Read Online At Fear's Altar by Richard Gavin - Free Book Online Page B

isolated locale, The Abject might as well have been an alien planet.
    When she panned upward and discovered the great cave entrance, Petra almost gasped. It was a granite hole that held the ugliest blackness. She truly was terrible at measuring things, yet she still had the undeniable impression of the cave’s vastness. She could almost understand why people decorated a place like this with a legend of fallen Watchers and barbarous cults. Almost.
    “I recommend using one of these for the actual eclipse,” Charlie called.
    Petra lowered the eyepiece and turned in Charlie’s direction. He was seated on the cooler, struggling to assemble a small cardboard contraption.
    “These things are designed for eclipses. I gather they’re safer.”
    “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Tad rebutted. He was reclined beneath a poplar at the forest’s edge, his mind and his thumbs enthralled with his Blackberry’s Sudoku program. “Solar eclipses are the only dangerous kind.”
    “Well, better safe than sorry, right?” Douglas said. Petra recognized it as yet another expression of his peacekeeping nature. It was a quality she’d always admired about him, loved about him in fact.
    Petra accepted the plastic cup of white wine Douglas offered her.
    “Should be soon,” she said.
    “Yes. Oh, hey, if you walk a bit this way you can get a really good view of the tree line.” Once they were out of earshot, Douglas said to her, “Okay, now tell me everything.”
    Petra’s response (“What do you mean?”) was so insincere an attempt to sound bewildered that even she didn’t buy it. She looked at Douglas and saw him looking at her, the way he used to, the way he always had, the way Tad never did. She pressed a hand to her mouth and began to sob.
    “I’m sorry,” she gasped. She leaned against Douglas and repeated, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do this. I’m ruining the whole night.”
    “To hell with the night,” Douglas replied as he gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze. “Talk to me.”
    “I would if I could. But I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know where to begin.”
    “So start at the middle.”
    “I’m lonely,” she blurted. The words sounded odd as she spoke them, almost like a fib she was feeding Douglas to stave off his prying. She hadn’t thought of herself as feeling lonely. She lived with Tad, after all. But somehow this pair of words also felt true; a simple summation of her innermost workings.
    “I could tell.”
    It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him about all the rest; about the abortion and the sickening hollow feeling she’d had in her heart ever since, about her occasional desire to check out of the world, about the unbearably horrific dreams. There was so very much to tell.
    “Hey, you two!” Charlie shouted. “It’s almost time!”
    Petra craned her head upward to see a lightless disc slipping over the moon.

9

    The blackness sleeved the moon at a pace so gradual it was almost unbearable, or so it seemed to Petra, like watching a crab crossing a white desert. She and her three companions stood on Earth’s End, watching the umbra claim the lunar light.
    She momentarily allowed her eyes to drop to where The Abject was, or had been before the masking had camouflaged it utterly. She raised her flashlight, strangely bemused by the feebleness of its beam. The light was but a skeletal finger poking into the great gulf of space. It scarcely seemed to reach beyond the cliff’s edge before being smothered completely.
    As the eclipse reached its zenith, Petra silently marvelled at just how richly varied the Night could be, how the dark could splay and flaunt itself in so very many textures and shades. She wondered if it was always this way, or if tonight’s rare celestial contingency caused these rare visions. Either way, she could not help but be awed by the sights. And the sounds.
    Upon first hearing it, Petra dismissed the noise as merely a forest sound