The Everborn Read online

  This confounded Scratch’s jolted comprehension all the more intensely and he broke down in anguish. “Nigel haunted me. You talk. I don’t know which I’d prefer. But if there’s a deal to be made, I’m at your disposal, goddamn you, but depending on what your deal can do for me. Nothing remains of me and I resemble a dog-mauled doll thrown beside a Goodwill depository in the dead of night. So what the hell is the deal this time?”

  “Let Salvatia tell you herself, then....”

  ***

  “I want you to kill your brother..,.” spoke a third voice from somewhere, yet out of nowhere, identical to the commanding voice of his youth, all too familiar, all too enticing, a voice of dominance and an almost playful wickedness, and its words asserted the same fundamental plea....

  An arm’s stretch into the hallway and to Scratch’s rear towered Salvatia, Simon BoLeve’s self-proclaimed anti-Watchmaid, the genie of darkness who could only be freed of her unjust banishment through this Dreg, her hair a sea-witch black and gliding at the tips along currents of air enveloping her invisible lower half and draping her upper silvery majesty. As Scratch found himself facing her, she advanced upon him, backing him into the television set.

  But Scratch retreated with a degree more of astonishment rather than fear. “Where have you been?”

  “Did you miss me that much?” Salvatia emitted a disarming scowl.

  “I’ve wanted to kill you.”

  “Yes, I suppose you must’ve, considering how you blame me for making you the prodigal son that you are. Your deeds are your own. In fact, you would never have lived this anomalous life of yours if you’d only followed through with the first deal....”

  “Fuck you. I couldn’t do it! You can’t blame me. He’s my brother and he’s connected to me...fuck if he doesn’t know it. Besides, since all that I’ve tried to better myself.”

  “Better yourself?? Until the stars aligned, of course, and the...book...came along.”

  Uncle Maxy came up beside them and flaunted the manuscript he possessed in a maddening melodrama. Scratch was intensely dismayed.

  “That book is the Watchers’ work,” Salvatia said, her eyes an abysmal gyroscope of spellbound orange. “The work of the Master Magicians it speaks of. They’re manipulating you, my precious. That is why being born-again doesn’t quite make the fat lady sing. Not according to her anyway. And look; ah...your lady had you aborted. How sad."

  “I did not know it would turn out like this,” Scratch said. “Alice was supposed to have been my way out.”

  “You were supposed to have been my way out!” Salvatia snarled. “Before this mystifying book of yours came to your attention, I had a solution to the way out for both of us. You should have believed in me. You could’ve resolved everything for us long ago and you flaked at what could’ve been our finest hour. Now, don’t you see, after all this time...the answer has always been my way?”

  “Damn you, creature!” Scratch unleashed a very daring exhibition of spite and advanced a step; Salvatia backed off. “You must be some warped spitball God blew at me from His celestial pea-shooter! Why does nothing in my life ever happen to normal people? If other people’s lives held any resemblance to my own, at least I’d feel slightly better. Look at you, you’re a creature for godssakes. Who, other than me, is aware of creatures like you on a personal basis? You made me evil!”

  “And look at you,” Salvatia countermanded, “you’re becoming a creature yourself.”

  “I believe he’s losing it,” observed Uncle Maxy, which irritated Scratch’s dementia all the more.

  “Besides,” Salvatia reasoned, “I wouldn’t call it evil. I’d call it an indulgence in primal hobbies. I simply aided you along on your quest to find what you really are, and what you are is a Dreg.”

  “I was an innocent child when you stole me away from my family.”

  Salvatia abandoned interest in the debate. Immediately, she withdrew into a meditative trance and the room fell silent.

  “Come to me all ye who are weak and heavy-laden and I will give you rest,” spoke Salvatia next in heightened plea, as Jacob Bradshaw would in calling his flock to penitence. “Can you hear them? Can’t you hear the insatiable whispers of my sisters? The Magdalene cry for release, as do you, my Dreg child. I can set you free. I can set you all free. Camelia is dead. There is only Bari now between us and our prize and the book the Watchers sent to suppress and confuse us can be exploited to suit our cause. Join us, and this time we will be complete in both our mutual efforts and in revenge!”

  And in the silence which followed, Scratch listened, and he could almost hear the undertones of thousands of whispers merging with the distant torrents of outside wind.

  He knew he had nothing remaining, nothing left to lose.

  So, unless his situation resolved itself somewhere along the way, somehow, he at last elected to give in to Salvatia’s latest proposal.

  And Uncle Maxy knew just where to take it from there....

  42.

  Company for Melony

  -October 31st, 1994-

  -Happy Halloween-

  “Each of us carries a measured burden of misfortune, of loss, and of goodbyes...of a specific breed of goodbyes, not the see-ya-later goodbyes but the goodbyes in which seeing you later is just not the case. These goodbyes are absolute and nonnegotiable, they make us sad, and they render us craving for a therapy impossibly beyond our reach.”

  These were Matt McGregor’s words, the first words he’d spoken to Melony Polito since that fateful period of post-August, since Melony and Ralston Cooper each fled separately yet with equal panic from Andrew’s apartment when Ban revealed herself to defend her Everborn, since Matt and then other police officers discovered BoLeve’s lair...blood and grisly mayhem, Jacob Bradshaw’s limp remains, his daughter drugged and dog-tied to a bed frame and all....

  These were the same words as were quoted by a fellow law enforcement official at Bradshaw’s funeral while McGregor underwent a forced leave of absence for the sake of professional therapy. Above all of this, Matt dared not make mention to anyone a single word concerning the silvery woman-creature he’d beheld within the church attic and previously once before in childhood, the one-and-the-same creature who’d stolen Max Polito’s body away.

  If Melony was to name any one single most determined son-of-a-bitch aside from her husband, it would be Matt McGregor, hands down. Way down. Next to Max, he demonstrated the soundest and strongest-willed of minds. Yet the rock he’d crawled under since the church attic drama weighed him down so painfully that his only recourse was to burrow in denial.

  Melony found a discussion over their late traumas to be pointless with him, let alone any hopes of support or encouragement. Matt’s own family and career clearly suffered from his chronic declination of spirit, but Melony completely understood.

  Mel acquired a related affliction.

  And besides, the only rationality among the insane was to not discuss it, for what was one to do? What action could be taken? Alert the FBI? Expose their dilemma to unempathetic ears only inevitably headlining the Weekly World News and not getting anywhere anyway?

  Before, with her husband’s research, her own personal ‘big picture’ of the way the world worked seemed real enough with only the facts and theories to cling to. Nowadays, the fruition of his research now simply hit too close to home for her to know what to do.

  When Melony’s visit to her physician unveiled a pregnancy where the inception should have taken place a couple months prior to her night with Andrew...it was enough cause for anyone to think twice about speaking at all.

  When Matt’s comforting words concerning loss and goodbyes fell upon the ears of Maxwell’s distressed wife, her inner convictions evoked an immediate (if not rudely immediate) response:

  “My husband’s alive. He’s out, there somewhere, existing under the control of his captors I suppose, existing beyond my ability to reach him and to let him know my regrets about our shortcomings and how much I
really love him. He’s out there, wherever he is, and here am, wherever I am. Don’t dish me a rehearsed speech about goodbyes and the loss of loved ones. It may have done good for the poor unfortunate Bradshaws, but it’s just not the case with me and my husband.”

  ***

  My husband is still alive.

  His body wasn’t found.

  ***

  “I am my greatest mystery,” Melony spoke aloud somberly as she awoke from a deep sleep of mysteries. She heard herself say it, understood what she said, but didn’t understand what she meant by it. She was certain she’d woken herself by saying it.

  She lifted her head nestled by cradled arms to discover she was seated slumped forward upon a chair...

  ...before her own outdated electronic typewriter...and found the words typed upon the inserted and otherwise blank page:

  MY HUSBAND IS STILL ALIVE.

  HIS BODY WASN’T FOUND.

  She couldn’t recall typing those words. She couldn’t remember what she’d been doing upstairs to begin with, let alone how she’d fallen fast asleep in her office workspace.

  She couldn’t have been asleep for more than a half hour.

  And then the doorbell rang.

  ***

  Trick-or-treaters.

  Melony stood from the typewriter as abruptly as if to salute an officer, attentive and wide awake with the exception of a lingering post-dream-state haze, and bustled herself out of the upstairs office and down the stairs to instinctually greet tonight’s first group of Halloween trick-or-treaters.

  On her way down, the weariness of her body forced herself to a slow stroll; she’d momentarily forgotten that she was with Andrew’s child, most certainly with somebody’s child (that was for damn sure), her memory jarred by an uncomfortable nausea and she clenched her belly.

  At the foot of the stairs, she avoided the front door, sidestepping into the living room and meeting her own reflection on the work of mirror-art upon the wall opposite her and above the couch.

  Her reflection never quite seemed real anymore, not to Melony, not to someone so relentlessly bombarded lately by legions of this kind of out-of-the-ordinary welcome-to-Neverland bullshit.

  To Melony, nothing seemed real since her night with Andrew.

  But it was Halloween, she knew that much was real, and perhaps only the time of year and the days on the calendar held within them the sole hope she had on retaining some form of sanity. It may be that the television kept her in line as well; it proved an amusing distraction and was these days rarely silent. Right now, it projected a broadcast of Halloween IV from its corner perch.

  About and around Melony’s shoulders a $19.99 witch’s gown spilled down her arms, splashing across her hips with daggers of frills after overcoming the obvious stretch of black fabric over the terrain of her obtrusive belly. Swaying to and fro above her head and with her was a pair of Playboy bunny ears, harnessed by an elastic pink cotton band fastened beneath her chin.

  She entered the kitchen and passed the French double pantry doors.

  Digging both hands into a plastic bowl of mini M&M packages resting upon the kitchen counter completed half her mission, but through the process of delivering these treats to the children who’d come for them, she felt herself increasingly on the verge of emotional collapse.

  Another doorbell ring was her salvation for the moment; she wasn’t about to allow the M&Ms she carried to trigger a breakdown anyway, even though they were Max and Melony’s favorite plain chocolate and goddamn sentimental candies.

  As she unlatched,unbolted and opened the front door, she wondered if a handful of treats would be enough. She wondered how many children were at the door. She wondered if they’d already departed impatiently. In the next instant, she didn’t care. As she beheld them, the children outside her door beneath the moth-magnet porch light were dressed as Watchers with black hoods and full greyish latex head masks with pasty black oblong alien eyes. By some stunned reflex, her candies fell from her hand, bouncing off the doorway’s metal threshold and skidding just short of the unnerving band of all six of them.

  Eerily and simultaneously, the alien children knelt to fetch their treats, stooping, then placing the candies into each of their own UFO alien plastic Halloween bags.

  All but one of them then departed down the walkway to collect the next free hand-out without saying a word.

  The single remaining trick-or-treater rose up straight to face her and the kid’s alien guise began to speak as it lifted a free hand in a hesitant effort to remove its mask.

  “Oh, by the way,” it was a timid male voice, deliberative, apologetic, “trick or treat...”

  He grasped his mask’s latex underchin and pulled it up and over his face and head until it flopped backwards freely and hung down his back, hood and all. What appeared at first to be a second mask beneath, began once again to speak, but the near-lipless horizontal slits of its mouth were much too animated for Melony to remain unwitting of its innocent masquerade. Its eyes were bulbous diagonal teardrops, still human enough to embody dilated black/brown pupils so immense that its bony sockets were twice the normal size to accommodate them. Its face was pale and gave an effect of having been stretched somewhat from chin to forehead silly putty-style, sloping up top into a hairline of fleshy flat tree branch shapes with remnant clusters of hair strands still falling like autumn leaves.

  It fell short of the mainstream image Melony had grown used to in what she’d expected of a Watcher, but she knew as sure as the paralysis of reality gripped her that this half-breed creature clenching a bag of candy upon her doorstep was not quite yet a Watcher.

  And as it spoke with a voice still human and far, far too familiar to her, she knew that this being was the same being she carried inside her, the dying half of her child awaiting rebirth, the other half of a one-night-stand with the Devil.

  This was Andrew Erlandson: “Sorry. Take a deep breath. I know you’ve been waiting to hear from me. I know of your sudden fear-flooded attempts to return to the apartment, if for no other reason but to disprove what happened between us that night. You couldn’t quite bring yourself to make it into the complex though, but had you conquered your panic you’d have only come across the very ‘apartment-for-rent’ referred to by the streetside sign you were never able to pass. It was Bari’s idea to clear out immediately, what with you and then Ralston and the threat of exposure lingering long after you left.”

  Melony exerted a response with muttered success. “Y...you.. .y...you...you...And...d...drew....”

  “Deep breath, poor Melony. Come on....” He relinquished his hold on the bag of treats and went forward, one small black boot meeting the doorway to gain entrance, one hand reaching for the front door’s outside knob. His human/alien expression was a display of concern; it would've been far easier to have remained shrouded in the mask for Mel’s sake, but this approach would certainly promise the risk of Melony yanking it off boldly herself like Christine to a hideous Erik in Phantom of the Opera and Andrew didn’t want that. He’d argued the point with Bari shortly before.

  “Andrew, s..stay back....” Melony uttered in weakened breaths, backing away yet allowing him in.

  “I’m so sorry, Mel. Its better it be this way, I mean, the timing and all. How else can I get around this way, out in the open, looking the way I do, except on Halloween? Besides, it’s become imperative I see you. Your life is in great danger. You must leave this place immediately and only Bari and I can help you.”

  Surrendering to Andrew’s intrusion, Mel felt herself aware that the further she was drawn into his words alone, the further her feelings slipped from atop that mountain of alarm built by the unavoidable sight of him.

  The front door closed after them, and the porch light died just in time to discourage the noisy sidewalk shuffle of another half dozen or so oddities demanding something out of Melony tonight.

  ***

  Andrew Erlandson felt a common bond with Melony as he faced her for the first time
since Bari and Ralston Cooper both had taken part in completely eradicating his chances of developing a relationship with a decent woman.

  He somehow knew of his unlikely chances all along, with any decent woman, the same way he knew ultimately that Bari was in control of his destiny moreso than he. Even still, there was a master plan in the works, as if the book had already been written....

  The common bond he felt was by no means related to his current deteriorating condition, nor was it the increasingly accumulated insight to the overall situation. It took little effort on Bari to impart to Andrew who he truly was; all his life, any given insight had been up to Bari herself. Not this time. Since his regression into his new life had begun, it was all starting to come back to him on its own.

  It wasn’t anything obvious, this common bond. At least not to Melony, Andrew was certain. But as he moved into the living room and depressed the TV cable box’s power button, the room fell silent and they faced each other alone. The silence spoke well on its own. This experience was frightening and awkward to the two of them equally, for opposing reasons, and for mutual reasons it equally damaged their realities.

  Andrew made his way to the sofa and stood upon it, so as to inspect his image in the wall mirror-art. He scratched his head, withdrew from between his fingers strands of loosened hair which he habitually discarded into a pants pocket beneath his costume. “We haven’t much time, Mel. The forces responsible for the deaths of many including your husband’s are on the prowl as we speak, searching to destroy us both in order to destroy so much more.”