At Fear's Altar (6 page)

“What do you know? You made it!” Charlie was dragging a plastic cooler out of his jeep while Douglas stood fidgeting with the clasps of a large backpack.

“No thanks to your lead,” Tad called as he exited the second jeep, “or this deathtrap you stuck us with.”

“Hey, go easy on her,” Charlie replied. “That jeep took a hell of a beating when Doug and I drove through the Badlands a few years ago. Besides, what’s to complain about? It got you here, didn’t it?”

“Barely.”

Gravel crunched beneath the soles of Petra’s runners as she crossed the tiny roadside inlet where the vehicles were parked. Charlie’s description of their destination as “breathtaking” and “out of this world” had clearly been hyperbole, for as she surveyed the tall, pervasive hemlock trees, Petra saw only common woodlands. The boughs all seemed to mesh, forming a spider’s web, or perhaps a shroud, above her.

Craning her head back, shielding her eyes, Petra discovered that the sky was only visible in shards. She felt foolish lugging the small amateur’s telescope along in its cheap plastic case.

“So this is it, huh?” Tad’s hands gripped his hips and his mouth was bent in a sneer of dissatisfaction.

Douglas shook his head. “No, this isn’t it. This is just the entrance to The Crawlspace. We won’t reach Earth’s End for another couple of hours.”

“Two hours!” Tad cried.

“Maybe less. It depends on how fast you can walk.”

“Why don’t we just drive up there?”

“Because we’d need a road to do that,” Douglas explained. He grinned and added, “The mouth of The Crawlspace here is as close to Earth’s End as you can get by vehicle.”

Douglas stepped over a corroded iron chain that drooped across a thin footpath. A battered signed warned NO TRESPASSING. NATURAL REGENERATION IN PROGRESS. DEPT. OF AGROFORESTRY, but the faintness of the text rendered the warning inconsequential.

Two years ago Petra had been single and had sacrificed her days for slave’s wages at an independent book and magazine shop in Providence. Tad had been one of her regular customers. The store sat kitty-corner to the financial planning firm where he was employed, and three or four times a week Tad would escape his desk in order to pay a lunch-hour visit to Petra’s store, usually for a newspaper, but occasionally for a paperback potboiler. His shyness was mild enough to be endearing.

Four months of lingering and small talk lapsed before they had their first date. It was Petra who’d done the asking. They went to a screening of
Picnic at Hanging Rock
at The Columbus Theater and then for coffee at a quaint diner that had art deco fixtures and a live jazz trio every Thursday. By Christmas that year they were living together.

But their pantomime of married life began to erode all too quickly, and Petra did not even have wedding day memories to cling to as the watershed of their happiness.

A promotion resulted in an almost exponential increase in Tad’s hours at the office. With her meagre financial contributions rendered unnecessary, Petra quit her job. Tad bought a house for her to rattle around in and stew over her fear that, day by day, she was becoming her mother; someone whose life had always seemed to Petra to be little more than a forty-year-long stifled scream.

Her only salvation came in the form of lazy daydreaming on the living room sofa. She would fantasize about fashioning one of the upper bedrooms with a crib, a brightly coloured rocking chair, a herd of cartoon zoo animals dangling from a ceiling mobile.

After sharing her fantasies with Tad during afterglow one night, he’d told her they would talk about kids when the timing was better. Timing had always been of great importance to Tad, always.

That night she’d come to realize that a pure and unconditional love, something she’d been aching for since childhood, was something that could never be found in the world. Adults had too many conflicting needs to truly mesh with one another completely. There was too much solipsism, too much baggage on everyone’s back. The only way to find that pure love was to create it. To create a living being that was partly her; Petra wanted nothing more than this.

But Tad had other plans.

As she drifted off that night, Petra experienced the first in what would become a running stream of recurring nightmares. These unsettling dreams differed widely in aspect but were unwavering in theme: she would always be held captive by her past. Some nights she would find herself at a party, cornered by several of her ex-boyfriends, all of whom took great pleasure passing a telephone between them and sharing with Tad all the mistakes and embarrassing things she’d done during the time they were each bedding her. Other nights she would dream of wandering her childhood home, which would be rotted and haunted by the anguished ghost of her mother.

The nightmare where her father, afflicted with something akin to rabies, chased her down an endless stairway, shouting “Run! Run! I’m coming!” was particularly indelible and had led to more than one bout of insomnia.

The Crawlspace was a winding trail domed by fat vines and greenery. The flora was so dense it actually knitted together, transforming the footpath into a tight, humid tunnel. The growth pressed so near to the ground that those who were foolish enough to roam The Crawlspace had to stoop while they treaded its arduously sheer incline.

Charlie and Douglas led the way. They each had large packs strapped to their backs and were lugging the plastic cooler between them. The pair of them were demonstrably more experienced at hiking than Petra, who was practically speed-walking just to keep them in sight. Tad lagged at the tail end of their party. Petra glanced back to note his sweaty, scarlet-coloured complexion and wondered whether it was due to exertion or rage.

“We’re nearing the peak,” Charlie shouted, “so you need to watch yourselves. Once you cross over the top, this path drops downward. It’s steep as hell, so get ready to run.”

“Running, too?” Tad hollered. “This just keeps getting better.”

“You can always roll down the decline if you want,” Douglas suggested without looking back.

Petra couldn’t resist stealing a glimpse of her lover’s expression, which flaunted the impotent fury of punctured pride.

The remainder of the upward trudge was met out wordlessly until Charlie called, “Okay, this is it!” Then he and Douglas dipped over the summit and vanished.

When Petra reached the thin ledge, the tunnel of flora became an echo chamber. The low-end thumping of Charlie and Douglas footing full-tilt down the path was contrasted by a high hushing sound, akin to the whirring one hears inside a conch shell.

“Go, go!” Tad ordered as he came up just behind her.

Petra stepped over and began her descent. It felt as though the world had switched on its axis and begun to spin wildly, hurling everything forward and down, forward and down. The overgrowth extended even lower, constricting the tunnel into an airless pipe. The terrain became horrifically uneven; thick vines and chunky rocks jutting up here and there like booby-traps in the soil. Terrified that she might stumble, possibly fracture her skull, Petra began to scream. Behind her came the sound of laughter.

Seconds later she saw the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Day glimmered at the far mouth of the Crawlspace, brilliant as a struck match head. By now the thudding of footsteps had stopped, or perhaps had been drowned out by the rushing sound, which was almost deafening.

Petra reached the aperture and came rocketing out onto a plateau of slick flat rock. The sunlight was so radiant that for a beat she thought the world had been consumed in waves of white fire. Her eyes instinctively squinted shut as she ran. Every stomp against the stone jarred her from her soles to her skull.

She thought she might run on forever, when a barrier suddenly knocked against her midsection, blasting the wind from her lungs. Falling forward, Petra opened her eyes to see Charlie holding her. Her face was reflected in the black plates of his sunglasses. She resembled, she thought, a feral daughter, with her scorched-looking face and wild, sweat-drenched mane.

“Careful,” Charlie said. “A few more paces and you’d have gone right over.”

Once her eyes grew accustomed to the glare, Petra surveyed her surroundings. The ocean below refracted the sunlight into a measureless cobweb of diamond-glints.

“Kind of makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?”

Petra hadn’t even heard Douglas moving up behind her, and she flinched at the sound of his voice.

“And a little jumpy too, apparently,” she chirped.

“Don’t joke about being jumpy when you’re standing by a nine-hundred-metre drop.”

“I’m no good at measuring, but I’ll take your word for it. God .   .   . this place .   .   .”

“Yeah, it’s pretty neat. I used to come up here a lot when I first moved out west. Charlie introduced me to it. He’s been coming to Earth’s End since he was a teenager. Not to party or anything like that, usually just to think.”

“I’m guessing there weren’t too many beer bashes on a cliff like this.”

“Or none that lived to tell about it.”

Even with his smile to temper it, Petra found Douglas’s statement unnervingly cold. She wondered if he sensed her discomfort, for he quickly changed topics.

“When you stand with your back to the escarpment you can understand why this place has always been known as Earth’s End. There doesn’t seem to be anything out there but water and sky. Go on and stare out there for a bit. It’s eerie.”

Petra heeded and focused her attention on the expanse before her, doing her utmost to shut out the rock and greenery that braced and backed her. Douglas was right: from this vantage the world seemed as distant, as fleeting as a childhood fever dream. She felt as though she were floating among the varying shades of blue, expanding and soaring through both the great empty sky and unbottomed water.

But with this, Petra felt the sky lose its comforting lustre. It revealed all the openness and emptiness of the cosmos. The dark ocean and the ghost-pale foam of its breakers suggested a pit brimming with damned spirits.

There was nothing here,
nothing
.

Petra’s realization of this was palpable, irrefutable. She had reached the omega point and wondered if she could ever return to the life she’d known back on Earth.

But there
was
something here.

A lengthier study of the vast expanse revealed an incongruity in the distance, a dark blip that disrupted the vacuum of blue. Jutting up from the Pacific, looking much like a Stone Age dagger or a granite lingam, was a mountain. It was only nominally shorter than the cliff at Earth’s End, but was far thinner, almost needle-like. It put Petra in mind of a stalagmite instead of a proper mountain.

“What’s that?” Petra mumbled.

“That,”
Charlie began, his voice almost boastful as he pointed to the distant rock, “is a story unto itself.”

She’d met Douglas when they were students in the same first-year English Literature class at Brown University. Petra was hoping to get an English degree, but Douglas was only taking the lit. class as a breather from his engineering courses. He was, as Petra came to appreciate, as famished for love as she was.

“Sometimes,” he used to tell her, “it seems like the only way I can make any headway in life is to listen to my instinct and then do the exact opposite. How crazy is that?”

They got on right away.

Twice they’d attempted to nudge their friendship into something amorous, but both tries resulted in giggly, physically awkward evenings that ended with the pair of them trading secrets in the dark.

The summer between their first and second year of university, Douglas came to accept fully that he was gay. The night he shared this fact with Petra he had taken her for a long walk on Buttonwoods Beach. Standing on the wet sands, under a cold moon, Petra felt thrilled for him but a little sad for herself. Douglas seemed to have found his path, leaving her to bob listless and alone.

Once Douglas met Charlie while vacationing in British Columbia, his life began to move in an upward trajectory. Charlie managed to get Douglas recruited by the same Vancouver engineering firm that had headhunted him. The pair of them relocated to western Canada before Douglas had even finished his degree.

Petra traded e-mails with him now and again, not really believing that his allusions to having her out to the West Coast for a visit were anything beyond a nicety.

In April she’d written him a lengthy e-mail in which she detailed her relationship with Tad. She had tried her best to sound positive. Douglas was enthusiastic in his response, and a week later he sent a charmingly insistent message:

Petra,

I’ve had a Eureka! Moment:

August 27th. You and Tad. Charlie and me. The longest total lunar eclipse in 3000 years (supposed to last 90 mins).

You haven’t lived ’til you’ve seen Earth’s End. Let’s go watch the lights go out together!

Love,

Douglas

Tad hadn’t wanted to go. At all. But after the incessant bad dreams and the other drama of recent weeks, he concluded that perhaps he owed Petra this much. One long weekend, then back to seeking her some help for her anxieties. That was his offer. Petra accepted the terms and booked their plane tickets.