Free At Fear's Altar by Richard Gavin

distorted by distance and echo. Perhaps it was a drunken holler let out by Charlie or Douglas, both of whom were brandishing empty wine bottles like clubs. The sound certainly hadn’t come from Tad, for he was, as a quick pan of the flashlight revealed, too busy exhibiting his boredom.
    As the noise persisted, Petra realized that her assumptions about animals or her companions had been foolish, for the faint wail was clearly coming from somewhere in the blackness before her.
    Her repeated attempts to find the source of the sound were as futile as her first, but now Petra was frightened, panicked. Somewhere in the night, with its buried moon and its dead stars that were unable to pierce the heavy fleece of clouds, an infant was screaming. It was the thinnest possible sound, but was unmistakably the cry of a babe lost in some unreachable nook of the night. Petra felt heartsick. The mewling was so forlorn. It was the howl of something unwanted, something abject.
    She only became aware that she had stepped off the cliff’s edge after she’d glanced down and saw nothing but blackness beneath her feet. Perhaps she was dreaming, or was already dead. But if this was annihilation, it was exhilarating. Petra felt unbounded, as open as the night itself.
    Petra began to walk and the shadows felt downy beneath her, as soft as thunderheads. Perhaps she was projecting, but Petra felt that every step seemed to calm the unseen infant. She walked on, across a bridge that was formed in darkness and of darkness.
    She wondered what the poor babe might look like after being flung from the end of the world. Her mind conjured the image of a bat-wing bassinet set beside a fire that wept Hell-glow and smoke.
    Petra could not even hear the cries of her companions behind her, so complete was her enchantment.
    She looked up and she Saw.

10

    Tad had kept his intentions of returning to British Columbia to himself. He had no friends to share these plans with of course, but even when he booked off the last week of August he told his supervisor it was to catch up on some renovations around the house; a plausible excuse as his home had fallen into disrepair since Petra’s demise. Tad had never realized how warm and full the house had felt when they had shared it. But now it was cold and dirty and hollow, like an old warehouse, like an excavated tomb.
    The weather during the flight was pacific, as though nature was speeding him along to face that which he’d previously been unwilling to face.
    He spent the first night holed up in a motel, trying not to think about the close proximity of Earth’s End, of The Abject, of Petra’s watery grave.
    The following morning was dull and dim and rainy. Tad partially hoped that his rental car would skid out on the mountain road. He was actually nourished by morbid visions of himself being impaled on a tree. But, after several wrong turns, he ultimately arrived at the neglected entrance to The Crawlspace. He’d been dreading the possibility of finding Douglas’s jeep parked along the side of the road. Perhaps he and Charlie had thought of marking the tragic anniversary in the same manner. But the area was as vacant as it had been last summer, perhaps the way it had always been.
    It was late afternoon, but the sky was so heaped with grey that it felt like evening. Tad remained slumped behind the wheel, watching the raindrops splatter on the windshield. At last he reached over and dragged the .38 from the glove compartment. Tucking it into the front of his jeans, he exited the car and disobeyed the NO TRESPASSING sign for the second time in his life.
    The Crawlspace went past in a green blur. Every so often Tad thought he saw Petra just ahead of him, racing once more toward her death under an eclipsed moon.
    The ocean roared and crashed in great tumults at the base of Earth’s End. The atmosphere was hazed with mist. The Abject was little more than an onyx pin swathed in fog.
    Tad’s gaze went downward, his mind