At Fear's Altar by Richard Gavin

repelled so many chimed with this man. He felt a sense of Place. It was a peculiar sensation, one that made his blood sing.
    Finding a niche for himself at last—despite the fact that this place was populated only with remains and with trees whose limbs bend like a Pharaoh’s crook—the man cloisters himself there.
    And before the snows could silt him in under their pallor-pale drifts, the man labours long and hard to fashion for himself a house; a humble one, to be sure, but one whose wooden walls met firm and true. He laboured diligently as a farmhand until he’d earned enough to purchase window glass for his home. And in time the house was ready.
    Within there was a rocker and bed and a womb of rocks and mortar where the man could cook and be warmed.
    His fortress! It stood near a lonely footpath; the sole ligature between his beloved burial ground and the town that bustled and swelled with each passing day on the sunnier side of Meadow Hill.
    At the house’s humble summit was an attic with roof beams that stabbed together at queer angles. It was here, in this elevated cloister, that the man spent most of his time, squatting in the dark, listening to the low cold winds squeezing the frame of his home, making it creak like old bones.
    Dust piled and cobwebs plumped and spread across the rafters and the beams, until the attic ceiling became suggestive of a ghostly chandelier; arms of tender webbing fanning out to flaunt its gems of old wooden splinters, of the long-lifeless insects that had become ensnared in its tangles, of the ash the man would sometimes sprinkle from his pipe onto the filth like a dull reeking pollen.
    All through the fierce and lingering winter the man enjoyed his invisibility from the world. His meals were meagre, often consisting of a handful of the mushrooms he had picked in the woods and dried the previous autumn, or some heated chestnuts of which he had deprived Arkham’s squirrels. This rodent’s fare was, as far as the man was concerned, wholly apt.
    ‘Yes,’ he would think to himself as he munched and rocked back and forth in his temple of disuse and mad-angled wood, ‘yes, this is good. This is all very fine indeed.’
    And so it was. In fact, his solitude was so complete that the simple act of recalling his Christian name eventually became something of a chore. This, as were all his other symptoms of regression into the lunar mind, was immediately shaped into an amusing pastime. The man would rechristen himself with the most outlandish names imaginable, tittering like a schoolboy all the while. Sometime later, how long he could not say, the man decided that he would be known in his house simply as the Unnamed. Having all but disappeared from the world of men—a blessing for which the Unnamed was overwhelmed with gratitude—this was a fine choice.
    It was while he was dozing off during his first night as a wilfully identityless entity that the Unnamed came to realize that he was no longer alone.
    He knew by the way his skin suddenly shrivelled cold and tight around his bones, by the manner in which flowers of frozen pins instantly blossomed along the garden of his spine.
    Something else was up there in the darkness with him.
    The hand of the Unnamed scrabbled about the floor in a blind search for his tinderbox. His breathing was thin and manic. He called out “Who is there?” but stillness was the only reply.
    Even after the stump of the tallow candle was lighted and the Unnamed lunged it forward to gleam the shadows clean off the attic’s narrow corners, no trace of the invader could be found .   .   . yet its presence remained palpable. The Unnamed could feel it creeping past him like a thin draft of winter air leaking through a fissure, graceful as a feline with glass paws.
    The Unnamed waited, but the presence refused to fade. He pictured it crouched in the attic’s high peak, at the nexus where all the strange angles converged into a singularity. Perhaps it was there,