A Dirge for the Temporal

A Dirge

for the Temporal

Darren

Speegle

A Dirge for the Temporal Copyright © 2004

by Darren Speegle

Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press

Hyattsville, MD

First printing 2004

Cover image: Mike Bohatch www.eyesofchaos.com

Book design: Jennifer C. Barnes

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-9745031-3-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004093337

www.rawdogscreaming.com

For my brothers

Josh and Joe

Acknowledgments

September first published in
Fortean Bureau
, Sep 2002

Indulgence first published in
The Dream People
, Apr 2002

The Whole Circus first published in
Here and Now
, Aug 2003

Illusions of Amber first published in
Underworlds
, Apr 2004

Merging Tableaux first published in
Horrorfind
, Mar 2004

The Crookedness of Being first published in
3AM Magazine
, Oct 2001

Triangle first published in
Plots with Guns
, Mar 2002

A Dirge for the Temporal first published in
Rogue Worlds
, Oct 2002

Eyes of Hazel, Kiss the Earth first published in
Darkness Rising 6
, Jun 2003

The Ego Game first published in
Antipodean SF
, Mar 2003

The Day It Rained Apricots first published in
EOTU
, Oct 2001

Papa Bo’s Big-Ass Barbecue first published in
Of Flesh and Hunger
, Jun 2003

Junkyard Fetish first published in
Bloodfetish
, May 2002

Clockwork first published in
The Dream People
, Feb 2002

On the Job first published in
Horrorfind
, Dec 2002

Along the Footpath to Oblivion first published in
Underworlds
, Dec 2002

Hush Hush Little Kitty first published in
Redsine
, Jul 2002

A Fixture on River Street first published in
Aoife's Kiss
, Sep 2002

Mousse first published in
Horrorfind
, Jul 2002

Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall first published in
The Dream People
, Aug 2002

The Curse of Lianderin first published
Futures
, Aug 2001

Dandelion Girl first published in
Chiaroscuro
, Apr 2001

rhyme or reason, Dear God first published in
5_Trope
, Aug 2001

The Lunatic Mystique

I
t was fitting that her eyes were the feature he came into contact with first. Physically, those forever changing pools were the most disconcerting thing about her. Even in that pre-introductory glimpse, as her face slipped between the vertical windows that teased him with the reality of the world, he saw twin fans of color unfold within them. She had been looking in at him, in advance of drumming her fingers on the pane, her eyes magnified in the secret glass. Then he was opening the door, and those opalescent vessels became a faintest watery blue, the pupil a pinpoint tunnel that sucked his soul like thread through a button hole.

  “Yes?” It was the most clever thing he could come up with, in the face of her magnificence.

  Her beauty, savage as it happened to be, was secondary to her eyes, falling from them like radiance from diamonds; yet not unnoticed as its elegant curves flooded his senses. The face alone was worthy of wow, darkly exotic setting for her prize jewels. Still, the jewels themselves…

  “Good morning, Mr. Avian. My name is Cocoa. I am originally from South America. Because I love your daily column so ferociously, I’ve come to collect you from yourself. It is time you recognized Danny Avian as the sole player in a boxed-in game.”

  For all his newspaper eloquence, he could produce nothing better than: “Huh?”

  “I’ve been reading your column for years, Mr. Avian. Your insights and observations demonstrate a keen understanding of our universe, but beneath your bright truths fester loneliness and isolation. I have a sense for such things. And having fallen under the spell of your
poetry
, I feel it is my obligation to help you.”

  “I’m sorry but is this one of those celebrity worship things? Because I simply don’t have any room for that kind of nonsense…”

  “No, I sense there is very little free space in your box,” she said. “Look at me. Do I look like a celebrity worshiper?”

  It was an opportunity to more fully gather in her whole delicious form, but he continued to drink only from the wells of her eyes, which now had grown silvery with the quality of a ghostly mirror.

  “You look like a test,” he said. “Did Vanguard send you? He knows
better than to distract me. It may seem like I simply ramble off my poetry
, as you’ve referred to it, but a lot of time and concentration goes into it.”

  “You are an exciting man, Danny Avian. May I come in while you pack?”

  “Pack?”

  “A few days’ worth will do.”

  “Well, that answers whether or not Vanguard sent you. There’s no way the paper would
offer
me a vacation, even though I haven’t had one in three years.”

  “It’s time you did…Danny. May I…?”

  He wasn’t sure whether she meant come in or call him Danny, so he merely nodded a hopeless head. He wasn’t feeling well right now…about any of this. People just didn’t come by. And when they intended to, they warned him well in advance. So maybe Danny did live in a box, but it was his box.

  “Can I offer you something?” he said, closing the door behind her.

  “May I see your hand?”

  She hovered inside the door, by the mahogany rack on which hung a single coat and a single hat. She didn’t wear a coat herself, though it was March, and her hair was in a high, luxuriant knot, exposing her elegant neck. Maybe these were symptoms, in the way her name was a symptom, of that tropical mystique of hers. He noticed the caramel delicacy of her hands as she took his.

  It was the first touch. His nerves wailed as he managed to say, “Don’t tell me you read palms.”

  She caressed his thumb, as though for imperfections. “No. I am not as obvious as my name.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply.”

  She released his hand. “Better, I think, that you cease with the apologies
and the self-consciousness and all that other stuff that comes out of being stuck in your boxed-in game. Be the poet, not the person who is the poet. Simplify things. It’s not as though you invented the poet. Talk
to me as you would talk to the blank word processor screen. Let me discover
on my own what’s beneath.”

  He looked at her. Cocoa’s eyes, as they returned the stare, were clear—like truth. Beside him, his discarded hand was naked, impotent.

  “I find you…intriguing company,” he said, discovering her advice in his words, though he hadn’t consciously applied it.

  “Then pack.”

  “For what type of climate? Will there be a computer? May I submit my column from there?”

  “Whatever you wish on all counts. Just leave the box behind.”

  “You make conditions?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Your willingness to come means you’re abandoning the box.”

  This made him wonder as to her layers. Nonetheless, he did his wondering as he packed. Manipulator, madwoman or messiah, she moved him.
And that was enough for a graying columnist with fading intellectual dreams.

  She had followed him back, and stood in the doorway to his bedroom as he threw casual articles into a casual bag. “In your column you said something once, something that deserved a Pulitzer, as far as I’m concerned. ‘Life grows without mystery into worms.’ It stinks of cynicism but delights the senses with its accuracy.”

  “Are you really here?”

  She was. He wondered whether to toss his passport into the bag. Did, just because.

~

  If Avian was surprised to find that their transportation matched the standard for the semi-rural setting where he made his abode, he was even more surprised to find a man behind the wheel of the old rusty pickup. A four-fingered hand came off the vinyl to wave as he walked down the footpath to the drive. Avian couldn’t help but notice that the hand still holding the wheel also lacked a thumb.

  “Abe is the Gatherer,” Cocoa introduced him. “Abe, this is Danny.”

  “Gatherer?” Danny said as he accepted the other’s hand through the open window. The experience of the nubble was surreal.

  “It is my calling,” the man said. And didn’t expound.

  Cocoa tossed Danny’s bag in the bed, then hopped in the cab, scooting
over to the middle. As Danny got in Abe started up the truck, the four fingers
of his right hand dropping the shifter into gear.

  “So do we know where we’re going?” Danny asked.

  “‘There is a road,’” she said, looking at him through steely gray orbs. As nonchalant a statement as it was, he recognized immediately that she was quoting him. “‘One that winds all the way to the end of the universe.
That is the road I decided to take, in my search for nothing and everything:
tomorrow, the moon, a Jazz musician on the street corner, cigarette pro
truding from one of the valves of his sax. It has no number, this road, nor does it have a specific destination. If it possessed a name, that name would be Mystery.’”

  It touched him in varying ways that she knew it to the word. He looked across her at the driver, with his leathery skin and whiskers, eyes at once intense and lost as they searched for the road at the foot of the drive. Perhaps these two had been lured into his life by that specific column—
the same one in fact that had produced the quote about life growing without mystery into worms. But that had been at least two years ago.

  “Do you remember the party Vanguard threw for you,” Cocoa said, “when your column went to syndication? You wouldn’t remember I was there. I doubt you remember reading to us a short story you had written some time before. You said you had intended to market the piece, only to watch it
devolve
—as you put it—into material for your column. You were terribly stoned.”

  They were on the road now and heading away from newspaper routes.

  “I don’t attend parties,” he said quietly. “And if I did, I wouldn’t read.”

  “Sure you did. The story was in the first person, about you and a girl named Jan. I’ve been intensely jealous of her ever since.” She laughed, but he didn’t like it.

  He didn’t like being sabotaged out of his burial grounds.

  She persisted, reciting: “‘Which is why we quit our jobs, sold our furniture, packed our bags, and went. For most of us, life grows without mystery into worms, and that is our legacy. Jan and I sought more.’”

  If it had been, it had been destroyed. Posterity had his columns. The four winds had the ashes of everything else.

  Nodding Fog was the first place of interest. We rolled in about nine
o’clock in the evening, having outlasted an annoying clog in the fuel line of the old Ford truck, which we were committed to dumping when it finally
gave up. Nodding
Fog was a small village, maybe thirty roofs and a circular fountain in the middle.
There was parking by the fountain, which we used, and a bunch of rowdies pitching down beers and celebrating Friday. “Where’s the store,” Jan wanted to know of one of them. “We don’t have no stores, we don’t have no motels, go home strangers.” Apparently the town was on the way to somewhere, and we weren’t the first to have dropped in.

  The wind on the highway had whipped Jan’s hair into a frenzy, she had on no makeup and looked like Medusa at sunup. Otherwise, from my experience, the boys and the beer would have been asking her to please please stay. Ah well, there were no mysteries here anyway, it was plain to see, and—but wait, what did they have there in the fountain?

  The wind blew now against the passage of the truck. He could hear it in the failing seals of the window. March whined, and Cocoa’s neck was close enough to kiss.

  “Mystery,” she said softly, letting her eyelids fall sleepily over silver novae. “I was brought up in a place where epiphanies and strange sightings were routine. The villagers devoured the prospect of sharing the world with the unknown. I was one such epiphany. My natural parents, who lived in a village on the other side of the mountain, had thrown me away. They threw me away because I ate a poisonous plant and did not
die. They threw me away because I went into forbidden places in the forest, walked among the fantastic, the others, angels and shadow people.
They threw me away because of my eyes. Even then, before I was given real sight.” She opened them to him, newspapers bleeding smoky ink into water. “They threw me away, Danny, because of my thumbs.”

 
Jan had already seen, and had stepped up to the brink to have a look in.

  “Thumbs?” He looked down at his own, turning them, touching the pad of one, the knuckle of the other.

  Thumbs, mister. That’s what we have in the fountain. Thumbs little, thumbs big, thumbs whole, thumbs rotting.

  “Had to kill all the dogs, all the cats, ‘cause they kept dragging them off.”

  “You know what I mean, Danny,” smiled Cocoa. “Only you know what I mean.” She put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes again. Her hair smelled of…

  Despite himself, with the hammers of Abe’s disembodied thumbs pounding alarm bells in his head, his chest, his groin, he followed her into that sleepy place, drawn on whiffs of…of…chlorine?

  Jan had taken the one speaking by the arm, and sure enough, he was a nubbin. Same with the boy to his left, same with all of them. She peered for some moments into the pool, Jan did. At last she asked.

  “Do you want one of mine?”

  “Residents of Nodding Fog only. Foreign thumbs are tainted. Sorry.”

  She nodded. But I don’t think either of us really understood.

  I watched for a moment. Some of the thumbs floated, some had settled
to the bottom, some had begun to dissolve. Then a thought occurred to me. If the road that Nodding Fog was on really led somewhere, then that somewhere probably had a lot of stores.

  When I asked one of the boys, I was told Banshee Creek had twenty thousand people by last count. He knew, his aunt lived there when she wasn’t in Manitoba. “Which way?” “Same as you were going when you stopped.”

  Jan and I hopped in the Ford and headed for Banshee Creek. I didn’t have to tell her I had an idea. She knew me. We don’t go on the mystery tour with those we don’t know. Banshee proved just big enough to have the sort of place I was looking for. The question now was: Did they have anything exotic? He showed us gold ones, imperial ones, ones that had whiskers, translucent ones, and yes, exotic ones. We chose one of each.

  By the time we got back—it was now midnight or so—the boys had wandered home.

  We dumped all twenty-one of our little friends into the fountain, went to find a spot in the woods, spread the blanket in the back of the truck, went to sleep. We were up with the birds. Since we were only a mile out, we left the truck there and walked back to town.

  We sat on the church steps across the street from the fountain and had to wait a while for the first of the nubbins to emerge. She was a woman, and we could clearly see her nubs against the red shaft of the broom when she paused from her gutter sweeping to nod at us.