At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  His ears were now filled with a soft hushing sound as the unnumbered grains pushed forward in an elegant, inexorable sweep. The dark wave drew closer, doubling in size, tripling, quickening its pace.

  As the landscape just ahead stretched away, it revealed the ossuary it had created. The bones curled up from the dark sand; brilliantly white, picked clean of every scrap of tendon and flesh. Perhaps the Plain was boasting to Dobbs of its spoils, or simply toying with him.

  The bones were of every size and description, the gothic architecture of every manner of bird, beast, and human being that had ever breached the Plain. Judging by the number of bird skeletons, Dobbs wondered if the Plain blasted itself up like an oil geyser to snatch vultures and crows from the heights they assumed were untouchable. He wondered where his companions were among all this morbid rubble.

  Dobbs was sinking. The Plain had already set to work on the exposed delicacy of his feet.

  The black sand swarmed over his calves; piercing the skin just enough so that it could absorb a mere pinhead droplet of blood. The grains that had been patiently entering Dobbs’s nostrils and his sleep-slackened mouth began to push their way out. By the time the hissing wave engulfed him, silting in his final shriek, Dobbs was almost grateful.

  The sun glared emotionlessly as packs and bones were occulted beneath the surface.

  After a time, a precious harvest began as the Plain pushed gold nuggets up above its surface where they rested like golden fruit of temptation.

  The evening gloom was hoisted by the tinny peals of children giggling. The residents of Pearl River, every last one of them, had come out of their homes to bask as the first drizzle spilled out from the graven sky and was whisking across the village.

  The McArthurs were bartering over a five-pound half-sack with Otis Till on the porch of his feed store. The group of them stopped when they felt the cool magnificent mist. And when the mist became a downpour Mrs. McArthur joined her daughters in the road as they danced and whooped. Their feet, stripped of their re-treaded boots, left impressions in the mud as if to mark this auspicious evening.

  Otis felt himself, almost autonomously, turning to face the dying sun, which was gorgeously smothered by rainclouds.

  Mr. McArthur stepped out from beneath the warped awning and removed his hat. He moved forward until he was sure Otis could see him. Mr. McArthur’s mouth hitched into a half-smile; an expression of bittersweet relief, of cautious optimism.

  Otis nodded at him once then looked ahead.

  Only Enuma Elish

  I’d never performed a single good deed in my life until I met Katrina Claxton. It’s not that I was a bad person, or even a selfish one really; it’s just that I’d always preferred to keep my fellow species at arm’s length. I certainly didn’t wish anyone harm, but I had no interest in helping them either. I lived alone and worked at a job that prevented all but the most essential conversation. Most of my relatives, including my parents, were deceased, so as I grew older I became increasingly reclusive. I wouldn’t say I was happy, but my insular lifestyle at least made me feel secure. (Some consider being even-keeled to be purgatorial, but I’ve always preferred a clockwork existence.)

  Then, one random afternoon, on impulse, I extended a helping hand. And the fallout of this lone action flung this world into chaos.

  At that time I was living next door to the aforementioned Katrina Claxton; an elderly woman who was almost as great a shut-in as I was. I was new to the neighbourhood, having just bought my house the previous winter. Prior to that I’d been dwelling in a one-bedroom apartment, but I found having neighbours pressed in on either side of me almost unbearable. I grew tired of forced chitchat in the elevator or the laundry room. I wanted my own space, and since a cabin in the sticks was out of the question until I could afford to retire, I settled for a little wartime cottage on a boring side street. I didn’t actually see the old woman who lived beside me until well after the April thaw, and when I did, it tore my heart out.

  I was walking home from the supermarket when I spotted a frail figure with a shock of white hair. She was straining to push an ancient-looking manual mower across the weedy hell of her front lawn. The teenaged boy who lived on the opposite side of me was skateboarding up and down his driveway with two of his friends and, perhaps just to make the scene that much more awful, the boys were laughing at her.

  As I said, I’ve never been an ambassador of goodwill, especially when I was their age, but I like to think that even in the F.T.W. phase of my youth, I would have had the decency to lend a hand in a situation like this.

  I didn’t bother moving to the lighted crosswalk, but instead made a beeline for my front door. By then Katrina was leaning on the mower handle as though it were a crutch, wiping her brow with a waded tissue. She smiled when she noticed me.

  “Warm,” she rasped. It really wasn’t; merely fifteen degrees or so.

  “Hold on,” I called, stepping inside just long enough to kick off my leather loafers and replace them with a battered pair of runners. I plunked the groceries on the kitchen table on my way to the garage.

  When Katrina saw me wheeling out my gas-powered mower, she nearly burst into tears.

  “Oh, you don’t have to,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll manage. Chores take twice as long when you get to be my age.” She laughed and I smiled. My grandmother had died when I was only nine, and I’d never realized just how much I missed her until that very moment.

  “It’s no trouble,” I replied. “It helps me relax,” which was true. At that time I was working in the invoicing department of a magazine distributor, so any hands-on labour was a remedy to number-crunching.

  “I wouldn’t have bothered with it,” Mrs. Claxton explained, “but a man from the city came by today and said there’d been complaints. Did you know there’s a bylaw against letting your grass grow too long?”

  I did but said I didn’t so the old woman wouldn’t feel foolish. She introduced herself and I did the same. Then she shuffled toward her backyard, dragging her squeaking mower behind her.

  The lawn was a son of a bitch to mow down. Every time my mower stalled from being weed-choked, I would scowl at the giggling punks down the road as if they were somehow to blame. When I finally finished, I spotted Katrina peering at me over the warped planks of her gate. She insisted that I join her in back for some lemonade. She dragged back the misshapen gate and I followed her around the side of the house.

  “Bylaw man can’t say anything about back here,” she boasted. “Nobody’s got to look at it but me.”

  When I saw the condition of the back yard, I wondered why the old woman seemed so proud. It was so unkempt that just being there made the skin on my arms creep. The grass had sprouted above my knees, and everywhere there grew strange freckly weeds. A rusted-out shed lilted against a drooping length of clothesline; the only barrier that distinguished the old woman’s property from the field it backed onto. The manual mower had been dropped in the middle of the lawn; the most recent castaway on this island of refuse that also included garden hoses, trashcan lids, broken mason jars half-filled with stagnant rain, a bicycle frame.

  Katrina gestured toward a pattern of cement slabs; a patio in only the most rudimentary sense. The plastic chair I lowered myself onto felt gritty and its wobbly legs made me nervous, but the glass Katrina handed me looked clean, and the lemonade it contained was cold and tart.

  She prattled on for several minutes about how cramped the suburbs were becoming, the current cost of gasoline, human interest stories from the news.

  “Are you married, Mr. Jude?” she asked abruptly. When I didn’t answer right away, my hostesses put a hand to her mouth. “I’m prying, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, you’re not prying. No, I’ve never been married.”

  “I only asked because, well, I know this sounds funny, but you seem like a very neat man. Most men only get that way through marriage.”

  I chortled a little. “I inherited that from my mother, I
suppose.”

  “You keep a tidy house then?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe you can give me some pointers.” Katrina exposed her ill-coloured teeth with a broad grin. “I was married once. But my husband passed away many years ago now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “We had twins,” she added proudly, “a boy and a girl. They’re all grown up.”

  “Do you see them often?”

  She shook her head. I could see the pride bleeding out of her. Sadness was its swift replacement.

  “Now I’m the one who’s prying,” I said. This made her laugh. She helmed the conversation back to generalities until I finally rose and thanked her for the lemonade.

  “Thank you for visiting,” she chirped. “Can’t remember the last time I had a guest.”

  The next day I found myself wondering about the woman a great deal. When had her husband died? Had she raised her children singlehandedly? Where were her kids now? Wouldn’t she be better off in a smaller, more manageable abode? Because I knew none of the answers, I invented my own theories, all of which painted Katrina in a tragic light. I began to pity her, and pity is dangerous. Compassion, I suppose, is a good thing, because you empathise with another person and maybe want to help give them a leg up. But when you pity someone, you envision them as something less than human.

  After work that day I wandered down the “the Dregs,” which was a massive iron bin holding hundreds of magazines that had been rejected from shipments for various reasons. Employees could take their pick for free. It was a company perk. Believe me, there weren’t many. I fished out some titles I thought a woman Katrina’s age might enjoy: Time, Ellery Queen, Home & Hearth. I toyed with giving her a copy of Lawn & Garden Care but feared she might not appreciate the joke.

  After my bus ride, I made my way to her house.

  I flicked up her mailbox lid, exposing several weeks’ accumulation of fliers and bills that was bulging up from the box.

  “Well, hello!” called the familiar voice from beyond the screen door. “What a nice surprise! Come in, come in.”

  She flung the screen door wide, her expression one of elation. I stepped into the old woman’s home. Mrs. Claxton shut the inner door, sealing out the fresh afternoon breeze from her must-choked house.

  “I thought you might like these,” I said, holding up the fan of periodicals.

  “Oh my!” She took them and tossed them atop of a cluttered boot rack without even glancing at the titles. “Let’s go into the living room.”

  Excluding vermin, I failed to see how anything could actually live in the room my hostess led me into. Whatever furnishings the room did offer were interred beneath hills of dirty laundry, half-emptied drinking glasses now fuzzy with dust, broken and grimy-looking bric-a-brac. I glimpsed one of the skewed towers of newspapers that flanked the archway. The yellowed headline announced the passing of an actor who’d died several years before I was born.

  “Looks like you already have a lot of reading material,” I said.

  “You can never have too many things to read,” was her retort. “One day I’ll find the time to read them, but I always find myself drawn to the same books over and over again.” She gestured toward the fireplace mantle, the only portion of the living room that was not submerged in chaos. “These ones here are my favourites.”

  Though I was too far away to read the spines, I could see a gold-leaf cross glinting on one of them. I swallowed hard.

  “Are you a religious man?” she asked. I set my teeth against the anxiety that her question stoked inside me. Considering that even hollow forms of chitchat make me uncomfortable, I would opt for thumbscrews or the rack over being asked the Big Important Questions about the Big Important Topics.

  “Yes and no,” was my tepid reply. Mrs. Claxton nodded.

  “Well, I was never much of a believer until I found this book in an old box upstairs. I guess whoever lived here before me must have left it for me to find.”

  I was taken aback when Mrs. Claxton did not reach for the Bible. Instead she tugged a slender volume, no bigger than an address book, off the mantle.

  “Have you ever read the Enuma Elish?”

  I think I shook my head, though I might have just stood dumbly in the archway.

  “It tells how the universe was created. It comes from ancient Babylon, but it’s about the here and now, too. I tried finding meaning in those other religious books, but only Enuma Elish gave me the answers I needed.”

  “That’s . . . that’s good,” I mumbled before regressing a step or two into the foyer. “I’m running late, I’m afraid.”

  “Take this with you!” She thrust the book toward me. “I have other versions stashed all over the house.”

  I reluctantly accepted her offering of Enuma Elish, and even lied about how I would read it soon.

  “Don’t be surprised if you see someone familiar when you do,” Mrs. Claxton chirped.

  I was never so happy to be outside as I was that afternoon. I went home and drew the blinds in every room of my house, yet I imagined that the old lady’s eyes were studying me.

  Going to and from work the next day was a covert operation. I peered out between the blinds before creeping out my front door. I took a different bus home and hopped my own back fence in order to slip into my side door. One never knew when the old loon would be puttering in her yard.

  Later that week, Mrs. Claxton caught me on my stealth mission of taking the weekly trash to the curb.

  “Well?” she cried. Her eyes were wide, sparkling with hope.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The book, silly,” she said. Her expression dulled a little as she asked, “You did read it, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “And?”

  Not knowing what else to do, I simply shrugged.

  “The goddess of chaos . . . gave birth to twins? Sound like anyone you know?”

  I stood stoic.

  “Tiamat!” she blurted as she pointed at herself. “The goddess of chaos, the one who is torn in two by her son Marduk, the one who commands primordial water and winds . . . she’s me, silly, she’s me!”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” There was rage bubbling beneath her voice. I took a step back. “But don’t you see?” she continued. “You’re the one who will piece me back together, who’ll bring me back. You’re the one who brings order after my chaos.”

  I can’t even recall the response I sputtered out when Mrs. Claxton finished proving her insanity. Whatever words I’d come up with must have been appeasing enough, for I remember that the old woman and I parted on good terms.

  After locking my front door and sliding the safety chain in place, I slumped against the wall, trying to centre myself. The encounter had managed to wrench me from the true. I needed to realign myself. Once the smog inside my skull had cleared, I vowed never to speak to my neighbour again. I even had the impulse to put my house up for sale.

  Most of that night’s dinnertime consisted of me poking at my macaroni with a fork while I flicked through Mrs. Claxton’s copy of Enuma Elish. She wasn’t lying when she’d said that the goddess Tiamat bore twin children, though for all I knew Mrs. Claxton had no children at all and had simply fed me a lie that jelled with her cherished Babylonian myth. In Enuma Elish, Tiamat is a widow, just like Katrina, and she is indeed halved by her son, the god Marduk, who uses one portion of his mother’s cadaver to build the sky and the other to forge the earth.

  I skipped to the end to see where I apparently came into the picture as Tiamat’s restorer, but I learned that the fifth and final tablet of Enuma Elish has long been lost to history. Whether Tiamat is ever rebuilt or avenges her murder will never be known. The fate of the world, it seemed, was a lacuna in a text, a gap, a black hole.

  I set my alarm an hour early so that I could toss the Enuma Elish on Mrs. Claxton’s doorstep without running into her. Even crazy old ladies aren
’t usually milling about at four A.M. As much as it pained me to shake up my life, I forced myself to stick to my remoulded routine in order to minimize my chances of seeing her.

  It worked. The days tumbled past and into a summer so sweltering that, apart from work and errands, I never left the air conditioned sanctuary of my home.

  Because I was a shut-in for June and July, I never gave much thought to the fact that I hadn’t seen my elderly neighbour in a long while. Her lawn was scorched yellow, but then so was mine. The clutter on her porch and throughout her back yard proved nothing, because that was how she lived: drenched in chaos, just like her beloved Tiamat. Occasionally I would see a car veer into the driveway and someone would deliver a pizza or Chinese food, but I never saw Katrina.

  By mid-August I began to worry. When the mailman inadvertently dropped Mrs. Claxton’s hydro bill into my mailbox, I was furnished with the perfect excuse to check in on her without having to stay too long.

  I crossed the lawn and cautiously scaled the porch, which was piled with trash bags, most of which had been clawed by raccoons. Reeking, sun-baked roughage had spilled across the steps. I raised my fist to knock but the door was suddenly flung open.

  “Who are you?” demanded the man behind the screen. Thick steel hoops dangled from his earlobes and his septum. His cropped hair was dyed a platinum blond, probably to disguise the grey, and his haggard, scabby face was obviously not that of a young man. Tattoo-sleeved arms hung at his sides. He was dressed in a T-shirt that might have advertised some spooky metal band, but the silkscreen was flaked and faded to the point of illegibility. His spindly legs poked out from a pair of cut-off track pants.

  “I live next door,” I explained. I must have leaned to one side in order to peer into the foyer, for the man shifted in order to block my view of the filthy interior. “Is Mrs. Claxton here?”

  “She’s sleeping,” the man answered at once. “Why?”

  I held up the envelope. “This was delivered to me by mistake.”