A Dirge for the Temporal (18 page)

  “Prime candidate for what?”

  “Vie,
mon ami
. Life! But let us wait and see how your blood tests before excitement takes us over.” He bade
au revoir
and disappeared
through the same door Sonja had disappeared through. Cal was sure he saw ascending stairs behind the settling beads; behind the mist that settled
over his senses.

  Eyes closed, he let the music have him. Tears from the aether fell around him in isolated drops, music from the moon levitated him. If only he’d had this to retreat to when Natalie became less a person and more a name. If only he’d been able to submerge in oblivious moonsong after Timmy and Lila had revealed that they were afraid of him because of a simple change in appearance—a haircut. The Club Rouge didn’t know haircuts. Oblivion didn’t know haircuts.

  Tears from the aether, and here was his goddess again.

  “Come, let’s get our blood heated up,” she said. “You’ve proved exactly
what we’re looking for. Lucky for all of us, yes?”

  He sucked on his vodka tomato but it failed to illuminate. She pushed him back on cushions, licked his lips of excess, caressed his sensitive places, explored him as he became more fully aware of himself. Clothes strewn about in their wake, she led him on her words, promises of exaltation, to the fourth floor.

  Beads, strong scent on the air, life itself. Sonja turned to him before what lay beyond was unveiled. “Remember,” she said, “this is not about being lost. It’s about being found.” She stepped backwards into layers of beads, the smell growing increasingly stronger as the strings separated. The music grew less random, pulsing to the rhythms of multiple hearts.

  “Come to me,” she said. “She grasped his buttocks and pulled him against her body, meeting his fullness. “Yes, come to me,” she breathed on his neck. The beads released their clutching bodies to the other side and the odor rose to a sharp, even shrill, crescendo.

 
“Jesus, I can feel it in my whole body,” he said into her hair.
It
had no
description.

  “Me too,” she said, pulling him with her as she moved backwards, up another stair, then another, into the mysterious embraces of the fourth floor. “Let go,” she said. “Fall with me…”

  Into warm deep thick liquid. He knew at once as his mouth tasted it, his skin recognized its texture and temperature, that he had plunged into a bath of blood. Losing track of Sonja, he surfaced, gasping for air, sucking
in the copper oxygen his mind had failed to correctly associate. Sonja was in front of him, tongue swiping at her exhilarated lips, eyes for once fully awake and piercing like jewels.

  Around them, arms resting along the circular rim of the spa, men and woman leisured like Roman senators. Watching him with senatorial amusement.

  “Tash…Sonja, what…?” He hadn’t the ability to finish it, too bound to his fascination even to retch.

  “You’ve been invited to join in the
Coeur de Vie,
as we call it. Stand and you will be afforded a better view. Come.” She urged with her hands, caressing his body as she did, reminding him in a soft voice that life was being celebrated here.

  “
Vie
,” she said. “The Heart of Life surrounds us.”

  He stood, trailing fluid from his limbs, trapped in wonder terror as the whole scene opened before him. Whalesong blue tiles stretched from one end of the floor to the other, interrupted by oblong rectangular pools and the equipment that kept their sanguineous contents circulating. The pools were shallow, the fluid within stirring beneath frequent releases—from isolated individual drops to brief fan-like cascades—of the same unmistakable substance from the ceiling above. Suspended around the whole hideous operation were microphones, capturing the sounds produced.

  Cal opened his mouth in soundless horror as he looked around him at these people pleasuring in all this bloody extravagance.

  “Welcome,” said one of the men. “Our house is your house.”

 
“Oh God,” was all he could manage. An emission of breath, with cop
per tints.

  “God?” said another man. “Yes, life being divine, God is here. You might even call this a cathedral. For it is not just the material of life that we record and engineer into the symphony you hear. It is also its essence, its spirit, its
âme
. When a drop of lifeblood is amplified into a perfectly clear note suspended in empty space, it is the soul we are hearing. Perhaps what is most difficult to capture about life is its grace, hence the delicate instrumental overtones we’ve added. But of course up here, where we immerse ourselves wholly in the miracle, nothing is lost.”

  Cal had no words for the face that spun such madness.

  “Come, Cal,” said Sonja. “I’ll show you where it begins.”

  He did not want to know where it began, where it ended, or anything else to do with these people. But the voice to describe his aversion simply was not there. He stepped out of the spa, touched by the hand of the gray-
haired woman nearest him, resisting the impulse to kick her face. Across reaches of Romanesque tile squares, Sonja led him, and as the tilt of reality
readjusted, he reacted normally, by throwing up.

  She ignored it. The music caught him again, chiding his insurrection. The
Coeur de Vie
pulsed uninterrupted, hungrily vibrant. His bodily
movements merged with the tune of the rain forest and jungle, and Sonja led him into secret rooms, where those rhythms could be met at the source. “‘Our house is your house,’” she quoted. “That welcome is a beginning
. I envy you.”

  The face of the waiter grew before him. The blade felt cold as it opened the way for the heat to pour out of him and into their machinery.

Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall

I
know I was never born; that I have existed forever. It is why I have brought her here.

  She has come willingly because of my overwhelming innocence and…as she thinks of it, as they all think of it…naïvete. What they have
never understood is that the wonder I express comes from holding reality
up to the light and scrutinizing it for what it really is. What they have never understood is the light itself. Death is our preoccupation, we the deceivers of ourselves.

  I told her she was a liar, the worst kind, deluding herself. I told her as I tied the belts around her wrists and, against her manufactured struggles, lashed her off at the fence posts, just wide enough to stretch the muscles, elegant contours along her taut sleek limbs. The stirrups are homemade, but sufficient for the task. She twists against her restraints, not disappointing me with the pretense; the symbolism is exquisite.

  I invite her, not for the first time, to accuse me of contradiction, dichotomy, but she refuses. Because of my innocence, I am allowed my “fantasies.”

  Calming the motion of her bare belly with my hand, I proceed to tell her about the freshly laid eggs. When first I ate one whole and uncooked, the fragmenting shell cut my youthful lips.
Life unborn
, I tell her. How pure is that? Unspoiled. Undiluted. Or is that undeluded?

  The first glimpse of doubt now as her innocent, naïve, trusted lover draws the blade from where it has lain superficially buried, more figuration,
in the hay and loose earth. Still, we have played our games before; the death game comes to mind, where I pretend I am a corpse, so that I
may show her how fiercely the light shines even when we are reduced to that physical state. She always indulges me, not knowing that my heartbeat
has truly stopped, and forgets, at last, how peculiar she thinks the sport as I lift her to the crescendo and fountain that so represents the misguided thirst for animal consciousness. For these are the processes
that ensure the whole race of men is a race of madmen, while its members
know it not.

  The fading shadow of concern, and the materializing smile, as I draw not the keen side of the blade, but the back of it, across her midsection, marking the spot.
Is this the way
? I ask her.
Or better here
? As I touch the moist crevice whose function it is to spill forth the graduate of the fetal waters. But I already know: the damage is greater from below; indeed the potential to extinguish the light,
very
real. Nevertheless, we must not abandon the ritual of birthing.

  She squirms as I tease the spur, clever little garden of nerves that it is. Her legs relax as I pause to bask in a scented wind off a coming afternoon storm.

  “Please,” she breathes.

  I touch there again. But my words carry into deeper realms. “
Push
,” I invite her. “I will give you that chance.”

  “Chance?” she manages in a slight gasp.

  “Chance to bring it forth in the traditional way.”

  “It? Is this some new game? Are we pretending I am pregnant?”

  “You are pregnant.”

  “Don’t snap. I’ll play.”

 
Yes, you’ll play. I caress her soft skin and imagine how smooth her off
spring’s will be. Like the unborn egg. It is fitting that we have come here, to my mother’s home, where I was never really born on the kitchen floor, in a pool of fluids, the woman who carried me experiencing her last hour in agony, writhing in the delusion of our lunatic minds.

  “Push,” I command. And as the noise comes out of her nostrils flared in amusement and carnal curiosity, I remember that face.

  My mother’s sister, in whose house I was brought up, wore that face the first time she caught me fully exposed. I was on my bed, a bible before me, tearing out the pages of Genesis one by one, stuffing them in my mouth, ingesting them.

  “Like the mother’s milk you never had?” she suggested. And then she began to tell me, in greater detail than she ever had before, about my birth, shedding layers of clothing as she did, until she stood before me nude. My wonder made her laugh.

  “You’re still so amazed?” she said. “We’ve been doing this for a long time.”

  So we had. But the fluids had been ours and ours alone until that day.

  At the funeral, which ritual I alone attended, I put a whole hen’s egg in her mouth, a perfecting gleam to her still lascivious rictus.

  “Push!” I demand of the woman before me. This time I will have it. This time I will not be tricked. This time my appetite will be satisfied.

  I look up at her face. It is distorted by her desire to please me, yet I know I must enter her and find it myself. We can never trust them, these mothers; they are the doorways into this game of lunacy that is earthly existence. They defy the whole idea of perpetuity.

  Her eyes are closed as I lift the knife. A strained high-pitched sound now as she puts her all into the exercise—
but what’s this
?

  A sudden light along the edge of the blade…

  I look down to see it coming out of her, wrapped in brilliance.

  Without hesitation, I cradle the egg in my hands, take it into my mouth, catch its mother’s eyes as she cranes forward to observe more closely.

  I recognize something there, in her face, in her eyes, as she watches me begin to chew.

  She believes all of it a game.

  I, on the other hand,
know
it’s a game.

The Curse of Lianderin

C
urious thing, I couldn’t help but imagine it…

 
Fragments
.
Stained glass in deep Stygian shades
...

  Stygian? Had he really used that word? A word that I had never actually
heard used in conversation.

 
…deep Stygian shades, alternately opaque and translucent, blacks and grays, seams shimmering in the effulgence of the rising moon…

  There was a moon on this cold November night. A rising moon. Not quite full but bright.

 
…a silvery coin, imperfect, not circular but clipped, a Roman coin…

  But that description had come before the elaborately articulated transformation of the sky, when the storyteller was still setting the stage.

  Disconnected and nonsuccessive were the bits and pieces of his story coming to me now, almost twenty-four hours later, my eyes on the continuously unreeling center line, the deepening night and its antiquities meshing around me. As the road carelessly wound its way up the ridge, I couldn’t help but imagine that when I arrived there, at the overlook, and the magnificent, multi-turreted castle that is Lianderin’s offering to the
world commanded my vision, the rich material of the sky would suddenly
fragment, not a fabric at all but stained glass, seams shimmering.

  …
the answer to a warlord’s arrogance and foolhardy ambition finally
unfurling
…

  A great shadow, elegant and flickering, descend over the
Our
valley.

  …
a plague bestowed as by the thrust of a biblical staff, locusts showering down on the earth
…

  Funny, but I had never thought myself so suggestible.

 
They rushed the silent, undefended
Schloss,
the cry of victory on the air, and then all at once they detected a disturbance from high above and all four corners of the compass, a sound whose alienness alone, in the heavy quietude of the night, was cause for alarm
…

  How ostentatiously poetic he’d been in the telling of it, an innkeeper whose words of themselves were worth the francs. And Castle Larochette like a tomb outside the bar’s slightly fogged window, a grim accent to his tale. His English had been as superb as his meticulous attention to detail, his language mitigating his accent such that I hadn't been able to tell whether he normally spoke French or German—I mean to his wife, his children, upstairs and asleep, oblivious to the terrors of the night. He’d said his town of birth was Bollendorf, but Bollendorf was even nearer the border than Larochette. Of course in the time of his tale there hadn’t been a Luxembourg or a Germany. There had only been regions. And the lords of them.

 
High Lord Gilzern was a boar of a man, brawny, whiskered and smelling of sour beer. His one weakness was his fearlessness
…

  I had drunk entirely too much local while my host told his story. And perhaps that was the motive behind his lengthy elaborations. I was the inn’s only guest, as I found out the next morning when I sat alone at the
house’s complimentary, and decidedly one-person, breakfast. A hard living,
an inn and the off-season, tap never running dry. Please excuse, of course, the better-than-generous volume of beer to which my host treated himself.

 
“Witches,” sneered Gilzern. “Humph! Neither witches nor bloodsuckers,
devils nor ghouls shall alter my purpose. Lianderin is the prize and Lianderin I shall have, be the hordes of Darkness Itself there to defend her walls.”

   The crest was nearing now, and not far beyond it, I knew, stood the Schloss, grandly illuminated in the night. I had been here before, the naïve tourist arriving at a late hour. But not at this time of year. And not
this
year, this night. Strangely, there was no traffic on the road.

 
Tomorrow is the anniversary of that fateful night when Gilzern and his army crossed the Our River and rushed the castle
…

  I hadn’t intended to be arriving so late—or after dark at all. Upon leaving the inn I had experienced car trouble. A certain hesitation (recently noticed and ignored) had evolved overnight, as my car sat idly contemplating its own existence, into an outright sputtering. Resisting acceleration, the already languid hatchback had putted like the train that thought it could up a long gradual hill and then died without honor ten meters shy of the top.

  I walked the three kilometers back to the
Gasthaus
, and the innkeeper
put me in contact with a local garage. They pulled the car in (at an extravagant expense), and while it waited its turn, I explored
Larochette’s castle and the hiking trails surrounding it. Not until the third time I checked in did they actually have a man on my car. That was around two o’clock. It was four-thirty before he had chased the problem down, a clogged line, back near the fuel tank. The sun was setting as my keys were returned to me, my wallet significantly lighter for the inconvenience.

  After a brief dinner at a nearby restaurant, I stopped by to thank the innkeeper before continuing on my journey. He looked at me disapprovingly
when he learned my destination hadn’t changed.

  “You will go on to Lianderin anyway? At this hour?”

  “I’m a man on holiday,” I said. “Pleased to be without a schedule—”

  “Then no harm will be done by your accepting my invitation to rest here another night.”

  “I will rest in Lianderin.”

  “The only rest you will find in Lianderin tonight is of the permanent variety.”

  There it was, right out in the open. And seeming somehow more than just an extension of his story. I studied him a protracted moment before letting the corners of my mouth lift in a grin. Although he smiled back, it didn’t feel like a secret between us. Nay, ‘twas I the fool.

  And perhaps that was the job of the Third of the Three Angels on this mythological holiday of mine—to bring me, with a whisper in my ear, to that simple assessment. Her sisters had successfully performed their jobs: one to put a gremlin in my fuel system, the other to make it difficult to locate. All designed to keep me in Larochette, while Lianderin was only forty kilometers away.

  And now, with all that in the rearview mirror, it seemed my guardians
still had not abandoned me. The words of their mortal emissary kept me company every step of the way.

 
Fragments
…

  I pulled over before reaching the top of the ridge, wanting a clearer view of the sky than I would be afforded when first the rim of the village, and then the castle with all its floodlights, emerged out of my memory and into the sensory realm. Stepping out of the car, I gazed up at the sky. Glittering tapestry that it was, I could not imagine it quite as he had described it. Fragmented, perhaps. Stained glass, no. Alternately opaque and translucent, no. No light would show through when the vault was filled with their wings.

  When High Lord Gilzern’s scouts reported that both Schloss and surrounding village were empty and defenseless, Gilzern threw back his head and laughed. “You see!” he announced triumphantly. “They have fled like hares. I gave them a fortnight’s notice and they have fled. Now what think you, you craven advisors of mine? ‘Avoid Lianderin,’ you said. ‘Avoid Lianderin, for Lianderin is home to a great covey of witches.’ So where are they now, these associates of Darkness?”

  Gazing across the starry arch of night, I found myself wondering the same thing. I climbed back in the car, somewhat amused with myself.

  “A shame,” said Gilzern, “that my men, for their long march, will not be rewarded with a battle. But I say again, the real prize, when the horns have blown, is Lianderin.” Yet even as he spoke these words, he was reminded by his instincts that not often were prizes of such rarity obtained without a cost...

  A sign stated the proximity of the Schloss, and I wondered where my excitement had gone. The words of the innkeeper tarried, but without the haunting quality of before. My roadside study of the night sky seemed to have stolen the flutter.

  I rounded a turn and the road leveled. Houses oddly modern, out of setting, slipped by. German symmetry, French nonchalance, American overtones. The trees among which they were built fell away, and, sooner perhaps than I had expected, I found myself looking out over the valley and upon the castle perched on its own hill above the surrounding village. The to-do I remembered was absent. The floodlights were off, the Schloss standing dark and silent at its enviable site amidst the hills, and yet all the more lovely for its solitude and lack of occasion.

  As every eye turned to the firmament, Schloss Lianderin stood silently
by. Solitudinous, majestic. A prize oh so easy, oh so effortlessly won, and yet, as they were about to find out, so profoundly, so utterly unobtainable.

  Yes, it does seem to be that, I thought. Not in its design, for it lacked as a fortress. Not in its location, for wasn’t it meant to impress more than to discourage? Its
presence
was what made it the prize it was, and no floodlight could adorn that perfect fact.

  I sighed, moved.

  Since then, upon every hundredth anniversary, as a reminder and a warning to any who would dare consider mounting an assault upon her, Lianderin has suffered no visitors. This is not to say that she has remained untouched by the great wars which have passed this way, for no thing has. But woe to those aggressors whose ambitions are within her power to thwart. Whatever form they may assume, it is to them she speaks. For even today the shadowy ones are among Lianderin’s residents, and in spite of their swift and utter victory over the invaders that night, the insult remains.

  The obligatory overlook before driving down into the village. Although a second-time visitor, I stopped here to absorb the vision, to enjoy it the way commercialism had not allowed the first time. But as I stepped out of the car, I detected a disturbance—

  …
from above and all four corners of the compass
…

  My eyes shot upward. The sky—yes, the gods above, it had become, in an instant, just as described—fragmented!

  Not a whapping, leathery, batlike fury, as would seem to better fulfill the imagination, but a dance of glass, alternately opaque and translucent
,
the seam of every fragment shimmering in the light of the moon, and perhaps
their own intrinsic energy as they gathered over this trespasser in their domain.

  As I leapt into the car, they descended. As I swung the wheel and roared away in the direction from which I had come, they fell upon the car, faces flashing in the windshield, eyes telling the story in a way the innkeeper, eloquent as he was, never could have; mouths twisted in a savagery matched only by my desire and determination to be down the mountain and away from this place. How I managed to avoid wrapping the car around a tree during those first seconds of the ordeal I cannot accurately say. Perhaps it was that almost as soon as I began my flight, I brought the car to a screeching halt, failing to throw the creatures from the vehicle as it skidded sideways, coming to rest at odds with the direction
of the road.

  What inspired this reaction was not the vigor and madness of their assault, which I only wished to flee, but a sudden stench, an acrid, sick
eningly pungent, almost palpable stench that entirely effused the interior
of the car. I swung around, looking for the flames, the burning bodies, the whatever it was that fueled the foulness permeating the air, but found only a fresh perspective on the dark blizzard that consumed the car. I spun the wheel even before turning my shoulders square again, and laid hard on the accelerator. I was absolutely blind, my heartbeat racing to velocities incomprehensible as I called upon the intervention of a greater power—over and above any instinct I might have had at my disposal—to save me from the grab bag of fatal conclusions awaiting me.

  Then all at once my attackers relented. They rose as one unit from the object of their assault, lifting up into the funnel of their own whirlwind, Elijah upon a chariot of black flames, from this earth and unto heaven.

  The world whirred by with the kilometers I put between myself and unholy Lianderin. Within the hour I was brought, by destinies beyond my own to pilot, to the door of the inn in Larochette. Of the drive there I
remember little, except how unbearably smothering the close confines of
the car. Despite the cold November air, I drove the distance with my window down.

  Presuming the bar would be empty, I went to the main door. I wondered
what time it was. I had not thought to check the clock in the car. Apparently the house was yet to sleep, for soon after the bell rang, the door opened and the face of a pretty young girl greeted me.

  “
Hallo
,” she said—and even as the word issued from her mouth, that pretty face twisted into an ugly one, as though beset by something detestably foul.

  The innkeeper’s last, almost incidentally presented paragraph, a footnote of suddenly horrifying proportions, emerged from the revulsion I witnessed on his daughter’s tender face. Words which could not begin to prepare me for the reactions that, starting here and tonight, would plague me for the rest of my days.

  For those who are allowed to escape Lianderin on anniversary night, there is a fate infinitely worse than perishing at the hands of her shadowy residents. And that is, to be the bearers of the memory. A memory not as the mind provides but a physical one. A memory of that fateful night when the High Lord and as many of his soldiers as material would allow were mounted to poles around the castle, and piles of brush and branches were set to flame beneath their suspended feet. That same night when their often still conscious remnants were left to hang there on the scorched poles
to be lusted over by scavengers until gracious death finally came. And after death had come and gone, still they hung there. Hung there to be ravaged
by the carrion crows while decomposition took its lazy course. It is said that for weeks after, Lianderin stank of burnt and rotting flesh. But the memory of it never fades. In those who carry it with them from Lianderin, it survives in all its vivid, putrescent, reeking detail.