Read Online A Dirge for the Temporal by Darren Speegle - Free Book Online Page A

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