The Everborn Read online

And that shall I do.

  With these words and insights conveyed, I shall do it right now.

  So follow me farther than this and continue to keep ever close:

  What follows are the chronicles of all who remained involved, of Salvatia’s second and final attempt at freeing herself from the shackles of Magdalene-hood by seeking the life of Andrew Erlandson once more, and with a vengeance.

  Needless to say, I’ve something further to show you...

  ...the most important part....

  PART FOUR:

  THE MASTER MAGICIANS

  “....And all the world is wild and strange:

  Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite

  Shall bear us company tonight.

  For we have reached the Oldest Land

  Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.”

  -Kipling, “From the Dusk to Dawn”

  41.

  Company for Scratch

  -September 30, 1994-

  Smoke...

  ...ethereal trails spilling about the space of air within the central rooms of the house....a soundless gambol of cigarette smoke, intrusive as though its origins were not from inside but from out.....

  ***

  Simon BoLeve, who’d come to call himself Scratch as of late, held a unique history of skillfulness in the art of lying low. It came naturally to him like an inherent introversion, and throughout his life he never consciously carried the drive to be as social as anyone around him.

  This was a good thing, to remain virtually unnoticed all these years, to maintain a status of unsung nothingness while the busy beehive of society slaved for their dollars and gods and ideals.

  It was a good thing for Scratch also, considering the overwhelming mischief he had on his head. Why, his own foster parents, dear Brother and Sister BoLeve, would have been better off adopting some other little auspicious lad, and never would’ve eventually lost their lives to him.

  Scratch had been very clever at lying low for that.

  Indeed, miraculously, Scratch proved himself a slippery sucker. But, as Jacob Bradshaw often quoted from the Good Book, your sins will surely find you out.

  And Scratch’s sins were to find him out in a big way.

  ***

  Smoke....

  Scratch could smell it in the living room, could smell it in the kitchen. Someone had been smoking a cigarette; he could still catch sight of its cloud-white traces stretching higher into the air then tumbling downwards as he flicked up the wall switch of the kitchen light.

  The kitchen was long and narrow and at its opposite end, the door to the side of the house hung ajar. Odd thing, considering Scratch had locked and bolted the door from the inside, and it had remained that way a month now...a month since he’d set out with the emphatic initiative to pay a house visit on a couple of church acquaintances-turned meth dealers, the idea being to take up latent residence there with his hosts sent on a restful vacation buried beneath the cement of a backyard tetherball pole.

  A month that he’d been lying low.

  He seized an elongated knife from the pile of utensils and dishes soaking in the stagnant sink dishwater and sprinted for the door. The identity of whoever had intruded was a mortifying mystery. Whoever had intruded, once he found him...Scratch would strike first at his face, thrust him before a mirror to see if the sneaking sonofabitch could stand the inability to identify himself.

  Quietly, subtly, he slowed past the door and prowled the outer side walkway, sidestepping the row of garbage cans and cardboard boxes of decomposed lawn trimmings. He scanned the backyard, dusk-lit and vacant save for the tetherball pole and sheltered patio and then doubled back to inspect the padlocked side gate.

  His developing conclusion was, whoever violated his sanctity had fled and hopped the fence. Whoever it was, Scratch reasoned, had to have known the previous occupants of the house intimately enough to have in their possession a key, to know their way around. That much was certain.

  And they smoked.

  On another hand, the uninvited guest could have been nothing more than a vandal, a sketched-out tweeker tempted into a little burglary by the prolonged absence of his connects, spooked by Scratch’s presence. Surely this enigma hadn’t caught full sight of Scratch, hadn’t caught sight of him and recognized him by some nonsensical twist of chance. Of course, Scratch was the man wanted for questioning on the murder of Jacob Bradshaw, the once-pastor of the previous occupants and the presumed abduction of ufologist Max Polito. After all, both events took place within his own previous attic home at The Rock. Aside from that, there was the unavoidable ordeal involving the kidnapping and rape of Bradshaw’s daughter Alice and the slaying of her dear boyfriend Benjamin. It was all over the papers and the lips of the Eyewitness news team on channel seven.

  But however the intrusion or his suspicion of the intruder, nothing could explain to Scratch how anyone could’ve penetrated the Bondo he’d applied to the side door’s keyholes. And, as he observed, the Bondo was still intact.

  Wary and substantially paranoid, he retreated into the kitchen, closed and rebolted the door. He spun around with the sud-soaked kitchen knife poised within his left-handed grip. His intuition warned him like an acutely aware predator that someone might still be remaining within the house.

  Hiding.

  Contriving.

  He resolved to canvass the inside of the house, just to make certain he was again alone. He cautiously entered the living room, sidestepped towards the shoddy thick wall of curtain concealing the inner house from the outer patio. He lifted his free hand, parted a corner section of the curtain in ill attempt to inspect the tenebrous shadows of post-dusk beyond the awning. This was not a good idea; if his visitor indeed escaped but chose to hang around for awhile in a concealed stake-out, Scratch risked complete visibility peering out as he was.

  But his own reflection in the sliding glass window became at once an appalling distraction, and he swiped the curtain shut before he found himself drawn into the decaying features surrounding his own hollow eyes.

  Had his attentiveness lingered upon the outside dark a moment longer, he would have witnessed the evasive specter of what might’ve been a man racing midway through the depths of the yard from one end to the other, a man perhaps but for the inhuman speed, which carried him back into obscurity.

  Scratch was shirtless, attenuated and pale. His white cotton drawstring sweat pants were ragged and torn and soiled with stains of inconceivable tumult, of smeared charcoal black and brick-red dried blood and the drippings of food. With scrawny, vulture-like feet and toe nails curved into unkempt claws he crept slowly across a landscape cluttered with newspaper pages and crumpled discardings of trash and debris. His deteriorating countenance further suffered from an excessive loss of hair. Portions of his beard and scalp were barren in malformed patches as though randomly shaven for a dyslexic punk-cult group initiation. Scratch would have otherwise preferred that to have been the case; the truth was, he was losing his hair quite naturally or unnaturally, and he’d discovered it could be peeled off in clumps and portions much like removing prosthetic make-up. Aside from this, his stature had been decreased by at least a couple of inches, he was sure of it, and if he’d lost any more weight he’d be ghastly skeletal.

  But no matter.

  Alice Bradshaw was with child, that’s what it was.

  With his child.

  With him.

  In no time, he would diminish completely until he was no more, to be reborn anew and sinless and perfect with a nice clean slate. He would emerge into a new life, Born Again into Christian upbringing even, and that frightening she-bitch Salvatia would never know what became of her stooge-of-a-Dreg named Simon BoLeve should she be seeking him out.

  It’d been years now and Salvatia had never again caught up with him since the days of his youth. Neither would the law, neither would anyone or anything. Not even his sins.

  Yes, he was damn good at lying low.

  That, and given another mon
th he’d be a hell of a scare come Halloween.

  An island of cherrywood coffee table surfaced before him at the foot of the crimson sofa and matching love seat. It was here where Scratch spent a majority of his hours, where he slept, ate, viewed TV, held vigil day in and day out to watch for potential trespassers lurking beyond the front and side doors and windows; he expected such annoyances at a drug dealer’s pad.

  The opposing 19-inch color television perched atop a wheeled cart of molded plastic relayed its hourly Headline News updates, sporadically spewing the latest goings-on in between five-minute commercial sponsoring Irish Spring and super absorbent tampons. The volume was purposely low enough to maintain a dismal silence before and after Scratch had cleared the premises of the living room, and as he sidestepped his way down the corridor of the gaping hallway the television volume faded as did the memory of being able to hear it.

  Upon brief inspection of the remainder of the house, Scratch was satisfied that all was clear. He made his way from the end of the hallway and the opposing mouths of the two bedrooms, casually relaxed and relieved, to return to the entrance of the living room, to return to the normalcy, the placid doldrum, to a front-and-center earshot once again to the Headline News.

  He didn’t so much as emerge past the arm of the sofa when he halted, when the advent of the latest news update captured and contained his attention enough to extinguish the worries of a vigilant house search for good. His grip on the kitchen knife loosened to the point that the blade slid to the tips of his fingers as he held it lethal-side up, but the sting from its incidental incision did not prevent its fall onto the carpet by his feet. In fact, he paid this no mind.

  Instead, without the slightest forewarning, the television news itself demonstrated that Scratch didn’t need an intruder to fuck up his day.

  The Headline News, right before him and plain as peach pie, was reporting for the first time in three weeks a recap of the atrocities of the Church on the Rock’s secret attic abode. Added now to the saga was a segment centered upon Scratch’s own little dear Alice and her untimely pregnancy.

  With a plastic sobriety, the screen’s bushy blonde anchorwoman spoke of an escalating religious controversy between sympathetic mourners of the late pastor and Right to Life activists. A cut to the scene of a crowded special Rock service was met with an articulate male voice-over narrative, preceding an announcement made by a woebegone Alice herself as she approached the main podium and leaned nervously into the mike.

  “I...I’d like to express on behalf of myself and my family how blessed and grateful we are to have the prayers and support of so many loving friends through this horrible tribulation...in light of what has happened I made the only choice I could to separate myself from the pain. The abortion was performed on Tuesday afternoon. Please forgive me.”

  ***

  Please forgive me?!

  What did that mean, for goddamn’s sake? Was she speaking directly to him? To Scratch? To a wicked Dreg in search of a hope for redemption...and when at last he found it, it kicked him right the fuck back in the ass?!

  Damn, Scratch thought the second before his heart froze, that’s just like a woman!

  And then his heart did freeze, only to be revived in the instant of the sudden distraction of The Beverly Hillbillies.

  And smoke....

  Scratch turned his gaze towards the corner of the living room to his right, towards the loveseat about-facing the patio’s sliding doors, towards the presence responsible for changing the TV channels, the presence responsible for the smoke, the intruder....

  “Just think,” spoke the presence, “you would’ve had a seizure right where your scrawny pathetic ass stands if it weren’t for The Beverly Hillbillies...and me, of course. So before you move to retrieve that knife, you’d best remember that. Especially after what you did to poor Nigel and all. I wouldn’t want you to go doing that to me. But, alas, now that Nigel is gone, you’re going to have me to deal with!”

  The presence was crouched, squatting, demon-like, upon one half of the loveseat arm and the corner table, bobbing in his balance into the table lamp lampshade and altering the shadows of the room light. In one hand, he bore a channel clicker. Hung from between his lips was a half-spent cigarette, the vapors of its smoke somersaulting into the air like a circus of steam. Clenched in the grip of the opposite hand and sloped over bended knee was a short stack of papers, the papers of a very recognizable manuscript.

  But the presence himself was even more recognizable and the most dominant and lingering impression Scratch had of him was his first impression, which came to him as soon as the cataclysm of evening news gave way to the perplexity of Max Polito actually being there...of how he’d taken the life of the reverend and championed this other geek who turned out to be some UFO crusader named Max Polito, leaving him mangled and bleeding and behind with dear Alice and his sweet abandoned abode, and the sonofabitch still lived....

  Only to impose yet another, solo, visit...

  And this time, under tableturned quandary.

  The news of Alice’s abortion rendered Scratch vulnerable and defenseless, and the intruder he’d been searching for had chosen this of all times to make himself known. Hell, even the immediate acknowledgment of the presence’s identity was enough for Scratch to regress into a motionless statue of awe.

  “Do I have your attention?” The visitor puffed upon his cigarette bent at one side of his mouth in a wince like Burgess Meredith. He raised the manuscript from atop his knee and waved it in the air as if to proclaim an acquired victory. “I now have what you have, as much as the knowledge of this...fragmented...book. It’s extremely interesting, this...book. It aides us in our cause. Pity it misled you. But even though you must be devastated how your efforts to impregnate Alice went to shit just now, I know what’s written beyond the pages of this book, and I can set you free.”

  The resurrected Max then outstretched his legs, one after the other, until he found footing upon the carpet and stood fully.

  There was something disturbingly familiar and otherworldly about him, Scratch noted next; the hair of this Max-thing was flailed as though slept upon and was of a dyed gothic blueblack. His eyes were as inkpools of equal color and absent of pupils. His skin was bloodlessly pale. The clothes he wore were the same as on the moment of his death, yet their color appeared to blend and become one with the color of his beige leather jacket,his trousers, even the socks on his feet were of a shade of beige.

  And there was a subtle transparency begirding him, the suggestion of a distorted aura, as though this presence was a bluescreened impersonation of Polito superimposed upon the realm of physical reality...

  ...all the post-death attributes of little Nigel, augmented and somehow superior.

  Another click of the channel changer and the Headline News commenced. Polito discarded the clicker onto the loveseat, took his cigarette and extinguished it beneath his beige shoe at the coffee table’s corner leg.

  “Yes, I’m indeed the same sort of creature Nigel became.” Polito confirmed Scratch’s suspicions, “But only because of the age I died I am far more useful than him. You see, my Beloved One can only create one of us at a time and we can only be conformed to her image when we are freshly killed by you. I am my Beloved One’s eyes and ears. My lips speak her words. One of the many purposes of mine is to keep tabs on you, yes, like Nigel did, but I am here to give assurance to my Magdalene that the coast is clear for her to reveal herself and to prepare you for a brand-spanking new deal, to set you free. Tell me, for my sake, how did you ever manage to catch poor Nigel, after all these years?”

  “The same way I can catch you," Scratch said, determined yet plainly.

  “How can you catch a ghost?” Polito scoffed.

  “You are not a mere ghost! Whatever you are, you’re physical enough to be killed again and for good when I get my hands on you!”

  Scratch went forward in a bold fit to make Max an example of his point, but before he knew it
Polito was no longer there. Instead, the vision of him vanished, reappearing to Scratch’s left at a corner by the front door. Between his lips was a newly-lit cigarette; the manuscript remained in his grip.

  “I guess you mustn’t blink,” Polito summarized. “But you’d have to put a greater effort into me. With me, it’s not as simple as the discipline of not blinking. You’d have to abolish the fact that you still can be reborn with my help, if we can make a deal. Kill me and kiss your sorry-ass existence good-bye.”

  “What kind of a deal?” Scratch insisted.

  “Oh, you know the sort, Simon,” tempted the being.

  “My name is no longer Simon,” he responded with a degree of spite.

  “Yes, yes, you call yourself Scratch these days, but what with Alice’s abortion and all...it doesn’t seem to matter what you call yourself does it? However am truly no longer Maxwell J. Polito. I think I shall take the liberty to call myself something else. So you...why don’t you just call me Uncle....”

  “You mock me!” Scratch retreated away, backwards and towards the inner sanctum of the hallway, quite distressed and lightheaded. “My entire life mocks me! Look at me...what am I becoming? And look at who I am! Why did my life lead me this way? And who the hell are you people?!”

  “Come on,” the Max-thing cajoled, “let it all out. You can tell Uncle....“

  “Fuck you," Scratch spat in defiance. “So where is Salvatia? Why does she send the dead to torment me...and why hasn’t she made herself known all these years? I know she’s been watching me. That’s why Nigel is six feet under. I learned I can kill whatever you are, if I don’t blink.”

  “Nigel is not six feet under. In fact, his body is frozen under the lock and key of a very secretive order of the U.S. government. Thanks to you. I do not wish to fill those shoes. Nigel, like I, was a mere puppet for Salvatia to monitor you yet keep a distance herself until the time was right to emerge again. You see, she’s been rather busy. Being the prophesied one and all to her kind. She’s gathering up a rather sizable rally of pissed-off Magdalene and now she’s ready again to cut you a deal...oh, and many thanks to the advent of this magnificent manuscript of yours. The Master Magicians have not seen the last of the Magdalene!”