SEPTEMBER

by

Darren Speegle

As he drove by the sign marking the limit of the village, Galen compulsively shifted his gaze to the mirror. This side of the sign provided the same information as the other, except the word had a slash through it, to indicate one was leaving town. Sept, the metal plate bluntly maintained. Out in the middle of nowhere, a village bearing his own surname. What were the odds?

The road had followed a rushing Alpine stream for the past twenty kilometers or so, venturing deeper into the mountains than his ambling path had previously carried him. The village lay in a wider area of the canyon, its thirty-odd structures located along both sides of the stream. Two parallel streets joined by a bridge appeared to be the extent of Sept's road plan.

Sept. The village was pristinely beautiful, contrary to the way those four letters had served Galen in his youth. Septic Tank they had called him in middle school; in high school it had been a more concise Septic. The handle had been used by all save one, a girl who wrote poetry and told him how insecure he was behind his handsome face. To Ginger he was September. Funny that he should think of her now, funny that he should think of school, for these belonged to that taboo place, the past. When his wife, Laura, walked out after four years of marriage, he had decreed the past a place not to be visited. Laura had told him she needed to go home to be with her family, but he knew it was forever. He knew what being abroad had done to each of them. The sense of setting had nearly consumed him, to the alienation of her. The sense of distance had gotten her, to the alienation of him.

That sense of setting was at its peak now as he pulled into a space that might have been reserved for him. A lovely, gnarled chestnut tree stood between his car and a painted footbridge over the stream. Beyond the bridge, chimneys poured smoke into the nippy afternoon air. Beyond the roofs of the houses, golden unharvested fields lapped at the base of a steep fir-covered slope. To his right stood a small church, stained glass windows narrow and arched in its rough yellow wall. Galen looked at his watch, wondering if he need go any further than this village today. Four o'clock resounded no--as if the time of day might really be a factor when the gods had brought him here to a village by his own name.

Stepping out of the car, he looked around for the inevitable Gasthaus, staple of central European villages. He spotted the friendly structure on the other side of the street, near the motorist bridge. He left the car where it was and walked the short distance, admiring the building as he approached. A scene from farm life had been painted on the side of it: the proverbial plump, aproned Austrian woman bending to scoop up a handful of hay. On the half-timbered façade hung some of the implements of that life, painted black to stand out against the ivory stucco. Windows were plenty, their ledges covered in red flowers, their curtains drawn back to let in the sunshine. The house itself was the solid body of construction they all were, tall and deep in its dimensions. If Galen had stayed in one of these, he had stayed in a half dozen, more often than not to Laura's protests because she had once found a pair of pubic hairs on the seat of the community bathroom. She had always regretted the shortage of big American hotels.

The small lobby was lit by electric lamps made to look like wick and oil jobs. A massive disgruntled boar's head dominated one wall, while against the adjacent one rested a cigarette machine and a feeble supply of travel brochures. A set of stairs stood straight ahead, and to the left was the reception counter, with a bell. Galen rang it and waited. Emerging from a door in the wall behind the counter, a young woman interrupted his stare-down with the boar.

"Gross Gott," she said, smiling. She wasn't plump, she didn't wear an apron, she smelled nothing like the farm.

"Gross Gott," he said. "Sprechen Sie Englisch?"

"A little, yes."

"I would like a room for the night."

"How many in your party, sir?"

"One, if you count me."

She didn't seem to get it--and there was nothing to get anyway. She produced a registration card, and as he accepted it, their hands brushed. The brief sensation reminded him how far along the road of loneliness he was. Yes, he had shared an office with females during this past year of his separation from his wife, but co-workers didn't count. Did Austrians? he wondered. Did Europeans? Did the whole blessed gender?

"I'm curious," he said as he tapped the card with the pen, brows furled with the effort of remembering his new address in Brussels. "How did Sept come by its name?"

When she didn't answer immediately, he glanced up. She was looking at his name on the card.

Their eyes met. Hers were a rich brown touched by a certain joylessness, like his own. Her cascading hair was brown as well, more than complementing her eyes--lending to their momentary intensity.

"You are Austrian?" she asked.

"I'm of German ancestry…maybe Austrian, I don't know. Is it an Austrian name?"

"I…" She hesitated, frowning. "I do not really know, sir. If so, it is uncommon."

He nodded.

"Where are you coming from, Mr. Sept?"

"I've lived in Vienna for the past three years, working for the Atomic Energy Agency." He gestured behind him with his thumb. "Today I'm coming from Salzburg."

"What brought you…here?"

He shrugged. "I'm being transferred to Brussels. I'm not due there for a few weeks, so I thought I would wander some of the less traveled roads. I'm at the whim of my path, if you like."

"No map?"

He mirrored her look, which was markedly strange. "No map."

Slowly, with an elegance that moved him, she extended her hand. "Verena," she said.

He shook it without his usual flare because he was disturbed.

"Shall I get the key?" she said, glancing down. He realized he still held her hand.

"Yes of course. I'm sorry."

"Please," she said, smiling.

He assumed she was coming right back, that the key would be hanging on a rack behind the door, or somewhere equally convenient. When she didn't, he wandered over to the brochures. One showed a skier, radiant against a clear blue sky as her streamlined superimposed image jumped Olympic distances. Another depicted the façade of the very house in which he stood. Yet another was for the village, the word Sept appearing above a silvery picture of the mountain stream. A fourth leaflet was apparently a map of the region. He picked up one of these.

There was nothing inside.

He picked up another of the maps. Nothing. Shrugging, he picked up one of the skiing brochures. This time the absence of printed matter startled him. He picked up the Gasthaus brochure. Nothing. The last one…again nothing.

"Mr. Sept?"

"Yes," he said, turning. "Yeah…these brochures, they're…"

"You aren't supposed to look at them," she smiled, wrinkling her nose. "They are…the word--it is ornaments?"

"Like a Christmas tree?" he said with irony. And realized as he said it that it wasn't fair. She was the only one attempting to use the other's language.

As he stepped up to the counter, she gestured at his hand. "You wear a wedding band. May I ask…where is she?"

He thought about this for several seconds. At last he gave her the answer he felt spoke to the greater truth:

"Not here."

She nodded, led him up the stairs, skeleton key dangling on a ring.

At the door to Room 11 she stopped, inserted the key, stood back to let him enter. Again he brushed her. Again he was reminded.

She waited as he glanced around the room. "It is OK?"

"Yes, very much. Before you go, can you recommend a place for dinner?"

She smiled. "Our own restaurant perhaps? A table has been waiting, I think, for a long time."

"What do you mean?"

"We don't get many visitors here, Mr. Sept. We are honored to have you."

Leaving the key, she closed the door, and he was alone.

Room 11 was on the back side of the building, with a balcony and a view that swallowed him into its oblivions upon the moment of first contact. The slope behind the Gasthaus was rocky and steep, one section boasting a waterfall draping in quivering iridescence from the lip of a high cliff. A scent not especially pleasant, but raw, real, came off the pool formed by the falls. On the brink of the sheer face stood trees whose twisted roots dug into the stone, forming the knitted, contemplative brow of a sage old man. Down by the pool stood another chestnut tree, and another, and grass as green as May.

But May is September, September is May,
The fields that we play in, we always will play.

He could not recall where the verse came from, and chose not to go searching among the relics. The past was not to be visited; so it had been decreed. Then why could he not refrain from his images as he gazed out across the rich grass? Delete the waterfall and wasn't this the park where he had lain with his poet Ginger and understood the secrets of the universe? Hadn't he made he love to her only there, beneath the tree, while she spoke to him in whispers of September, that whispering time of year? Ah, the verse was hers, of course. Where did she go, with the stars in her brown eyes, poet of his?

She had been his inspiration for dabbling in the arts himself. He had taken up painting, then photography, then, in college, writing. After a year of submitting his fiction to the same responses--mainly that he spent too much time on exposition and not enough on narration--he gave it up. The psychiatrist his mother was seeing at the time--a probing, discerning man--had expounded on the theory for him. Galen's approach to literature was Galen's approach to life. If he spent as much time actually living his life as he did setting it up, he would doubtless live as living was meant to be. The aside was that almost all people took the approach Galen did. This gratis observation no doubt encouraged Galen's falling into his European setting with such love. Only one year separating his degree from its application, he had leapt into the world offered him, perhaps at Laura's expense. While she screamed permanence, he belted about the rare opportunity they had. They'd best seize it while it was at their grasp because one day it was back to Iowa and they would have missed their chance to live.

The fields that we play in, we always will play.

"Excuse me, Mr. Sept…"

Her voice came from below. He leaned over the balcony rail to find her smiling up at him. Something belonging to the moment, something about the unassuming expression on her oval face, or the last of the afternoon sun dancing in her hair, made her look especially youthful. He wondered how old she was, but there was no answer to be found in gazing upon her rather wistful, though lovely, features. Her eyes belied her visage, and vice versa.

"Please call me Galen…Verena."

"Of course. If you would like, I will have dinner ready for you, Galen."

"You prepare it yourself?" he asked.

"There is no one else. Not for a very long time."

He confessed, "I'm confused. Earlier you referred to it as our restaurant. You said, 'We don't get many visitors.'"

"It is…how do you say…a figure of speech?"

He looked at her a moment before asking, "Did you come back here expecting to find me on the balcony?"

"I was going to the waterfall to wash my hands." She held up the right one, palm to him. "I must know if it will 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, his eyes were 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 organ, around his nerve bunches, 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 did, 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 vaster 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 now.

He left the Gasthaus for a ship that might right itself again without him aboard. The lobby was empty as he passed.

Outside, the afternoon grew a deeper purple, the sun long gone behind a ridge. The stream flowed inevitably. Smoke pumped inevitably. Yet there were no cars except for the wagon he had brought in. There were no people save him. He felt as if he existed in the lull of nightmarish sleep. He foresaw the key turning in the ignition, the engine coming to life, the tires snatching at the asphault in their haste to obey him. He saw the sign as it would appear in his rearview mirror. Would Verena run after him, pleading about the gears of September?

September is May and May is September,
Nor free to forsake, when bound to remember.

He would laugh as he drove away, he swore. Laugh for the being done to. For the goddamn being done to, Laura. The keys in his fist were like tangible her, biting into his skin, cold, inflexible. He shook from the others the one key that mattered. The noise of the stream lifted as he neared the wagon.

"Galen!" came the voice of Verena over the rushing water.

He wasn't going to look back. He stepped around to the driver's side of the car, key in front of him like the stolen screwdriver or ice pick in the hand of the prison escapee. As he grasped the handle of the door, he caught sight of something on the stream.

His eyes locked on the object, instantly recognizing it as a body, a limp, naked human body riding the flow from the direction of the high Alps, now passing under the footbridge, a rag doll at the will of the current. A half second elapsed between its clearing the shadow of the bridge and passing the line of Galen's vehicle, but it was enough time to reveal the change that visited the body, a shift which shook Galen the witness down to the bone and marrow.

The body had turned on the current and opened its eyes to mark him.

No sooner had he beheld this terror than another body passed under the bridge, emerging in a similar surprise of flesh and awakened eyes, rolling against the force of the current, pulling and dragging as if to impede its momentum. In its wake came a third--the other two now having swept out of sight--and behind the third came a fourth. In all Galen counted seven before their abrupt cessation reminded him that he was supposed to be inside his wagon and on his way out of this haunted pass in the foothills of the Alps.

Slamming the door behind him, he turned the key to the beautiful greeting of a trusty engine waking from a doze. He pulled the shifter into reverse and backed out somewhat slower than he would have liked, in case Verena had decided to come running up behind with her plea. He caught her in his mirror as he shifted again, preparing to speed off in the direction from which he'd come. Out in the street in front of the Gasthaus, she stood akimbo, striking him--rather perversely--as stirringly sexy in the pose. Nonetheless, he put the pedal to the floor and was almost out of there when they appeared in the road in front of him--four, five, six, seven of them, all sexless, of a sickly yellow hue, flesh leeching to their bones.

He slammed on the brakes--too late as one went flying over the top of the car and another buckled underneath. As the others stared through the windshield at him, mouths stretched in every rictus and scowl, he saw that their expressions were the only thing of life they possessed, making them, as he saw it, fair game. As he yanked it in reverse, however, bringing the rpm to critical mass, the creatures divided, rushing by the car, more interested in what was behind it than what was inside.

Verena! He let reverse carry the car all the way around, one hundred and eighty degrees, paused only long enough to convince himself that he wasn't about to invite real-life blood into a hallucinatory reality, then he rode them down like pylons in a road course, too tempting to leave be. Having punched through the last of them, he found himself and his wagon, in a haze of hot rubber and clutch and brakes, facing Verena. Verena and the akimbo. Would he or would he not come to dinner?

She did not protest, in spite of her impatient stance, as he dragged his victims one by one back to the stream, where the water accepted them eagerly, instantly sweeping them away. He never looked at them as he did the work. He did not know their nature and did not want to know. To his hands they were cool, moist; it was enough. He glanced only when they were in the clutch of the stream, then only for a second, to make sure they obeyed.

The wagon he left in the middle of the road. It was an admission.

To be denied no longer, Verena held out her hand to him.

Inside, at their neatly laid table, the candles provided a scent as well as light, but the light was exclusive and the shapes of their faces drifted radiantly. She made him eat the petals of flowers, drink water from the falls, kiss her face when there wasn't enough. She was Laura, she said. And Ginger.

"Once, a long, long time ago," she recalled, "a stranger ambled in off the Wanderweg. His arrival caused the gears of September to freeze. His presence caused the stream to flow backwards into the wilderness of ice and snow, carrying with it the vitality of our little village at the end of civilization. Now you have returned."

"Sept is a delightful name for a village."

"Your village," she said. She raised a glass. "Unforsaken."

THE END

Story copyright Darren Speegle 2002, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com