A Dirge for the Temporal

by Darren Speegle

  “We got a doctor,” the man nearest me said. “You look like you need one.”

  So goddamn routine.

  A low rumbling sound began. I fantasized for a moment that maybe it was an escort coming out to meet us, then I watched the degenerating shades of the faces around me: curiosity to puzzlement to consternation to awe. The rumble grew into a tremor, rattling the tail gate, the cans, bone. The driver braked hard and the truck skidded sideways, throwing bodies against me as the rear passenger wheel suddenly dropped and the frame struck ground. Curses abounded but were swallowed by the noise of the earthquake, itself a curse, a curse upon the Earth. Though the truck had come to a dead halt, it did not stop moving because it was now being carried by the lip of the opening rupture. My eyes and mouth must have opened with it as I stared over the side of the truck at the unholy separation in the desert floor and the cords of tubular matter shot up like so many jellyfish tentacles searching for prey.

  While these tentacles bore every resemblance to the things that protruded from the heads of the creatures, they came independently, feelers and ropes. One latched onto the side of the bed, followed by a second, then yet another. There appeared to be no threat of their tipping the truck as they burst easily beneath the butts of the rifles. I grabbed hold of one, steeling my nerves against its coolness as I wrapped it around my wrist, heaving upward. The problem with trying to detach it from its source was that the cord’s slack was as incalculable as the depth of the fissure. Nonetheless, I felt resistance as the cord drew half-taut with a quivering spray of wet foulness. It was elastic as I kept winding and pulling, searching for the snapping point.

  I felt its pulse in my palm and forearm, my own heartbeat threatening to join it. The line grew thinner and thinner as I was too committed now to unreel it and leap out of the truck like everyone else. The crack seemed to have opened as far as it was going to and still I concentrated on this lifeline from the pit of fucking Hades. “Hang tight!” came a voice from my right, outside the truck, then the blade of a hunting knife appeared. Another hand, fine-fingered and familiar, reached out of the darkness to grasp the wrist of the knife holder. The silvery arch of the blade caught the moonlight as the knife, followed by its wielder, fell into the chasm.

  The rope shuddered as the hand reached up to seize my throat. Christ Jesus and the Cross as the hollowed-out face of its owner appeared, tubes dancing around a visage I recognized even in its ragged fleshlessness, only now more so because of the totally unobstructed view of her black soul. Though she’d no mouth, I could have sworn I heard her laughing as her tubes found my head and she swept up like the maw of oblivion to devour me.

  A shot sounded in my ears. The tubes withdrew wetly. Jagged’s face was the same pit it had always been as it hovered, knowing me. Then finally the cord snapped and down she went in a blaze of black nothingness, and maybe just maybe, as determined bodies managed to get the truck pushed up over the rim, I was going to get to see the other side of goddamn New Mexico.

  Making Sense

  Until he looked out the window that morning, Craig had almost decided to skip riding up to the spot where he had seen the thing. His ambivalence had calmed as he sat over coffee and nothingness, the wisdom of waiting a day or two filling the gulches left by last night’s brutal dreams. But then he went to the kitchen and opened the roller blind to the bright March day. He found the faces out in full expression. Which was to say, possessing none at all.

  Props.

  Frau Schneider across the street looked back at him as she swept the already perfectly clean sidewalk in front of her house. She stood about four and a half feet tall, but her cast was no warmer for her diminutive stature. In fact it seemed the diametric opposite—if stoicism knows degrees. Craig waved, and she nodded in reply. The lines of her face never changed.

  While Craig washed his mug and the coffee pot, Herr Friderich appeared, walking over from his house next door to visit with Frau Schneider. They spoke a few words, then in unison turned to look at Craig in his kitchen window. The stares cooled him more than they used to, even the dishwater losing heat around his hands. Someone went by on a scooter, older gentleman quintessential in his cap and patterned knee-high socks, looking for nowhere.

  Props. Reminders.

  Craig took his morning valium and put on his sweats and jacket and sunglasses. He stuffed two beers in a backpack otherwise empty, fetched his bike from the garage. The landlord and lady met him on the drive, their own aspects red with the exertion of being aspects. Their eyes and mouths told tales in spite of the absence that made their faces, like everyone else’s, its home. How long will you stay now that she’s gone, Craig?

  The gears of his bike knew him better than his neighbors did, responding in quiet conformity as he began the ascent out of the village. The day a cloudless and mild precursor to spring, folk were buzzing about, finding excuses. Craig might have understood them better if they had whispered or made covert gestures. Instead they merely stared, as they had always done.

  Even when he passed the place where it had happened, their expressions remained blankly inquisitive, forever uninspired.

  Props. Reminders. Butchers.

  He couldn’t look there, by the curb, he couldn’t bear to see the stain that had settled around the drain. Drain…cutting himself that morning when she surprised him from behind, causing his razor to slip off track. Making love on the vanity, the mirror steaming mysteriously, as if it knew what was coming.

  At the right where the Grillhütte sign stood, Craig turned, passing the last of the houses and entering the forest. Through the Wald for two kilometers to the plateau and its pastures and interval crop fields. Wooden fences tilted from winter winds. Animal scents, piss, hay, faint taste of the shit fertilizer the farmers used to prepare the ground for the wheat and barley.

  And at last, the bench overlooking the broad expanse of grass. This was the spot where Craig had been coming to make sense of things for three years. Used to come to make sense of things. For now it had become the spot where he had seen the alien thing. How Belinda would have marveled at it. She had sucked up her husband’s tales of the dark and strange with a thirst that sustained him. For her, his fiction had been a parallel future, a thing beyond time, space, and her once-sexy international job.

  Craig leaned his bike against the birch tree and sat on the bench. Around him songbirds heralded the rebirth season as he gazed out at that particular spot where he had watched the thing awaken on two occasions. Today was Friday of the week owned by this phenomenon, but it didn’t matter what day it was anymore. The days were like the props’ countenances, blurring into a canvas on which nothing would ever be painted.

  A gentle disturbance out in the middle of the sun-drenched pasture marked the rousing of the thing. Dense red fog poured from the spot, filling an invisible, amorphous balloon which pulsed like the heart muscle in the breast. Craig found one of his beers, uncapped it, never taking his eyes off the trespasser in this place where he came to make sense of things. The mass pulsed and he drank his beer, letting the alcohol fall in drops from his eyes. He made sense of no thing.

  Something was different today. The mass grew larger, deeper in color, and began to move in his direction. The fog took on a more gelatinous texture. The plateau, fields and forest alike, fell silent. The songbirds fell silent. Craig’s heartbeat stretched out to join that of the body coming towards him, and the two fell into one, echoing in Craig’s ears like Belinda united with him in passion. The drain in the road filled his eyes, the blood encircling it without dropping into the black abyss. And Belinda…reflected in skin, in faces made of skin and nothing more.

  As the mass collected before him, he recognized features, fragments from his dreams, hints of a face gone reminiscently expressionless and inanimate as it stared blindly at Craig from the coffin. I can
’t see you, my husband. No one can see anyone. Everyone has been dead a long, long time. Kiss me where I lie and perhaps I will sleep.

  Tendrils of vapor matter reached around Craig, gathering him in. He perceived her through his senses, essence there for an instant then lost among the odors of the farms and fields. But the gesture lived on, on his lips. A kiss containing the brightness and majesty of the steel blade he had brought with him lest the alien thing prove malevolent. Lest he prove so deserving. He had thought about it many times, doctor’s valium fix or no.

  His eyes opened. He was at the place where he came to make sense of it all, and he was beating like a drum. He studied his moment awhile as he put the second beer to use, tapping the cold hard metal against the glass, joining the rhythm, finding focus after long days and nights. Would they know him down in the village, so revived? He hoped so. He hoped for any spark of precognition.

  At the first house no one answered, though a child watched from the yard behind the structure. The second house opened to Craig, singing with memory as the steely music formed dark pools in which to view past and future with equal nonchalance. At the third house, they inhaled because they recognized his aspect as their own. On Hauptstrasse they came out by twos and threes to see what was taking place. Belinda might as well have still lain there, fresh from the skid on the ice, the bike sucked into the nearby chestnut tree, her body broken by the curb.

  Craig found the exact spot in the road and, dripping blade tucked behind his wrist, beckoned them to come, knowing their fascination for oblivion, for watching blood leak away while no one lifted a hand to help. Recalling perfectly how they stood like stage set pieces as he crested the hill, minutes behind his wife, wholly unprepared for what he was about to discover.

  Props.

  Reminders.

  Butchers.

  Ghosts.

  Triangle

  So I was there and she was there and all three of us were there. So what.

  So what? So it was my birthday and she had a gun pointed directly at Tiny’s face, that’s what.

  Tiny, meantime, looked like he was about to shit his pants. There was no one else in the joint, thank God. Tiny being the bartender himself made matters a little less complicated. No witnesses, that way. Witnesses to what? That’s what I was wonderin’. I mean, Christ, I lived with Debbie. Had she mentioned to me she was going to pull a gun on poor Tiny? Hell, I’d no idea she even had her piece with her.

  So there’s the gun in Tiny’s face, and Tiny…well, he’s looking at me like I know somethin’ about somethin’. I can only shrug at him and wonder when Debbie’s going to cool it so’s I can have a damn beer. But Debbie, it seems, ain’t gonna cool it.

  “You are a mother prick, you know it, Tiny? And I’m a fucking dupe for lettin’ it go on.”

  A fuckin’ dupe, she says. Not just any dupe but a fuckin’ one. I’m really troubled now because the only time Debbie ever uses that word is when she’s especially steamed.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Deb.”

  “Don’t call me Deb, Tiny,” she says, sticking the nose of the revolver in his nostril.

  “What do you want from me?” he squeals. Like he ain’t no bigger than his title. Which he damned sure is—else his ass would have been kicked all over the joint fifty times and countin’ by now.

  “You know what I want.”

  “I don’t, Debbie. I truly don’t!”

  “You, you big gorilla. It’s you I want. Why do you think I moved in with this bum in the first place? Was to get to you, of course.”

  “Huh?” I’m not sure which one of us said it, Tiny or me. I knew this, though: absorbin’ it was like absorbin’ a punch in the ear, the ‘verberations rollin’ like a drum through me.

  “Why, you ask, do I need a piece to make that point,” she says to him matter-o’-factish, muzzle still in his nostril.

  His big alarmed eyes are now fixed on yours truly. “Wh-why, Debbie?” he stammers.

  “How else,” she says kinda sexy-like, bending real close, “was I gonna get your attention?” The last word was a breath. Hot, I imagined.

  Oh, but I don’t know where I got the juice to do what I did next. I’ve been in some situations, some pretty damn hardcore situations, too, but I ain’t never had a lady drop one on me like that. Not when I’ve been romancin’ her and treatin’ her right and, yeah, I ain’t ashamed to admit it—thinkin’ about marrying her. That’s the fat and skinny of it right there. I loved the girl.

  I pounced on her like a cat on a rat, five words tumblin’ through my head. I’m gonna kill the bitch. I’m gonna kill the bitch! I’m gonna kill you, bitch! As I seized her throat in one hand, I grabbed at the gun with the other. It went off with a muffle more’n a bang, partly ‘cause Tiny’s head suppressed the noise, partly ’cause I was in another zone, the killing zone, and I wasn’t hearin’ much o’ nothin’ beyond those five words inside my skull. I think I must o’ premonitioned the shot goin’ off ‘cause at that very instant my head jerked up, just in time to see Tiny’s marbles go sprayin’ across the bottles and the mirror behind the bar.

  Suddenly people were rushin’ into the room, from the back, from the bathrooms, from everywhere, it seemed, and all at once. A single word filled the air, but I was so consumed by the blood rage now, I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d wanted to. Clutching her head in both my hands, I bounced it off the cushioned edge of the bar. Dazed, she watched me lift the gun, level it, and fire.

  She dropped like a weight. Behind the spot where she’d stood, balloons floated, mouths hung open, the word still lingered on the blood-scented air…

  Surprise!

  The Smell of Sex

  As India, she knew her body. She’d lived without anyone but Angela, the other woman inhabiting her body, for two decades now, and she had memorized its every blemish, its every suggestion. She knew how she appeared to men, how she affected their senses: she had the manner, the bearing and the speech of a woman skirting forty, but the softness of skin and absence of wrinkles of a girl of seventeen. She was naturally dark with hair that fell down her back in waves and eyes that spoke of exotic locales. She had taste, an elegance of dress and movement that both suited and was at odds with the manufactured ambiance of the piano bars where she spent her evenings. She possessed the sumptuousness of night, and no man, however unworldly, would ever have mistaken her for a day creature. She smelled of smoke—Angela hated it—and beneath the smoke, a hint of the perfume that Angela sold for a living.

  And under the perfume, apparently, sex.

  “Did you say…?” She stared at the man who had taken the stool beside hers, knowing she had heard him right, and that she was learning something new about herself—through the man, as always. Other than the barkeep, who read a newspaper by the impotent light intended to be synonymous with romance, and the pianist, whose icicle melody aspired to the same, they were alone. She had selected the stool at the far end of the bar, in relation to the hotel lobby, so she could be close to the mystery-lending darkness of the corner.

  “Sex,” he smiled, doing it again, taking in her aroma as if she were a wine. “You smell faintly of sex.”

  If she had been Angela, she would have tossed her drink in his face. But then Angela wouldn’t have been here, and Angela’s drink of choice had ice cream in it, which didn’t toss well.

  “You have a lot of nerve.”

  “Don’t pretend to be offended,” he said. His voice was deep, with a soothing, intoning quality like a hypnotist’s. His eyes were deeper yet, almost black, as he openly searched hers. The shadow of a beard accentuated a model’s jaw line. His nose, rather beautiful itself, contributed to a predatory look. The flare of his nostrils told him hungry. Now.

 
She sipped her drink, unaroused, unimpressed. It was her game, India’s game.

  “Without lowering your eyes,” he said, “tell me what I’m wearing.”

  “Black,” she said. “You’re always wearing black. Black suit, black leather jacket, black boots, black wingtips…what difference does it make?”

  “I can tell you what you’re wearing.” He firmly held her gaze.

  “Is that what you tell the girls you find in the phone book late at night?”

  “Skin,” he said, undeterred. “And the merest layer of sweat.”

  He knew. He knew what India had been doing before she emerged from her room tonight. It wasn’t a line. He genuinely smelled it on her. She smelled his powers of perception, his acute senses, on him. He was starting to smell good.

  It was still India’s game, and she let him know it. “I carry a toy or two in my bags. It gets lonely on the road. That bitch I share a bed with is no good. I travel with Angela. She hasn’t had sex since the day her husband walked out on her twenty years ago.”

  “Why did he walk out on her?” he said.

  “She was screaming at me in the mirror. He dubbed her irremediably crazy. It was the last time she ever spoke to me. I don’t think she knows I exist anymore.”

  “A woman you share a bed with?”

  “Yes, well, I have night wings.”

  “Night wings,” he echoed admiringly. "I’ve a pair of those myself. My name is Anton.”