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eBook Category: Dark Fantasy/Science Fiction
eBook Description: A man awakens in a filthy bedroom with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. Seeing an old Gideon bible on a nightstand, he finds a name to call his own--Temple. This is the story of Temple's quest for identity and purpose in a dying, decaying world. By turns heartbreaking, enlightening, and surreal, British fantasist Steven Savile has created a story that T.M. Wright describes as "a story about Death written by a man who has clearly consorted with devils." This novella comprises the four part Temple series published in Apex Digest issues five through eight, with a special introduction from T.M. Wright and an afterword from the author.

eBook Publisher: Apex Publications, LLC/Apex Publications, Published: 2007, 2007
Fictionwise Release Date: February 2009

4 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [125 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [152 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [94 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [438 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [106 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [175 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [162 KB] , hiebook (KML) [284 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [181 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [87 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [109 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [175 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [157 KB]
Words: 32837
Reading time: 93-131 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
ISBN: 9780977668168

"Here's the truth: we, all of us, are the "wandering dispossessed," and Savile knows it. You may be reading this little book in a comfortable room, in a comfortable house, in a comforting city, within an apparently comforting and secure civilization, but all of us know (or we wouldn't be reading this book) that all of that matters little, if at all, that circumstances not just beyond our control, but, more importantly, beyond our ken, will doubtless change everything, everything, and we will see ourselves for what we really are: wandering (without real focus; because where do we focus?), dispossessed, and in imminent danger of becoming one with the abundant dead."--T.M. Wright, author of A Manhattan Ghost Mystery

Junkyard Dogs

The night was a bitter black glittering with a thousand points of light. Temple watched a sad-faced girl making a boat out of folded paper, her hands trembling as she let it sail away down the gutter with all of her hopes and dreams stashed aboard. Even before it floundered in the drain the girl shrank back into her doorway, pulling the collar of her threadbare coat up around her throat. The wind had that familiar cutting edge to its caress. Any day now, snow. Someone pushed past him, head down, a grunt of apology or accusation lost in the folds of their scarf.

Reaching into his pocket for his tobacco tin and the makings of a cigarette, Temple sat himself down on the stoop of a crumbling tenement. A washer woman's mop sloshed around his feet, suds soaking down through the cracks in the pavement. Ignoring her, Temple watched the girl. Her fingers moved through some kind of sign, twitching out a subliminal message to her soul. He had seen it before. Give up, it said in the language of the streets. Curl up in your doorway and die. Close your eyes on the end of the world and open them again on some fantastic place. He drew a deep breath into his lungs. Let the smoke waft up over his face like a veil of ghosts.

While he smoked, bodies wrapped in society's cast off bits and pieces shuffled in and out of the small soup kitchen that had once been the Christus Church clutching their tinfoil trays of mashed potato and meatballs, drinking in the aromatic steam of hot food. The spectres of the Lady Hamilton Hotel and the lead-stripped spire of the old church haunted the maze of dirty streets. Temple exhaled another wraith of smoke for this ghost town. In the distance the bells of the meat wagons played their nursery rhymes, taunting these living, still breathing corpses. Kids crawled over the husk of a car, caught half in half out of the broken glass teeth of a shop window in the devastated shopping mall. Back in the darkness he observed the naked shelves--long ago stripped of any material offerings.

Temple ground out the cigarette butt beneath his heal, feeling nothing as he listened to the cries of "Bring out your dead, bring out your dead" because they weren't his dead. They had no claim on his soul, on the emptiness deep in his gut that was like a worm tunnelling its way to his outer consciousness.

A cannonball was lodged in the second story of the building on the street corner. It was an odd little detail but it stuck with him.

A scuffle broke out in the food line, a metal tray clattering to the floor, food wasted. Lupus-disfigured hands scrabbled after it, stuffing it into more than one hungry mouth. He watched it all with a sense of dislocation. It was the play of everyday life but it didn't matter. It didn't touch him. There was nothing here for him. These unforgiving streets weren't his home. These hopeless actors weren't his friends. He was one of a new breed. The Dispossessed. He was just another scavenger feeding off the bloated corpse of this Brave New World.

He hadn't seen any real traffic for days. Since before the Millennium Clock on the wharf stopped ticking. We're not so different, you and I, he thought, watching a fat-bodied rat pick a path through the mound of feces steaming on the street corner. But of course they were different; the rat was a survivor where he had given up trying to survive. Temple pushed himself to his feet, turned his back on the black rat, and joined the thin-faced crowd with his battered food tray.

The Eastern edge of the square was a corrugated iron fence. Rust-pitted gates hung like the broken wings of a fallen angel. Some forgotten son had painted The Gates of Heaven across the ripples of iron, and they might just as well have been. Headless statues of long dead statesmen stood either side of the gates, keeping a blind watch. Through the gates, at the end of the Yellowbrick Road, sat the old Kings Palace where the politicians buried their heads in the sand while they waited for a miracle that wasn't coming.

An old tank rumbled slowly along the line of the iron fence, caterpillar tracks eating the rubble and rock dust of the road, a snake of street boys, Burgess's Droogs come to life, dancing in its wake, their faces painted white and tattooed with spider webs. The scavengers had come to loot the corpses; their wordless whooping chant ululated through the old town.

An olive-skinned boy threw himself in front of those relentless tracks, light and flame engulfing his corpse as one of the web-faced street boys poured gasoline on his blue jeans and another ignited it with a carelessly tossed match. Other faces turned away but Temple watched the boys' burning dance, fascinated by the slowly charring skin and the blisters that wept beneath the flames.

A pretty young girl--twelve, less maybe, or more, it was difficult to tell with kids these days, they all looked the same--moved down the food line, offering her wilted flowers for sale. Her brother worked the subway entrance, polishing strangers' shoes and hoping for a miracle in silver. She moved past Temple, the hunger starkly visible in her watery eyes. He could only shrug when she offered the sad blooms, swapping a dull coin for a brighter smile. Like a magician, he drew a second coin from behind her ear and pressed it into her hand. "Take it and feed yourself," he whispered, looking at the emptying trays of food further up the line. "Somewhere," He was going to say nice but instead said, "better than this."

When it was his turn, Temple took a ladleful of the swill they were serving and five meatballs the size of his knucklebones, picking out the black flecks of dead insect as he ate. After inhaling the meager offering, he licked the tray clean and buried it beneath the folds of his coat.

Temple cupped his hands around his mouth and blew a funnel of warm air back up over his face. He stamped his feet, trying to force the blood to flow before he started another lonely walk between the dead buildings and their baleful ghosts. Of course, they weren't real ghosts, weren't the spectres of dead fireboys burned beneath the eyes of the street kids, or the wraiths of hope cast adrift on a gutter sea in paper boats. No. These were the ghosts of celluloid and memory, of newspaper cuttings and a life that belonged to someone else. He had nothing and that was just the way he needed it.

What is identity anyway? He asked the face he saw distorted in a store window. A question of self-worth and ownership? There was a hole where his life should have lived, and in that hole he was left to invent himself, his dreams, his past. How much time had passed since he woke in that fleapit motel, bills paid four weeks in advance, with nothing more than the clothes on his back and line of bruises and needle marks marring the inside of his left thigh?

That had been the worst, not knowing himself. Not owning a history. A personality. Values. He had stared at his naked body in the mirror, no memory of who he saw being who he actually was, and forced himself to pick a name from the Gideon bible on the nightstand.

"My body is my Temple," he whispered out loud, tasting the rightness in the bitter irony of the words--that his body was all he had, and so he was reborn: Temple.