At Fear's Altar

by Richard Gavin

  If you can train yourself to think ‘otherly,’ even perversely, you will see how this internal elsewhere is in fact a root, a root that binds you to Autumnal. It comes down to learning how to figure out just where one was and what one was doing during those absentminded commutes to work and so forth.

  Begin with that and the Samhain Gate will draw nearer and nearer.

  Anyone can crash the Gate, but so few choose to do so. Autumnal’s splendours are too ruddy for most. It is Hell to some, but home to Others.

  I realize how difficult this must be to digest. That is why I’ve written it down, so that you can reflect upon it as often as you need to. Or you may hand it down to your child, if you choose.

  Not once have I attempted to explain this, and certainly not to my keepers here. They are of a new mind, whereas I am of a decidedly old one. The ancients thought like me. But the rules of reality changed a long time ago and we can no longer find our Old Dark Ones out among the stars or in the wood. Our logic has toppled their palaces. The light of reason burned Summerland into a dead grey Autumnal, but it did not eradicate it completely. The light did not slaughter the darkness. It wounded it, yes. But those of cunning can still cross the Samhain Gate. The whole ordeal is just a little trickier than it was in ancient times.

  The key to the gate can only be found when one understands their true place in the world. When you find home, the place you’ve always seen in your most decadent fantasies, somewhere in the physical world, then your nature and true Nature are in harmony. Harmony opens doors, opens gates.

  Meditate on that while you may.

  If you believe what these men and women here tell you, then this really was a boyhood fugue, one that was broken the moment I murdered an elderly woman named Jacquelyn Henderson. They tell me this act is what caused a “fatal break,” and that I hadn’t even thought about Capricorn for many years. I’d buried the old woman in her fallow field and had then gone about living my life as though the ugly crime had never happened.

  They tell me I probably only thought about Capricorn again when I learned about the baby. This was enough to cause something to snap, to hurl me back into a fantasyland. Somehow I do not think this situation is that tidy, do you?

  I hope they allow you to get this notebook, Ms. Etienne. (How convenient that you share my last name.) I hope you can read these pages for yourself so that maybe you can understand what I went through. You will not see yourself mentioned until the end because, frankly, if I ever truly did experience a “fugue state,” it was with you, for I do not believe I ever even finished grade school, let alone go on to college where we met and courted and married. That, Ms. Etienne, is the break with reality. Those photographs they showed me are doctored figments, a conspiracy to lure me further from the Gate.

  However you choose to view this record is out of my hands. But know this: the baby that is growing inside you did cross the Samhain Gate, even if it was still in your womb at the time. No matter how fledgling that life is, it tasted Autumnal and I believe it will know gruesome things, that it will be an acolyte of an eldritch faith.

  The reason I know this is simple: Capricorn has left me. From the time I was dragged back into the day-bright cities and condemned to this cell, I lost all ties to Autumnal. At night I find I merely sleep. I am no longer able to dream.

  For months this tortured me as I longed for a trapdoor back to my heritage, my home. But it is not to be.

  Then one night a thought crept into my brain. It was so coolly smooth that it felt implanted; a transmission if you will. It is my belief that this thought was a final message from Capricorn, because the thought came in the image a foetus rapt in Dreaming.

  You are now carrying Autumnal inside you.

  I suppose in some way my being ripped from the eternal moment that is Autumnal was a blessing. My appreciation for that continuum has only grown, erupting into something that cannot be contained. Even now, as my body lies in a room that has a complex lock on the door and steel mesh between the window glass, there is a part of me that is still growing, reaching.

  Not long ago, in the lower corner of this room, just above the baseboard heater, where the north wall meets the east, a hair-thin fissure began to form. I have been watching it very closely, studying it as it creeps, glacially, almost imperceptibly, up and up. Last month this split sprouted four squiggling appendages, one of which now reaches all the up to the ceiling. A nurse has noticed it and has assured me that she will report it so that a caretaker can smother it with plaster; my secret passage. The repair has yet to take place. I thought the nurse out of my life; the very next day she was transferred to another ward.

  The passage continues to grow. When it rains, the cold autumn water seeps in, making the plaster swell like yoni walls. The liquid bubbles out like chilly lava, carrying with it fresh echoes from the Below.

  Have you noticed that the sun is having more and more trouble pushing its beams through the steel-shaded clouds these days?

  As the passages broaden, there will be further signs.

  One day you may come across your precious little one playing a strange game in an ill-lit basement, or drawing an almost uncontrollable bliss from a simple ghost story. Its fresh eyes have likely already begun to scour the city for churchyard markers or gnarled copses.

  Last Tuesday, if I’m not mistaken, was marked by the appearance of two carrion crows just outside my ugly window. I watched them arc and cascade, those little shards of midnight cawing out an October fanfare.

  Their presence told me that the world in bloom was just beginning to wither irretrievably through the gutters of the undivided Real. Summer shall sluice down into Autumnal.

  It is the immutable nature of things.

  There will always be Others, always be new games for children to play.

  There will always be one who is willing to keep the Faith.

  Acknowledgments

  “The Abject” originally appeared in Black Wings II, ed. S. T. Joshi (PS Publishing, 2012).

  “Faint Baying from Afar” originally appeared in Aklonomicon, ed. Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. and Ivan McCann (Aklo Press, 2011).

  “A Pallid Devil, Bearing Cypress” originally appeared in Delicate Toxins, ed. John Hirschhorn-Smith (Side Real Press, 2011).

  “King Him” originally appeared in Chilling Tales, ed. Michael Kelly (Edge Science Fiction & Fantasy Publishing, 2011).

  “Annexation,” Cthulhu 2012, ed. David Wynn (Mythos Books), forthcoming.

  “Only Enuma Elish” originally appeared in Nemonymous: Null Immortalis, ed. D. F. Lewis (Megazanthus Press, 2010).

  All other material is original to this collection.

  The author also wishes to express his gratitude to Clive Barker, Derrick Hussey, Harry O. Morris, Wilum Pugmire, Joe Pulver, Ian Rogers, David E. Schultz, Phil and Sarah Stokes, Simon Strantzas, Jeffrey Thomas, Don Webb, and my wife and children.

  Finally, a very special thank-you to S.T. Joshi, whose faith in and guidance of my work honours me more than words can express.

  About the Author

  Richard Gavin has written three previous volumes of horror fiction: Charnel Wine (Rainfall Books, 2004), Omens (Mythos Books, 2007), and The Darkly Splendid Realm (Dark Regions Press, 2009). Richard has also penned critical writings on the genre and various essays of arcanum. He lives in Ontario, Canada, with his beloved wife and their brood. His website is www.richardgavin.net.