Free At Fear's Altar by Richard Gavin Page A

raced backward.
    He hadn’t wanted to relive the night, and certainly not with such vivid, lacerating clarity, but the interred memories began to claw their way back to the surface.
    Tad imagined himself as once again standing under the occulted moon. The white wine and beer had made him feel that the cliff he stood upon was on a pitch, for he swayed to and fro, listening to the two queers yammering and tittering like schoolgirls. Petra was standing aloof, shining her flashlight ahead of her, into the darkness. She’d been leaning forward, had been shielding her eyes with her hand as if this action would somehow enable her to see.
    What had she seen?
    The question had been gnawing at Tad for a full year. On those rare nights where he was able to snatch some REM sleep, that image would bloom in the grey haze of sleep, wrenching him into a panting, twitchy wakefulness. He would see Petra taking that lone fatal step over the edge, would see her being instantly subsumed by the night.
    Had he been the one who’d inspired Petra to jump? What had driven her to drop so casually, so easily?
    Tad pulled the revolver from under his belt and examined it. He began to sob. It was the first time he had cried over Petra.
    He’d been downright stoic through the long investigation that came once that rare darkness ebbed and the moon returned, and later the sun. He had stood wrapped in a fibrous grey blanket that one of the emergency workers had given him. Douglas had been given a sedative to calm him. Charlie had wept and snivelled while he’d insisted over and over that he’d had no clue as to how Petra had fallen.
    The boats had bobbed across the ocean for three full days afterwards. They’d dragged the same area again and again but turned up nothing. Tad had been warned that the chances of recovering Petra’s body in these waters were slim.

11

    Perhaps there was some corner of Tad’s soul that was sanctimonious after all, for despite many repeated attempts at placing the .38’s nub against his temple, he was unable to squeeze the trigger. So he remained seated, his legs dangling over the edge of Earth’s End, his body shivering from the cold shower that continued to fall upon him. He looked out at The Abject, and in a weird way he felt it was he who was being looked at, watched.
    The rain eventually lightened, but by then the sky had grown dark.
    “Petra .   .   .”
    He spoke her name quietly, almost sibilantly. He was exhausted in every sense of the word, too drained to speak in anything above a whimper.
    It must have been this destroyed state of mind that caused the optical illusion of the fog swirling into a great funnel; the chute that afforded Tad a clear view of The Abject.
    There was a fire in the great cave, or so it looked to Tad. He scrabbled back from the ledge and rose to his feet. He could see plump sparks of light glowing like flung embers against the ancient dark. These flint-sparks enabled Tad to see that the rim of the cave was eroding, quickly. Its stone edges were peeling back to reveal .   .   .
    Teeth.
    And then the cave was no longer a cave, but a crooked grin.
    The face that pulled up and out of the rock was immense, with a glacier-pale complexion and eyes like stagnant tarns.
    Tad’s vision blurred, wavered. The cliff felt like pudding beneath him. He glared dumbly as The Abject sprouted an arm, another. And as the vast thing shook off the crust of its deosil hibernation, it fanned its limitless wings, hiding the cloudy sky behind a veil of black plumage and dangling tufts of rot. Each heave of the thing’s scaly chest choked the air with stench and embers.
    Its howl shook Earth’s End and dropped Tad to his knees.
    The Watcher turned its dead gaze to the cliff. It reached, as though it could grasp the escarpment with ease. Tad’s mouth worked frantically, forming silent pleas.
    ‘She saw this .   .   .’
    And then Tad saw Petra.
    She was walking on night air, or so Tad thought