At Fear's Altar (8 page)

Tad had kept his intentions of returning to British Columbia to himself. He had no friends to share these plans with of course, but even when he booked off the last week of August he told his supervisor it was to catch up on some renovations around the house; a plausible excuse as his home had fallen into disrepair since Petra’s demise. Tad had never realized how warm and full the house had felt when they had shared it. But now it was cold and dirty and hollow, like an old warehouse, like an excavated tomb.

The weather during the flight was pacific, as though nature was speeding him along to face that which he’d previously been unwilling to face.

He spent the first night holed up in a motel, trying not to think about the close proximity of Earth’s End, of The Abject, of Petra’s watery grave.

The following morning was dull and dim and rainy. Tad partially hoped that his rental car would skid out on the mountain road. He was actually nourished by morbid visions of himself being impaled on a tree. But, after several wrong turns, he ultimately arrived at the neglected entrance to The Crawlspace. He’d been dreading the possibility of finding Douglas’s jeep parked along the side of the road. Perhaps he and Charlie had thought of marking the tragic anniversary in the same manner. But the area was as vacant as it had been last summer, perhaps the way it had always been.

It was late afternoon, but the sky was so heaped with grey that it felt like evening. Tad remained slumped behind the wheel, watching the raindrops splatter on the windshield. At last he reached over and dragged the .38 from the glove compartment. Tucking it into the front of his jeans, he exited the car and disobeyed the NO TRESPASSING sign for the second time in his life.

The Crawlspace went past in a green blur. Every so often Tad thought he saw Petra just ahead of him, racing once more toward her death under an eclipsed moon.

The ocean roared and crashed in great tumults at the base of Earth’s End. The atmosphere was hazed with mist. The Abject was little more than an onyx pin swathed in fog.

Tad’s gaze went downward, his mind raced backward.

He hadn’t wanted to relive the night, and certainly not with such vivid, lacerating clarity, but the interred memories began to claw their way back to the surface.

Tad imagined himself as once again standing under the occulted moon. The white wine and beer had made him feel that the cliff he stood upon was on a pitch, for he swayed to and fro, listening to the two queers yammering and tittering like schoolgirls. Petra was standing aloof, shining her flashlight ahead of her, into the darkness. She’d been leaning forward, had been shielding her eyes with her hand as if this action would somehow enable her to see.

What had she seen?

The question had been gnawing at Tad for a full year. On those rare nights where he was able to snatch some REM sleep,
that
image would bloom in the grey haze of sleep, wrenching him into a panting, twitchy wakefulness. He would see Petra taking that lone fatal step over the edge, would see her being instantly subsumed by the night.

Had he been the one who’d inspired Petra to jump? What had driven her to drop so casually, so easily?

Tad pulled the revolver from under his belt and examined it. He began to sob. It was the first time he had cried over Petra.

He’d been downright stoic through the long investigation that came once that rare darkness ebbed and the moon returned, and later the sun. He had stood wrapped in a fibrous grey blanket that one of the emergency workers had given him. Douglas had been given a sedative to calm him. Charlie had wept and snivelled while he’d insisted over and over that he’d had no clue as to how Petra had fallen.

The boats had bobbed across the ocean for three full days afterwards. They’d dragged the same area again and again but turned up nothing. Tad had been warned that the chances of recovering Petra’s body in these waters were slim.

Perhaps there was some corner of Tad’s soul that was sanctimonious after all, for despite many repeated attempts at placing the .38’s nub against his temple, he was unable to squeeze the trigger. So he remained seated, his legs dangling over the edge of Earth’s End, his body shivering from the cold shower that continued to fall upon him. He looked out at The Abject, and in a weird way he felt it was he who was being looked at, watched.

The rain eventually lightened, but by then the sky had grown dark.

“Petra .   .   .”

He spoke her name quietly, almost sibilantly. He was exhausted in every sense of the word, too drained to speak in anything above a whimper.

It must have been this destroyed state of mind that caused the optical illusion of the fog swirling into a great funnel; the chute that afforded Tad a clear view of The Abject.

There was a fire in the great cave, or so it looked to Tad. He scrabbled back from the ledge and rose to his feet. He could see plump sparks of light glowing like flung embers against the ancient dark. These flint-sparks enabled Tad to see that the rim of the cave was eroding, quickly. Its stone edges were peeling back to reveal .   .   .

Teeth.

And then the cave was no longer a cave, but a crooked grin.

The face that pulled up and out of the rock was immense, with a glacier-pale complexion and eyes like stagnant tarns.

Tad’s vision blurred, wavered. The cliff felt like pudding beneath him. He glared dumbly as The Abject sprouted an arm, another. And as the vast thing shook off the crust of its deosil hibernation, it fanned its limitless wings, hiding the cloudy sky behind a veil of black plumage and dangling tufts of rot. Each heave of the thing’s scaly chest choked the air with stench and embers.

Its howl shook Earth’s End and dropped Tad to his knees.

The Watcher turned its dead gaze to the cliff. It reached, as though it could grasp the escarpment with ease. Tad’s mouth worked frantically, forming silent pleas.

And then Tad saw Petra.

She was walking on night air, or so Tad thought until he looked down and discovered that the hideous thing from within the rock had stretched one of its wings across the water, forging a bridge between its Outer realm and the world of man. There were other figures perched on various ridges of The Abject, human in size if not altogether in shape; just as The Abject itself had been mountainous in scope, but not in composition.

Petra, looking feral, black-stained, yet regal in her madness, treaded upon the feathery arch. Most of her body looked positively ossified, save for the belly, which was swollen with fledgling life.

She held something in her spindly, filthy arms.

Something that shifted and mewled.

Something that she freed.

Something that came scuttling at a great speed toward Earth’s End.

Tad saw the thing pushing itself along on unnumbered flabby claws. Its eyes were like the suckers on a deep sea creature’s tentacle. Its mouth was nothing but tongue.

He prayed he’d have time enough to fire once.