At Fear's Altar (20 page)

N
othing remains unfathomable forever. No matter how remote the impulse or how empyreal the dream, we are always able to codify our visions, to tether our impulses by naming them. We inter the uncanny beneath the silt of cosily acceptable forms.

Yet there will always be flashes when the seams of life begin to show. You might have tasted yours during a bout of fever, or through a vicious trauma—the source does not matter. In the end, every last one of us must glimpse the Minotaur in the maze. None of us glides through the world uninitiated.

Of course, most people are only too eager to avoid or outright discard these flashes of the panic-inducing All. These individuals try to make sense of the whole messy ordeal, crutching themselves against other people, using the concepts of love and fellowship and a lust for life as harnesses that just might keep everything reined in.

Opposed to this group is a band of misfits who tend to deify those flashes when the screen frays and the unfenced gulf of Beyond starts seeping in. They invent words of power and knock-on-wood rituals in the hopes of forming a ligature between the terror in the pit of their hearts and the Otherness that sprawls so far beyond them.

If there is any fundamental difference between me and you it is that you are one who spends your life scrambling to make all the pieces hew again, whereas once my shell cracked I was only too happy to pick and pull at the rift.

We are human beings, and human beings fashion faiths. It is the schema of our being, as innate to us as breathing.

I say this as one whose impulses always seemed to pour in from the farthest margins, one whose childhood was a storm of anxieties during the day, asphyxiating panic-dreams after the light fled.

The conditions of life have always been incomprehensible to me. In fact, the moment I became aware of the world I began hunting for a portal out of it. It’s taken me many years to be able to admit this fact to myself. It seems I’m simply not hardwired to process the din and dynamism of humankind. And so I withdrew my membership. I stepped out of line and let the hunt rush past me, contenting myself with nestling down among the bones your tribe left in its wake. I made myself very small in the world and welcomed those faint and far-off impulses to come stealing in as they pleased.

I forfeited the tangible for the spider-graze of some far phantom realm.

And yet it was I who found the Real.

This is no Gothic romance. I will not taint my account with poetic delusions. I’ll strive to write earnestly.

Let me begin by trouncing the fantasies that you might be expecting: No, I was not conceived under auspicious conditions. The stars did not align to herald my eruption from the womb. I was born of an average man and woman, and I came into the world with neither a seer’s caul nor a head heaped with memories of past incarnations. I was ordinary in every way. My life was one whose tedium was blessed with rare disruptions of the uncanny; intrusions that were magnificently terrifying.

Instead of shunning these experiences, I cultivated them, served as a cultist
to
them. I wanted to impress the world’s dull clay with crooked signs, and I did so. It all boiled down to my paying attention to remote impressions, chanced glimpses of an Otherworld, and then training myself to take in a little more the next time, to reach a welcoming hand to the Other.

Understandably, neither the import nor the impact of what I was doing was apparent to me at the time, for my faith was realized at the tender age of seven.

And it came to me in the guise of a game.

The game was born in the manner appropriate to all noteworthy things: in darkness. In this instance, it was the dull matte of a lustreless cellar; my sanctuary from the summer above.

As a boy, one of my greatest pleasures was sleeping in the basement of my parents’ home where it was cool and ruddy and dim. The walls down there were stacked cinderblocks that met at weird angles, and the corners were always clouded with cobwebs and mounded dust. The unfinished ceiling stood just high enough to allow the damp air to lazily swirl and keep the mustiness from becoming cloying. Silence held fast in that basement; an anticipatory quiet, sharp and tenuous, like an undying hiss, as though I was trapped inside an iron lung that had malfunctioned mid-breath, a machine that was forever threatened to suddenly resume its function and erupt with a heart-stopping gasp.

During sweltering afternoons I liked to envision myself as skulking around the bottom of a great cistern that had long been exhausted of the libation it had been designed to house; a lidded pit where only the weakest glimmer of sunlight pierced the grime-fogged windows, sunlight that was never strong enough to sully my chthonic playground.

In the late evening I would watch the shadows lengthen across the battered, cast-off furnishings, stretching like the skeletal boughs of a great misshapen tree.

My father had fashioned a crude pantry beneath the zigzag beams of the basement stairs; a primitive larder of pickled vegetables, glinting tins of meat. I would swathe myself in a fraying blanket and eat in that pantry, pretending I was the lone survivor of some life-purging holocaust, huddled snugly in my secret bomb shelter, waiting for the ghosts to come slithering down from an irradiated wasteland.

And in time a ghost came; not a toxic one, but a segment of some great outer Dark. It came by way of a self-fashioned game I called Curtains.

Curtains was a simple amusement and, like all those that were in any way meaningful to me, it was a solitary one. Should you ever wish to open the way yourself, I urge you to experiment with Curtains. The tools are basic, consisting of nothing more than an old bed sheet or tarp; anything that can be transformed into a shroud with the merest nudge. I employed a length of plastic sheeting that my father kept waded up beneath his workbench.

To play Curtains I would simply hold the sheet before me and slowly pace the unlit basement, as though the floor was a great Ouija board and I was a living
planchette
being yanked along by a force both within and beyond me. Roaming, often with my eyes instinctively squinted, I would wait for some propitious moment to fling the sheet in hopes of covering something.

But with a lone fabulous exception, Curtains always ended in disappointment; the thrown sheet cascading down to crumple flat and empty upon the unswept cement floor. Even when my head was brimming with ghost glossolalia, the end result would be failure.

Yet the
anticipation
that preceded these failures—those breathless seconds of watching mute and saucer-eyed while the
potential
of an apparition tainted the basement’s atmosphere—was narcotic enough.

Even my failed experiments caused me to tear up the basement steps and out into the sunlit world. The paradisiacal afternoon would gush past me in an indistinct smear until I eventually found some shady patch of lawn to slump down upon. There I would push out short, panicked breaths and yoked that dread-drunk state for all it was worth. Even then, as a boy still relatively fresh from the womb, I grasped the rarity and the magnificence of the panicked state.

Sharing the richness of these failed games of Curtains does, I hope, convey just how potent a successful game would have been to me, how precious. Spirits move mercurially, you understand. To actually Curtain one while it is whispering? I know of no rarer accomplishment in this life.

I was granted just such a blessing one sweltering July afternoon.

The soundtrack to that particular game was a discordant blend of the murmurs bubbling in my skull and the peals of neighbourhood children playing in the yards above me. The high noon sunlight was reduced to its usual fever-and-flu haze as the window-wells became lantern domes, giving my game an ambient glow rather than direct beams of harsh light.

From its commencement, I knew that particular game was going to be special. I roamed the unswept floor, clinging to a guarded optimism that I might just succeed. I followed the mouthless voices over to a cold corner whose bricks were haired with dust tufts. A pressure struck my chest, pressed down to my loins. The back of my head began to swell, as though a pressure valve had been wrenched loose, freeing whatever had been holding manic congress inside my skull.

I held my breath and flung the Curtain, stared in a taut eagerness as it began to drop.

One edge crinkled as it hit the ground. For an instant my heart sank.

I was so distraught over thinking that I had lost the game yet again that I doubted the shape that began to form beneath the cloudy sheet.

The peak of a head was the first detail to become visible. Beneath this egg-like lump, the cragged arch of misshapen shoulders began to placidly mould themselves.

The Curtained thing was breathing, its frame heaving like wind-bullied laundry on a line. Condensation beaded the plastic where the shape’s mouth might be. Its breath formed minute diamonds of moisture on the tarp’s underside.

An exquisite cold shot down my back. It planted a garden of ice needles down the length of my neck.

“Who are you?” I asked, though I had no real voice.

The shape spoke not in words, but through gesture.

It reached out its veiled arms and grabbed me, pulling me until my face was pressed against its dense chest.

I remember this encounter as an eternal moment, though it likely only lasted a few panicked beats of my heart. I was held firm against something that felt like little more than a pocket of dense air, a vacuum of nothingness that somehow had shape and heft and power.

A mitten-like hand pressed against my back, and then everything began to lilt together into something soft and amorphous and so awfully distant.

I don’t remember fainting, or even falling backward once the thing released me from its grip. All I can recall is lying on the floor, staring up at the beams of the basement’s crude ceiling. I was sickened by the thought that the spirit I’d Curtained might have slipped out from beneath its sheet and fled back to the Beyond while I had been lying dazed.

Crackling sounds like the static of a detuned radio brought an eerie reassurance that I was not alone down there. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked ahead, simultaneously craving and dreading what I might find there.

The shape was crouched low. I would say that it was studying me if the thing had possessed eyes, but it was a shallow featureless grey lump that gently rocked to and fro like a willow. I could not tell whether the force beneath the shroud was struggling to free itself or merely to coax its covering into a new shape.

Sitting up, I felt the familiar fear swelling inside me, wringing my throat dry, damming my voice completely. I rose to run, but for the first time while playing Curtains I hesitated. After all, was this not what I’d wanted? What had all those games been for if not to reach this moment?

I heard the far-off voices of the neighbourhood kids, and their words sounded to me like some foreign tongue. If I were to flee, what would I be racing toward but a world that seemed to have no slot for me from the moment I entered it?

Children of seven can be very wise indeed.

“You .   .   .” I rasped, “you won’t hurt me, will you?”

The shape stilled itself. Was it demonstrating passivity?

I took a step forward, but only one. The shroud’s only motion was the gentle lift and drop of its breathing. I neared it, reaching out at first to touch it, but ultimately resisting. Instead I sat down cross-legged before it.

For a long while I just basked.

I asked the curtained thing more questions but received only crinkling in response.

“We need something .   .   .” I mused.

Twenty-eight recipe cards, all but two bearing a letter of the alphabet, printed as tidily as I was able at that age. The final pair of cards was emblazoned with the words ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ This gamut was spread in a semicircle pattern upon the basement floor. An upturned plastic tumbler sat half-concealed under the hem of the Curtain, approximately where a hand might be.

It was all the “something” we needed; crude, but serviceable enough to open the gates of communication.

Being a child, I was bursting with curiosity and fraught with impatience during our first attempt to converse. Squatting before the Curtained thing, I would blurt out a question and would then endure the tedious process of the cup being dragged at an agonizing pace toward a desired letter. Upon reflection, this procedure must have demanded a monumental effort on the part of my companion. To cause an object to shift when one is scarcely more than breath and drapery demonstrated immeasurable will, a sparkling clarity of desire, a mathematical precision of intent.

My initial questions provoked the longest of these response times, undoubtedly because the thing in the Curtain was also new to the procedure.

In response to my request for its name, the wraith spelled out:

C                     N

A               R

P         O

R   C

I

“Your name is Capricorn?”

YES

“My name is Michel. I want to be friends with you. Do you want to be friends with me?”

YES

“Okay, okay good. Capricorn, did you used to live in this house?”

NO

“Do you know this house?”