A Dirge for the Temporal (9 page)

  My eyes went up to the still-circling vultures, the memory of the scavengers
I had witnessed at work earlier coming back with force. Jesus God, how many of these devils had bled out of this rupture in the earth?

  Lights appeared in the distance, out beyond the overturned jeep. Headlights. I leapt to my feet and ran. The creatures’ heads lifted to watch the prey a moment before they gave chase, lanky legs producing strange spider-like strides, while their trunks had an ape-like, lumbering movement somewhat contradictory to their gangling frames. In flight my
skin was on fire, and my working muscles and bones sore from the bruising
and battering my body had taken. But worse by far was the pain in my head. Ripping fucking pain, no doubt from the injury that had left me unconscious for hours.

  I shot by the jeep, wishing I had time to unbelt those gas cans, which had survived the crash thanks to the roll bars. An avid smoker of non-
tobacco products, I’d a lighter in my pocket and the will to set the fucking
universe aflame. The gun would be nice too, but God knew where that had landed.

  A metallic noise which I knew in advance belonged to Jag’s truck caused me to look back. Covered in the spidery fuckers, the hulk came unwedged at last, plunging into the abyss. But it was what was happening in the foreground that really piqued my interest. Pick your fucking poison. The creatures had multiplied, strike one, and closed way too much ground, strike two, in the seconds that had passed. So much that I could distinguish individual sets of eyes bobbing in the night, teeth snapping in anticipation of the frenzied feast to come.

  The report of a rifle preceded the crashing of one of the creatures to the desert floor. Another, opening a gouge in the pulp of the night air. Now a whole torrent as the vehicle that bore the gunmen drew close enough to be recognizable as a pickup. Figures in the back leveled rifles, shouts rose over the riddle of bullets. But it was a brief hope as I felt the first of the long, reaching tendrils of their hands graze my back. Lead whizzed by my head. War zone was right on. Adrenaline pushed with an amphetamine insistence, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Goodbye Jagged, goodbye me, please let my circle of hell be far from hers.

  The weight behind me—I couldn’t tell if it was one of them, two of
them, or the whole goddamn army—drove me to the ground, desert
searing my face as I slid across it. I turned to meet my death, to be introduced to it proper, to watch its robe swirl in the motionless wind and its sickle catch the light of the moon. Yeah like that, moon running like honey along the blade, falling in a long heavy drop.

  The teeth and face before me exploded, bringing me instantly to life again.

  “Get in the fucking truck, asshole!”

  I turned against guns blasting like cannon fire around me. Arms reached out of the back of the spinning truck, dragging me up onto the open tailgate. My head struck the rim of the bed, bringing me even more awake, and I turned to see the fuckers falling like targets at a shooting range, only in fluid and meat, and teeth, fucking teeth, shattering in their misshapen skulls. “Hell yeah,” I kept saying. “Hell yeah, you
fucks
!” As I watched them fold under the butts and barrels of rifles, the crash guard and the big tires of the truck.

  “Anything in the jeep we might need?” one of them asked me.

  “Gas?” I said.

  We sped to the jeep. Men jumped out, cutting the belts, hauling the jugs aboard. A few last pops at the dispersed remainder of the devil mob and we moved away towards the sweep of sky ruled by the moon.

  In the silence that settled, the temptation to ask questions flared and then died. The faces that stared back at me were worn to their frames. Eyes that had glinted as the gunfire rained were now dull and lifeless, routine. I became aware it wasn’t the moon we were following but the wound in the earth that produced the vile. We were hunting.

  There was only one more incident along the rupture, near the road I had driven in on, a few choicely placed shots in the heads of the scattered few we encountered, no passion really, no victory yells. Then we were beyond the rupture with only the moon in front of us. Again I felt the urge to ask, again it went away. There weren’t any answers. Not in this game.
If anything made sense anymore, I suspected it was the staying and battling
it out, the protecting your own.

  We rode for several miles before the silhouette of a town came into view. This one had lights, which meant life—totally unlike the one Jagged had chased me through. I began to see the slightest changes on the faces of the men as we got closer, as if here at least was something in a world gone mad.

  “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 pro
truded from the heads of the creatures, they came independently,
feelers and ropes. One latched onto the side of the bed, followed by a sec
ond, 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

U
ntil 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.