Richard Gavin is one of Canada’s most critically acclaimed horror writers. His books include Omens (Mythos Books, 2007), The Darkly Splendid Realm (Dark Regions Press, 2009), and Charnel Wine: Memento Mori Edition (Dark Regions Press, 2010). His nonfiction writings have appeared in Rue Morgue, Dead Reckonings, Starfire Journal, and on his blog, “At Fear’s Altar” (www.richardgavin.net). Gavin lives in Ontario with his beloved wife and their brood.
EARTH’S END WAS ONLY MOMENTS AWAY, YET SHE STILL had nothing to say to him.
As the jeep negotiated the rugged mountain road, Petra caught herself meshing her hands across her middle in a protective gesture. When she remembered this was unnecessary she crumpled inside and allowed her arms to drop.
“Jee-zus!” Tad blurted as they bounced over a pernicious pothole. After the next hairpin turn the steepness of the incline forced Tad to fumblingly jerk the gearshift into second, first. He thudded his foot down on the accelerator. “Do me a favour, call Charlie and ask how much farther it is. I’m afraid this thing’s going to fall apart around us if we don’t get there soon.”
Petra reached for her purse and began the quest for her cell phone.
Charlie’s hello was a peep beneath the rumble of engines and the roar of the open jeep windows.
“Hey,” Petra cried. “How much farther is this place? Tad’s getting a bit nervous.” She pressed the phone hard against her ear. “Charlie says you should chill out.” She hoped her tone was not too gleeful; just enough to jab at Tad’s already ornery mood. “He also said to tell you the End is nigh.”
As she snapped the phone shut, Petra heard Tad mutter something she was sure was an insult.
“First a flight from Providence to Vancouver”—as he ranted, Tad moved his hand in prima donna sweeps—“now a four-hour drive up this mountain range. Your friends really know how to show their guests a good time.”
A dozen retorts, ranging from witty to outright caustic, swam through Petra’s mind. Certain that whatever reply she chose would be the wrong one, she opted to look silently out at the sycamores and yews, which were reduced to grey-green smears as the vehicle rattled past them.
“WHAT DO YOU KNOW? YOU MADE IT!” CHARLIE WAS dragging a plastic cooler out of his jeep while Douglas stood fidgeting with the clasps of a large backpack.
“No thanks to your lead,” Tad called as he exited the second jeep, “or this deathtrap you stuck us with.”
“Hey, go easy on her,” Charlie replied. “That jeep took a hell of a beating when Doug and I drove through the Badlands a few years ago. Besides, what’s to complain about? It got you here, didn’t it?”
“Barely.”
Gravel crunched beneath the soles of Petra’s runners as she crossed the tiny roadside inlet where the vehicles were parked. Charlie’s description of their destination as “breathtaking” and “out of this world” had clearly been hyperbole, for as she surveyed the tall, pervasive hemlock trees, Petra saw only common woodlands. The boughs all seemed to mesh, forming a spider’s skein, or perhaps a shroud, above her.
Craning her head back, shielding her eyes, Petra discovered that the sky was only visible in shards. She felt foolish lugging the small amateur’s telescope along in its cheap plastic case.
“So this is it, huh?” Tad’s hands gripped his hips, and his mouth was bent in a sneer of dissatisfaction.
Douglas shook his head. “No, this isn’t it. This is just the entrance to the Crawlspace. We won’t reach Earth’s End for another hour, maybe two.”
“Two hours!” Tad cried.
“Maybe less. It depends on how fast you can walk.”
“Why don’t we just drive up there?”
“Because we’d need a road to do that,” Douglas explained. He grinned and added, “The mouth of the Crawlspace here is as close to Earth’s End as you can get by vehicle.”
Douglas stepped over a corroded iron chain that drooped across a thin footpath. A battered sign warned NO TRESPASSING. NATURAL REGENERATION IN PROGRESS. DEPT. OF AGROFORESTRY, but the faintness of the text rendered the warning inconsequential.
TWO YEARS AGO PETRA HAD BEEN SINGLE AND HAD sacrificed her days for slave’s wages at an independent book and magazine shop in Providence. Tad had been one of her regular customers. The store sat kitty-corner to the financial planning firm where he was employed, and three or four times a week Tad would escape his desk in order to pay a lunch-hour visit to Petra’s store, usually for a newspaper but occasionally a paperback potboiler. His shyness was mild enough to be endearing.
Four months of lingering and small talk elapsed before they had their first date. It was Petra who’d done the asking.
They went to a screening of Picnic at Hanging Rock at the Columbus Theater and then for coffee at a quaint diner that had art deco fixtures and a live jazz trio every Thursday. By Christmas that year they were living together.
But their pantomime of married life began to erode all too quickly, and Petra did not even have wedding day memories to cling to as the watershed of their happiness.
A promotion resulted in an almost exponential increase in Tad’s hours at the office. With her meagre financial contributions rendered unnecessary, Petra quit her job. Tad bought a house for her to rattle around in and stew over her fear that day by tedious day she was becoming her mother; someone whose life had always seemed to Petra to be little more than a thirty-yearlong stifled scream.
Her only salvation came in the form of lazy daydreaming on the living room sofa. She would fantasize about fashioning one of the upper bedrooms with a crib, a brightly coloured rocking chair, a herd of cartoon zoo animals dangling from a ceiling mobile.
After sharing her fantasies with Tad during afterglow one night, he’d told her they would talk about kids when the timing was better. Timing had always been of great importance to Tad, always.
That night had marked the first in a running stream of recurring nightmares for Petra. These unsettling dreams differed widely in aspect but were unwavering in theme: she would always be held captive by her past. Some nights she would find herself at a party, cornered by several of her ex-boyfriends, all of whom took great pleasure passing a telephone between them and sharing with Tad all the mistakes and embarrassing things she’d done throughout her life. Other nights she would dream of wandering her childhood home, which would be rotted and haunted by the anguished ghost of her mother.
The nightmare where her father, afflicted with something akin to rabies, chased her down an endless stairway, shouting “Run! Run! I’m coming!” was particularly indelible and had led to more than one bout of insomnia.
THE CRAWLSPACE WAS A WINDING TRAIL DOMED BY fat vines and greenery. The flora was so dense that it actually knitted together, transforming the footpath into a tight, humid tunnel. The growth pressed so near to the ground that those who were foolish enough to roam the Crawlspace had to stoop while they trod its arduously sheer incline.
Charlie and Douglas led the way. They each had large packs strapped to their backs and were lugging the plastic cooler between them. The pair of them were demonstrably more experienced at hiking than Petra, who was practically speed-walking just to keep them in sight. Tad lagged at the tail end of their party. Petra glanced back to note his sweaty, scarlet-coloured complexion and wondered whether it was due to exertion or rage.
“We’re nearing the peak,” Charlie shouted, “so you need to watch yourselves. Once you cross over the top, this path drops downward. It’s steep as hell, so get ready to run.”
“Running, too?” Tad hollered. “This just keeps getting better.”
“You can always roll down the decline if you want,” Douglas suggested without looking back.
Petra couldn’t resist stealing a glimpse of her lover’s expression, which flaunted the impotent fury of a punctured pride.
The remainder of the upward trudge was effected wordlessly until Charlie called, “Okay, this is it!” Then he and Douglas dipped over the summit and vanished.
When Petra reached the thin ledge, the tunnel of flora became an echo chamber. The low-end thumping of Charlie and Douglas footing full-tilt down the path was contrasted by a high hushing sound, akin to the whirring one hears inside a conch shell.
“Go, go!” Tad ordered as he came up just behind her.
Petra stepped over and began her descent. It felt as though the world had switched on its axis and begun to spin wildly, hurling everything forward and down, forward and down. The overgrowth extended even lower, constricting the tunnel into an airless pipe. The terrain became horrifically uneven; thick vines and chunky rocks jutting up here and there like booby-traps in the soil. Terrified that she might stumble, possibly fracture her skull, Petra began to scream. Behind her came the sound of laughter.
Seconds later she saw the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Daylight glimmered at the far mouth of the Crawlspace, brilliant as a struck match-head. By now the thudding of footsteps had stopped, or perhaps had been drowned out by the rushing sound, which was almost deafening.
Petra reached the aperture and came rocketing out onto a plateau of slick flat rock. The sunlight was so radiant that for a beat she thought the world had been consumed in waves of white fire. Her eyes instinctively squinted shut as she ran. Every stomp against the stone jarred her from her soles to her skull.
She thought she might have run forever, when a barrier suddenly knocked against her midsection, blasting the wind from her lungs. Falling forward, Petra opened her eyes to see Charlie holding her. Her face was reflected in the black plates of his sunglasses. She resembled, she thought, a feral daughter, with her scorched-looking complexion and wild, sweat-drenched mane.
“Careful,” Charlie said; “a few more paces and you’d have gone right over.”
Once her eyes grew accustomed to the glare, Petra surveyed her surroundings. The ocean below refracted the sunlight into a measureless cobweb of diamond-glints.
“Kind of makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?”
Petra hadn’t even heard Douglas moving up behind her, and she flinched at the sound of his voice.
“And a little jumpy too, apparently,” she chirped.
“Please don’t joke about being jumpy when you’re standing by a nine-hundred-metre drop.”
“I’m no good at measuring, but I’ll take your word for it. God… this place…”
“Yeah, it’s pretty neat. I used to come up here a lot when I first moved here. Charlie introduced me to it. He’s been coming to Earth’s End since he was a teenager. Not to party or anything like that, usually just to think.”
“I’m guessing there weren’t too many beer bashes on a cliff like this.”
“Or none that lived to tell about it.”
Even with his smile to temper it, Petra found Douglas’s statement unnervingly cold. She wondered if he sensed her discomfort, for he quickly changed topics.
“When you stand with your back to the escarpment you can understand why this place has always been known as Earth’s End. There doesn’t seem to be anything out there but water and sky. Go on and stare out there for a bit. It’s eerie.”
Petra heeded and focused her attention on the expanse before her, doing her utmost to shut out the rock and greenery that braced her. Douglas was right: from this vantage the world seemed as distant, as fleeting as a childhood fever dream. She felt as though she was floating among the varying shades of blue, expanding and soaring through both the great empty sky and unbottomed water at once.
But with this, Petra felt the sky lose its comforting lustre. It revealed all the openness and emptiness of the cosmos. The dark ocean and the ghost-pale foam of its breakers suggested a bottomless pit brimming with damned spirits.
There was nothing here, nothing.
Petra’s realization of this was palpable, irrefutable. She had reached the omega point and wondered if she could ever return to the life she’d known back on Earth.
But a lengthier study of the vast expanse revealed an incongruity in the distance, a dark blip that disrupted the vacuum of blue.
Jutting up from the Pacific, looking much like a Stone Age dagger or a granite lingam, was a mountain. It was only nominally shorter than the cliff at Earth’s End, but was far thinner, almost needlelike. It put Petra in mind of a stalagmite instead of a proper mountain.
“What’s that?” Petra mumbled.
“That,” Charlie began, his voice almost boastful as he pointed to the distant rock, “is a story unto itself.”
THE WORLD, FOR ALL ITS SIZE AND BUSTLE, NEVER seemed able (or perhaps willing) to clear a path for Petra to follow. From her earliest childhood recollections of rural Dunwich to her all-grown-up-now life in Providence, she had invariably been the Outsider. Never able to pinpoint the reason for her feeling a few degrees off from the rest of humanity, Petra’s childhood was one of lush interior experiences, which she cultivated in order to shield herself from the cold, sterile routines of school and home.
She’d met Douglas when they were students in the same first-year English literature class at Brown University. She was hoping to get an English degree, but Douglas was only taking the lit. class as a breather from his engineering courses. He was (Petra came to appreciate) as ill-suited to the world as she was.
“Sometimes,” he used to tell her, “it seems like the only way I can make any headway in life is to listen to my instinct and then do the exact opposite. How crazy is that?”
They got on right away.
Twice they’d attempted to nudge their friendship into something amorous, and both tries resulted in giggly, physically awkward evenings that ended with the pair of them trading secrets in the dark.
The summer between their first and second year of university, Douglas came to accept fully that he was gay. The night he shared this fact with Petra he had taken her for a long walk on Buttonwoods Beach. Standing on the wet sands, under a cold moon, Petra felt thrilled for him but a little sad for herself. Douglas seemed to have found his path, leaving her to bob listlessly alone.
Once Douglas met Charlie while vacationing in British Columbia, his life began to move in an upward trajectory. Charlie managed to get Douglas recruited by the same Vancouver engineering firm that had headhunted him. The pair of them relocated to western Canada before Douglas had even finished his degree.
Petra traded e-mails with him now and again, not really believing that his allusions to having her out to the West Coast for a visit were anything beyond a nicety.
In April she’d written him a lengthy e-mail in which she detailed her relationship with Tad. She had tried her best to sound positive. Douglas was enthusiastic in his response, and a week later he sent a charmingly insistent message:
I’ve had a Eureka! Moment:
August 27th. You and Tad. Charlie and Me. The longest total lunar eclipse in 3000 years (supposed to last 90 mins).
You haven’t lived ’til you’ve seen Earth’s End. Let’s go watch the lights go out together!
Love,
Douglas
Tad hadn’t wanted to go. At all. But after the incessant bad dreams and the other drama of recent weeks, he concluded that perhaps he owed Petra this much. One long weekend, then back to seeking some help for her anxieties. That was his offer. Petra accepted the terms and booked the plane tickets.
“IT’S CALLED THE ABJECT,” CHARLIE BEGAN. HE PAUSED long enough to fish two bottles of Corona out of the cooler. He uncapped them and handed one to Petra. “The legend about this place, which supposedly goes back to before the Paleoindians, is that the Creator who shaped this world had forged a thousand planets before it. He was totally indifferent to the worlds he made and would destroy them on a whim. But whenever the Creator made a new world he would send four alien beings called the Watchers to keep an eye on that planet’s life-forms while he went off to keep building.
“These Watchers were omniscient. They floated around Earth, observing us puny humans as we fumbled our way up the food chain, but there wasn’t really much of interest down here to a starry being. The early tribes eventually stopped roaming and began to put down roots. Then for eons the Watchers saw nothing more than people planting in the spring, harvesting in the fall, popping out a few kids and teaching them the same song-and-dance. Over and over and over.
“Well, one of the Watchers got sick and tired of this. He wanted people to start looking up at the stars instead of just keeping their eyes on the soil year in, year out. He wanted to show them how deep this rabbit hole really was, so he broke the rules and flew down to Earth. He hid out in a desolate mountain.” Charlie nodded to the Abject. He was staring intently at Petra, as if trying to gauge how well he was managing to ratchet up the legend’s tension. “Once he was there he began sending out strange dreams to the people, visions of alien worlds and horrible cities that the Creator had laid to waste over the eons.
“Most of the early proto-humans didn’t think much of those dreams, or didn’t understand them. But one man became utterly obsessed with them, so much so that after a while he couldn’t take the life of Homo sapiens any longer. He went off to live like a hermit, far away from boring old civilization. Naturally he chose the most remote mountain he could find to live his solitary life. Lo and behold, if this guy didn’t come upon the Watcher.
“The Watcher offered to teach this man some very special things, which he did. The man learned how to cross the wall of sleep, and how to speak to the dead souls in all the ruined cities that are buried somewhere out there.
“So, things were going good—depending on your definition of good—for this man. But then the Watcher told him that their relationship is give and take. Since the man had been given a taste of the otherworldly, the Watcher wanted to get a better foothold in the worldly.
“He’d developed an interest in changing us humans, you see. An interest in giving us powers we aren’t meant to have. So the Watcher instructed his devotee to bring women to the cave for the purposes of… well, procreation. The Watcher wanted to create a species that looked human, but had monstrous souls. This race would have the best of both worlds; souls that could roam the stars and bodies that allowed the Watcher the use of opposable thumbs, taste buds, emotions.
“The student obeyed and brought the Watcher women, probably against their will. In time a little colony of these half-human, half-Watcher beings began to grow within the mountain cave.
“Well, eventually the other Watchers got nervous about not hearing from their brother, and they decided to check in on this corner of the world. When they saw what was happening they immediately reported it to the Creator. He was so outraged that he cleaved off part of the world and filled the divide with water. He banished the fallen Watcher to his cave and cut off his followers from the rest of the world. He then transformed them into ghouls, hideous things.
“From that night on the Creator said that this cliff we’re standing on would be the actual end of this world, and that mountain over there would be known as the Abject, the Hell where all the blasphemers were imprisoned. He vowed not to destroy this planet, not because he cared about humanity, but because he wished to inflict eternal punishment on the Abject.”
“That’s quite the fairytale,” Tad said.
Charlie chortled. “It’s just an old spook story, Tad, nothing to get nervous about. Now, who wants another drink?”
By then Earth’s End had begun slipping into the gloaming. The group laid out blankets upon the cold, puddle-laden rock. Wine bottles were uncorked, steak sandwiches and brie and apples were served and gobbled.
In the sky just beyond the needlelike pinnacle of the Abject, a crescent moon was visible, crowned by the shimmer of the first eager stars.
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE SHE’D RECEIVED DOUGLAS’S invitation, Petra had gone with Tad for a late lunch at an English-style pub on Hope Street. She had stopped the waitress immediately after Tad had ordered them two rye-and-gingers; their customary drink. As the waitress had been leaving their table, Petra had gently gripped the woman’s elbow and requested that the bartender hold the rye from hers.
With that, Tad had looked at her and he’d known. He’d known. For a long spell he’d merely stared at her, not saying anything. When he did finally speak, his choice of words (“We can correct this”) had motivated Petra to spring to her feet and hurl her drink in his face. It was the first time she’d ever done such a thing, the first time she’d even seen such a thing done, save for the movies.
She’d stormed out of the restaurant and into the bustling crowd on the sidewalk.
And all at once Petra had felt the world disintegrate. Providence had paled to an indistinct grey haze. Everything slowed to a crawl. The people that milled about her all sounded as though they were speaking behind glass.
Things stayed that way for some time. Somehow while in that cumulus state, Petra must have reconciled with Tad, must have considered what he’d had to say about the situation.
Somehow she must have consented to have the issue “corrected.”
The problem was fresh enough that the remedial action was but a day procedure. When it was over, Tad had come bearing white orchids. Petra had slept a lot and tried not to think about the fact that her long-standing desire to carve a niche for herself, to create someone who was like her in some way, had been eradicated.
The nightmares had returned almost immediately afterward, with unmatched relentlessness and ruthlessness. In this new batch, the stairs that Petra tried frantically to run down would dissolve like soaked sugar, and her father’s following cries were no longer in English (“N’gai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y’hah…”).
In these recent nightmares, Petra’s father found her.
Nightly she would feel herself being clutched, choked. But not by human hands.
HOW EFFECTIVE THE CHILDREN’S TELESCOPE WOULD BE at discerning constellations Petra had yet to learn, but she’d discovered that it did serve as a very effective spyglass for studying the mountain of forbidden things. The encroaching nightfall smudged a great many of the mountain’s finer details, but as she stood panning the telescopic lens up and around the Abject, Petra was able to see great cragged rocks that were bearded with sun-bleached weeds. Some of the mountain’s indentations held stagnant rainwater, as though they were libation-bearers. With its barrenness and its isolated locale, the Abject might as well have been an alien planet.
When she panned upward to discover the great cave entrance, Petra almost gasped. It was a granite hole that held the ugliest of blackness. She truly was terrible at measuring things, yet Petra still had the undeniable impression of the cave’s vastness. She could almost understand why people would decorate 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.
THE BLACKNESS LURCHED ACROSS THE MOON AT A PACE so tedious it was almost unbearable, or so it seemed to Petra. It was like watching a crab crossing a white desert. She and her three companions stood on Earth’s End, watching the umbra scab over the lunar light.
Petra 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, Petra 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 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, as a quick pan of the flashlight revealed, he was 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 noise 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.
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, 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 into amoebalike shapes 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 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 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 it been he 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.
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, eclipsing the gibbous moon 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 until he looked down and discovered that the hideous thing from within the rock had stretched one of its wings across the water, forging a bridge between its Outer realm and the world of men. There were other figures perched on various ridges of the Abject, human in size if not altogether in shape; just as the Abject itself had been mountainous in scope, but not in composition.
Petra, looking feral, black-stained, yet regal in her madness, trod upon the feathery arch. Most of her body looked positively ossified, save for the belly, which was swollen with fledgling life.
She held something in her spindly, filthy arms.
Something that shifted and mewled.
Something that she freed.
Something that came lurching at a great speed toward Earth’s End.
Tad saw the thing pushing itself along on unnumbered flabby claws. Its eyes were like the suckers on a deep sea creature’s tentacle. Its mouth was nothing but tongue.
Tad prayed he’d have time enough to fire once.