At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  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.

  Finding nothing on his property, the Unnamed began to question the validity of what he was hearing. Perhaps his guilt-stained soul was haunting him with phantom sounds as penance for his transgressions. Perhaps it was only just law that he faced the consequences of his actions.

  And so the Unnamed scaled the stairs to his former fortress.

  Before even entering the room the sound was unmistakable: the scratching of claws upon window glass.

  Guilt drew the Unnamed up into the attic and wrenched his head around until he saw the mangled shape in the glass, clawing and scratching, its mouth misshapen with a silent howl.

  The Unnamed shrieked, then watched with unbelieving eyes as the image that had once been his twin pushed itself away from the glass and dropped from the second-storey perch.

  The Unnamed shambled to the window, scouring the area in search of his stray reflection.

  He spotted it just before it escaped, just as he had the night before. It was a whitish thing, more glimmer than flesh. It craned its knotty face up to the window to study its maker. The Unnamed wondered how such a thing could have been forged from his meditations. How could the nocturnal reveries of a mortal man give birth to something . . . Unnamable.

  The spectral horror leapt over to one of the aged grave vaults and dove through the crack in the stone lid. Its body conformed to the rift as though it were made of water. In the blink of an eye the Unnamable had been created, in the blink of an eye it vanished.

  Terror aged the Unnamed man prematurely. His hair whitened and his hands began to palsy. His anxieties became phobias, his sanctuary twisted into a prison.

  The life of the Unnamed became a graveside vigil. Yet it was not mourning that bound him to the mighty dead, it was fear, anticipation. The Unnamed wondered if his thought-spawn would ever crawl back up from the rip in the granite.

  When the shape finally did return, it was in the autumn of the Unnamed’s life. His spine was bent, his flesh withered, blood chugged sluggishly through his veins. Because of these things, the Unnamed could barely keep up when the whitish thing came scuttling up from the riven slab and ran gobbling shrilly into the woods.

  The Unnamable was much more physical than when he’d last glimpsed it. The creature was more flesh (flour-white as it was) than light, and the old man wondered what kind of spectral nourishment the fiend had been sucking from the hoary earth, for the thing was now endowed with swollen breasts. A pair of hooked horns split the flesh of its brow.

  The old man took up the chase as best as his old bones would allow.

  Their race wound from the nighttime forest and into the immortality of folklore when a post-rider on a trail near Meadow Hill happened to glimpse the old man chasing and calling after the frightful loping thing.

  By the time the dumbstruck man shared his account with the locals at a nearby inn, the old man and the Unnamable had come full circle.

  The creature went bounding into the house and up the stairs. Once in the attic, the Unnamable hoped to resume meditating with its master.

  But its master had not followed the thing into the attic. Instead the old man had closed the attic door, securing it with an iron lock.

  The sound of the Unnamable crying out was the last thing the old man heard before the pain in his chest winked him out of the world.

  His body was discovered some days later by a wood-cutter who had investigated the cottage’s open door.

  The man was buried in the charnel ground whose occupants had been leeched by the Unnamable thing that had now become the invisible Seer.

  The locals never unlocked the attic. The house was left as it was, and in time it fell into even greater shambles.

  Years passed, and the burying ground became all but forgotten. A new church had been erected in Arkham, and the newer generations took to burying their dead on the sacred ground adjacent to their temple.

  The Unnamable remained in its attic cell, deathless and on constant watch, seeing the night come alive with countless eyes—in the cadavers and the willows and the toads and the moon and the noxious river. It was at once the seer and the thing seen, both subject and object, and neither. It was the terror of infinity.

  How the Unnamable longed to share this horrendous miracle, if only to see another mortal brain shatter.

  But to do this, the Unnamable would once more have to become the thing seen. It would need to impress itself on physical reality once more. And so it waited, waited for the time when it might once more become the thing seen.

  The opportunity did not come for many decades; by then the crumbling wood house and the burial ground it flanked had become a near-mythic place, the object of many fireside murmurings by fearful locals.

  The one who finally broke the attic seal was scarcely more than a boy. He had known the legends of the childless old man and the monster he’d been seen pursuing; knew, but was not afraid. The miserable child had felt a vague kinship with the thing.

  And so he strayed to the shunned house and manipulated the corroded lock until it gave.

  What he saw within the must-choked attic broke him.

  Whatever matter the Unnamable had been housing itself in had putrefied to an oily substance that stank of offal. The inhuman contours of its skeleton were plainly visible through the slimy film that scarcely held the shape together.

  The boy found his way out of the cottage, but not back to the world he’d known.

  Marooned once more, hopelessly alone, the Unnamable waited. Because it had not been bor
n of natural laws, it could not be annulled by them. Thus it endured, its shell now a mere cluster of bones, its essence once more becoming the dust and aethyr that are peculiar to forbidden places.

  The Unnamable had almost resigned itself to an eternity of seeing only the dullness of the rotting attic when, to its delight and shock, a new seeker entered its domain.

  This interloper was mature and, the Unnamable could feel, housed a black desire in his heart.

  This desire was demonstrated when the man breached the attic, found the monstrous bones, and, instead of fleeing, took them up, studied them in the murky sunlight that bled in through the aperture that had long been deprived of its glass.

  The Unnamable then watched with delight as the man collected its bones into a sack and return them to the selfsame grave where it had glutted so long ago.

  At last the time to be the thing seen had come. But the man had departed. The Unnamable wondered if its acolyte would ever return.

  The following day he did, but not alone.

  He’d brought a companion with him, and together they spent the autumnal afternoon upon a granite slab. The Unnamable actually heard itself being mentioned, summoned.

  How long it had been since the Unnamable had heard its un-name uttered by living mouths!

  The Unnamable concentrated and flexed until its formless presence became a focused blast that blasted through the attic and out into the vast majestic night.

  It witnessed its disciple and his companion rising, and the Unnamable hoped they were moving to greet it. But their eyes betrayed their horror. Both mortals turned to flee.

  Having no mouth, the Unnamable relied upon the howl of its propulsions as it spun ’round and around the fleeing men.

  Having no form, it could not truly pass on its great secret, the monumental gauntlet it had acquired during its centuries in hibernation.

  All it could do was offer flashes and lashes from its windy form. It tried to cleave the men free from their cages of bone, to unravel the tender meat of their cocoons.

  If only they could attune themselves the way the old man had been able to. They could know the Unnamable liberation of Being, Unbound.

  A Pallid Devil, Bearing Cypress

  1

  Whenever the bombers came sweeping over the city to carpet the streets with shelled death, Josef Amsel would indulge in the strangest of the many strange rituals with which he filled his solitary existence: he would saunter outside of his narrow boarding house and wander amidst the raining bombs, contemplating his destiny.

  The first time he’d gone out for one of these perilous strolls was during a particularly low point in his life. He’d been plagued by feelings of isolation, of loneliness, and his financial situation was dire. During that inaugural Blitz-time saunter, Josef would have welcomed annihilation, and was in all likelihood courting it. But in the fourteen months since that fiery night when Josef returned to his room breathless, basted in sweat, and almost drunk from the dangers he’d faced, he’d made several positive changes in his life.

  Some fortuitous hands of poker had enabled Josef to pay off a fair sum of his debt (he retired from gambling before his luck could sour again), and although he was still a bachelor, he was now content to remain so. Thus, his wartime walks were now more rooted in what Josef called “Communicating with the Fates” than in suicidal tendencies.

  So, on the night of October 7, Josef giddily flung back his bedcovers the instant he felt the familiar rumble rock his home. He hurriedly dressed to the music of the encroaching explosions. Just before exiting his room, he inserted the earplugs he’d fashioned for himself out of an old washing sponge. These he wore not to soften the noise of the bombs, but to mute the cries from his neighbours or from any soldiers he would encounter.

  “Go home, you damned fool!” they would shout. “Are you mad? Run for cover, you idiot!” But he refused to heed them, opting instead to listen to the guiding voices inside his head. It instructed him to veer left or go straight. It directed him to the various treasures that lay buried under all that broken stone.

  Josef liked to believe that these voices belonged to spirits, and that the destroyed cities were Halls of the Dead. Such games reminded him of the tales his mother had told in order to decorate his childhood; stories of Fairyland, of child-munching witches, of Cruel Frederick giddily maiming his pets.

  Cherishing these gifts as he did, Josef also carried another remnant of his mother, one that was not quite so prosaic. It had been an errant wish of hers, one she’d fervently harboured since she was a girl: “I would very much like to meet the Devil in person,” she used to tell her son in whisper. “I believe . . . yes, I truly believe that He would be the most fascinating creature one could ever know.”

  Josef’s mother had perished from influenza when he was only twelve, and he was still saddened by the fact that she had died with her grandest desire unfulfilled. She had been right: of this Josef was certain. Surely none would be more fascinating.

  The sky was an embankment of tomb-grey clouds, occasionally backlit by bomb-fire; a sight Josef found rather pretty in its own way. He wondered if there were shrieked pleas coming from behind curtained windows, beyond bolted doors.

  He rounded a corner onto Münsterstraße just as a building lost its form in a mushroom of flame and smoke. Josef lifted an arm to shield himself from any flying glass, for although he was a confirmed bachelor, he was still fond of his appearance. When gravity coasted the last of the debris earthward, Josef carried on his way.

  By the time he neared the end of the sloping road he was afraid that the Blitz had already begun to drift further east, making tonight’s Communication very scant indeed. Why, he’d scarcely had time to contemplate his future before the bomber planes departed.

  Wishing to wring the night of every ounce of inspiration, Josef negotiated the ruins in search of casualties; a practice that always gave him a renewed appreciation for life. Whenever he managed to come upon a broken, lifeless person lying amidst the steaming rubble, his mind would race with so many theories and impressions that he could scarcely keep track.

  The dominant theme of such meditations, Josef had discovered, was mulling over whether or not the soul was a measurable substance. This theory had leapt to the forefront of his mind after he’d come upon the cadaver of a neighbour late one night. The explosion had been so extreme that the man was scarcely recognizable. It was quite startling. In fact, Josef had to bite his tongue to keep from cursing the dead wretch after he’d nearly tripped over him in an alley. Poor pale fool; all broken and gaunt. Josef remembered how his neighbour’s face was distinctly saggy, as though the life-force that had once animated it had been leaked out like air from a balloon, leaving a withered husk in its place.

  He hoped to find a similar treasure tonight. What Josef encountered instead was more of the uncanny than the charnel, but it captivated him nonetheless.

  Frothing up out of the halved foundation of a destroyed building were lurid flowers. The petals were vivid caricatures of stars; ivory, lavender, arterial red.

  Grinning, Josef bent to smell what, if any, fragrance the determined flora might offer. But as he crouched, Josef discovered that the vine-like thing had merely been placed in the crack rather than planted there. It toppled to one side, revealing its broken stem.

  Rescuing it from the ruins, Josef placed the flower under his nose. He smelled nothing, but he did discover many other specimens of the same bright flowers scattered over the leavings of furniture and the nuggets of window glass. The petals and bristly vines formed a colourful trail over the wreckage before ending at a vacant doorframe.

  The doorway and a portion of the brick wall it had been built into were the only standing remnants of the structure. Eyeing the flowers and the open door, Josef thought back to the fairy stories of his boyhood; of navigational trails of breadcrumbs left by wood-folk, or bewitched honeycakes used to tempt curious children.

  With such dark delights bubbling in his mind, Jo
sef was hardly surprised when the figure stepped out of the doorframe and into moonlit view.

  The creature was worthy of a Black Forest fable. It was stout and wild-eyed. The skin of its head was pallid and pocked. Long tufts of wiry hair framed the supremely ugly face, and twin horns of what to Josef’s eye looked to be dirty bone hooked outward from the large brow.

  These horns were the head’s sole feature, for it bore neither eyes nor nose, neither ears nor mouth. It was a lumpy mass of skin, the complexion of which was an ill stew of greys and beiges and whites. Most of the body was secreted in a length of grubby, fibrous material.

  The thing’s fingers were ropy, mottled things. In their clutches was a great bouquet of the star petals and the stiff emerald vines.

  Josef almost wept with joy. ‘If only mama was with me,’ he thought, ‘if only she could see Him . . .’

  When the monstrous figure extended its arms, Josef assumed he was being invited to accept the flowers. He stepped forward, his feet worrying upon the unstable terrain. He was disoriented, due of course to the strangeness of this encounter, but also to his loss of hearing because of the earplugs. Josef plucked the sponges from his ears and immediately heard the screaming.

  The cries were feminine and seemed to be emanating from somewhere to his right. Turning, Josef discovered a young woman of about seventeen lying pinned beneath a toppled brick wall. Her features were paled by brick dust, and there were two distinct rivulets of blood creeping down her cheeks. Her shrieks were hoarse. Josef wondered how long she’d been crying out for his help while he’d been standing deaf and Devil-awed.

  Josef snapped his head around, just in time to watch the creature slipping back into the doorway's dimness. His heart plunged to his stomach. He raced off in pursuit of what he was certain was his destiny.

  After so many bomb-laden treks, Josef had at last found his purpose.

  “Where are you going?” shrieked the pinioned girl. “Help me! Please!”