At Fear's Altar (3 page)

He sighed when the dazzling bluish beam pierced the black that had been suffocating him.

Colin’s first instinct was to better illuminate the picture at his feet. He presumed that his imagination, which was evidently more sullied than he would have liked to believe, had interpreted a water stain as something impossibly lurid.

Whatever self-hatred Colin had been housing faded when the light beam brought the photograph into sharp view. Its subject was irrefutable.

More galling than this was the discovery of two more smutty images, which had been placed alongside the first. He gently kicked at the pictures with the toe of his boot, but they did not shift. These leaves from some pornographic magazine appeared to have been pasted to the chapel’s floor.

And to its walls.

And over all its pews, which had been tilted up against the far wall like a row of half-toppled dominoes.

Each twitch of Colin’s light beam introduced images of such wanton, such animal abandon that he could almost feel his divine soul shrivelling like a salted slug.

Everywhere there were curves and redness and bodies fused in positions that were almost insect-like. The pictures were all creased and viscid from moisture, but Colin could still discern women with men, women with women, men with men. Tacked scattershot amidst the magazine pages were a few Polaroid photographs. Colin advanced cautiously toward one pew, squinting to confirm that the man in one of the photographs was indeed wearing what looked to be vestments of battered leather.

He wondered if the pitched ceiling had been defaced in a similar manner, a red-light-district twisting of the Sistine, but did not bother to confirm his suspicions.

His light, and, briefly, his heart, halted at the sight of a hand reaching out at him from the back corner of the hall.

Colin opened his mouth to shriek, certain that what was grasping for him was a cadaver.

But then he saw the sacred wound in the palm.

He hated the fact that his mind was so soaked with lasciviousness that it had smeared the sacramental blood and the nail into something phallic.

The effigy of crucifixion had been left propped in one corner, relegated there like an unseasonal decoration. The ropy arms and red-weeping torso were greyed with dust, making the figure’s skin livid. The loincloth, grubby though it was, appeared to be made of real linen. Colin was grateful to see at least one figure inside the place that was chastely swaddled. The body was carved wood. Moths, aroused by Colin’s light, leapt from the grooves of the figure’s emaciated ribs. Colin traced the finger of light up along the chest, only to discover that the statue’s head was missing.

The crucified form was capped in a great keen splinter—the only remnant of a head that likely bore a crown of thorns and an expression of tortured acquiescence, of ultimate acceptance. It appeared as though the head had been snapped off, bashed from the body in an act of concentrated fury. Bottle flies buzzed manically around the half-neck of jagged wood.

It was all too much: the confusion, the alien church with its cumulative desecrations. Colin careened backward, whipping the light about until by some fluke he found the vestry door.

He moved through the musty closet until he saw the knob of the chapel’s back door. Slamming his shoulder against it, Colin came spilling out into the blindingly bright woods. Through the splattering amoebas that clouded his vision Colin was able to discern the forms of Toni and Sara standing obediently on the footpath.

He tore down the wooden steps, landing face-first in the shallow bog. Unfazed, Colin scrabbled up and out of the marsh, shouting for his granddaughters to follow. He went hobbling across the path, straight toward the incline.

Colin climbed. Rocks and foliage and trash tumbled down with every frantic reach of his arthritic hands, each kick of his aching, rubbery legs. Like an inept mountaineer scaling his first great hill, Colin did whatever he could to ascend. He wrenched plants and clawed at the stony dirt. He used tree roots as towlines. All that mattered was getting up, getting out.

Something was burning into his back; probably the rays of the midday sun, but maybe, just maybe, the eyes of the blasphemers, the ones who had ruined the strange church. Colin felt his backbone turning to ash.

“Come on, girls!” he screamed, unable to bring himself to look back to ensure that they were still behind him. “Come on! Climb!”

The road came into view. It was a sight so rife with the promise of relief that Colin dared not blink at the risk of making this mirage vanish. But then his palm slapped the hot asphalt, and Colin knew the road was
there
. It had always been there. Of course it had. The world does not change that drastically. Not his world at least.

A pair of pathetic-looking bodies came squirming up to the edge of the forest behind him. When Colin saw their grubby tear-streaked faces, their bloodied hands, their ragged clothing, he was at a loss for words.

Their exhausted homeward shamble down the service road was mute, save for the quiet whimpers and sniffles of the girls who refused to look at their grandfather.

Even after he and the girls had limped around the bend in the gravel road and saw, at last, his little cottage slipping into view, Colin still somehow doubted that he had successfully led his group home.

Paula was standing at the end of the driveway.

As if on cue, both girls simultaneously erupted with sobs and bolted toward their mother, who reflexively opened her arms to catch them. It took Colin longer to hobble onto his property, and when he did he had just enough energy to perch himself on the bumper of his old Buick and free the damp handkerchief from his vest pocket. The chrome was hot beneath him. The air felt thin.

“Grandpa got us
lost!”
blubbered one of the girls, Colin was unsure which.

“It’s all right, it’s all right. You’re home now. No harm done. Why don’t you two go inside and splash some cold water on your faces. Your lunch is still on the table and there’s lemonade in the fridge, so pour yourselves two big glasses of it, okay?”

Colin heard the screen door creak open and bang shut before he heard the rhythmic crunch of gravel as his daughter neared him with measured steps.

“Warm one,” he remarked, using the handkerchief to push the sweat off his face and the back of his neck. Paula’s silence conveyed more sour energy than words ever could. Colin managed to avoid turning his head to look at her, but it took every speck of willpower he could muster.

“What happened out there, Dad?”

Colin sloppily returned the handkerchief to his vest pocket, muttering curses when the zipper refused to obey his trembling tugs at it.

“I asked you a question.” Colin hadn’t heard his daughter’s voice so keened with insolence since she was a teenager, and even though her tone today was more sternly maternal than it was impertinent, he was offended by it all the same. A proper response—proper by his own ornery standards at least—leapt to Colin’s attention, but he found himself unable to comprehend the words he was trying to use.

What leaked out of mouth was little more than a warbling noise. The apt reply seemed to skirt away, just out of Colin’s comprehension, like bits of a dream that sluice through the brain upon waking.

“Do you know I was just a few minutes away from making calls, from having the local rangers go in there looking for you three?”

“You’d best watch your tone, young lady.” Colin had remembered at last.

She laughed at him, actually
laughed
. “No, Dad!” She was shouting now. “Not this time! You’re not going to turn this into a conversation about your being disrespected! Do you understand that you put my daughters’
lives
in danger today? Do you get that?”

Colin gesticulated, enforcing a statement he was unable to make. He peered across the road to Millie Fuerstein’s cottage. Judging by the pruning shears in her gloved hands, Millie had been outside tending her rosebushes, although now she was obviously eavesdropping.

“N-n-no trouble,” Colin stammered loudly. He was unsure whether he was addressing Paula or Millie across the road. “There was no trouble. The .   .   . the path got a little loopy on me and I got turned around, that’s all.”

“Bullshit!”
Paula screamed.

Colin saw Millie Fuerstein turn and creep inside her cottage.

“You were gone for over three hours, Dad! When you didn’t come back after that first hour I went out to look for you. I walked the main path twice, calling out the whole time, so you weren’t even in earshot! How far off the track did you take them, Dad? Suppose Sara had fallen and broken her leg, or got bitten by a snake? What would you have done, Dad? Jesus Christ, I
told
you to just take them around the main path and then come back.”

Colin didn’t even realize he was sobbing until he saw Paula’s expression instantly soften. She crouched down in front of him, placed her hand over his.

“How long has this been happening?”

“I think I want to go lie down.”

She was silent for awhile. “Okay, Dad, let’s get you inside.” Paula tried to help him up. “Where’s your cane?”

“Out there somewhere,” he mumbled, pointing to nowhere in particular. Colin felt his arm being draped across his daughter’s shoulders. She let out a grunt while attempting to hoist him to his feet. They lumbered conjoined up the driveway, into the cottage. The girls were stationed at the Formica table, lunching as wordlessly as vow-bound zealots.

“Eh, everything’s okay,” Colin called as he was escorted past the kitchen. “It’s all okay, girls.”

Paula laid him out on the bed. The aged mattress cradled him like a great sling.

“I want you to lie here for a while,” said Paula. “I’m going to bring you your lunch. Make sure you drink the lemonade.”

He grimaced. “Never cared for it. Too tart.”

“I’ll bring you some ice water then. Rest.”

She stranded him in his stuffy cell, with its alarm clock ticking like an endlessly clucking tongue, and all its shaming signs of his laziness such as the strands of cobweb that prospered on the upper walls, the ergs of dust piled against the floor moulding. Colin rested his hands upon his growling belly, did his utmost to rein in his breathing until his trunk became a bellows, cycling the airflow in a reassuringly steady rhythm. Colin hoped to maintain this calming exercise for a good long while, but the heat was becoming stifling. He realized that he had not freed himself from his puffer vest, and the standing fan in the corner was not on.

It was just after he reluctantly listed himself up to peel off his vest and long-sleeved shirt that Colin noticed the alteration to the room.

His nightstand was always kept clear of all but three items: his alarm clock with its punitive ticking, a small reading lamp, and his favourite photograph of Beverly, which was displayed in a special frame he’d made from cut reeds bolstered with shellac.

Discovering that someone had switched Beverly’s picture stunned him initially, but then infuriated him.

“What’s the matter?” Paula’s voice was unexpected, but Colin was too upset to be startled. “Dad, what’s wrong?”

He lifted a bent finger to the frame and asked “Who is that?” When his question met with a protracted silence, Colin assumed Paula had not heard him. “Who changed this picture?”

His daughter’s expression, when Colin finally looked to the doorway, was one of fear, with a soupçon of heartache. She was holding a plate in one hand, a water glass in the other. “You know who that is.” Her voice was thin and deadened. “That’s Mom.”

“It’s not! It is not her! Look!” He jutted the frame toward Paula, wagging it as though it were a bone being used to tempt a dog. “Look!” he repeated.

“I did look, Dad. Who do you see in that picture?”

“A stranger, that’s who I see, a stranger!”

“It’s Mom.” She was practically whispering now. She entered the room and handed Colin the glass of ice water without comment. Colin drank gratefully, greedily. He was only dimly aware of the picture frame being tugged from his grip. Paula set the plate down beside the photograph and helped Colin remove his vest and shirt. “You want the fan on?” she asked.

“Please.”

She snapped it on and departed.

Colin exhaled when the manufactured breeze passed over him. He took up the plate and bit into the sandwich. The flavour exploded in his mouth. Colin closed his eyes, savouring the sense of rightness that was slowly being restored. He stopped chewing, questioning whether he had the courage to glance at the picture again.

He did, furtively. When he noticed that the familiar delicate contours of Beverly’s face he stared intently at the picture, he sighed. It was her.

The silly naming of Black Forest flung Colin’s attention back to today’s dense and confusing forest. And the heat. And the unfamiliar church with those awful sights inside .   .   .

Colin set the plate to one side and closed his eyes once more. For a long time his mind lingered in a semi-relaxed state. He could hear every chirping sparrow, each distorted voice from the yards beyond his window. Colin wondered how his neighbours could be so complacent, so assured of the trees and copses that had wreaked havoc with him.

The illogic of it all, the sheer
randomness,
made his head swim. He drew in a long breath, held it, and when he finally released it Colin imagined his exhalation fanning out like great wings, ones that freighted his psyche to more tranquil climes.

He saw himself lazing in a great meadow, his body domed by the gentle shade of a willow. Everywhere Colin looked he saw long and supple grass that had never known the taming hand of humanity. The wind that bullied them was cool and fresh. There were no sounds beyond the perennial gush of the willow boughs.