A Dirge for the Temporal Read Online Free Page A

wash away.”
      “Wash away…” Seeing nothing there, he shook his head to suggest that he did not understand her. But she was already walking in the direction of the waterfall.
      “There’s a nip on the air,” he called after her.
      “It is always so,” she called back. “In Sept it only pretends to grow cold. As it only pretends to grow warm.”
      As with other things about her, which occurred to him seemingly at random, only now did he notice what she wore. Both sweater and pants were a nondescript beige, in harmony with her elegance. Her feet, he was alarmed to see, were bare. He thought to call again, but opted instead to treat his eyes, without further interruption, to her grace. She moved with a fluidity that enchanted; she was the first zephyr of September, a specter, a muse. When she reached the pool, she pulled up the legs of her pants, patted out into the water. She extended one naked foot, teasing the falling water, teasing the senses of the man standing on the balcony watching her. More tentatively, she reached out her hand, middle finger stretching as if to test the shimmering column of fire cascading from the mountain. When it was not burned, she plunged her hand into the flame; when her hand remained whole, she lay back her head and laughed happily.
  Stepping back out of the water, she found his gaze across the reaches, holding her palm to him, triumphant. He waved back…as he had waved at Laura, her own palm white and segmented against the misty window of the cab. She hadn’t even let him see her to the airport, though he went anyway, without her knowledge, saluting again as the plane flew away.
      Verena wasn’t flying away. Verena was coming back. Verena was here, now, alive to him, accessible…though he had watched her bathe in the sacred falls. The moroseness he had glimpsed had been replaced by something incalculably more difficult to define.
      “Will you come soon?” she said.
      “To…oh yes, of course. Dinner. Would you care to…I mean, may I invite you…?”
      “Loneliness dwells with me too, Galen. I know.”
      Yes. She knew. Somehow he knew that she knew.
      “Look,” she said, holding up her palm. “It didn’t wash away.”
      “What didn’t wash away?”
      “My hand…the hand that you touched.”
      Now an emotion that he did not like visited him. An emotion with tentacles that wrapped themselves around his nerve bundles, caused his breath to come sudden. Its name was old, old, and it chilled in any season, though the mercury never drop and the wind never blow.
      He reached for her suddenly, as if he could compel his arm to stretch that far, far enough to take her hand in his own. “What has happened here?” he queried. “Where is everyone?”
      “I’ve told you,” she answered, a curtain falling over her features. “There is no one.”
  “I’m afraid,” he said quietly.
      “Shhh. Be still,” she said.
      He was, not realizing what he was opening his senses to. Almost immediately the perception of place warped out of all familiarity. A sound that was both deeper and more vast than silence held him suspended. It was as if the Void were coming in like a great sighing maw to devour them.
      “What is it?” he whispered, eyes darting around him, up at the purpling sky.
      “The gears of September,” she said. “Your return has brought them to life again.”
      His skin felt as if it were being pulled from his bones. He clutched his head between his fists and prayed it go away. When he opened his eyes, a tear emerged, slipping down his cheek. In its magnificence she was reflected. He knew; he saw her at the same time in the waterfall.
      “Your table will be ready within the half hour,” she said.
      He fled into his room, sliding the glass door shut. As the compartment pressed in on him, with its strange, mysterious objects and props—TV, pictures, safe, bed, mirror, mirror —he knew he could not remain here. Not