The Everborn Read online

  But until the rumored ghostly cries, it had never known murder. Not like this. Not like the corpse of the young man discovered twisted and slumped against the muddy overgrowth of hedges at the building’s most remote side. The man’s head had been found resting sideways and sunken into the mud, appearing to almost float within the basin of blood formed by its shallow imprint. The real treat that impressed the coroner, however, was how the face of the skull had been crushed so far inward that the nose played peek-a-boo with the back upper neck in protruding cartilage.

  No evidence of a weapon. Not one hint aside from the very corpse itself, betrayed the identity or methods of the force behind it. No one had seen the ill-fated prey wandering about before-hand, and no one had heard his screams. No one would know anything, period, until the officials and authorities chose to release this enigma from its bottle.

  But it wasn’t due to the grisly shape of the corpse or any of these trivialities that enforced their decision to wedge the cork in tighter, and to keep it that way. What concerned certain authority figures most were the numerous, bewildering footprints all about the hedges. Clusters and trails of tiny footprints no larger than those left by a child.

  In their eyes, these puzzling leftovers were no more made from a ghost than they were a Wraith-child. And whatever they were made from, it was somewhat unlikely that the makers of the prints were responsible for a slaying of such proportions.

  For one thing, the prints had not appeared at all until six hours after the body was gurneyed away, at a time when surveying eyes were about to reap the misfortunes of having turned their attentions elsewhere. For another thing, these authorities claimed to know what it was that made those prints.

  ***

  They were within the shadowy labyrinth now, sidestepping bits of decaying lumber and exposed dusty wiring wrenched from the structure’s inner framework, the results of previous intruders’ scavenging the grounds for useful hardware.

  The inner reaches of the apartment building provided a perfect eerie landscape for the alert imaginings of neighborhood children, and the three huddled close as they inched across concrete and torn carpet. They carried with themselves no flashlight and regretted not having prepared for the unexpected, not to mention, numbly enough, the degradingly obvious. Luckily enough, streams and jets of mild sunlight managed their invasion through boarded window cracks and sections of missing brick within the walls. Partitions between the rooms had somehow crumbled, rotted through, or fallen prey to the mallets of vandalizing pranksters. Portions of ceiling had fallen through, providing partial glimpses of the overhanging floor and added lighting from unboarded second-floor windows.

  The possibility suddenly occurred to the girl of the building collapsing around them in a quake of deadly plaster boulders, and her paranoia gorged hungrily upon the illusion that the ground floor walls were weakening with age beneath the floors above. She replaced her crumpled baseball cap upon her head as though this could shelter her and her hand darted for a portion of Matthew’s shirt and held tight for assailable comfort. Physical contact with girls annoyed Matthew as he found no remedy to the unfailing tension brought along with it, and he swung a hand to self-consciously fend it away. She responded with an irritable tug and wound his shirt tighter around her fingers.

  Nigel let out a solemn yawn. As young as he was, he knew that anything called a Wraith-child could not possibly be as monstrous as what he heard. The fact that it was a child in the first place was a sure indication of harmlessness. Even if the Wraith-child didn’t exist at all, this outing certainly topped remaining at home with Ma. Ma was a penniless sexoholic and willing groupie to any rock-and-roll band passing through town toting needles to share; where Nigel was now couldn’t possibly be any worse than being with her, at least on weekends when she was most deliriously dreadful.

  Without warning, Matthew screamed in terror. This abruptness could have come at no better time for Dabby’s poor, persecuted nerves, which reacted like the inner coils of a pocketwatch wound too tightly, propelling her forward and into Matthew’s side. The impact sent them both tumbling, her deathgrip on Matthew’s shirt stretching the material up and over the back of his head and into his face. The boy fought to wrench free, his cries muffled against the force of her smothering grasps. The wrestling ceased soon enough, and Matthew sat up from the decaying carpet to look at the girl.

  “It was a joke,” he spat at her. “I wanted to make you jump. Jesus...”

  Sprawled and panting, Dabby rolled to her side and rubbed her eyes. She looked up at him and began to laugh, if not for the simple fact that it had been a false alarm, which she’d prefer against the real thing. “You buttwipe.”

  “You lunkhead.”

  “You buttwipe.”

  Matthew smoothed over his shirt and brushed the dust from his jeans. Gazing absently around, he rose to his feet. “Where did Nigel go?”

  Dabby sprung from the carpet and darted her head. They were both alone. Desperately, she began to call out for him, and Matthew joined her.

  The panic was real now, and little Nigel had vanished completely into the oblivion of the building’s shadowy, broken innards.

  ***

  Matthew’s inept scream had sent Nigel running; a suddenly frightened, scurrying vision of baggy clothes darted across sleek cement and into the blackness of an open section of wall opposite the direction where the three had journeyed.

  He had been more excited than frightened. His first impulse was to run, and as he did so he squealed in frenzied glee as his two friends wrestled yards behind him. His second impulse was to hide.

  And hide he did, right straight through a gaping hole surrounded by brick and plaster. It was like entering a giant, opened mouth, much the same as the uncanny entrance of a carnival funhouse. He once visited a funhouse, with its mirrors and bellowing mannequins and multi-colored mists. This, however, was much different. This was real, and a real friendly ghost was lurking about, waiting to be discovered.

  Somewhere.

  If the Wraith-child was real, Nigel thought, then maybe people were scared of it because it cried. Matthew himself admitted to have heard its crying and fled. If Nigel could make the Wraith-child stop crying, then perhaps it would befriend him.

  Perhaps, except...no one was crying here. No one yet.

  Maybe the Wraith-child was hiding.

  But when Nigel entered the gaping section of wall, he hadn’t counted on falling, tumbling; apparently his feet met with a floor board which sloped into the darkness at an angle. His chest met with smooth concrete, and if he had been arched differently his chin would have felt the impact with a sharp and painful slam. Instead, he skidded, unharmed, to a halt within the center of a large and empty room, absent of carpet and nearly totally absent of light.

  At first, within the abrupt confusion of the fall, he felt the tremendous urge to cry himself. And cry he would have, upon the sudden overwhelming impression that he was lost. But he wasn’t lost entirely; deep, deep into the walls behind him, he heard the faint sounds of his friends calling his name.

  That, however, did not stop him from crying.

  What stopped him from crying was the unexpected vision to his side, to the wall at the corner of the room beneath a boarded windowpane. A broken portion of bare glass allowed a slanted stream of vaporous afternoon sunlight to illuminate the corner.

  And within that corner sat silently a naked baby boy.

  The Wraith-child.

  It was not much less than four years younger than Nigel, perhaps merely a couple of years old. The child was Caucasian, but aside from this he in many ways bore facial features which resembled Nigel’s. And he was dirty, he was filthy, as though he was a cartoon character and a grenade had just went off in his hands, as though he’d been dragged through a coal mine.

  “Do you live here?” he asked the infant.

  The baby was silent, squatting diaperless, within the surrounding blackness under the filtered beam of sun. He glanced up at
his visitor, then down again at something he appeared to be playing with, something he held within his hands. Whatever he held, it seemed to be moving. Something small, no more than the size of a human eye.

  Nigel picked himself up from the stretch of concrete floor and patted white plaster-dust from his clothes. The dust rose upwards and around his face like a cloud and he swished it from his eyes. He coughed once, twice, from the dust, stepped forward little by little to the baby. He entered into the dim sunlight stream just enough to cast a shadow...

  ...and just enough to view the thing which captivated the infant’s attentions so. It was shiny black, rounded at the body into a slick polished teardrop tip, eight legs contracting around a ruby red hour glass.

  Nigel knew what it was. He had been taught what bugs to touch and what not to. And he knew big black ugly spiders could bite. Could kill. Like snakes. Like strangers. Like crossing the street without looking both ways.

  And he knew this spider was a bad one.

  Or was it?

  Why wasn’t it biting the baby?

  “Is that a pet?” inquired Nigel. “Is it? You shouldn’t play with spiders, you know. Is it a pet?”

  Just then, slowly, the infant raised its hand, palm upwards, exposing a candid presentation of the creature crawling deliberatively upon a bed of fleshy pink and five outstretched digits.

  A black widow.

  “Did you take out its teeth?” asked the boy now, taken aback by the infant’s gesture, a move which suggested a bid for Nigel to handle the menace himself. Dismayed at his own temptation to oblige the infant, Nigel scrubbed his hands into the knees of his trousers in sweaty preparation to accept the offering. “Is it your friend? Is it really?”

  As it lifted the spider persuasively closer, the infant opened its mouth to speak. It spoke in a faint, slurred whisper. “Reeeeally.”

  Reeeeally.

  It was imitating him. “I’ll be your friend, too....okay?” And with that, Nigel fearfully extended his arm to receive the creature. Very, very carefully...

  The spider’s soft, bulbous body tumbled from the infant’s overturned hand and plopped dead center, onto the yielding flesh of Nigel’s, its legs recoiled by the sudden turbulence.

  And then came the screams.

  ***

  Matthew and Dabby had been calling out for no more than a handful of minutes before they heard the screams. Matthew’s first impulse was to escape into another room and away from a second assault of Dabby’s hysterics, but she had stiffened with the cries in suspenseful expectation. It was not very often that Nigel so much as cried, let alone screamed and the two youngsters feared their own mounting suspicions that these were Wraith-child cries. Or worse.

  The Wraith-child got Nigel.

  Without a second to spare, the two raced toward the sounds, up and over plywood and broken concrete and piles of bricks, past torn walls and jet streams of light, to the opposite wall’s gaping hole.

  Matthew peered inside. He could see nothing. “Nigel?”

  Another scream, this time less distant, but nevertheless quite faint.

  Quickly, the boy lunged through the torn hole. His feet fumbled onto an angled plywood board and he came crashing down, sliding, vaguely attentive to Dabby’s shrill outcries behind him. Within the next instant, he found himself face-down upon icy cement. Rising rather awkwardly to one side, he flinched at the sudden jolt of pain within his left elbow. Turning, the pain subsided as his attentions riveted to the convulsing specter of his friend. Matthew leapt over to the small boy, seizing him immediately, turning him onto his back.

  “Nigel,” Matthew bellowed, “Nigel, what’s wrong?”

  Just then something distracted him, and he repelled against the unexpected vision of another presence in the room beside him. A hand, a baby’s pale, dirty hand, was groping for an object on the ground several inches shy of Nigel’s feet. Dwarfish fingers fumbled and found their grip, lifting the object into full view and suspended before the boy by a single tenuous leg. Its remaining limbs protracted, twirled and caressed the air.

  A spider. A black widow spider.

  As Matthew gazed upwards, he beheld an infant, clutching the spider carefully and proudly, an infant of bloodless white and sooty with filth, retreating into a dimly lit corner. It sat there with its vile plaything, withdrawing into a curious stupor and ignorant now to its mettlesome guests.

  Without further thought, Matthew called out to the darkness behind him, gathering his friend hastily into his arms.

  “Get someone!” he shouted, he bawled, “Oh please...the security man, hurry, go get the security man, he’s dying!”

  Tears flooded the boy’s face now, tears which anguished for his little friend’s life, of grief over the woeful fact that it was he himself who brought the boy here, that it was his own damn fault.

  He turned, called out again behind him, but Dabby did not respond. Did not, or could not. Perhaps she had heard him and his pleas for the security man. She would bring him, and he would know what to do.

  Nigel’s spasms and breathless gasps weakened sedately within Matthew’s arms. Matthew struggled feebly to keep him alive by rocking him almost furiously, instinctually believing the boy would remain conscious if only he was kept in constant movement.

  At first, he did not notice the massive pool of shadow which now towered over and above him, nor did his senses reveal the currents of warm air against the sudden rankness of the decaying room surging into the back of his shirt and rippling against his skin.

  And the shadow moved.

  His face met the malodorous rush as he pivoted into it unexpectedly, alarmingly. The dark silhouette of what now filled his vision was shrouded by a warm and wispy blur. Matthew stared into it, glaring, his thoughts racing then slowing then numbing like a ferris wheel grinding to a stop. His fear and panic ceased as though the currents of warmth had snatched them away, sucked them up the way a drinking straw drains the contents of a cola cup.

  And Matthew remained that way, even after the echoes of the security man’s shouts announced the advent of what could have been salvation if only by then they were still not too late.

  Max Polito would not sleep that afternoon; and for many years afterwards, languished dreams would remind him of the confoundment beheld in the moments to come. He would remember the first hazy mutterings of a nine-year-old treated for shock, the boy who sat silent and totally alone when Max had discovered him just beyond the ramshackle walls of unsettling memory.

  The Wraith-child got Nigel.

  These dreams would come to involve and encompass him, in time, and in them he would discover his own desperate dreams.

  And perhaps he would live to regret them.

  PART ONE:

  MAX & THE WATCHER SWAP STORIES

  “What we call the beginning

  is often the end and to make an end

  is to make a beginning.

  The end is where we start from.”

  -- T.S. Eliot

  1.

  A Message of Untimely Importance

  -January 2nd, 1995-

  Let me take a moment to properly introduce myself. I am Maxwell J. Polito. At the time of this writing, I am forty-six years old. I am three years into my first marriage, and my wife and I are happy together. My full head of light-brown, greying hair gives me a rather scholarly appearance when I slick it back with protein gel. I keep a slim, athletic build with daily exercise routines and by avoiding red meat, and I drink water from small, expensive, corrugated plastic bottles. From the way I dress to the way I vote I am methodically conservative in style, and I carry a keen business sense by which, like an aggressive newspaper reporter, I let nothing stand in my way.

  If my parents had not sought careers in the film industry early on, I can only envision myself encompassed within a life of priesthood and pasta in a Queens, New York neighborhood where they hailed from, where their parents would still be hailing Mary and taxi cabs from if they were alive today. This wou
ld probably have been better for my own eventual good, and my folks would’ve given me brothers and sisters rather than being so excessively preoccupied with making film features. Instead, I was raised in and around Los Angeles, and if it had not been so, I would not be where I am today.

  And I wouldn’t be telling this story.

  Over the years, I have been regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities concerning the unknown, and more precisely on the subject of UFOs. Most of you may find yourselves familiar with my public television series, with my books and lectures, or through distastefully written one-liners by late night talk show hosts. I hold a Ph.D. in Psychology from Hawthorne University and have undergone extensive studies in the fields of physics, parapsychology and ancient history. I have worked in eleven different countries and speak five languages fairly fluently. When people think of the cosmos, they think of Sagan; when they think of UFOs, they think of me.

  I owe much of my success to only a few very human simplicities. I know how to appeal to the common sense of the average skeptic by remaining candidly honest and persuasively rational. An open mind has earned me the respect of the fanatical. My success could never have been possible, however, if it were not for that basic universal human trait we all share differently: a belief in the unknown.

  The way I see it is this: I have always believed in the existence of myself. Before I could ever believe in the unknown or in anything else, I became aware I was alive. This self-awareness is a kind of introductory courtesy bestowed upon us by the powers that be, a “welcome-to-the-planet” free parking pass for a global theme park that still requires “E” tickets if you wish to enjoy the rides.

  The second thing I ever believed came along so quickly afterwards, my awareness and I were left with scarcely time enough to become remotely acquainted.