At Fear's Altar (4 page)

All too swiftly, the dream began to sour and darken.

Gone was the clean-smelling air, the pacific atmosphere. Now there was only the stinking cloister of a taboo chapel. Colin’s dreaming self looked about, grateful for the shadows that had congealed over the walls and pews, guising the pornographic tapestry. He was wrung with a raw hot fear when he discovered that he was not alone.

The faceless bodies began to depict the acts he’d seen in those wrinkled magazine images. Colin bottomed out completely. He tried to turn away, but one of the crawling, slippery-skinned women was familiar to him. He’d know Beverly’s smile anywhere.

He started awake, unaware of not only who he was, but indeed
if
he was. The house was silent, and for one icy moment Colin felt utterly marooned.

A reflexive grunt slipped out as he pushed his trunk off the mattress. The air inside his mouth was sour. He stole a draught from the water glass, but it did nothing to rinse the taste from his palette. He rose and shambled out to the living room.

His granddaughters were visible through the box window. Muted by distance and filtered by grimy glass (Colin just that moment remembered his plan to wash all the panes before Paula’s visit), the girls appeared as actresses in a silent movie. Colin found himself trying to read their lips, to interpret what every gesture insinuated. He was half waiting for explanatory subtitles to stain the air between them.

He didn’t spot Paula until he entered the kitchen to fix himself a rye-and-ginger. She was standing where the front lawn hemmed the main road. She was talking with Millie Fuerstein. Whatever the spinster from across the road had to say, it was delivered with dramatic flair and was drawn out.

Colin cowered behind the yellowing lace of the curtains Beverly had sewn the year they’d bought this house. He peeped as Millie used her pruning shears as a pointer, singling out
his
house of all things. She flattened a gloved hand across her chest, roughly where her heart would be. Was she offering Paula sympathy? His daughter had her back to the window, but Colin could see her nodding, nodding, slowly.

He backed away and resumed mixing his drink, wondering why the fluid in his bottle of Crown Royal was so thick and gummy. His confusion worsened when he read the bottle’s label and discovered he’d taken a bottle of vegetable oil from the cupboard instead of his favourite whiskey.

To avoid any embarrassing confrontations with Paula, Colin dumped both oil bottle and drinking glass into the trashcan.

Any doubts he may have harboured about Paula and Millie’s conversation being about him were removed once Paula entered the house. She was pleasantly surprised to find her father awake and in the kitchen,
too
pleasantly surprised in fact.

Colin informed her that he was going to watch TV for a while. She said that sounded like a good idea.

The flickering images were an incoherent jumble, but Colin endured them until Paula called supper. The clam chowder she’d prepared was tasty, but Colin found his appetite was still lacking. It was an irksome meal that consisted of all four people doing their best not to look at one another. Colin was grateful when Paula broke up the party by ordering that the girls go finish packing for their morning departure.

When Sara and Toni had left the kitchen, Paula said, “I wish I was able to stay a few more days, Dad, but the girls start back to school on Tuesday.”

Her words were only faintly audible to Colin, who was staring raptly at the tablecloth pattern, lulled by a petit mal.

“Dad?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you hear me? I said I spoke to Millie Fuerstein this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes. Yes? Millie .   .   . from across the road.”

“Right. She told me about what happened here last month, Dad. She told me.”

“Last Monday?” he mumbled. Colin could again feel the words passing through his mind like lemmings plummeting off the cliff-edge of his memory. “Monday? Nothing happened on Monday .   .   . you were here .   .   . you and the girls .   .   . they have school soon .   .   . you probably have to leave .   .   . I’ll be sad to see you go.”

“We’ll be sad too, Dad, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Do you remember what happened last month, with Millie?”

“.   .   . Millie .   .   .”

He watched Paula slowly close her eyes. Her lashes became dewy. “She said she saw you on the footpath. You were wandering aimlessly and screaming for Mom. Do you remember doing that, Dad?”

“Your mother’s deceased, Paula .   .   . Don’t .   .   . don’t you speak of her that way .   .   . My Beverly is deceased .   .   . April fifth .   .   . it was a Tuesday .   .   . two years ago .   .   . pneumonia.”

“That’s right, Dad. I know and you know. But Millie thinks you must have forgotten that day because she found you in a daze. She says you even mistook her for Mom.”

“No!”

“You did. You might not remember, but you did. Millie said you grabbed her by the arm, that you started to drag her down toward the marshes. Luckily her son was with her and he helped calm you down. Jesus, Dad, do you understand that you scared her half to death?”

Colin said nothing.

“Millie said that once you were back on the main road you were fine. It was like someone had flipped a switch. But her son practically had to drag you out of the woods first.”

“She’s mistaken .   .   . Millie .   .   . she’s old, you know.”

“Why didn’t you let her phone me after that happened, Dad? She and her son tried to get my number, but you wouldn’t give it to her. You also refused to let her call a doctor.”

Colin could feel his brow furrowing and was sure that this expression gave Paula the feeling that he was deeply pondering her words. But in truth his mind was a clean slate, a still pond.

Paula reached over and took his hand. “I think it’s time we took another look at having you move .   .   . someplace else, somewhere closer to the city and where you would be with other people.”

Colin was proud of himself for resisting the unsavoury response that twitched inside him. Instead he slid his hand out from underneath his daughter’s and took a few seconds to choose his words.

“I hope,” he began, “I really hope that when you get old, Paula, your children won’t be so quick to ship you off. And you
will
get there, believe me. You will have your bad days, days when you feel just a few degrees off from the rest of the world. When that happens, I hope your girls will have a little bit more understanding.”

He stood and exited the kitchen, unwilling, or perhaps unable, to look upon the fallout his words had wrought.

Outside, the day was perishing in a slow burn that primed the entire hamlet in gloaming. Colin settled into his porch chair and tried to draw comfort from the façades and landmarks that had seemed, prior to today, immune to change. The yews and the sycamores stood in charcoal relief against the twilight. A slow-moving wind harassed their boughs to nod. They resembled shaggy behemoths all huddled together, all agreeing on some silent pact.

Unbidden, the image of the chapel at night surfaced in Colin’s imagination. He pictured it swathed in shadows of the deepest blue, the pitch of its roof and the summit of its steeple knitting with the earthward darkness of the boughs. Cadres of fireflies transformed the lolling reeds into votives. The fetid air was bubbling with the sound of toads and crickets chorusing a chthonic hymn.

Colin was perversely curious to see just how far down his mind would drag him. How deep into the tangled jungle of his id would his thoughts bore before the safeguarding gates came slamming down to spare him? Were the defamers, whoever they may be, moving up those rotting steps in procession this very moment? Would their animal hide vestments be shed at the nave? What would creatures like that deem to be the greatest sacraments?

The September night felt unseasonably chilly. Colin’s shiver was enough to purge the vision. He wanted so much to tell Paula about the chapel, about what he had seen there. During dinner, when the tensions were nearing the breaking point, he had actually toyed with the idea of taking his daughter there, of showing her the true reason he had been so upset. Had he gotten lost this morning? Yes. But there was something in those woods, something .   .   . incorrect. Something that offended him. Perhaps, only perhaps, some primal faculty in Colin had perceived the
incorrectness
as soon as he’d stepped onto the paths, and it was this primal unease that had caused him to lose his bearings in woods that he’d lived near for the better part of six decades.

As consoling as this theory was, it did nothing to detract from a profoundly upsetting fact: that somehow the woods had managed to hide a perverse structure from Colin, and presumably everyone else in the village, for who knows how many years. There had never been a chapel in those low-lying marshlands. Never.

Though the moon had barely begun its ascent, Colin decided that it was best to turn in. Upon passing the closed door of the small bedroom his granddaughters shared during their visit, Colin overheard an exchange between the girls and their mother. Though muffled by wood, their words were still audible.

“.   .   . then after I tried, like, to see if there was anyone else hiking who might help us, he made me stop and told me to stand there. Then he walked into the swamp, until the water was, like, up to his waist, and just stood there for, like, five minutes.” It was Toni’s voice, Colin was sure. He could even hear the wad of gum that she never seemed to be without smacking as she lied through her teeth. “Then he just ran off into the trees and we had to go after him.”

“Did he say anything when he was standing in the water?” Paula this time.

“He just kinda breathed loud, like when you feel surprised.” That Sara had joined the cabal was a fact that weighed heaviest of all on Colin’s heart. He shuffled to his room and undressed for bed in the dark.

***

Autumn crept into the village overnight. The morning was bright and the breeze carried the first crisp portents of the coming season.

Paula and the girls were still sleeping when Colin began scrambling the eggs for their breakfast. He waited until the first of his guests, Sara, emerged from her room before he poured the orange juice and called everyone to the table. Their meal was a pleasant counterpoint to last night’s rigid dinner. Colin was relieved to hear his granddaughters laughing. Even Paula seemed a little less on edge.

After the meal, Paula loaded their luggage into the hatchback and the four of them stood on the driveway not saying much of anything.

“Safe trip,” Colin said at last.

The girls piled into the car. Paula ordered them to put on their seatbelts before urging Colin to take a few steps out of earshot.

“I’d like to come back next weekend, Dad.”

“Oh fine, fine. It will be nice to see you and the girls again.”

Paula shook her head. “I’m going to see if Stan would be willing to bump up his weekend with the girls so that you and I can have some time to talk some things out.”

Unable to react, Colin merely stood while his daughter informed him that she would be “making some calls this week” and would talk to him “real soon.” She leaned in for a cursory embrace, then drove off without so much as glancing at him.

Colin stood on his lawn. A shape of lurid colours leaked into his periphery, and Colin craned his head to see Millie pretending to shower her rosebushes. He waved at her but Millie must not have noticed. Colin went inside and plopped down on an armchair.

Feelings cascaded through him so swiftly Colin could barely register one before the next came racing along. He worried over Paula’s almost threatening promise to return in a few days. He pined for the days when his wife would unfailingly balm his anxious spirit. But chiefly, Colin thought about the chapel, specifically why his granddaughters had decided to omit the building from their recollections of yesterday. Perhaps they had merely sensed the incorrectness of the place and opted to will it out of their memories. If this was the case, Colin wished the girls would teach him how to do the same.

But he had seen it, had even wandered its nave. Whatever havoc his flaking brain had been playing on him these last few months, the chapel was a different matter. It was palpable, visceral. Even if the crazy story Millie had told Paula was true, even if he had taken some wrong turns while walking with the girls, Colin was staunchly certain of what he had seen and felt inside that marshside temple.

Yet he’d also been certain of his ability to navigate the footpaths, and how to pour himself a rye-and-ginger, and the myriad other minutiae that were becoming more tedious and fleeting with each passing day. And if Paula doubted these tiny day-to-day trivialities, what would she do to him if he told her of a lascivious church?

He needed proof, if for no other reason than to pacify himself. And he knew precisely how he might obtain it.

The Polaroid camera Bev had once given him as a birthday gift was still on the closet shelf where he’d stored it, some twenty years ago now. He was pleasantly surprised to find that he still had some film left on a cartridge, but was sceptical about the device’s working ability after so many years in storage. Nevertheless, the thin possibility was enough to inspire Colin to don his puffer vest and his hiking boots.

Even after filling a hip-bag with a good deal of water and food, he found himself unwilling to depart for the paths just yet. He stood rigid in the centre of the living room, the heat rising around him, wondering if he could bring himself to face those woods again so soon. But Colin had always been a man of strong resolve. He knew that not facing the mystery that had swayed him from his accepted course would cause him to lose faith. He set off.

He felt like a mischievous child as he skulked past Millie’s house, out of view of her windows. His passing by a young couple stirred another flash of panic in Colin, but this too passed once he stepped onto the path and began to hike.