Table Of ContentAT FEAR’S ALTAR
HIPPOCAMPUS PRESS LIBRARY OF FICTION
Edith Miniter, Dead Houses and Other Works (2008)
Jonathan Thomas, Midnight Call and Other Stories (2008)
Ramsey Campbell, Inconsequential Tales (2008)
Joseph Pulver, Blood Will Have Its Season (2009)
Michael Aronovitz, Seven Deadly Pleasures (2009)
Donald R. Burleson, Wait for the Thunder (2010)
Jonathan Thomas, Tempting Providence and Other Stories (2010)
W. H. Pugmire, Uncommon Places: A Collection of Exquisites (2012)
Peter Cannon, Forever Azathoth: Parodies and Pastiches (2012)
At Fear’s Altar
Richard Gavin
Hippocampus Press
———————
New York
Copyright © 2012 by Richard Gavin
Published by Hippocampus Press
P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.
http://www.hippocampuspress.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without
the written permission of the publisher.
Cover art and frontispiece © 2012 by Harry O. Morris.
Cover design by Barbara Briggs Silbert.
Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos.
First Digital Edition, 2013
Kindle edition: 978-1-61498-075-9
EPUB Edition: 978-1-61498-076-6
This book is dedicated to Clive Barker,
and to the memory of Algernon Blackwood
Contents
Prologue: A Gate of Nerves
Chapel in the Reeds
The Abject
Faint Baying from Afar
The Unbound
A Pallid Devil, Bearing Cypress
King Him
The Plain
Only Enuma Elish
The Word-Made Flesh
Annexation
Darksome Leaves
The Eldritch Faith
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue:
A Gate of Nerves
A
s if to spite the eatery’s fluorescent-on-chrome brightness, Ken and I took
to discussing horrors, both real and imaginary. My lifelong devotion to
Gothic literature gave me an advantage when discussing classic shudder tales,
but Ken had me trumped when it came to real horror. His roots reached back to
rural Japan where his and his family’s concept of hardship utterly eclipsed
whatever small discomforts I had known, growing up as I did in the comfort-lush
suburbs of Ontario.
The only approximation I had to offer was my girlhood encounter with what
I believed to be a ghost. (Real or imagined, I still cannot classify the
occurrence.) Ken welcomed my confession with a passion that bordered on lust.
My account of it was delivered in a disjointed, awkward fashion; a symptom
of my embarrassment over the whole thing. I suppose I was hoping for, perhaps
even expecting, a helping of empathy. But Ken was stoic. He reached across the
table and snatched one of the tofu cubes from the salty black puddle on my plate.
He chewed it savagely, and I wondered if he was pretending that this morsel was
somehow my childhood fear made solid.
Evidently my trauma was quite succulent.
Some silent time passed before Ken finally slapped the table with enough
force to turn the heads of the café’s other patrons.
“I know just what you need! There’s a gathering this Friday night. It will do
you a world of good.”
I rolled my eyes. “Please. Being sardined inside some frat house or the
campus pub, inhaling everyone else’s beer breath and pheromones? Thanks but
no. I’d rather have a root canal. Besides, I’m exhausted from mid-terms. I don’t
think I could even fake being the merry girl for the night.”
“It’s not that kind of party. It’s very low-key. And very exclusive.”
“Won’t I stand out then?”
Ken shook his head. “You’d be my guest.” He surprised me by reaching
Ken shook his head. “You’d be my guest.” He surprised me by reaching
across the table and giving my hand a reassuring squeeze. His touch shot sparks
down my spine. I tried not to let my emotions get the better of me, keenly aware
as I was of Ken’s reputation on campus as being something of a rake. “Trust me
on this, Cara. Think of the weekend as a retreat. Imagine how great it will feel to
skip town on Friday morning and go to the country for a couple of days; no
classes, nobody knocking on your door, no phone calls.”
“Okay.” I could feel my cheeks rouging. “I admit that does sound pretty
good.”
I shirked my Friday morning Japanese Religion tutorial in order to meet Ken in
front of the library at seven-thirty.
“Have I over-packed?” I asked when I noticed that Ken was loading my bags
into an otherwise empty trunk.
“It’s fine,” he assured me, “just fine.”
His hatchback was small and its cab smelled of strange flowers or perfume,
but I was glad to be riding in it once I saw the campus shrinking in the rearview
mirror.
We chatted enthusiastically for the first part of the trip. Ken told me about
his being born in Osaka and how he family relocated to Canada with his
grandmother and his parents when he was three.
When our drive passed the three-hour mark I posed the question so often
asked by children to their keepers: “Are we nearly there?”
“We’re closer than we were three hours ago,” Ken said, grinning.
“So what kind of gathering is this? Should I pick up some wine or something
along the way to bring with me?”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Who all is going to be there?”
“My family. And to get back to your first question; we still have a fair ways
to go.”
———
“I’m curious,” Ken uttered, breaking my trance of listening to the hum of the
tires as they moved us over country roads. “That experience you told me about
the other day . . . had you ever had anything like that happen before?”
“No. No, just that one time.”
“And nothing since you moved out to go to school?”
I bit my lip.
“Cara? Did something else happen after you moved?”
“Yes. Two days ago.”
I heard Ken’s breath pushing out in a sharp, almost bestial sigh. “What
I heard Ken’s breath pushing out in a sharp, almost bestial sigh. “What
happened?”
“I sensed the thing again.”
“Where? Where?”
“In my dorm hall. While I was in the shower. It was bunched up in the top
corner of the stall.”
“And it was the same thing you saw when you were thirteen?”
“Twelve,” I corrected him, “and yes, it was nearly the same.”
“What was different about it?”
“It seemed . . . I don’t know, more anxious than before. And . . .”
“And?”
“It was a lot bigger than I remembered it being.”
We reached our destination in the late afternoon; a pale, time-bullied fishing
village, all but depleted of its residents. Dwellings merely peppered the
landscape; cottages primarily, all brittle-looking and hollow as autumn husks. A
finger-like pier pointed across grey waters. All was antiquated, corroding, half-
silted out of this world and into another.
“There’s a general store just around the bend,” Ken informed me. “We can
pick up some provisions there.”
We bought clipfish, a bottle of white wine, bread, sugar, and tea; then Ken
drove us further into the hamlet.
He parked before a droopy bungalow that looked as though it would topple
if I looked at it the wrong way. The pagoda-style roof was bowed and bristled
with ivy and freckly weeds. The glass front was cracked and partially boarded.
There were no other vehicles in sight.
“I thought you said this was a party.”
“It is.”
“So where is everybody?”
“Don’t worry. Why don’t I cook us some dinner? Come on.”
The air from the estuary was pungent with marine decay. It was also damp
and musty, a wet fur smell.
The encroaching evening cast steel-blue light across the bungalow’s door of
gouged wood.
The instant Ken exposed the interior I knew I did not want to enter. The
staleness of long-trapped air and the abundance of cobweb strands that billowed
out of the open doorframe like curtain fringe, like stray hairs—it was eerie. I
could sense the thickened atmosphere that only places in a state of neglect
exude; the kind that tweaks our reptile brains, tells us that although this site may
be void of occupants, it is still somehow teeming with presence.
