A Dirge for the Temporal (6 page)

  But on his tongue was the word and question: “
Us?
”

  Ian said, “We have been unsuccessful at breaking down Silver’s superior
strains of the drug. He uses some sort of code that we cannot decipher.”

  “When you say
we
…?”

  Ian’s voice was smooth as the surface beneath their feet. “There was a maxim among the fully automated law enforcement, tourism, and other services of former Orlando.”

  The ever present Ethereal spoke it:

  “
Entertainment is primary
.”

  Shelley peered, trying to make sense of it.

  “The maxim of course was installed,” Ian said.

  “So?”

  “So…this naturally conflicted with the taboos imposed upon artificial intelligence.”

  Shelley let his eyes drift around the compartment. How strangely attentive was this random car on the Lakeland-Orlando Tubeway.

  Ian went on, “The Matrix was approached by a union of independent intelligences—by ‘independent’ I refer to those intelligences which are well armed with human brain cells and do not have to rely on programs. These intelligences extolled the virtues of experimentation. Little did we know where those experiments would lead…”

  He produced the dropper that Shelley had taken a shower beneath. As he held it over his eye, everyone else within the car followed suit.

  “Little did we know,” Ian repeated, blinking.

  Shelley looked from face to face, eye to eye, realizing that the ratio was far more fantastic than he had figured. Psycho, it seemed, would fuck up more than human minds.

  It was beginning to look like those labs and warehouses were obtainable after all.

  Turning to the Ethereal model, all the more beautiful for her glistening, Psycho-awakened eye, Shelley asked her if that terminal was still available.

Illusions of Amber

M
y first thought, as I opened the motel room door to find the stranger standing there, was that Death had wandered into the rural, nickel-sized town of Amber, Indiana, seeking to fill his quota. Why he found it necessary to look farther than the gangsters and drug pushers in the big city was a question which hadn’t time to formulate before he was extending a well-manicured hand and introducing himself to me.

  “I apologize for the intrusion, sir. My name is Pike. Doctor Edward Pike.”

  I looked from his sober bearded countenance to his dark, official-looking suit, simply adorned at the cuffs and absent of the merest wrinkle,
and I had to wonder when they started bestowing the prestigious title of “Doctor” on morticians. He certainly wasn’t a medical doctor. Not from this county. He wore no bow tie.

  “What kind of doctor?” I asked, purposely withholding my name. I sounded to my own ears as stiff as he looked.

  “A surgeon, sir. But that is neither here nor there. I call on you not in a professional capacity but as an agent of the townspeople of Amber, who wish you to participate in an affair this evening.”

  “You do not know me, Doctor—Pike, is it? You do not know me, and the townspeople of Amber do not know me. I am passing through.”

  “I know that you occupy Room One at this motel, as almost all who stay here do. I know that you are from elsewhere. I need to know no more.”

  I let my opinion of this insufficient explanation wear nakedly across my face (as if I actually needed to demonstrate to him just how strange I thought the whole situation). My interest, however, was piqued.

  “What sort of affair?”

  “You know, sort of a country affair.”

  “No sir, I do not know.”

  “A little thing in town with balloons and children and games.”

  Of course. Children, balloons, games and
me
. I shifted back into first
gear. “Let me ask you something, Doc. What is a surgeon doing in humble
Amber, Indiana?”

  “Amber is my summer home. I am a prominent and, if it pleases you, well-to-do member of the medical community, and find myself with the luxury of being able to spend the warm months in this little town where I was born. But again, my capacity today—”

  “What happens to the show?” I interrupted.

  “The show?”

  “Surgery. You just up and leave it. What happens to it?”

  “I should hardly think that is any of your concern, sir.”

  “It wasn’t I who came calling on you.”

  He ignored this with an unapologetic deftness which I found easy to admire. “As I was saying, my capacity today is that of town spokesman. The festivities begin in less than an hour and we would dearly like to have you as a participant.”

  I gave him a long once-over then. But I already knew my answer. I had been wondering how I would spend my evening in this microscopic dot on the map.

  “Would you be escorting me to this…
affair
, or would I be allowed simply
to show up?”

  The grave doctor actually smiled as he said, “Why, the latter of course. There are too many frightening characters in today's world to entrust oneself to strangers.”

  Impulsively I glanced down at my left tennis shoe, where the latest stain still lingered. When I looked back up, I found him staring fixedly into my eyes. As though he would not deign to cast a downward glance.

  “And when and where will this affair be taking place?”

  “Seven o’clock, center of town.”

  “I’ll think it over.”

  “Very good. But do not think too long, sir. We would hate for you to miss any of the fun.”

  “Goodbye, Doctor Pike.”

  “Goodbye, Mr….?”

  “You mean you haven’t already looked at the guest register?”

    “That would seem pointless, don’t you think? So often false names are given to motor inn clerks.”

  “Burke,” I said, smiling, and closed the door.

  I took a brief shower, threw on a pair of cargo pants and a cutoff tee shirt. Somewhere along the way I had lost the inclination to blow dry my hair before going out, leaving it to the whim of the wind through the car’s open window. But when I ventured out into the summer air of Amber, Indiana that evening, I saw I wouldn’t be driving.

  I hadn’t realized when I pulled into the motel that the main of town was less than a quarter mile down the road which intersected the high
way. Stepping around the corner to the parking area in back of the build
ing, I was facing downtown Amber. Colorful carnival lights were blinking to life even as my eyes fell upon my destination, and somehow a great part of the mystery, in that moment of time, was lost. The deluge of childhood memories did not prevent the tickle that spread through my body like the cold tentacles of fear. It could not. Just like that, I was bound to my own mystery now, damn them for ever knocking on Room One’s door. Whatever their game, mine was the more shocking. Whatever they’d in store for me, I’d far worse in store for them.

  I checked a pocket, wondered why I had brought it along when all I’d meant to do was humor them.

  The summer air felt good. Hot, dry and still. Moth wings whapped beneath streetlights, generating the only breezes that blew. Houses were black, as if there were no medium: you were either at the affair or you were buried away in your sanctum hidden from its terrors. I passed a balding, withering woman.

 
Are you Mr. Burke?
she did not say.

  Who is Mr. Burke?

  Along behind her, a boy, eleven or twelve, squeeching rubber shoes.

 
Are you from Room One?
said he not.

  I am here. Isn’t that enough? Must we ask questions with our eyes, tell our souls with our shoes? Mine is the mystery and yours is the show.

  And here it was at last, the laughter and the lights, the banners and the barking, the wheels and the witless, and the costumes wear us all. Blossom and splendor and a great hole in Amber, Indiana, because the carnival was not trucked in but homemade—its secret corridors ambling through tents and the town’s buildings themselves—which made not for a carnival but an exposé of the hollowness of the soul.

  Out of this blossom and splendor appeared Doctor Pike, descending upon me as if we were brethren in arms. “Welcome, Mr. Burke! Welcome to the affair!”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it, Doc. Did you do the costumes? I mean, when you weren’t performing surgery?”

  Laughing: “Mr. Burke, I am always performing surgery.”

  “I’ve no doubt.” And imagined how he was going to be as a patient.

  He showed me first the House of Mirrors, guiding me by his own hand, forgetting suddenly his luxury and his summer cool. I thought to express my true feelings to him then and there, shards of reflective glass and the illusions of existence, but decided I might be intruding upon
his
game.

  He showed me next the House of Freaks, notice the mutations and the distortions and the deformities as you drift among them. Notice the pig-man with his absurd features, the caves of his nostrils. Notice the crisscross
man with his wondrously strange dermis. See the African serpentess with her scales and her black forked tongue—

  “You,” I said to her. “Where did you come from?”

  The doctor seemed both displeased and pleased that I was engaging her in speech, ssss.

  Her beady eyes, her tongue darting in and out, an apology somewhere amidst it all. “Room One at the Travelers Lodge.”

  I stood there some seconds in my amazement, fetched it out with the practiced simplicity of a pro, tucking it up behind the wrist, turning to him slowly.

  “What does she mean, Doc?”

  “A fantasy of hers. She is a deceiver and a liar, beware.”

  “What are you, then?”

  He regarded me as if through a fragment of stained glass. “I have not stayed in Room One.”

  The bellow of the bull-man one cage over. The screech of the mermaid one tank back. The howl of the wolf-man…

   “All of them?”

  He slipped away through folds of canvas. The freaks ingested and digested and spat him out again before I emerged. What is that in your hand?

  I
am
the House of Horrors. Between the courthouse and the library, the House of Fun and the House of Imagination, beneath the banner whose message is scrawled in crimson, beyond the stairs slippery with blood, there will you find me. I am the House of Horrors. Come unto me, Doctor.

  Yet as I slipped past the doorman who asked for no ticket, into shadows requiring only that I be checked in at Room One of the Travelers Lodge, I could not separate myself of the feeling that I was coming unto him.

  Around every corner, through every door, upon every stair, shadows protracted as if beneath unfolding wings, reaching out to rake me in. You know where you are going, Mr. Burke, you are going where the screams originate. Their muffled agonies seemed to come from deep within the place, the cries of the unborn in the womb, out of the womb, on the slab that is earthly existence. These eloquent sounds fell on my thirsty ears, and I knew I would have been drawn to this jubilee even if Dr. Pike had never bothered to fetch me out of the motel. I looked at the thing in my hand. It suddenly seemed such an insignificant instrument…after all the service it had given me.

  Double doors admitted me, and there, over the table, was the surgeon.
His patient’s arms and legs were stretched out infinitely, and the lolling,
wailing thing at the end of the trunk was more a distension than a head, presumably from all the fluids fed through tubes into its facial tissue. In the doctor’s hand was a scalpel very much like my own, on his face an unsoiled surgical mask. The blade of the scalpel, like my own, shined pristinely.

  “I try to determine,” he said, waving the tool, “where to insert, where to cut, but I’m tempted to start slicing senselessly. As you see, I have been unable to come up with a theme for him. Unlike the others in our menagerie, where the finished product reflects either the nature of the subject or the nature of the subject’s transgressions, this creature has left me at loss. His actions were so utterly random, his mind so chaotic in its workings, I’ve no motif with which to work. He wasn’t even fleeing when he landed at the Travelers Lodge. All of you flee something—persons, deeds, memories. He fled nothing.”

  “What do I flee, Doc?” I asked as I stepped deeper into the room.

  “Ah,” he said, gliding in his long white coat around the table to meet me. “The illusion, I think, is what you flee.”

  “What illusion?”

  We came to a halt simultaneously, one slashing stride between us. The agony of the monstrosity on the table wrecked every potential for scholarly debate.

  “The illusion that surrounds the instrument in your hand, the blood stain on your shoe.”

  I would not deign to cast a downward glance. “Yeah…”

  “The illusion that killing does not exalt you, that blood does not darken
the mystery of you.”

  “But blood always darkens the mys—”

 
I felt the pain in a long swift angle, the warm fluid swell beneath my tee shirt, the foulness of the air as I sought to have more of it in my lungs suddenly.

  “It will require some nipping and tucking,” said the surgeon, “but I think you will be our magician. For here in Amber you cannot escape your illusions.”