At Fear's Altar by Richard Gavin Page B

eventually pried the Unnamed from his perch, and even then only for a few hours. In fact, his life was swiftly whittled down to little beyond the stoic act of perching before the attic window. Shiftless his body may have been, but the Unnamed’s mind swelled like a river, deluging him, breaking the levees of the logic he’d spent his years on Earth accumulating. The Unnamed ultimately found himself existing with neither ration nor taboo, his life now a prolonged act of coaxing the monsters within himself to impress themselves upon the contours of his face. The Unnamed would peel his lips back to reveal the grey teeth of his rictus, would lean away from the tallow’s light so that his head became a map of shadows. On the chillier nights the Unnamed would shift his focus to the frost that knitted across his glass replica, webbing his cheeks with skeins of ice.
    All life, it became apparent to the Unnamed, was simply a matter of perspective, of choosing whether one wishes to be the seer or the thing seen.
    Throughout the afternoon after he rose, the Unnamed was invariably the seer. He would shift his pine stool just enough to obscure himself from view and would then spend the solar hours watching as the fauna scurried from their hidden dens, as the elements took their toll on the headstones. On rare occasions humans would enter the churchyard, and whenever they did they would inevitably peer uneasily over the shoulders at the house of the Unnamed, as if sensing his obscured presence.
    Night brought an altogether different perspective. In the gloaming, when his reflection began to darken and deepen its impression on the pane, the Unnamed would become the thing seen . The shape in the glass would scrutinize him , study him and inevitably cause his blood to congeal.
    But familiarity is the mother of discontentment, and after months of scanning and being scanned the Unnamed began to feel his passion for this practice ebbing.
    As if in response to this ennui, his double dilated their exchange to an unprecedented horizon.
    It was a temperate July eve. The Unnamed was striving to look at his reflection without blinking. He saw, with undeniable clarity, the face in the glass slowly shut its eyes.
    The Unnamed’s jaw dropped but saw no evidence of this in his reflection. Instead the semi-transparent face grinned at him.
    A storm of actions: the backward reeling off a toppling stool, a flight down crooked unswept stairs, an antelope-quick run from the flung front door and into the deep starlit woods without so much as a backward glance.
    The Unnamed lingered at the creek’s edge until long after sunrise, and even with the light dappling the vibrant flora around him the Unnamed’s homebound hike was weighted with great reluctance, with the horror of what he might find there.
    The doorframe still loomed open from his manic escape. The Unnamed crossed the burying ground with his eyes fixed upon the weathered, cracking headstones, unable even to consider looking up at the attic window.
    He frittered the day away in the lower level of his cottage, cleaning and cooking and, foolishly, praying that the night would not return.
    Return it did, but the Unnamed attempted to bleed it of its powers by refusing to venture up to the attic. He tugged the drape across the small window of his kitchen, lit a fresh candle, and settled into his rocker for the night. He vowed that he would return to the attic in the morning and close the shutters for the last time, perhaps even smash the glass from the frame.
    ‘I shall change my ways,’ the Unnamed thought, ‘on the morrow, on the morrow .   .   .’
    Though he did not realize he had drifted off, a strange noise caused the Unnamed to start up in his chair. It was dark, a far reach till morning. He could hear it, shrill and grating. The Unnamed rose and listened, and although he was certain that the sound was coming from the attic, he resisted and instead went outside to search for a stray animal