At Fear's Altar Read Free Page A

go that way. When in doubt, always head east, I say.”
    Toni asked why.
    “That’s where the light comes from,” her grandfather replied.
    The girls let Colin take the lead this time, though it was obvious to him that his increasingly sluggish pace was exasperating to them.
    As their party jerked forward, hidden cicadas added their sine to the thumping of feet and the hush of foliage being tossed by the humid wind. One by one the mosquitoes began to appear. They hovered around Colin’s ears as if solely to irk him with their buzzing before perching themselves on his sweat-slick neck to feast. He smacked a few, but never quickly enough.
    When his cane thumped down on some buried obstruction, it buckled and nearly caused Colin to spill.
    “I’m all right, I’m fine,” he called back to quell the concerned cries. “Let’s keep moving.”
    But the panic had already begun to smoulder in his stomach. It had begun to chew on him when the trail seemed to take on alien bends and all his long-trusted landmarks began a game of hide-and-seek. Colin’s fear had caught on the kindling of his bones. It strengthened and spread until nerves began to burn like tangles of dry weeds. He pulled off his glasses to sweep rivulets of sweat from his nose and brow.
    “You sure this is the right way, Grandpa?”
    Colin let out a helpless wheeze. He squinted, as though distorting his vision could somehow squeeze the terrain into somewhere familiar.
    “It’s just a little ways further,” Colin lied, “d-d-don’t you worry, Paula.”
    “Who?” the girl snapped.
    Colin waved his hand as though he were still shooing bugs. “Sara, Sara, I meant Sara. Everything’s okay. I’ve walked this path a thousand times. This is the way back to the road. I’m sure of it.”
    Whether the shadows becoming swollen and denser was due to clouds scabbing over the sun or something else entirely, Colin was not quite so sure.
    The predicament was distorting his thought. His mounting confusion was now causing him to contest his long-cherished memories of watching his Paula toddling along these trails. Those images now felt as though they’d been borrowed from another person’s life. Had he really ever seen his daughter scampering through these woods? Had he ever really been here before?
    Colin had no recollection of copses like these.
    Nor did he remember a chapel like the one he suddenly spotted in his periphery. He halted to study the structure that was squatting at the base of the glade.
    It was stout, almost gnome-like in its design. Colin would have mistaken it for a cottage had the building not borne a steeple (though the cross on its peak was broken). A small iron bell hung within the belfry. Even at a distance Colin could see the cobwebs that festooned the corroding shell, indicating just how long it had been since the bell had summoned the faithful to prayer. Five steps of bowing wood led from the chapel’s arched door to the bulrushes and reeds that bearded its base. The walls were clapboard and looked to have once been stained barn-red, but the elements had bleached the hue to a lurid pink. The roof was shingled in cheap tarpaper, much of which was split and curling, wagging at him like playful tongues of coal.
    Colin wondered how long he had been holding his breath, for when he finally did exhale the air escaped in a dry, lingering rasp that scared him.
    There was coolness down here. Not a breeze per se, but something more akin to a frigid mist, as though a glacier was somewhere in the marsh, languidly radiating frost.
    “We’re not going in there,” Colin said, first to himself, then to his granddaughters, both of whom appeared shocked, if a little bewildered, by his words. “We are not . We are going to turn around and retrace our steps.”
    “What?” Toni protested. “That’ll take forever!”
    But Colin’s astern journey had already begun. “Come on, slowpokes!” he called back, striving to sound gleeful, not terrified. His