The Everborn Read online

  I sat trembling. Any strength I thought I had in facing my wife suddenly crumbled into chalk dust set adrift from a denuded slate. I was a thunderstruck corpse of petrified flesh and blood beneath the fear of what actually might be there, that if I was to turn I would find not my wife...but in fact something else.

  My eyes fixed upon her ghostly figure in the glass, my body hunched awkwardly over forgotten research relics. My hearing was by now acutely attuned to the sounds of clanking dishes and the sizzling of grills, sounds fading against the mounting threat of Melony’s voice speaking to me. I was aware of only silence until then, as though someone impulsively popped a quarter into a jukebox selection of kitchen clatter chorus to revive me from my stunned state. Just as instantly, I could smell the aroma of broiled and boiled banquet, as though it had not existed a moment before. All this would have surely antagonized my empty belly into record depths of growling rage if my hunger had not been snuffed beneath the numbing blanket of my wife’s semblance.

  As my senses livened to the environment around me, I found myself able to think, able to move. I felt myself capable of spinning to face my wife, to leap upon my feet and embrace her as I should have within the very instant I saw her, to cry out with every emotion suppressed until then by the confusion I had awakened to, to exclaim to the world and to the forces which separated us that I missed her, missed her deeply. I wanted to proclaim that regardless of unknown destiny, I could not face such an appalling isolation from my most precious beloved again and to do so would be an act of unmistakable evil I would fight against to the death.

  This resurgence of will was more than enough to encourage any conscious ability to move, if not to face my fears nor to embrace Melony, then to simply get out of the goddamn doorway. And I moved, turning in dilatory incline, my vision panned like a surveillance camera reviving from a power loss.

  I continued to turn, even as I sensed the touch of her hand. I felt it upon my shoulder, resting suddenly and comfortably and I had no recollection of it having actually been placed there. It was as though it had been there all along, even before the spectacle of my arrival, fingers molded gently against the arch of my collarbone, subtle palm cupped shallow into the knit sweater-cloaked soft flesh above my shoulder blade. It could be true that this touch alone initiated my ability to move and it had not resulted from my own strength after all.

  If this touch called me into motion just steps ahead of my own awareness, this would account for the strange, detached sensation which swept over me, a sensation cruelly overridden in the incessant parallel drawn for me since this whole mess began. It was at this particular moment, however, when time as I knew it broke free from its linear shell and emerged scrambled before me in mismatched fragments.

  To perfect a description of what came next, I would have to be dyslexic. Even still, only I could truly read and understand.

  But there came a voice: she was speaking to me, and as my eyes drew further into my wife’s direction I knew instantly that the voice I heard did not belong to the woman I knew.

  It was the voice of another woman entirely. What she said did not seem directed at me. It was more of a general announcement.

  “We’ve got tonight’s special!”

  And as I looked, I saw that what spoke was not human. Whatever it was, it was clearly female and quite curvaceous, but legless and floating upon a bed of invisible currents of warmth, unclothed, its skin gleaming with the luster of polished bronze. It raised its arms to me.

  As I dropped further to the floor in a trance of crippling weakness, my vision fell upon the typewritten letter that brought me there.

  I lost all consciousness then, but in my last remaining thoughts I realized what the voice had meant.

  And I thought of midnight meal specials.

  4.

  Time Retold At the Motel Untold

  My second episode of lost consciousness.

  So far to memory.

  And no matter the amount of days or hours or chunks of moments then passing beneath linear time’s eternal scrutiny, the occurrence, when I came to, felt like I’d blinked out rather than blacked.

  The abrupt rudeness in my unforeseen dismissal left me with a resentment of having been cheated out of a promise. Had I done something wrong? Had the plans been diverted, relocated elsewhere? Had the torch been passed to a more suitable and less clumsy candidate?

  If I opened my eyes, would I find myself home again, shaken to attention by Auntie Emm’s black-and-white realities where all my friends had been with me all along?

  It appeared that the scene had made its debut almost as awkwardly as I had made the scene, toppling from what I knew into what I knew the next moment, then into what I was learning still. I was a victim of parody, a parody of myself, an obscene portrayal of mock tangibility suffering sporadic power failures from a projection room in the theatre of my mind.

  As for the Powers That Be...well, for me, the Powers That Be weren’t the powers that they used to be.

  I opened my eyes.

  I was no longer in the diner.

  I found myself before an electric typewriter baring a blank sheet of inserted paper.

  I jolted upwards and awake.

  Jumping the gun of throttled instinct gave way to realizing I had not been rejected and returned to my home after all. My environment remained foreign. I faced a cheap wooden student’s desk, its two drawers planted like two weathered square boxes to the right of the encompassing leg space beneath my view. I faced the swirls of plain plaster yellow of a wall against which clung the desk’s backside, and the wall opened to my left, into a gaping black vestibule which reflected dim movement from deep within its center. An overhead lampshade blossomed from drooping chain links in a tarnished embroidery of rose petals, bathing me in a spotlight of webbed fumes from a cigarette.

  Without thinking, I reached towards a desktop ashtray that wasn’t there. I’d quit smoking years ago, sometime in my mid-twenties, and I had to remind myself so.

  Someone else was smoking.

  The movement of light within the black vestibule upon my next gaze was now a splinter of reflection from a mirror hung over a wash basin.

  Someone was with me.

  Someone was behind me, smoking a cigarette behind me.

  I was no longer in the diner.

  I was in a motel room.

  ***

  The Watcher made himself known when I turned to face his presence behind me.

  He was smoking, exhaling smoke which tumbled and twisted in vaporous streams throughout my realm of lamplight. He was seated at the edge of the room’s only bed, a queen-sized bed, unmoving and silent, his cloaked configuration facing an average-sized rectangular motel room window, his back turned toward me. The drapes were opened, the window was shut, my lamplight’s reflection bouncing blindness off the window’s glass surface together with the circular birch brown embroidery of the bedcovers thrown evenly and smoothly over the mattress and bloated twin pillows.

  Cigarette ashes fell from a smoldering filter tipped between fingers tenebrous and pale. It lowered, the figure lowering himself slowly with it, crushing the butt into an ashtray nest half full of smokes previously spent and destroyed upon the bed beside him.

  His countenance drawn for a moment beneath a perimeter of light, I beheld the windowed reflection of a wizened and familiar creature, clothed under a thick garment of cotton-white complimentary motel bathrobe, complete with what appeared to be an attached hood shrouding its head like a Bible-land holy man.

  My pulse quickened at its very sight, and I was at once frozen in a half-twisted turn against the padded cup of my chair’s wooden back rest. Speechless, I knew only the thrill of enchantment within the presence of destiny’s unspeakable climax of enlightened truth; I could not imagine a sensation more sobering than this, than at long last brought into an intimate confrontation with mankind’s ageless mystery in the flesh.

  Rubber-smooth knuckles curved and curled into a lemon-sized fist
which lazily lifted to stifle a raspy cough. His lipless mouth could not have opened any wider than the face of my wristwatch. When his mouth closed, it formed a simple, placid, horizontal line.

  I expected his body to be hairless and sleek, with skin of slate, or skin of creamy-colored off-white as his hands and visible facial features appeared to be against the lamp’s soft glow. Standing, he could not have been more than four feet in height. He sat with legs crossed, silently but for a series of ill-repressed coughs. I could not yet see his eyes, could not strain my own should any attempt at deliberate observation prove offensive to his company.

  He spoke to me, and in the reflection in the window I could see the fleshy, horizontal slits of his mouth which indented vertically, then expanding into a diamond-shaped cavity in much the same way the top flap of a milk carton would open. When he spoke, he did so in a voice completely unexpected to me, for I hadn’t anticipated anything less alien than a high-pitched sort of intonation or a bass-low royal utterance of authority.

  Instead, he spoke with the voice of a man. A contemporary human male, no less, with a kick-back slang spoken almost lazily, almost in depressed sorrow, hinting of a certain sarcastic resentment I could have taken personally if I hadn’t noticed immediately that it was directed not towards me but towards circumstance. There was an air of confidence, not in how he spoke but in the words themselves, which he used, carefully chosen, and in these words I found the underlying pronouncements of a being agelessly knowledgeable yet somehow human enough to remain at odds with that knowledge.

  “Do you love your wife?” he asked me.

  I did not expect this to be his first words, and I placed myself in check to expect the unexpected. Feeling subjected to a surge of humility in his presence, I instead gave in to my own professional instinct to question and not to simply kiss ass. And I had many questions. “Why do you ask?”

  He answered with a shrug, and was silent, but his shrug displayed an indifference which assured me there was no cause for alarm, although the apparent lack of concern pissed me off.

  Maybe this was his way of breaking the ice, because my sudden indignation reduced my awe considerably and I felt free enough to speak on human terms. But before I could answer, and quite demandingly I might add, yes I love my wife, what of it, he spoke again.

  “She loves you, and very much, I should say.”

  I didn’t expect this, either.

  Okay, so I still expected things.

  When I chose to keep silent, not knowing what to say to this, still absorbing my delight in his words and anticipating more, waiting for him to go on, he continued.

  He changed the subject.

  “How was your journey? Manic? Surreal? Frustrating?”

  I didn’t know how to answer.

  “You hungry at all?”

  I had forgotten about that. I remembered my M&Ms feast on my way there, and I couldn’t believe I was as hungry as I was. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t the least bit hungry now. This reminded me for crazy reasons not of food but of my equipment I had brought with me, the microcassette recorder, and I cringed as this in turn reminded me of my clumsy pratfall at the diner entrance.

  “You don’t talk very much, do you, Mister UFO Investigator? Or is it detective UFO Investigator?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Church On The Rock. Lawndale. Remember? You went there looking for my kind. You couldn’t very well tell the pastor of that holy place that you were there on official UFO business now, could you? You were the sly one, weren’t you? You could tell, Uncle....”

  Again, the detestable sarcastic cool. Wasn’t there a more reasonable method to pacify my butterflies than to pique my temperament?

  “Private Investigator,” I found myself answering, “I did not impersonate an officer.” I also found myself remembering. Remembering more. I thought to tell him, purely out of offense, I am not your Uncle, but the thought why did he call me Uncle distracted me, and instead I found myself dumbfounded, and I asked him, “Who are you?”

  “I am a Watcher.”

  I waited. In waiting, I noticed he had not changed his position, but remained in a half-turn, leaning toward his ashtray and I got the self-conscious feeling he was scrutinizing me from the corner of an eye that appeared to be bulbous and black.

  He continued, “Don’t ask me why I’m called that. That is what they call me. Why they call me that is a long story. What matters now is that I’m watching you.”

  I said nothing. I couldn’t say anything.

  “And you are watching me,” he said. “I must be very new to you, yet I’m very old. Older than you may suppose. Older than what I supposed when I thought I was human. Does that surprise you? That I thought I was once human?”

  This time he waited for an answer and, mesmerized, I gave him one. “I don’t know what surprises me anymore. When I was still in college, I was earning my way as a security guard. I was making minimum wage guarding this old cannery, and some children I knew decided to take a tour of this condemned apartment building, God knows where they got the guts, on the other side of it. They got around me, and before I knew it, I was pulled from my post by one of them, this little girl. She told me her friend was in trouble. When I got there, deep inside the building, I came across a boy who had seen something. It turned out that another boy, a little black boy, had died in his arms and was taken away by that same something afterwards. The older boy who had come upon him went into shock and later said that he’d seen some sort of a monster. Their reason for going there was to see a ghost baby, a superstitious rumor the people in that area were nuts about. But what the older boy saw wasn’t any ghost. It turned out to be huge, whatever it was, and it was guarding an infant. That is, if you buy the story. I learned to buy the story.” I could not take my gaze from the Watcher. “And I guess you buy it, too.”

  “News came in that the body of an infant was discovered in the back alley of a nightclub this summer,” I remembered I was now in January, “last summer. That news eventually led me to a church, and I was the only one who knew the child’s murderer went to that church. This toddler was verified as missing in 1968. And he was still a toddler. Dead. Talk about a ghost baby. But he wasn’t a ghost baby before he went looking for a ghost baby. I believed this other mysterious child grew to maturity, and eventually murdered this black child again, the one they found behind the club.

  “Second, that thing I saw in the diner, when I came up here, before I blacked out and found myself here, looked exactly like what that boy with the spider bite described way back when. Jesus, I thought it was my wife, at first. I mean...”

  “You thought Bari was your wife?” the Watcher asked. “You’ve been gone way too long, my friend.”

  I did not appreciate this whitewashed ridicule. “You know exactly what I mean.” I bit my lip before any uncertain convictions drove me to ask, don’t you? And then, in effort to restrain that uncertainty and retain my focus, I added, or rather, forced, “You mean, I’ve been dead way too long.”

  “No, gone too long. You’ve been dead long enough.”

  There appeared suddenly a new cigarette between the fingers of the hand that dowsed the last. I had not noticed how it got there, had not noticed any movement for him to reach for one. But as soon as my eyes fell upon it, and this realization had sunk in, he lifted the unlit smoke and offered it to me. His hand reached out in mid-stretch behind his back, over his shoulder.

  I declined. “Haven’t picked one up in eighteen years.”

  “And you died anyway.”

  “Am I still dead?”

  “You want this?”

  “If you were once human,” I half-challenged, half-reasoned, fully irate, “and if you know what I went through driving over here....hell, if you know all the shit I got into before I woke up tonight, you’d full as fucking well know I want answers, not a cigarette.”

  “Listen, Uncle,” he told me, addressing me as such, perhaps to insult me further
, “I was once human. I was human a thousand times over you. When a being as elusive and illustrious as myself offers you even a cigarette, you’d better take what he gives you. He might be preparing you for what kind of shit there is to follow. I full well know you had little to prepare you for anything until now, since you awoke tonight. You want it or not?”

  I stood, leaned across the bed, and took it from him. My fingertips brushed against his, though the instantaneous touch was void of sensation. I dared not gaze beyond those fingers, for fear I might behold his full face unprepared. As I withdrew, a red Bic plunged upon the bedspread beneath me. I took it, sparked a light, inhaled. I took in the smoke, expecting to cough it out immediately. I didn’t. Exhaling, blowing a smoke stream upwards and to the ceiling, I felt admittedly refreshed. In thinking so, I felt like a cigarette billboard slogan. I flung the lighter back to him, and he snatched it from between the white cotton crease of his bathrobe and where he sat. I returned to my wooden desk chair.

  “In all actuality,” the Watcher continued, “you smoked quite a great deal when you were dead.”

  I gagged on my half-inhaled smoke.

  “In fact,” he added, “you smoked a great deal just before you died. Like an oil refinery. Took up the nasty habit again not long before, when tension in life and more precisely in your marriage lured you to return to the habit. Shortly after your death, Melony had an affair, you know, before she found out what happened to you. You worked her ass off, in that business partnership of yours.”