The Altar. James Arthur Anderson
room. They’d laughed at the pretentiousness of rich people.
“When we get a place of our own, we’ll name the rooms, too,” Vickie had said.
“What if we only have two rooms?”
“We’ll still name them. They’d be our rooms, right?”
The new house wasn’t a mansion by any stretch of the imagination, but it did have more than two rooms. And Vickie had promised him an office of his own, designed any way he wanted. She had delivered on her promise.
He sat back in his luxurious office chair—an elegant nut-brown leather—and looked at the result. With a simple natural look, including small plants, nature prints, and the Thoreau collage, the room had Walden Pond written all over it. Erik had done most of his work in tiny apartments on a kitchen table. Now, for the first time, he really felt at home.
As happy as he was with the new place, though, he couldn’t stop thinking about the woods behind the house, and Johnny Dovecrest’s visit. Pastor Mark hadn’t done much to reassure him, either. He hadn’t realized the woods were so deep. The first investment he’d make would be a good, sturdy fence to enclose the backyard.
-4-
The trees towered over Todd, reminding him of the time they’d gone to a museum in New York that had an old stone building right inside the place. The old building hadn’t had walls, just these giant stone things that looked like tree trunks without any branches. Like that building, these trees formed a sort of roof over his head, and he could hear the chirping of thousands of birds that were settling down for the night. Somewhere an owl hooted and was answered by the angry caw of a crow. The damp air attracted swarms of mosquitoes, which he absently slapped away from his face. One lighted on his arm, where he smashed it onto a bloody smear.
He walked slowly, occasionally stumbling over a blueberry bush, or being picked by thorns, until he came to a narrow path which, while not overgrown, looked as if it hadn’t been used in some time. He glanced back at the house and saw the light shining from Dad’s room like a beacon from a lighthouse. Finding his way back would be no sweat, no sweat at all. He clutched his geologist’s hammer tightly and moved on.
He remembered a movie he’d seen in first grade about Daniel Boone, and he imagined he was a great explorer as he pushed forward along the path, blazing new trails into the wilderness. The hammer was a tomahawk. His sneakers were moccasins and his Boston Red Sox hat became a coonskin cap as he turned it backwards on his head.
The path narrowed as it edged deeper into the woods, but he hardly noticed. And when the trail ended altogether, he still didn’t notice, so intent was he on his role as a pioneer.
The silent voice drew him on, promising discovery just ahead, perhaps just beyond the next tree. The voice in his mind grew stronger as he moved deeper into the forest, and his excitement increased with the intensity of the voice.
Although the voice didn’t speak in words, it uttered the poetry of a language understandable to the mind of an adventure-seeking boy. Todd eagerly listened and heard.
He came to an abrupt halt as the forest unexpectedly broke into a circular clearing of neatly cropped grass. The last rays of the setting sun bathed the clearing in sinister shadows that seemed to take on strange shapes as the light flickered through the surrounding trees.
But it wasn’t the clearing that stopped Todd in his tracks. It was the huge rectangular black slab sitting exactly in the center of the circle. It was the same stone Todd had seen in his dream—the very same stone where he’d seen Dovecrest’s tortured body.
His breath rushed from his lungs like a popped balloon as he stood paralyzed, unable to do anything except stare at the terrible rock and wonder if it were real, or still a left-over from last night’s dream.
The rock was large enough to make a bed for a tall man, and stood shoulder-high to Todd. Blacker than any rock he had even seen, it reminded him of the coal-dark eyes of Dovecrest, eyes that looked as if they knew all of his innermost thoughts and secrets. He wondered if the blackness were real, or a trick of the shadows.
Then the voice in his mind grew stronger; the rock itself seemed to call him. Without even realizing that he was moving, Todd found himself crossing the open field, drawing closer to the slab. The birds had stopped their chatter and even the mosquitoes had disappeared, though Todd noticed none of this as he fixated on the huge rock. The air took on a sudden chill as his feet carried him forward with a power of his own.
He stopped at the base of the slab. His heart pounded madly and he had broken out in a cold sweat. Swallowing hard, he felt his body trembling with fear as he slowly turned away to look back at where he’d come from, hoping to see his house back through the trees.
The beacon from his father’s study had long since been consumed by the trees, and the path had disappeared also, now hidden in the darkness.
Vaguely, he realized he was lost and it had become dark. When he turned to look at the huge rock, though, he instinctively knew that being lost in the woods was the least of his troubles. As much as he wanted to run, needed to run, his feet remained glued to the ground, frozen in place by fear and some unknown, unseen, and unnatural power.
The slab was shiny and polished smoother than Grandma’s dining room table. A groove resembling a rain gutter ran around the outer edge. Tentatively, Todd reached his hand out and rested it on the polished surface. It felt cold to the touch, colder than an ice pop right out of the freezer. He was overwhelmed with a feeling of intense loneliness, as if he were the only person left in the entire world. Then, for no apparent reason, the slab began to warm up. His fingers tingled and he jerked them away.
The image of Dovecrest again flooded his mind and last night’s vision returned as he stared at this slab’s nightmare surface. This time, though, he didn’t see a vision of Dovecrest, but of a teenage girl lying upon the smooth, polished stone—a blonde girl. He flushed in embarrassment as he realized that she was naked, and she began to whimper softly as the moon poked its face over the tops of the trees.
Todd watched in fascination and terror as a shadowy figure appeared beside the girl and raised its arms high in the air. The moonlight glinted off a shiny steel surface as a knife blade hovered over the girl’s body for just an instant before plunging down in a sweeping arc of silver death.
The girl screamed once and a fountain of blood spewed from her chest and flowed out and over the slab to fill the grooves on its edge.
Todd clamped his eyes shut. His knees buckled and he fell forward to sprawl against the stone. Slowly he opened his eyes again, willing the dream to be gone.
The vision evaporated in an instant and only the slab was left. This new dream, a daydream, had been the product of his imagination after all.
Yet somehow he sensed that it was more—perhaps a history of what was, or a taste of what was to be.
He suddenly felt sick and the contents of his stomach did a back flip. He looked at the slab with hatred as he choked back the bile.
Without fully realizing what he was doing or why, he swung his geologist’s hammer over his head and brought it down with all the force he could muster. A loud clang echoed through the clearing as the hammer struck the rock; the shock of the impact vibrated up Todd’s arm and into his shoulder as the hammer bounced back like a rubber ball hitting the street.
Todd had slammed his eyes shut with the effort of the blow. When he opened them again he stared at the rock for a full ten seconds before he began to scream. It took him that long to fully comprehend the vision before him.
The very stone itself was trickling blood from a tiny chip he had made on its otherwise perfectly smooth surface.
-5-
Johnny Dovecrest was dicing onions for a stew when he heard the scream coming from deep within the woods. He paused, his knife poised in mid-air, and listened intently. But there was only silence now.
He put the knife down, walked to the window and looked into the blackness of the forest. His