine stool toward the glass and stationed himself there, loitering there until the night slowly immolated in the sky’s eastern furnace of light.

This silent contemplation stretched on until the winter sun died again.

That second nightfall proved to the Unnamed that his sittings were best served by darkness and the wan guttering of a lone candle. These elements united to make the double in the glass appear much more sharply, with all the detail of a portrait from the brush of a master painter.

His eyes burned from strain. The Unnamed squinted to relieve his discomfort, and in doing so discovered an entire galaxy of new possibilities for his meditation. This subtle flex transformed the Unnamed’s image into something monstrous; a mask of unimaginable grotesqueness. When his shudder ebbed, the Unnamed stretched his face until his eyes were wide as twin moons orbiting within their sockets. The reflection looked feral; more rabid hound than human.

Exhaustion was the only thing that eventually pried the Unnamed from his perch, and even then only for a few hours. In fact, his life was swiftly whittled down to little beyond the stoic act of perching before the attic window. Shiftless his body may have been, but the Unnamed’s mind swelled like a river, deluging him, breaking the levees of the logic he’d spent his years on Earth accumulating. The Unnamed ultimately found himself existing with neither ration nor taboo, his life now a prolonged act of coaxing the monsters within himself to impress themselves upon the contours of his face. The Unnamed would peel his lips back to reveal the grey teeth of his rictus, would lean away from the tallow’s light so that his head became a map of shadows. On the chillier nights the Unnamed would shift his focus to the frost that knitted across his glass replica, webbing his cheeks with skeins of ice.

All life, it became apparent to the Unnamed, was simply a matter of perspective, of choosing whether one wishes to be the seer or the thing seen.

Throughout the afternoon after he rose, the Unnamed was invariably the seer. He would shift his pine stool just enough to obscure himself from view and would then spend the solar hours watching as the fauna scurried from their hidden dens, as the elements took their toll on the headstones. On rare occasions humans would enter the churchyard, and whenever they did they would inevitably peer uneasily over the shoulders at the house of the Unnamed, as if sensing his obscured presence.

Night brought an altogether different perspective. In the gloaming, when his reflection began to darken and deepen its impression on the pane, the Unnamed would become the
thing seen
. The shape in the glass would scrutinize
him
, study him and inevitably cause his blood to congeal.

But familiarity is the mother of discontentment, and after months of scanning and being scanned the Unnamed began to feel his passion for this practice ebbing.

As if in response to this ennui, his double dilated their exchange to an unprecedented horizon.

It was a temperate July eve. The Unnamed was striving to look at his reflection without blinking. He saw, with undeniable clarity, the face in the glass slowly shut its eyes.

The Unnamed’s jaw dropped but saw no evidence of this in his reflection. Instead the semi-transparent face grinned at him.

A storm of actions: the backward reeling off a toppling stool, a flight down crooked unswept stairs, an antelope-quick run from the flung front door and into the deep starlit woods without so much as a backward glance.

The Unnamed lingered at the creek’s edge until long after sunrise, and even with the light dappling the vibrant flora around him the Unnamed’s homebound hike was weighted with great reluctance, with the horror of what he might find there.

The doorframe still loomed open from his manic escape. The Unnamed crossed the burying ground with his eyes fixed upon the weathered, cracking headstones, unable even to consider looking up at the attic window.

He frittered the day away in the lower level of his cottage, cleaning and cooking and, foolishly, praying that the night would not return.

Return it did, but the Unnamed attempted to bleed it of its powers by refusing to venture up to the attic. He tugged the drape across the small window of his kitchen, lit a fresh candle, and settled into his rocker for the night. He vowed that he would return to the attic in the morning and close the shutters for the last time, perhaps even smash the glass from the frame.

‘I shall change my ways,’ the Unnamed thought, ‘on the morrow, on the morrow .   .   .’

Though he did not realize he had drifted off, a strange noise caused the Unnamed to start up in his chair. It was dark, a far reach till morning. He could hear it, shrill and grating. The Unnamed rose and listened, and although he was certain that the sound was coming from the attic, he resisted and instead went outside to search for a stray animal or an intruder—anything that might serve as a reasonable and reassuring source of the accursed noise.