The Everborn Page 18

  He wasn’t going down without a fight.

  In his frustrated anger, he rose from the toppled bookcase quickly with one elbow as his support and one hand raised and curled into a fist ready to strike, and he struck hard and sure straight square into the madman’s bearded upper jaw. The figure’s lethal weapon sliced once across thin air merely inches beyond Max’s throat, flying upwards above both their heads, and Max caught its wrist with his opposite hand in a deathgrip as the figure sailed past his line of sight for a moment towards the closed attic door.

  Max maintained his grip upon the figure’s wrist and thrust his body weight upon the dark shape, rolling over and plunging his fist through the air and down upon the figure’s arm just inches above the wrist, again and then once more, in desperate effort to free the weapon in the assailant’s hand. An arm rapidly ascended from the figure’s opposite side and met with Max’s chest in an excruciating wallop, returning Max’s back to the floor, heaving, loosening and then freeing his grip from around the figure’s wrist.

  Max struggled to breathe, as though his lungs were severely punctured and his chest cavity split open and whatever oxygen he inhaled escaped effortlessly between his ribs. He clenched his chest, his fingers seeping into a sponge-like wetness, giving him the feeling that he was not only bare-chested but bare-skinned as well and his hands were clinging to his blood-drenched muscle tissues. Reality abandoned him once more, if only for a moment, though his adrenalin was pumping at a decathlon rate and the subconscious suspicions that he might be dying were surfacing just enough for him to scoff them away with a sideswipe of insistence that he was still alive and that he would live to see through this.

  The figure arose and darted again beyond his line of sight. Max pivoted into the direction he believed the figure went, but the piercing agony in his upper belly and chest crippled the process, causing him to double over. The urgent necessity to know where the figure was subdued him, to know where the next blow would come from and to be prepared when it would happen. With persistent effort he managed to locate the figure’s presence directly behind him; it was arched forward and towards the ground, its knees bent, and it appeared to be rabidly exploring the floor’s thick coat of shadow around and beyond him, in search of perhaps its dispossessed weapon.

  The following moment, the figure abandoned Max and the surface of the floor completely.

  Max conjured up another degree of strength to lift himself upwards and over until his body flopped onto his chest with a debilitating painfulness which he hadn’t intended. This stunt rendered him motionless until he regained his strength and began to crawl, inch upon excruciating inch at a time in a dilatory endeavor to reach the foot of the bed.

  When he arrived there, a light switched on from somewhere past the bed, on the other side.

  He again could not see the figure. He could only hear movement, the sounds of rustling of odds and ends being scattered and swished about the surface of a desk or table, clicks and clangs and drawers both metallic and wooden opening and closing. A few of those odds and ends fell, and Max heard their vibrations echo against the hardwood floor.

  With one outstretched hand he made an effort to reach above himself, upwards and through the rank air, until he caught hold of the dense fabric of the bedcovers at the bed’s edge. He fought for a firm grip, then lifted himself slowly.

  It hurt like a sonofabitch.

  Just to move, just to breathe.

  He succeeded, supplanting his climb, let go of his grip and reached for another clump of fabric to situate himself into a sitting position. The palm of his hand came down over something knobby and fleshy and round. It was the young woman’s ankle. He abandoned his grip immediately, offended at this, found a new and more compliable portion of bedspread, and continued in his effort to sit up. He succeeded further, his wounded chest in insufferable protest. He looked around, blinked, and gazed toward the light.

  It was the light of a retractable desk lamp, clamped and extended over a desk-like brown wooden table with a duo of two-drawer grey file cabinets beneath. The drawer of one of the file cabinets was pushed out and open. The figure had dropped to the floor and was now rising, pulling up and over his waistline a pair of cut-off faded blue raggedy jeans, and he was facing the opened file drawer and reaching for it at the same time, hurried.

  Max’s gaze darted in a dazed surveillance of his surroundings. It was a miserable place, miserable considering his state of mind but miserable in itself, poorly but efficiently kept for any miserable soul choosing to dwell in it, and it gave Max the feeling that this particular wretch remained at heart a homeless person still, only his cardboard box possessed furniture and a certain sadistic bit of ambience.

  The figure reached into the file cabinet drawer, seized something and drew it out, paused for a moment with his bony back halfway towards Max, and then he rotated slowly, both hands gripping a threateningly sizeable handgun, centering and then centered, clicked cocked dead straight into Max’s direction.

  “I know who you are,” Max found himself saying. It was a spontaneous remark, but with the light of the desk lamp and an awakened sobriety Max truly recognized the figure; aside from its gaunt and misshapen characteristics, the man presented with himself a ghostly mirror image of Andrew Erlandson. But Max knew better, had expected this, had known better for quite some time.

  Simon BoLeve lowered the gun. Just a little. Enough to still mortally wound Max should he choose to indulge his intentions. But the words Max uttered brought a quizzical semblance to Simon’s gaze, and he peered upon Max coldly, questioningly.

  And then, “Oh do you?” Simon told him. Even more quizzically, “What do you mean? Where do you know me from? I want to know this, you see, because as you can see, you are about to die. Whether you tell me or not. You may be stalling your death by saying this, but these are not a typical man’s last words. You have my interest. Then you die.”

  “Simon,” Max had no time to think things carefully, rationally. But he didn’t want to die and his stakes for surviving were at this point far better than the pastor’s. At this point, his knowledge was all he had, his best defense. “Simon BoLeve is who you are. And you are not a human being like me. You have a special purpose, you haven’t lived a life like I or anyone else has. You have a chance to understand yourself more, from what I have seen of you, since you were an infant. Your heritage is of a different kind. I know who you are.”

  Even if Max didn’t know completely, it was enough to openly confound Simon, and the gun he held lowered considerably then and the figure that gripped it darted his gaze around the room until it rested upon a pillowed corner to Max’s far left, where a stack of papers lay sorted and stacked and partially scattered upon a spread bed sheet like a spectral picnic of homework across the corner floor.

  At that very same minute, something startled the both of them. It was the exit door, a door centered at the far end of the attic room, the door to the outside roof area.

  It was opening.

  Max began to cough, violently. A liquid flem escaped from his mouth and he placed a hand over his lips, withdrew the hand, and he realized in horror that he was coughing up blood. The arm with which for the most part held his chest together was drenched with it. His clothing was saturated as though he’d been swimming in a pool of his own blood.

  The last thing Max saw was the vision of the new presence enveloped within the opening exit doorway. Whatever it was, it was clearly female, with skin of tarnished silver, its face resistant to emotion and its hair flowing straight and thick and black, its torso diminishing into a fading transparency, which turned invisible from the lower waist down into a fuming current of air like a fabled genie.

  It hovered into the attic room and surveyed the territory.

  It looked upon Simon firstly, then upon Max.

  Even from across the room, those eyes seemed to glisten like glossy windows to an eternity past.

  And this was all Max saw until he himself faded into a deep
dark abyss, the final seconds of delirium.

  And peaceful, euphoric death.

  20.

  Matt McGregor Goes To Church

  Matt McGregor had found his way to the Church on the Rock in much the same manner as Max had. When he spotted Max’s Mustang vacant and parked against the curb at the church’s adjoining intersection, he knew that Maxy had made it inside and was well into his investigative endeavors. Matt parked his Chevy Caprice a few vehicles away from Max and made his way towards the church, crossing at the intersection and heading towards the sanctuary’s front double doors.

  Inside, the first handful of pews remained packed with prayerful worshippers, the worrisome recipients of the heartbreaking news of young Alice and her very late boyfriend Ben, or at least the ones concerned enough to hold themselves after service hours in diligence to the Lord.

  Matt vaguely recalled what Bradshaw looked like from diverse television spotlights on the news and on Christian Broadcasting while flipping through late night channels and it appeared as if Max and the pastor were both elsewhere. Matt wondered if Max had even located the pastor at all.

  He went outside. No sign of the officers he’d sent there earlier to ask questions and to inform the immediate family and to look around. He assumed their task was short as it was simple and the last of them had vanished while he’d been cruising their way down the freeway.

  He stepped around the building and made his way leisurely down the side walkway until he spied an open door to his right. He went up to it and as he did so his eyes caught sight of a spent cigarette butt at his feet just outside the door. In a fleeting thought he figured it odd that someone had been smoking just inches away from a church; two thoughts then…either it had been discarded by a homeless person, and there were many who attended here, though they didn’t appear as such with thanks to the pastor and with double thanks as to how they were no longer exactly homeless (the church was by no means a soup kitchen, no raggedy derelicts pushing shopping carts here), or it was discarded by Max. And there didn’t at this point seem to be any people around.

  Then again, no big deal. It was only a cigarette butt.

  He peered inside through the open doorway and into an empty office.

  “Excuse me, my brother,” a voice startled him from behind. “You lookin’ for Pastor Jacob? He ain’t back yet."

  Matt spun around to find himself facing a black gentleman staring resolutely back upon him, garbed in a slick yellow sports jacket and tie, slick for the seventies to say the least, the seventies painstakingly itching to catch up to the nineties.

  “Yes,” Matt responded. “When will he be back? Did you see him with anyone?”

  “I saw him with some guy. He your partner?”

  “Yes, in a way he is. Hair kinda slick, dark—skinned, Italian-looking, in his forties, maybe dressed nice? Where did they go, do you know?”

  Mr. Yellowjacket nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. I think I saw them go back inside. I think they went up to see Simon.”

  Matt was intensely intrigued, and this was even more an understatement than Mr. Yellowjacket’s clothes. “Simon BoLeve?”

  Mr. Yellowjacket took an awkward pause to think. “I suppose that’s his name. He’s always been just Simon to me. He fixes things around here. Fixes all kinds a things. I’ll take ya to him.”

  With anticipation, Matt followed the man up the side walkway and away from the office, around to the front of the church, and together they re-entered the front double doors to the sanctuary. Sidestepping several underdressed and homely-faced church-goers sojourning towards the outside world, Mr. Yellowjacket stopped short and pointed a narrow finger towards the world that lay ahead for Matt, the foot of a stairway to their almost immediate right, adorned by a metal rack of pamphlets and tracts situated against the wall.

  “You go up,” Mr. Yellowjacket instructed. “I gotta stay down here and tend to things. Just go up the stairs past the choir room until you reach the door at the top. That’s Simon’s place. That’s where they should all be doin’ their thing.”

  “Thanks very much,” Matt told him and proceeded forward to begin his ascent.

  “God bless you, brother,” Yellowjacket said, he himself proceeding down the center aisle of church-pews and towards the remaining worshippers before the pulpit.

  Matt wasn’t as wary as perhaps he should’ve been. Yet with Max having long gone before him and in the good company of the pastor, Matt suspected he would walk into nothing more than halfway into an interview between Max and Simon with the pastor in their midst, the pastor more than likely perplexed with the contents of Max’s questionings. But Matt was sure that Max would keep his cool in the company of Pastor Bradshaw, at least partway sure. Given the nature of Simon BoLeve’s past and its seriously bizarre relevance to Matt’s own past, its profound and chilling relevance, Matt faced a certain deep, foreboding fear. To top this off, he was faced with his mounting suspicions of Simon’s involvement at the motel. Given the instincts and experiences of a cop, his journey upwards to the head of the stairs was plainly reminiscent to his attempts to locate and apprehend the suspected felons of escapades past.

  Given the evidence, he wondered whether his visits would end with Simon’s arrest.

  And given who Simon supposedly was, he wondered what would become of that.

  These contemplations were by no means any comfort to him as he approached the closed door at the end of the miniscule walkway he came across at the top of the stairs. If there was any comfort at all, it was in the Smith & Wesson holstered between his breast and the inside lining of his jacket.

  He halted at the door. Listened. There were no voices, no noise. It was abnormally quiet. Deathly so.

  He leaned forward against the door. He raised a hand, and with his knuckles, he knocked softly.

  He waited.

  No answer. Nothing.

  He was about to speak, but instead willed his opposite hand to rise to grip the doorknob. It turned in his grip; the door was unlocked.

  He opened the door unto the decadent dark.

  ***

  Matt McGregor did not expect the onrush of stale sweatshop pungency to welcome him as he opened the door, as if he’d opened the door to a men’s locker room after a sweaty day in the summer heat.

  Darkness broke into the lamplight of the far center of the room and fell upon the Stygian surprise party that awaited him. His vision canvassed the morbid exhibition uninhibited and ghastly underneath the vista of frolicking particles of light-washed dust and discolored dimness. These were the first things he saw, three bodies, one nude and bound and stretched upon a queen-sized bed like an unconsenting victim to a ghoulish game of bondage and masochism, another contorted and lifeless and drained of the blood now a bloodbath still drawn from a gaping black slit across his neck, the other slumped at the foot of the bed and equally bloody, equally lifeless...

  ...Max....

  Reality at once collided with the seconds-long inability to focus upon it and upon such an unexpected scene, but it was only within seconds that Matt acted and a cop’s instincts kicked in, instincts blurred with emotion and dislocation and the awareness of the identities of the other two, of Bradshaw and of Bradshaw’s young daughter upon the bed. Matt was quick to rush towards them and towards Max, insanely distraught as he did so but alert enough to reach into his jacket and pull his Smith & Wesson from its holster, to stop short of Max and to cock his gun and take aim, both hands clutching and stretched and readied, in one direction and then another and another....

  ...towards no one.

  The room appeared to be empty. A door hung open and wide at the opposite wall, somehow barring the murky late morning daylight from merging with the yellowing lamp-lit room, as if an invisible field prevented its entrance. It was beginning again to rain outside, the steady drizzle pat-patting against what chalky stretch of rooftop Matt could see.

  There was no sign of anyone else in the room and by the sight of the opened exitway Matt ass
umed Simon BoLeve had fled. If it was BoLeve.

  He gazed around the attic room. He couldn’t believe someone was allowed to live in this space, could hold residence here and beyond the reach of the comforts and the laws of adequate housing, of sensible living. His attentions then riveted to Max.

  He knelt down before Max, quickly. He lowered his gun, rested his grip and tossed it from one hand to the other. His free hand fell upon his dead friend’s shoulder. His touch went to Max’s neck, found where the pulse should be, felt for it. There was no pulse. He felt and felt again, his fingers pressing, still no pulse. Nothing. Matt slumped onto the hardwood floor before his longtime mentor. He didn’t give any thought to how Maxwell Polito’s own blood now seeped into his pant legs and around his shoes and through his socks. Matt was overwhelmed with loss at that moment as he would be for a long time afterwards, with his inept foresight and inability to have done something, anything, to have prevented this inexplicable tragedy. His sitting before Max was dreamlike, no, nightmarish, as though this entire episode was wrong and that Max was in truth truly still alive and should be rushed to the nearest hospital and that he would recover and that everything would be all right....

  Everything.

  Would be all right.

  He wanted to hold him, but the very act of an embrace seemed as distant as the fact that his dear friend was gone, was murdered by something horrid, was attacked and slain only within the past hour and that Matt himself could’ve arrived a great deal sooner if only he’d realized the immediacy of the situation, if only he’d known a lot sooner where Max had disappeared to, or had been there when Max left to know that Max had left at all.