At Fear's Altar by Richard Gavin

Author:Richard Gavin [Gavin, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Horror, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9781614980261
Google: ol7vMgEACAAJ
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2012-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

The next day I found myself wondering about the woman a great deal. When had her husband died? Had she raised her children singlehandedly? Where were her kids now? Wouldn’t she be better off in a smaller, more manageable abode? Because I knew none of the answers, I invented my own theories, all of which painted Katrina in a tragic light. I began to pity her, and pity is dangerous. Compassion, I suppose, is a good thing, because you empathise with another person and maybe want to help give them a leg up. But when you pity someone, you envision them as something less than human.

After work that day I wandered down the “the Dregs,” which was a massive iron bin holding hundreds of magazines that had been rejected from shipments for various reasons. Employees could take their pick for free. It was a company perk. Believe me, there weren’t many. I fished out some titles I thought a woman Katrina’s age might enjoy: Time, Ellery Queen, Home & Hearth. I toyed with giving her a copy of Lawn & Garden Care but feared she might not appreciate the joke.

After my bus ride, I made my way to her house.

I flicked up her mailbox lid, exposing several weeks’ accumulation of fliers and bills that was bulging up from the box.

“Well, hello!” called the familiar voice from beyond the screen door. “What a nice surprise! Come in, come in.”

She flung the screen door wide, her expression one of elation. I stepped into the old woman’s home. Mrs. Claxton shut the inner door, sealing out the fresh afternoon breeze from her must-choked house.

“I thought you might like these,” I said, holding up the fan of periodicals.

“Oh my!” She took them and tossed them atop of a cluttered boot rack without even glancing at the titles. “Let’s go into the living room.”

Excluding vermin, I failed to see how anything could actually live in the room my hostess led me into. Whatever furnishings the room did offer were interred beneath hills of dirty laundry, half-emptied drinking glasses now fuzzy with dust, broken and grimy-looking bric-a-brac. I glimpsed one of the skewed towers of newspapers that flanked the archway. The yellowed headline announced the passing of an actor who’d died several years before I was born.

“Looks like you already have a lot of reading material,” I said.

“You can never have too many things to read,” was her retort. “One day I’ll find the time to read them, but I always find myself drawn to the same books over and over again.” She gestured toward the fireplace mantle, the only portion of the living room that was not submerged in chaos. “These ones here are my favourites.”

Though I was too far away to read the spines, I could see a gold-leaf cross glinting on one of them. I swallowed hard.

“Are you a religious man?” she asked. I set my teeth against the anxiety that her question stoked inside me. Considering that even hollow forms of chitchat

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