A Dirge for the Temporal

by Darren Speegle

  He extended a hand, came away with one of the drops on his fingertip, smelled it.

  “Mom!” he called, more out of an urge to introduce her to this oddity than anything else. He had concluded that the substance was blood, and that it had a source in the room above, but he did not associate it with human blood. People bled in smears mostly, as his knees and elbows had proven a time or two—not like this. A bucket had been tipped over, something his dad was working on, something like that. The room above was after all in the attic, where little boys were not allowed to go.

  “Mah-uhhhm!” he called again on his way out into the hall.

  Where was she? Once, when she didn’t show for a half hour or so after he got back from his lessons, he had followed the footpath down to the neighborhood pond, where he found her sitting on a bench watching the ducks and weeping for all she had. It was her favorite place, she had told him once. The farthest extent of her world.

  He headed that way now, thinking about blood wandering its own paths. When he reached the pond, he found only the boy from next door skipping stones. Brett, who was two years his better in age, looked at him as he always did, as if Michael were a freak because he didn’t go to school like all the other kids. When Michael asked him if he had seen his mom, Brett’s eyes grew sadistically bright and Michael knew the teases were coming.

  “I thought you were s’posed to be so smart. Aren’t you the boy genius? Can’t even find your own mommy.”

  Michael retreated up the hill, tears stinging his eyes.

  Inside, he called again, to no answer. He walked down the hall as though to his execution. He ascended the stairs as though to some afterlife beyond the clouds of numbers and letters and planets and human organs that had drifted over his head all his days. The door didn’t want to give beneath his little hands, but finally did, swinging to the left, opening up the attic and its mysteries to him. He had never been here alone. A few small steps showed him that he still wasn’t. His mom waited with open arms, involuntarily pouring herself out to him.

  He fell as he rushed down the stairs, struck his nose, producing further evidence that blood did run so profusely. The phone in his hand turned red. He managed to dial his dad’s office. Daddy, Daddy, where are you? Answer the phone, Daddy. But Daddy wasn’t there.

  The hand on his head, as familiar a gesture as it was, made him scream. And scream.

  ~

  Domino went to the station and sat with Nelson and the detectives assigned to the case in the lieutenant’s closed office. Branton and Lundy occupied the chairs along the wall, while Domino and Nelson were separated by the big desk strewn with job litter.

  Nelson regarded Domino for a moment, as if to satisfy himself that his psychologist hadn’t lost his grip, then got right to it. “The body you saw belonged to one Brett Frier, CPA, unmarried, lived alone. Approximate time of death…Bran? Right, ten a.m. As for evidence, to this point they haven’t found shit. All we can do for now is focus on the character of this creep. This is going to be a motherfucker if you ask me. To go to such detail to make your goddamn point—we got a real crazy on our hands.”

  That was Domino’s cue. He only partially surprised himself when he skipped type, profile, and expert insight to offer this: “They let my dad out two weeks ago, Jack.”

  Nelson frowned, casting a glance at the detectives. “I heard,” he said. “Have you been in touch?”

  “Yeah. He wanted to see me, but I declined. He’s been at a sort of halfway house. I wonder what the other residents think about having a psycho killer around.”

  “It’s been, what, thirty years? That’s a long time, Domino.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s gotta be tough on you,” Nelson said. “Look, best therapy is putting your mind on something else. Bury yourself in the current case. When I lost Vonda, that was how I got through. It shouldn’t be too hard to do that on this one. Like I said, this creep’s gonna be a challenge.”

  Domino thought about telling him to get his head out of his ass and listen, but instead merely nodded.

  “Okay,” Nelson said. “Let’s start with the candles. What do you make of burning black candles? Satanist props?”

  If only it were that simple, Domino thought.

  ~

  Daddy wasn’t Daddy anymore, that much was clear to the young Michael. The features behind the flickering light of the candles were familiar enough, but their expression was strange. And the voice…it might as well have been a stranger’s voice speaking to Michael over the coffee table. He kept his eyes on the backs of his hands, which danced with reflections from the candles. His left hand was stained with blood from his nose.

  “The flames are your mother’s ghost in your eyes,” said his father, delicately touching one of the columns of wax. “What truth those young eyes of yours have witnessed tonight. Do you understand about your mom?”

  “I think so,” Michael murmured.

  “Where is she now, do you think?”

  He didn’t know. When his mom had spoken of heaven, his father had scoffed. He remembered hearing her once, through the bathroom wall, shouting at his father about that very topic. What am I to teach him then? That he’s going to the Great Equation when he dies?

  “I don’t know,” he confessed to the face. “Where?”

  “She’s in your memories, Michael. Remember that. That’s where they go when they have nothing else to offer us. Into our memories.”

  He thought about it, amid the candle flickers. But one question was not answered so easily.

  “So where,” he said to the stranger sitting across from him, “has my daddy gone?”

  ~

  They were impatient to do the autopsy, so Domino was given the private viewing he requested right away. Standing over the body, looking into its empty eye sockets, he had a sense of the pit and the void and the nothingness of his upbringing. Yet what precisely had his father meant by that particular touch? The candles, the bodily organs—they clearly spoke to the past. What did the removal of the eyes say?

  And what, for that matter, did Brett Frier have to do with anything? As Domino looked into the holes, he remembered the eyes they had once contained marking him as a freak. But how could his father have known about the way Brett and all the rest of them had looked at him?

  “It was Daddy you should have been looking at, not me,” he said over the dead face. “It was Daddy who made me the freak.”

  I thought you were s’posed to be so smart, it said back. Can’t even find your own mommy.

  He walked away, pressing at his headache, trying to work out how killers killed and moms went to flickers. He turned back suddenly, stabbing his finger at the face.

  “It was Daddy, can you understand that?!”

  I thought you were s’posed to be so smart. Aren’t you the boy genius? it said.

  He froze, staring. “What?”

  Genius, it clarified mockingly.

  The word was like a battering ram, smashing down doors inside him, revealing things that should have been left in the murk where they’d been buried.

  “It was Daddy,” he repeated, desperately. “Daddy, not me.”

  He stared into the sockets and saw flames, burning as they had only hours ago in Brett’s room, shadows from the suspended organs dancing on the walls and ceiling, on his freshly stained hands.

  “Where has my Daddy gone?” he whispered.

  He’s in your memories, Michael, came her voice. Remember that. That’s where they go when they have nothing else to offer us. Into our memories.

  Along the Footpath to Oblivion

  Night fell like dark honey on the nothingland and one of the two men under the bridge wanted to know about somethi
ng.

  “Why do we do it, Mace?”

  “Why do we do what, James?”

  “Why do we kill?”

  Mace didn’t like the highwayman approach any more than his partner did. “What else is there to do, James?”

  “I don’t know—work?” He breathed on his glasses, wiped with his soiled teeshirt.

  “We did that once. Remember? Let’s talk about it over a beer, OK?”

  “I want a motel. This time beer comes after. I need new glasses and I smell like blood.”

  “Fine.” Mace knew it was a matter of waiting it out when James got like this.

  “I mean it this time, Mace. Shower first.”

  “Glasses, too? Or can that at least wait till tomorrow?”

  James had to admit that he really didn’t want to buy a pair.

  “Some’ll come along,” Mace said.

  They watched a tanker out on the bay for a time. A ghostly moan-extending-into-a-screech sound came from over by the moorings, where one of the hulking captives tried its chains. Otherwise the night was in the grip of calm, the same calm that had settled over the two men. They always knew when they would score. It could be the most desolate, forbidden place, with the chances approaching nil, but that strange prescience was to be trusted.

  Sometimes, however, the calm eluded them, and they roamed all night without success. James became hard to live with then, and Mace was not much better. Sometimes James would suggest they simply go to someone’s home, do the ecstasy upon them right there, where they had all the comforts of the normals—shower, clean towels and sheets, a refrigerator with beer or yogurt. Mace patiently reminded him how he got, how enthusiastic, how loud, how inspired they both got in doing the thing. Oblivion became their only house, and for that reason they stayed out on the fringes, beyond ears more than eyes.

  Voices stirred the calm. Two voices, heels on pavement, emerging from the unhardened pitch of night.

  The one broke the surface with a confession. “I’m tired of this. Tired of this life, tired of this craving, tired of this disconnection.”

  “Arnold,” said the other. “You need a fix, that’s all.”

  “I hate it when you say that, Buzz. It ain’t heroin, you know. It ain’t crack. It ain't something you can just buy on the street corner.”

  “You forget if you think there’s that much of a difference. Bottom line is, it's a hunger that screams to be satisfied.”

  “Don’t you remember, Buzz, how it once was? How wide the margin separating this one thrill from all the others? It narrows with every trick.”

  Mace and James found themselves looking at each other by the thin light from the moorings. Above, the debaters drew nearer but weren’t yet at the bridge.

  “You hate it when I call it a fix, but you never hesitate to call it a trick.”

  Mace nodded his head.

  “Yeah well, Buzz, it’s become that cheap.”

  Now James nodded his.

  There was a relatively long pause. Arnold, the raspier voice, broke it. “I wonder, man, you ever thought about performing the trick on me?”

  They were on the bridge now. Even the tone of their steps had changed.

  “I’ve thought about it. Especially when you get like this. But then who would I share the thing with? There aren't any others like us, you know. You ever really looked at the expression on Gramps when he gives us the key to our room? I'm sure we're not the only stained shirts to show up at the cheapest, seediest motel in the city, but he looks at us like he’s looking at the face of God.”

  “Faces.”

  “What?”

  “Faces, Buzz. We’re two faces not one. I don’t care how lost we are.”

  “It's God that has the one—did you say lost?”

  Their approach stopped. Mace and James sensed it even before the footfalls were snatched away by night. The highwaymen raised their brows at one another, Mace mouthing the word Now?

  But James shook his head.

  The last spoken word, unlike the sound of the debaters’ heels, still hung there, almost on top of the highwaymen. Lost.

  The raspier voice: “What am I seeing in your face, Buzz?”

  “Lost? As in souls? That's bringing religion into it. Never has religion been part of it.”

  “Is it fear I’m seeing in your face?”

  “The blood vessel above my ear is throbbing. Fear is not the emotion.”

  “Ah.” A pause separated this from his next words. “I’ve wondered what it would be like...at the receiving end.”

  Night bled with another wailing from the moorings.

  “I’ve wondered if it would be different for one who has visited the act on others.”

  Silence from the occupant of space to whom he spoke. Silence from the trolls under the bridge, staring at each other, doing a bit of wondering themselves—wondering about the crazy mathematics of chance, about kindred souls on life's crazy roads. It was a more immediate prospect, though, that caused them to moisten their lips with their tongues.

  There was a sound like that of air being knocked out of a set of lungs, a grunted exhalation followed by a moment’s anticipatory lull. The next was a low, deep moan that gathered strength as it came, stretching into a rolling howl that in turn became something even fiercer, even stranger…

  The notion of letting the song spread from victim to perpetrator and thereby to fullest blossom before acting was considered and discarded. Never had the two men under the bridge coveted the thing so. In spontaneous union they surged up the short bank, hoisted by the ripping, tearing, screaming stages they knew were on the razor’s edge of taking command of the night.

  The mouth formed an O as the eyes beheld the deed. The deed faltered only a second as it realized it was under scrutiny—how unimaginative its commencement wound must appear to these experts—then threw itself into its mutilations with all vigor.

  He was alone, the perpetrator. Alone, the victim. They were one and the same man, and ribboning himself with the instrument jerking like a composer’s wand in his hand.

  Mace and James turned to look at each other, as synchronous a response as their aspiration towards oblivion. But neither found the other looking back as the music of the mutilator suddenly withered down a long tunnel to the single concentrated note of a great chain giving under stress.

  Confounded, fragmented, but nothing so much as consumed by the lust, the two halves of the one man who had hidden under the bridge descended on the whirlwind to have a bath in its ecstasies themselves.

  Hush Hush Little Kitty

  Calendar year CC060, A-Dam on Uram. Central Port bustling with the comings and goings of tourists. Inside, the subtle fragrance of the air conditioning system; outside, the smell of crumbling fungus acrid on the mizzly air...staler for the weight of the moisture, which seemed to hold it in place against a useless breeze.

  Unhappy faces as arrivals were forced to cross the distance between Landing and Receiving in the open air, thank you most graciously to a malfunction in the long tunnel which led to and from all gangways. The paneled glass façade that was the end to this particular inconvenience appeared to ripple like broken water as it accepted these unhappy faces into the giant main structure of Central Port.

  Inside the hall, at Receiving, a sweeping arcing graffito scrawled over the entryway announced: HUSH HUSH LITTLE KITTY AND YOU'LL HEAR IT WHISPERING BACK. The words appeared to have been sprayed across the wall, shimmering delicately in the light of the overheads, exhibiting a strange iridescence, harboring a strange meaning. Welcome to A-Dam on Uram. Check your psyches in at the main counter.

  The river of bodies leading there, the various styles and cultures, th
e wide, eager eyes...and lost in it all, myself.

  Myself...and the one who suddenly accosted me. An imparter of information, you know the type, inclined to brief me on the queer opalesque greeting that stared down at me.

  “You know, man, if the power was shut down right now—you speak standard?—OK, if the whole port went black, you would find that message still glowing. You know why? Because it's biological, man. They keep the shit in tanks, and spray it like paint. Only it's not paint. It's alive. It's alive in the tanks, it's alive on the wall. See the fuzzy edges—”

  Cut off, as he was struck by a passing shoulder. Cursing as he turned back to me.

  “Where was I?”

  Where indeed. Stoned maybe, as I took him in. As I studied this moving photograph of him, gesture and garb. Certainly that look about him. That look of the free spirit, as my grandfather had referred to them. That same look, in fact, that the travel agent had worn.

  I said, “The fuzzy edges.”

  “Yeah.” A hesitant chuckle. “You get that too, do you? When you look at things?”

  “Excuse me. I must be on my way.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, right. But hey, this your first visit to A-Dam?”

  “Yes.”

  Regarding me wisely: “Do yourself a favor. Heed what it says. Take a moment and just listen. Listen beyond the surface clutter”—leaning in, as though to keep the secret between us—“and you'll hear it whispering back.”

  Then my imparter of information—yes, we all know the type—straightened up, satisfied with himself as he received a nod from me.