At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  ***

  The trio’s mission to the Plain had been, for all intents and purposes, a selfless one. They had travelled at the behest of the residents of Pearl River, a village that had never known great boons, but that had been, up until the last year, relatively stable.

  They had ventured to the Plain on the thin hope that the legends were true. Dobbs had grown up with the yarns spun by the local raconteurs; tall tales of dead rivers whose parched beds sparkled with precious metal veins, where a mere brush of one’s hand could uncover fat gold nuggets. Dobbs knew it was all just fool’s stuff, and figured everybody else in Pearl River knew it too.

  But then the drought came. Folks think differently once they see their prospects dwindling and find their stomachs vacant. The ‘dry spell,’ as it was then called, began in April. It took its time wringing every last taproot dry.

  The townsfolk salvaged what food they could. In November they organized a communal larder in an attempt to stretch the collective harvests as far as possible. They divvied up potatoes, ears of corn. They pickled as much as they could, traded this item for that. Those families whose farms had yielded only dust were tearfully grateful for the scant donations they received.

  The meat was the first to be depleted, of course. They rationed the salted pork and the smoke-dried horsemeat. But there were so many people. Dobbs had always thought the village of Pearl River small, but when he came to view it as a pack of gaping mouths, it seemed immense, a place of multitudes.

  By midwinter the men had taken to talking at night, around the lukewarm flicker of woodstoves whose hulls were as poorly fed as their own bellies. Together they whispered in the wan light. They spoke of the Plain. But Dobbs knew these were no longer simple fireside stories. Desperation had given these yarns legs, and a backbone. And teeth.

  It was Emmett who’d claimed that his father’s father had made it to the Plain and back. Twice. But the fortune he’d lugged back to Pearl River had been either lost at gambling tables or filtered through his liver. McArthur’s mother supposedly had a distant cousin who’d also made his nut from the loot he’d found there.

  The men began to formulate a plan; a stick-and-rag solution that was lashed together with panic instead of wrought with logic. Some of them had begun urging Dobbs to make the journey on his own. Not because he had any experience with prospecting, or even because they felt him the bravest, but simply because he was a bachelor. Emmett and Jack were the next in line, being married men but not yet fathers. Dobbs reckoned they were almost as disposable as he was.

  Dobbs had stayed mum during those early plotting sessions. He didn’t feel one way or the other about the whole thing. He was tired of living like a half-starved rat. It was as simple as that.

  The trio had headed west at daybreak. Only the men and the wives of Emmett and Jack had been made aware of their quest. They hadn’t wanted the town to let its hopes reach too feverish a pitch. Or to let their fears overcome them.

  Everyone in Pearl River knew about the Plain. Knew the legend of its gold, of course, but they knew the reason why no one had ever truly stripped the sands of its fortune.

  It was said that there was something else in that flatland, something living and deadly.

  With a need more potent than their fears, the trio armed themselves with three Colts and one Winchester long gun and rode off to bring back the means to buy their people nourishment.

  It took six days of hard riding just to reach the outskirts of the great sun-baked mesa, and two more to crawl across the desert until at long last they saw the first sign of black sands of the Plain.

  The terrain was vastly different from what Dobbs had been expecting. According to the longstanding yarns, the Plain’s treasure resided in a great riverbed that had dried up long ago. But when he, Emmett, and Jack came upon the first peppery granules, the Plain seemed to curve in a circular shape. Dobbs had studied the tongues of black sand, all of which flowed down into a ravine. It looked like a pictograph of a black sun, with rays blasting out from the great round centre.

  The site did not feel natural. Dobbs sensed it. He even said as much to Jack, but Jack did not seem to care much. The air there smelled cloyingly of sulphur. Dobbs had kneaded some of the black grains between his fingers, determining that they felt more like ash than sand.

  He had looked up at the sky, wondering, perhaps intuiting, that this stinking black indentation had been formed when some burning thing plunged down to the Earth from somewhere in the stars. Was that how the Plain had become the blasted land it had become? Had something smashed into and permanently scorched the sand long ago?

  Whatever reservations Dobbs might have had faded once Jack began to scream, to cry that he had found gold.

  Some of the nuggets were as small as almonds, others were as large as ripe apples. They were simply lying upon the sulphurous black circle like so much flotsam, as if someone had carelessly tossed them and departed.

  Emmett and Jack had frantically begun to fill their packs. Dobbs eventually did the same, but every so often he felt the urge to peer about him.

  “This ain’t right,” he’d told his companions. “Some sumbitch is trying to trap us. Nobody leaves this. Nobody.”

  Emmett shouted at Dobbs to shut up and get busy. Dobbs even saw Jack reach for his Colt revolver. Dobbs filled his pack with more gold, thinking all the while.

  Then there was the attack at the horses, after which Dobbs thought about nothing for a good long while.

  By the late afternoon of that first solitary day Dobbs began to feel as insignificant as a beetle trying to cross the whole wide world. Every step drew him that much closer to a scorching nowhere. He thought about resting for a spell, but the notion of settling down anywhere on that blazing hardpan was somehow unbearable. He felt feverish and weak and unbearably thirsty.

  Worse than this was his mounting realization of just how wrong the Plain was.

  The whole expanse was not that large, a mile or two in diameter at most. He, Emmett, and Jack had made it to the centre of the circle and found the gold in no time. Dobbs had now been walking for hours in a straight line, yet the edge of the Plain was nowhere in sight.

  He paused to sneeze out a ball of phlegm, and when he saw that it was solid red in colour Dobbs muttered a curse.

  ‘Bleedin’ inside,’ he thought. ‘Not good’

  He watched with interest as the hot sand absorbed the red globule.

  Although he could hardly stand, Dobbs willed his splitting boot heel to go in front of the other. And again, again, for there was nothing else he could do.

  The sunlight had become a mortar and the endless flat black of the Plain its pestle, with Dobbs being ground to dust between the two.

  Had he been staggering in the wrong direction, due west instead of eastward, back toward Pearl River, Dobbs wondered?

  No, the sun that was burning a hole in his back assured him that, even in his pathetic state, his bearings were not so skewed.

  Perhaps he’d been wandering in circles? This seemed impossible to him as well.

  In a crazy fit, a manic impulse to make something different happen, Dobbs began to walk sideways. Caring nothing for which direction he was wobbling toward, Dobbs moved in a Cancer crab scuttle across the sand. When he tried to muster a suitable laugh, what came wheezing out of his mummy-dust throat was something nearer to a death-rattle.

  He gazed down as he moved, watching the thin, sick clouds of dust stirring beneath his feet.

  Dobbs grew winded too quickly, his lungs felt as though they’d been tightly stacked with baking brick. Like a fool he turned about to survey the wayward trail he’d forged, as though it was some monumental accomplishment to be admired.

  His tracks had been smoothed. Dobbs squinted, shielded his eyes, checked in zones he had not yet roamed, as though his footprints might have somehow been displaced.

  Dobbs walked on.

  After he’d gone a little further, Dobbs began to measure. He stayed put long enough to
confirm his suspicion: there was no breeze here, or certainly nothing with velocity enough to smooth and correct newly trod earth. But even if this was a fact, what of it? Pearl River was not going to make its way to him. He had to move on. It would be dark soon.

  He trudged, praying that the sand before him would soon brighten from volcanic black to sandy brown. But there was only the Plain.

  Exhausted and near-broken, Dobbs slumped down. He would have to make himself as comfortable as possible for the night and resume his journey in the morning.

  Hearkening back to the wisdom of his father, Dobbs wearily fished out his handkerchief and the small tin from his pocket. With a trembling hand he shook out the tin, clawed a small pit into the sand and then wedged the tin into its bottom before finally carefully tenting the handkerchief over the hole. He secured the contraption with the tin’s lid.

  He removed his boots and used them for a pillow. He lay back and looked up at the rising moon. His arms were folded across his chest as if this deathbed posture could somehow lull his troubled spirit.

  The temperature sank, and for a while Dobbs let his fantasies of vengeance warm him. He thought about the looks on Emmett’s and Jack’s faces when he kicked in their doors. He pictured himself cutting them with a buck knife, smashing their teeth into gory gravel with the butt of his rifle. He thought of tying them down and forcing them to watch while he raped their wives.

  But his hatred ebbed when he began to reason. Why had they robbed him? Dobbs wondered. It made no sense to drag him all the way out to the Plain just to leave him to die. Was there a plot in Pearl River, some conspiracy to liquidate its undesirable elements? Dobbs pondered whether the locals had brought others to the Plain and left them to die. He quivered and began to inventory all his worldly deeds, trying to pinpoint the ones that made him so unwanted in his community.

  Dobbs got to thinking about his father some more, now twenty years in his grave. He’d been a quiet man too, something of a lone wolf. But he’d been a good man and had taught Dobbs many things. Before Dobbs knew it, he was weeping.

  His tears were scant, and the shedding of each one made Dobbs wince at the prospect of his body losing moisture of any kind. He now felt as though he was carved out of bone.

  He must have dozed off, for at one point the cold uniformity of the Plain was gone, as was the void behind his closed eyes.

  Dobbs was parting, petals of mind and flesh and spirit were peeling back like flowers heeding their guiding darkness. He was upon an altogether different plain now, one of starwinds and netted glints of alien lights, and, upon this scintillating grid, beings. These shapes were not human, either in scope or shape. They passed through him and by him, whispering indecipherable words; sounds that hovered between hisses and far-distant howls.

  Everything these strange and sibilant winds brushed past seemed to awaken, as though some fell intelligence, a contagion of awareness was being bestowed.

  A realm of idealization; complexities draped in blunt images so crude and yet so apt.

  Dobbs, a man who’d never thought much of anything beyond his own bodily survival, understood it all.

  And what this vast realm told him was that its pure form needed to hunt, to rend all and everything that would encumber its flow of awareness, of becoming, of consciousness-in-flux . . .

  Dobbs opened his eyes and saw the stars so far above him. He knew that he was back on the Earth, so frigid and familiar, but part of him must have been lagging behind in the dream-world, for he could still hear the hiss-howls all around him.

  And there were shapes visible, but only fleetingly. The instant their presence registered with Dobbs these hazy forms swiftly melted down and down. Night’s silence was restored.

  The first morning rays warmed Dobbs’s face with enough strength to wake him but, mercifully, not enough to pain him. It was actually a pleasant way to be woken. The pain in his skull had waned slightly, but now his belly hurt.

  He rolled onto his side and carefully removed the lid that pinioned his handkerchief. He was scared to look at the tin, afraid that his makeshift condensation trap might have failed. Dobbs tilted the can and saw water. Not much, scarcely more than a swallow, but to his grateful eyes it was a veritable cold spring. Dobbs felt very grateful.

  The collected moisture was warm, but Dobbs could feel it trickling down the inside of his parched throat like precious rain slaking a long-dead river bed.

  His relief was fleeting, for he knew that this meagre libation would not sustain him, not for another full day in the Plain. With no barrel cactus from which he might draw water, no animals he might slay, no shade whatsoever, Dobbs knew he would be cooked by dusk. He heard his stomach growl and counted that a full four days had lapsed since he’d tasted food. Continuing to move was his prime concern, he had to make his way out. But Dobbs was also aware of the fact that he needed some form of sustenance if he was to survive the next forty-eight hours.

  He reached blindly for his boots and felt something else resting above his head.

  Aft first Dobbs didn’t believe that the bag was really there. He pulled it near and tried to keep his mounting joy in check. His brain was reeling with possibilities of the bag’s contents. It was not his saddlebag, but Jack’s. And inside it Dobbs found a wedge and a half of salt pork wrapped in cloth, a biscuit, and a canteen still half-full with water.

  Weighting the bottom of the pack was an even dozen gold nuggets, big glittering chunky ones.

  For the first time in his life Dobbs thanked his Maker. The how and why of this miracle mattered little to him. He was tempted to gobble everything but wisely rationed his provisions. Flavour burst in his mouth. The food was so succulent he whimpered and moaned as he chewed. He then lay back and examined the gold nugget. With this chunk alone he would never again be wanting. It was only a question of getting back to town, holing up for a while until the coast was clear, and then heading back east to Pearl River. If Emmett and Jack did survive, the plan was to head there. Assuming that hadn’t been a lie to lure him in, Dobbs would find them there and exact his particular brand of justice.

  It was almost amusing, the way in which his situation had reversed in no time at all. Less than an hour ago Dobbs was convinced there was only a woefully small chance he would survive the hike back to Pearl River; now he was relatively well fed and slaked, and had riches in his fist.

  He’d grown so content that he began to harbour an anorexic hope that the Plain might be blessed with a flash-flood today. He tried not to let the sight of the cloudless blue sky crush him.

  Dobbs was not so grateful for the pack once he realized just how ill he felt. It was still early morning, yet he was exhausted. He felt even more feverish than the previous day and, compounding this, waves of dizziness were passing through him. The ground beneath him was spinning too rapidly, wrenching him further and further off course. Eventually this sensation became too much and Dobbs hunched over and vomited.

  In the back of his mind Dobbs felt a queer shame for losing his precious food, but as he glanced what he’d brought up, he was horrified to discover that the puddle was predominantly blood. That and several small heaps of wet black sand.

  The lining of his throat began to burn. Trickles of blood began to seep from his nostrils.

  “Aw . . .” Dobbs whimpered, “aw, Christ.”

  He tried to run, unsure of where he could run to, or even fully grasping just what it was he was trying to flee from. He could hear the gold chinking in his pack but no longer had any regard for its value. He let it slip off his shoulders and come down.

  Then Dobbs himself crashed down. He howled into the Plain, watching as the blood from his nose and the inside of his mouth made stippling patterns upon the canvas of midnight granules.

  It took a good long while before Dobbs readied himself for his demise. He could already feel the world shrinking from him, slipping into pale and hazy simulacra of the nature he knew. The sky was a smear, the wind as distant as his ancestors.

>   His passage had begun, or so Dobbs believed. But then he heard it; a promising sound, a mere wisp, but it grew louder. Dobbs had been a farmhand since he was able to stand and could identify the sound of a running horse at a hundred yards.

  Lifting his head was a monumental effort, but Dobbs endured it just to have the luxury of his final image being a noble one: a mare in a free run.

  He heard the clatter of its hooves before he actually saw the animal. It was charging roughly in his direction. Dobbs couldn’t tell if it was his horse or not. It could have been Emmett’s, or Jack’s. It was without a rider and its tread was, to Dobbs’s eye, peculiar. It was lilting to one side. The creature was not quite maimed, but certainly injured.

  The desperation in the animal’s whinnying and snorting made him heartsick. Dobbs pushed himself up, fell once, but tried again. He called to the horse with what was left of his voice, made clicking noises with his cheek.

  It was a grey. Alabama. Emmett’s horse. Dobbs slapped his thigh, urged her to come to him.

  Alabama hobbled, her head bucking up and down, then side to side as if she was trying to shoo flies. When he drew near enough to her, Dobbs froze.

  The horse’s grey fur was mottled with black ants. They were pushing up the animal’s legs, coiling about her neck and head and eyes. Dobbs went to brush them off, then saw that they were not insects but thousands, perhaps millions, of grains of black sand. The granules crept up from the ground where they had been resting. As these waves of gritty shadow passed over the animal they left rawhead in their wake.

  As if driven by some collective soul or insect-like hive-mind, the sulphurous earth of the Plain moved over the beast in ravenous cascades.

  Alabama no longer whinnied, and in no time was nothing more than bones, and then the bones were buried and the Plain smoothed itself into placid and well-sated plateau. Dust to dust.

  Dobbs screamed, tried to at least. His legs faltered as the ground beneath him pulled down with such force that he was actually shucked from his boots. He sloughed forward and did his best to stay balanced.