The Everborn Page 12

  ***

  Alice Bradshaw led her boyfriend down the walkway, past the quieted, gated swimming pool and a series of juniper bushes stretching out like a multitude of hands, mossy and splintery from digging upwards and out from the ground. They arrived at the lightless front doorstep of room 06.

  She turned to her boyfriend and beckoned a pleasant second kiss and he obliged her, pinning her sleek-figured body gently but firmly against the door. The pressure loosened the number “6” plate from the metal “06”, knocking it onto the padded doormat below and making it room number 0.

  “This is your bright, bargain motel room?” her boyfriend laughed.

  “Ben,” she sighed, “it’s better on the inside. Besides, no churchy parents to hide from...you’re with a pastor’s daughter for Pete’s sake...and we don’t have to go all the way to your place now, do we?”

  “No,” he said to her slyly, tilting them both into the failed front lighting. “But we can still go all the way....”

  Alice playfully nudged him backwards. “Wait a sec, Ben, what if he’s watching?”

  He pulled away smirking. Then, “Can you believe him? You think your dad sent him, you know, to watch us? You know how paranoid he gets over you....”

  “He’s not my dad’s right-hand man, Ben. He’s only a handy-man. And he’s a cool friend.”

  “A cool friend that follows us???”

  “He helped us be able to come out here,” Alice told him. “He covered our asses...hell, he even told us about this thing tonight.”

  “He told us about the concert, yeah, and he showed up to catch the show, which I think is great. But he’s following us!”

  “Maybe out here, in this neighborhood, he’s looking out for us. And if he sees us go into the room, he won’t tell. He’ll maybe lecture us later....”

  “I don’t think he’s there anymore.”

  “You sure...?” Alice turned, looked past Ben.

  “Don’t turn! Don’t look past me!”

  Alice whipped her gaze back to him.

  “Just close your eyes...,” Ben said to her and kissed her once more. She relaxed and accepted his passion and returned it.

  A purse rose between them, breaking them apart. She dug into the purse, retrieved her room key. She had to jiggle the lock; she turned the knob and opened the door.

  In an instant, an abrupt flash, a spectral blur and Ben had no time to react. Alice could not contain her senses long enough to scream. Something collided with her and she found herself crashing down into and past the opened door, through the shabby carpeted entranceway, against the table in the nearby kitchen abyss. There was a distant distortion of light cut to the quick and in it she caught a vague glimpse of the door as it slammed shut behind dancing blackness.

  She reached in a desperate but feeble attempt to grasp for some stable support, her mind just as desperate to grasp reality. Blindness overtook that reality. . . she fought against it as though it took prominence over fighting for her life. . . and her hand fell onto the entranceway carpet. In abhorrent confusion she mistook the carpet for a heavy dampness...

  ...her own blood....

  ...but it was then, that her eyes came into focus with the twisting, contorted mass of what she knew to be her boyfriend, his throat severed and gaping, spewing a black formlessness.

  Still, Alice could not scream.

  Though she knew she was about to die.

  A gripping force overtook her from behind, lifting her from the kitchenette tile floor suddenly, her vision clearing further as the gripping hands flung her around to a full view of her assailant’s figure.

  She caught the gleam of a knife, a razor and the sight of the lurid shape behind it, the shabby grey shape shrouded in silhouette by the moonlight streaming through the curtains beyond.

  She could not move.

  She could not struggle.

  And there came a whisper... harsh, sunken...

  “I need you. I need you reeeeeeal bad.”

  It lowered the blade closer, almost until it reached the skin below her line of vision.

  “Not for love, not for sex, not for death. My needs are beyond these trivialities. My needs are for a more important cause...a more noble cause.”

  He lowered his face and the rugged bristles of his beard brushed against Alice’s nostrils and across the smoothness of her cheek.

  “I’ve been watching you for...oh, I’d say for some time now. Ever since your father took me in and gave me a job, which was very nice of him, by the way, I don’t think I ever showed the gratitude he deserved. I’ve been wanting you, Alice Bradshaw. But things are different now. Now, I need you. Reeeeeal bad....”

  And that was when she noticed, in the midst of horrid disarray...

  ...the scars.

  His words fell into place upon the nightmare bed of her conscious understanding. Her eyes widened in gradual realization.

  “Good girl,” he breathed. “It’s Simon. It’s me, Simon. Simon BoLeve. That bearded behemoth you see seated in the back left row of each one of your daddy’s Sunday social services. The one who jerks off toilet plunger handles and scrubs graffiti-smeared pussie drawings from the parking lot brick walls. The one who scares away the pussies that put them there. The one who roosts up in the church attic. Not that I’m complaining; it’s comfortable up there. Comfortable...but also lonely. So lonely. But not anymore. Something better has come along. Something special is going to happen. Something reeeeeeal special. Reeeeally special. Soon, lovely Alice Bradshaw. Soon. And until then, I’m not Simon anymore. Until then, you can call me....

  ....a flicker, a radiant gleam and the razor sliced cleanly into her right cheek. Blood seeped outwards and trailed beneath the inside crevice of her earlobe, downward, beading across her flailed hair....

  “....until then, you can call me Scratch.”

  Slowly, his free hand skimmed down the length of her side and found the base of her blouse.

  As she felt the distant numbness of his fingers fumbling with the top button fly of her jeans, one and then the next and then the next, as her panties soon slid with the jeans to her ankles and his coldness pressed hard against the exposed skin of her inner thighs, she allowed the evening’s realities to slip into a detestable emptiness where, compared to reality, she found a better and brighter place in which to hide....

  12.

  A Departing Exchange

  Andrew hadn’t been forced to pay as much attention to Ralston’s music nor the worshipping Ralston fans as he had first dreaded. Instead, he payed far more attention to the woman who asked him to dance and who offered him a seat at her table.

  Who would ever think.

  Melony hadn’t forced herself to pay as much attention to the investigative business of unknown truth-seeking as she had planned. Instead, she ended up clubbing and drinking and dancing with the investigation’s priority subject of the evening.

  Who would ever think that, either.

  They both ducked out from the show just beyond one a.m., allowing enough time for themselves to avoid the exiting onrush at the advent of the show’s climax and the last call for alcohol.

  Squid Friction had been well received and neither Andrew nor Melony could imagine the band’s debut as taking a turn for the worse this late in the evening, or any time before the gig ended. They both agreed, however, that the show’s success was largely due to the novelty and nothing that night could possibly herald a smashing debut album.

  The two made their way across the car-littered parking lot, up and over an infestation of weeds and cracks of broken sidewalk. As they crossed the adjoining intersection, Andrew paused to gaze back at the mouth of the Crow Job’s rear alley as the reminder of its hidden crime scene briefly struck his memory. Melony turned too, noting as her eyes caught sight of Andrew and then of his distraction that she should interject a regard for the evening’s professional mission while there was still time...

  ...before she found herself driving home without so much
as a promise from Andrew that she will meet with him again.

  For investigative reasons, of course.

  I’m walking her to her car, Andrew thought, and he could not believe where the evening had taken him thus far, holy gee-zus.

  “Andrew...?”

  Andrew looked at Melony. “Yes?”

  “I had a great time tonight. Thank you.”

  “You didn’t expect to, without me?” He meant to say, you didn’t expect to, unless you met someone, but the instant before he said it, he thought it too rude. Or too blunt.

  Melony laughed a short laugh. Then, rather straightforward, she replied, “I didn’t expect to really meet anyone tonight, unless it was....” (unless it was you in particular) “...unless it was Ralston or someone in the band.”

  “I was meaning to ask you about that,” Andrew said, “and now’s as gooda time as any. So, Diverse Arcanum covers entertainment as well, as, say, Noah’s Ark and vampires and Santa Claus? What’s a girl like you and a magazine about the unknown doing in a place like The Crow Job?”

  The two half-passed a lone and lowly motel before Melony began to cross the street to her vehicle with Andrew following. Approaching a sleek cherry-red custom-made convertible ‘68 Mustang, she withdrew from her purse a black box-shaped gadget and flicked its center button and the car responded with an abrupt chirp chirp! Already, she found herself relieved upon casual inspection that no rat-bastard hoodlum had attempted to tamper with it. She exchanged the black box with a set of keys.

  Behind her, across the street at the motel, a door slam startled her, made her turn. She found Andrew before her, jotting something down with a pen to a jagged paper within his palm.

  “This is my home phone,” he said, and coyly handed to her the jagged piece. “I...I was hoping tonight wasn’t just a really good night and nothing more....”

  She took the paperand it disappeared into her purse after a quick glance at it. Her keys clinked and jiggled in her hand. She didn’t know what to do with them, for it seemed that to turn and open her car door was to call her encounter with Andrew quits for the night. And she didn’t want to do that. But yet, she had to. For herself, for Max, for business.

  At the same time, she knew she had to meet Andrew Erlandson again.

  If but only for business.

  For one sweeping second, Melony found time to wonder whether the way she was achieving this task of getting to know Andrew was right or wrong. Was she coming on to him like some relentless diva willing to go as far as to sleep with a guy to get what she wanted from him? Was she a spy sent by Maxy to befriend Andrew, to be Andrew’s buddy-ol’-pal until she knew him good enough to exploit him? Was she genuinely attracted to him as she would be attracted to any intriguing young man, as though he actually was a man and not the secretive Being From Beyond she’d convinced herself of him to be?

  Was she finding him to be more of a man than anything she expected?

  Was she so incredibly turned off and tired of Max that any prospects of fooling around or falling in love again turned on and tempted her?

  Surely she wouldn’t cheat on her husband.

  Not under these circumstances, especially.

  It was okay to be attracted to Andrew. It made her comfortable with him and she had to be comfortable with him, or the aspects of what he was would make him far too intimidating to tap for unseen wonders.

  She was doing what she wanted.

  She was doing the right thing.

  And if Andrew found out who she was....by the time he found out, she was sure she could make him understand.

  “Call me, I’d like to hear from you,” she said to him. “Soon. Like maybe tomorrow. You got my number. Let’s get together this weekend.”

  “Or you call me, you now have my number, too,” said Andrew. “Or how about this, the first person to call the other wins.”

  “Wins what?”

  “Wins a full course Chinese dinner for two, courtesy of yours truly, on the house. Or should I say, at my place. It’s a cozy little apartment and I make great Chinese. We could do something afterwards, maybe, like go catch a movie....”

  “Sounds nice,” Melony replied, and smiled.

  As Andrew watched Melony pull into the street and speed into the distant lamp-lit black, his thoughts sped also, thoughts about the weekend, thoughts about dinner and beyond.

  ...and thoughts about what Bari would think of all of this.

  He was left in wonder and wondering these things when he proceeded back to the opposite side of the street to make his way to the apartment, casually observing the flow of nightclubbers exiting The Crow Job and swarming between the parking lot’s vehicles and it crossed his mind that Melony had never quite answered his question about why a magazine concerned with the unknown would concern itself with a horror writer’s rock n’ roll gig.

  Then again, it didn’t matter.

  He went home with these thoughts and with them he went home to Bari.

  13.

  A Few Fringe Benefits of the Gods

  When Andrew returned to his third floor apartment, he expected Bari to be somewhere about and waiting for him to come home.

  Bari herself was more than amused at this. She’d given up reminding her dear one years ago that she was always with him, always and in many ways. What was he thinking, that Bari slummed around the place like a bored housewife, that protecting him with her very soul meant macrame and Days Of Our Lives and hoping he’d return to her safely for chicken and dumplings and a piping pot pie?

  Andrew knew better than that; he simply wasn’t as conscious of things as he could be. And whenever Bari would appear to him, she would appear mostly at home and very rarely elsewhere, almost never in the presence of others or under the potential of being seen by others, except in a few past cases of protecting Andrew from harm. Aside from any exceptions when Andrew was out and about, Bari remained undetectable and observant and totally nonexistent to the physical realm of Andrew’s world.

  Oftentimes to Andrew, Bari’s absence grew so convincing and certain, stretching over the course of hours or even days or weeks that it became all but impossible to accept her claim of always being there.

  But hell...people generally take God that way.

  Whatever sort of creature or being Bari was or used to be, she was actively a Watchmaid, like it or not and she had been for quite a while now. Oftentimes, she dared to confront what few vague glimpses of memory she carried of her human self, of the mortal woman she once was, but in many ways it became a natural instinct not to dwell on these memories too much. Her duties were embedded within her from the single burst of moment it took for her to be transformed and the sudden enlightenment, which accompanied this transformation left her with no choice but to accept it and to remain true. It was like dying and embracing the inevitable afterlife, and then assuming the role of guardian angel to the very one responsible for her death.

  The only thing was, Bari never truly died. She was too physical and material to be a literal angel; she was also too spiritual and intangible to be limited to the physical world. Bari possessed the power to materialize into the physical world, to touch and to feel and to be touched, but she could also upon her own will manipulate her state of mind and body to disappear and reappear, to see the unseen spectacles which surround us all in spirit and limitless dimension and to take part in them as well. For her, there was no place on Earth she could not travel and nothing on Earth to keep her from traveling there, from walls of iron to the Gates of Hell.

  If the average Joe or Judy Human were to possess even a few of these fringe benefits of the gods, things would lead to nothing less than cataclysmic mayhem for the only species to ever walk the earth who could never quite seem to keep their feet on the ground.

  There was one thing keeping Bari from her own potential brew of cataclysmic mayhem, from exploiting such powers as Man could...

  ...and this was her allegiance to her Everborn, upon which these abilities were built. Ever
ything about her was dependent upon a solid guardianship of Andrew, for if any harm should come to him, the price for her would be banishment, banishment from the physical realm altogether, to forever walk the earth while merely viewing the physical realm but hopelessly unable to take part in it. Such is the realm of spirits, but she would not be spirit. She would no longer be a Watchmaid should Andrew die, die for reason.

  She would become what came to be called a Magdalene, a term coined by the many Watchmaids who had suffered this fate over the ages and centuries past.

  Andrew may not have been aware of Bari’s presence with him at The Crow Job that night, but she had nevertheless been with him, watching him, studying the wife of Maxwell Polito with amusement and intense interest and with increasing approval. She had been waiting for Andrew to make this sort of destined connection with another and it was seeming as if Melony would be the one. Of all women.

  But there had been something else present at The Crow Job that night, something lurking about near the dark and deserted alleyway at the nightclub’s rear, something aware of Bari’s presence also, of the presences of all involved.

  Something waiting and watching, pinpointing the movements and schemes of the man in shabby grey, savoring the lingering death smell of the black boy it had revived to keep tabs on the shabby grey man when he himself had been an infant; the boy whose second and final death had drawn the being to this alley so many years later.

  This something was one of the Magdalene.

  And Bari knew what it was waiting for.

  14.

  Max and Melony

  Max had trampled through the front door of his Malibu estate late that Saturday morning, a briefcase in one hand and notebooks and piles of papers in the other. He trotted upstairs, clad in blue jeans and a grey Los Angeles Kings sweatshirt (which was all he cared to wear on his plane trip up) and went directly to his office.