At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  For two days after my encounter with the Hound I paced and fretted over what I had seen, or believed I had seen. I waffled between seeing this through and putting this whole repulsive business behind me by fleeing Holland.

  I ultimately decided that if I did not do that which I was most afraid to do—namely, discover just what it is that was lying in wait for me in the burial ground—it would only be a matter of time before I found myself confined to a bedlam, or followed Patrick’s fate by wrapping my mouth around a pistol.

  I went back, Mother. I ventured out past Black River. I even left two pennies on the bank for the Ferryman as I crossed my private shallow Styx, this time not bothering to step from rock to rock, instead allowing myself to wade and trudge knee-deep in the moon-cold Stygian flow.

  It was midnight by the time I scaled over that sad fence for the second time.

  I heard the baying, and the sound of claws on wood. Both noises were muffled by six feet of earth.

  Having no tools with me, I had to resort to lying upon the five-centuries-old grave with my ear pressed to the frosty ground. Yet somehow I was able to hear the ancient ghoul, and he was able to hear me.

  We conversed until just before dawn.

  I made a subsequent visit to the grave earlier today, this time armed with a pick and shovel. I confess that learning anything more about Patrick or St. John was by then the furthest thing from my mind.

  This quest has mutated into something meant for me alone.

  I rifled the coffin lid, and the old ghoul’s retinue of bats came fluttering out like ashes from a dirty flue.

  The thing in the box sat up.

  Much, amazingly much, of him remained intact. It wore the jade amulet around its knotty neck.

  But more amazing still was when he began to Shift, taking on the vaster form I recognized from beyond my window.

  I sat on the rim of the pit and listened as my teacher told me of what is to come once the stars are aright.

  The following are principles you must grasp, Mother, and quickly:

  A stellar tide of transformation is rising, undimensioned and unseen by the bulk of earthly life. You shall be admitted to the Dog-Star, Mother. Patrick failed, as did St. John. Their lack of understanding sealed their doom. It is as simple as that.

  Perhaps they were not granted the congress with the Hound that I have been blessed with. If so, they were unable to grasp its message. Though if Patrick’s diary is any indication, I suspect they let their mundane appetites for the ghoulish eclipse the celestial import of their deeds. But that is neither here nor there.

  The important thing is that I have received the stellar gnosis, and that I’ve arranged for you to receive it also. Some time will pass before this can commence. In the interim you must prepare yourself.

  I have enclosed the jade amulet with this letter. Please wear it whenever you lie down to your sleep. This is how your Initiation will begin, Mother; in the guise of terrible dreams. I beg you; do NOT dismiss them as just nightmares when you awaken. You must record these experiences in minute detail, and must then treat these accounts as your unique black gospel. Nightmares are the means by which you will learn to wrench yourself from the human, learn to Shift as I and my Teacher have.

  I still find Shifting rather painful, but not nearly as when I first birthed my wings. It is now almost as easy as disrobing.

  & wait until you get your first direct blast of the Starry Wisdom, Mother; sheer orgasms of light & thunder.

  This will be my final epistle. I am not leaving you as Patrick did; in cowardice. I am still bound to you. So long as the greenstone Hound stays with you, I can come a-calling. The fetish is the means by which the Hound sniffs out Its faithful.

  Please listen for me, Mother, on the night of the North Solstice.

  I shall come for you when the Dog-Star has fully risen. But know this: when you next see me, I shall not appear as you knew me.

  ***

  3 September 1923

  To: Mr. Charles Hoy Fort

  c/o—The Offices of Boni and Liveright, publisher

  New York, NY

  Dear Mr. Fort,

  My name is Connell Dyer and I am writing in response to the request for “further materials” in the back pages of your delightful Book of the Damned. I hope you are still compiling evidence of the strange for a follow-up volume, for I have enclosed a clipping I think will appeal to you and may even be worthy of inclusion in your next book.

  The story ran in the back pages of The County Crier, a locally circulated newspaper from a rural area well east of Dublin. I can only assume that it was not more widely known because it fell victim to the same “damnation” as the extraordinary accounts in your book.

  Because I too am interested in such things, I’ve done a fair bit of investigating and can attest to this news item’s authenticity.

  Fact—The neighbours did hear an eerie, disembodied howling on the night of 21st June.

  Fact—These same neighbours were ear-witnesses to a lady screaming for her son, also on the night of 21st June.

  Fact—Debris (mainly tarpaper shingles and wood) was in fact found scattered over a vast distance of the hamlet the following morning. My own search of the area revealed that the old lady’s cottage was indeed torn apart. (The roof was slashed to kindling.)

  Fact—The old woman who inhabited the house has not been seen since 21st June.

  There is plenty more, but I’ll let you read the enclosed article for yourself. Should you be interested in learning more about this mystery, I urge you to contact me.

  In the meantime I am pushing forward with my own “Fortean” pursuit in order to prevent this mystery from being suppressed. Those close-minded lackeys of conventional science are deliberately mishandling this matter. Their rational minds failed to notice some interesting details on the woman’s property.

  For example, after only an hour of searching the yard with a keen eye and an open mind I discovered a set of strange paw prints on her lawn (I will be returning to make plaster casts of these impressions soon) and, lying in the overgrown grass just outside the woman’s bedroom, I found a small green pendant (a rather ugly one, I must say) which sits upon my desk as I write this.

  I shall close for now. I await your reply. In the meantime, may we both continue to fight the good fight until we have unearthed the reality these stubborn slaves to logic refuses to accept.

  Yrs,

  Connell Dyer

  Dublin

  The Unbound

  A Meditation upon H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable”

  Something 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 o
n 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 t
he 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.