At Fear's Altar (23 page)

I didn’t dig it up right away. Fear was unquestionably a factor in my keeping Capricorn under soil, but it was not the only one. The dominant forces that held me back were guilt and shame.

Nostalgia can be very powerful, and very toxic. The more I recollected that haunted summer when I was seven, the more idyllic it became. By December of that year I had managed to convince myself that my season with Capricorn had been the only true happiness I had known, that all the friendships and little triumphs I’d experienced since then were a kind of sick veil. How had I repaid Capricorn for its loyal fellowship? With abandonment when I went away with my parents and then finally with condemnation upon my return.

I avoided Capricorn’s grave for months, grateful for the ever-thickening blanket of snow that masked it throughout the winter. During that long season when the frigid gloom was disrupted by only the thinnest glimmers of daylight, I went for a lot of long walks and thought a great deal and spoke very little.

Elena had been popular enough to inflate our failed rendezvous at the Labour Day party into a breach of nature that resulted in my becoming a pariah at school. To be fair, the ostracizing I experienced that year would have likely faded over time had I been more willing to play the social game. But by then my introvert’s nature had already begun to reclaim its throne inside me, so I was only too happy to regress like a snail into its shell.

I turned thirteen that spring, just as the weather was beginning to mellow. I had taken to drawing a great deal, and my parents gave me a large sketchpad and artist’s pencils as a birthday gift. One evening I reconfigured the furniture in my room so that my small desk was positioned before the window, affording me an unobstructed view of my companion’s grave.

All told, I probably sketched twenty or thirty versions of Capricorn’s resting place. Throughout those long, wordless afternoons where I studied the far corner of the cedar hedge, I would mull over the best way to attempt to resume contact with Capricorn. I wondered how one extends the olive branch to something that is not, and in all likelihood never was, human.

Finally one blustery afternoon, as I sat watching the rain forming small bogs under the hedge and the sky beginning to smudge with deepening nocturnal shades, I was struck with the thought that the reason I had remained immune to reprimand was because Capricorn was gone.

An oily feeling passed through my insides. My shoulders slumped under an unseen burden. Why had I been so foolishly confident that Capricorn would have endured such neglect?

Later that night I attempted, for the first time in nearly six years, to make contact.

The fog had lurched in as if on cue, as if the ceremonious acts of snapping off the ceiling light in favour of a lone wax candle, of flipping the art pad to a virginal page, of breathing in a series of slow purging gusts were all the rubrics to some ancient ritual that could muscle nature into heeding one’s will. The elements seemed already to be acquiescing just to lend my reunion some pathetic fallacy.

I set the pencil tip against the sheet and waited. I was still seeing the spirit-trap’s grave, but this time only in my mind’s eye. Not wanting to act prematurely, I waited until every detail of the music box was salient before I finally spoke.

“Capricorn,” I whispered, “can you hear me?”

My hand began to drag, leaving wayward black strokes in its path. It began to pass over the page faster, faster. I could feel my palm beginning to heat up. My breath decreased to the shallowest gasps.

“Are you with me, Capricorn?”

My mind was a still lake. Neither thought nor image intruded on that calm. Even when I attempted to summon the image of the spirit-trap back to the fore, it stubbornly dissipated.

The séance lasted for hours. The result? Dozens of pages of pointless squiggles. Although I had experienced inklings of Capricorn’s appendage closing over mine during the sitting, in the end I knew that I had been playing, that my experiment had resulted in simply acting.

Capricorn was gone. Part of me understood this, but another part was unwilling to resign myself to such a hideous truth.

While lying in bed and staring absentmindedly at the ceiling I concluded that I needed to be certain.

I would dig up the spirit-trap. If the Presence had indeed vacated it, if the Voice had fallen mute, I resolved that I would willingly put all these pursuits behind me. Perhaps I would try rebuilding a social bridge back to my peers.

The following night was a Friday and my parents had gone out for their ‘date night’—a monthly ritual for rekindling whatever romance they’d once had. After they’d left for dinner or a trite film or whatever that week’s outing entailed, I crept out to the backyard and drudged up the box from the runny clay that covered it.

Much of its lustre had eroded, but the trap itself was intact. I sat in the gloaming, the muddy case resting on my knees, fearing that it truly was as empty as it felt. I remembered the box having a detectable heft when Capricorn resided there, but of course this memory was just as susceptible to distortion as any other. I am the first to admit that I do not possess anything even nearing total recall. My memories are always patchwork things; fact cloaked in errant wish and fantasy.

Lighter or not, I carried the box down to the basement, wiped it down with an old rag, and draped it in a clean bed sheet.

Once it was concealed I reached under and carefully undid the corroded clasp. It was as though I was handling hazardous materials, or defusing a bomb by touch alone. I flipped the lid open and stepped back, praying that the sheet would fill and rise, but it did not.

I waited, watching the covered trap until the basement window welled up with the headlight beams of my father’s car. Quickly re-closing the trap, I wound the box back in the sheet and carried the bundle to my room, restoring it to its proper niche beneath where I would lay dreaming.

A year or two prior my father and I had watched a television documentary about voodoo. Among the many strange facts that appealed to me was the tradition of ‘feeding the loa,’ which consisted of the voodoo practitioner leaving sweets and drink as offerings to attract spirits. That night I put this into practice, surrounding Capricorn’s casket of scuffed wood with thickly frosted cupcakes, an antique silver dollar that had been a gift from my great-aunt, and a paper cup brimming with some of my father’s best brandy. I even muttered a queer little prayer of calling before going to sleep that night, imploring Capricorn to accept my offerings and come back to me.

I remain convinced that my companion devoured my placations that night, for Capricorn digested them and passed their leavings back through me in the form of a prescient dream.

It was a brief nightmare, set in a location I’d not thought about since that glorious haunted summer.

The horrors of this setting flung me back into my body, which jolted up panicked and moist and pitifully shaken and frail. It was still dark when I sat reeling from what I’d seen. By sunrise one point had become glaringly important to me: I had dreamt not of some invented Eden, but a real place, a location in this world; near this very city no less.

It was no ordinary location, having long been a borderland, an interstitial place that blurred the boundaries between our world and another.

My investigation of the shrine beneath my bed that morning revealed the cakes unbitten and stale (the slather of icing bore no imprint of phantom fingers), the paper cup soaked through but the liquor unlapped by spirit-tongue. But the gesture had clearly been enough, for as my fingers pressed against the spirit-trap’s side it once again felt marvellously cold to the touch, for the first time in years.

My heart was in turn warmed. As I walked to school that day I found myself steeled against the snide little jeers in the halls, I was impervious to the askance glances of my teachers, because something was now swimming within me: a plan.

By noontime my fate was so clear to me I could barely stay inside my own skin.

Back then (things may be different now), if one traipsed due north on Lockhart Street, which begins right at the lakeshore, one would pass through the swanky residential nooks where the city’s upper crust cloistered themselves, and would then venture beyond the garden of little boutiques and mom-and-pop stores that comprised the downtown shopping district. Beyond this retail zone were several blocks of very average houses and low-rise apartments that were occupied by the city’s very average families. Lockhart Street ascended on an ever-steeping incline. By the time one reached its peak, the houses would be scattershot, with great fields, instead of narrow yards, distinguishing one property from another. Further still, the houses sat obscured by woodlands, and then there was only nature.

I spent the following Saturday treading this very course until at last I reached my secluded destination. The unwieldy bulk of my backpack pressed achingly on my shoulders. It was well into the afternoon by the time I finally let the pack drop at the edge of Palemarsh Pond and tore into my packed lunch.

The weather was quite temperate for mid-March. As I sat chewing my sandwich, I stared out across the pond, toward The Devil’s Finger.

Even set against the cloudless azure of the afternoon sky, The Devil’s Finger still cast an ominous glamour.

Every town has a similar site—a place so steeped in urban legend that, regardless of how embellished the tale may be, the location manages to sweat out a menacing atmosphere. My hometown was blessed with two such places: The Devil’s Finger and The House of Shades.

The Devil’s Finger was a great old oak that loomed over a footpath at the edge of Palemarsh Pond. The tree had supposedly earned its sinister title in the days of Frontier Justice, when wrongdoers had been condemned to hang from its limbs as a warning to those passing through the village.

But this form of savage punishment turned against the local lawmakers. It was rumoured that the souls of those who’d been condemned to hang were held in the Devil’s palm. Neither sinking to hell nor sailing up to the sweet hereafter, the hanged men’s ghosts became ensnared inside the oak tree like insects in amber, attacking anyone who was fool enough to pass by The Devil’s Finger after sunset.

I never did figure out the root of that legend. But, to the best of my knowledge, people still evoke it; primarily mothers who try to scare their daughters chaste, or boyfriends who try to use the tale to scare these same girls closer and closer, until they may forget all about their pledged chastity.

I’d made the pilgrimage to The Devil’s Finger not only because I hoped that Capricorn might feel more forthcoming among other spirits (assuming there were ever any there to begin with), but because this was the place I’d seen in my dream, and thus I assumed it was an auspicious site, a zone of power. I set about recreating my dream as accurately as possible. This, I guardedly hoped as I began to empty my backpack, would bring Capricorn back to me.

The effigy was the nearest approximation I could manage to the one I’d witnessed in slumber. In the dream I believe the figure of Capricorn had been garmented in a man’s clothes, whereas mine were of boyish size and consisted of a pair of my old jeans and a sweater. I duct-taped a pair of gardening gloves to the end of the sweater sleeves and runners to the denim hem. The head was a threadbare pillowcase. The whole figure was plumped with wadded newspaper. I nestled Capricorn’s box in the centre of the chest, roughly where the figure’s heart would be.

Properly lacing up the noose was the longest and most tedious aspect of the process, but I managed to have the dummy lynched by dusk.

After that, it was simply a matter of waiting, waiting.

Every so often I would be tricked into hearing false voices or sounds of movement tumbling up the footpath, but this was just a conspiracy of jangled nerves and rampant hope.

I stayed crouched under the effigy as it gently twisted in the breeze. The rising moon steadily drew the warmth away from Palemarsh Pond, and my breath began to spill out in white wisps. I longed for the sweater I’d sacrificed for my creation.

I had almost deemed my attempt at nightmare replication a failure when I heard a woman shriek.