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

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.