The Everborn (24 page)

Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of
, Max thought to himself, and yes, he was afraid, a little afraid, even more so than he cared to admit, but he had company, he wasn’t going to meet Simon alone, he was going to meet this prized enigma with someone whom Simon apparently respected. This gave him a subtle comfort, although his anticipations were as high as his adrenalin. If only the pastor knew what he knew.

Or what he was convinced he knew.

Hell, if Simon was simply a murderer, he was grateful to have respectable company to hide behind. With Max’s convictions swirling, he was beginning to hope he was about to meet just that --a murderer, or a suspected one. Not someone more, someone
unhuman
.

The pastor seemed to have a wariness about him just then, as if his rational self was beginning to actually doubt his own evolved opinions about Simon, was beginning to reflect upon this private detective’s investigative queries concerning his beloved handyman. The man was indeed bizarre, that Simon. He was mysterious and he was reclusive. The man had secrets and the pastor always carried the conviction that the facial scars which highlighted Simon’s features bore witness to a deep dark past.

But then there was the issue of repentance, that Simon was
born again
, that with repentance there was forgiveness and an erasing of the past, no questions asked.

Time would tell for sure, as simple as a knock on the door.

Without a word, the pastor knocked. And then a word, a few words, to Max, “I’d expect him to be here, as he’s only usually here or around the property. He’s never really any place else. One of us even delivers his groceries and he has a car for Pete’s sake. He’s not for being out and about....”

The pastor dug into his pockets the next moment, began to fumble with a small key chain. He sorted keys until he came to the precise one, then, inserted it into the doorknob. He knocked once more, knocked twice more, called out Simon’s name.

***

Bradshaw took one step forward, eased further into and against the attic door until it rested half way open. The hesitancy with which he did so was an intentional result of polite respect, much like the careful intrusion into a bathroom one fears may be occupied by an embarrassing moment and a
do you mind!??

Max’s hesitancy was far more primal. To him, this was yet another door open unto mystery pervading and ageless, which was nothing new for an experienced explorer of the unknown, but this particular mystery was to Max both threatening and deadly. Max held his breath, clenched his knuckles, and peered fearfully inside past the threshold, maintaining an immediate closeness to the pastor in front of him. If only Bradshaw shared in his suspenseful dread.

The pastor was about to call out again, but something stopped him. He stood still and motionless suddenly. There was an unmistakable rancidity which swept through the attic bowels and assaulted Max’s senses, humid as stale sweat. A dim lucidity invaded the attic space and revealed an atmosphere relatively spacious if not for the massively cluttered arrangement of dusty furniture; it gave Max the impression of having discovered a garage sale waiting to happen. He saw nothing but this at first, and it appeared as if no one was home.

If one could call it a
home
.

Max was certainly more relieved than disappointed at this, and the coast seemed clear enough to provide Max with the courage to enter the room fully and have a quick look around. With Bradshaw’s permission, of course.

But Bradshaw remained frozen before him, blocking greater portion of Max’s view and barring him from entering further.

“Pastor...?”

He was at once aware that Bradshaw was trembling, but when he reached for his arm in effort to gain his attention, the pastor made an unexpected move forward abruptly, quickly, and as he did so he cried out, “Alice? Alice, oh my God...
Alice
...?!”

And that was when Max came into full view of the surreal scene directly ahead and beneath the dismal daylight filtering down upon it, of a ramshackled bed and of the young woman sprawled naked and bound and motionless upon it like some wretched archaic portrayal of an innocent maiden accused and exorcised for demonic alliance, exhausted, having suffered shamefully and oh so miserably, waiting for death’s euphoric salvation to claim her and take her away.

The realization of what he was seeing swept through Max like a turbulent bitter chill, which numbed his senses and found him at odds with how to react. He didn’t expect the sight displayed raw and blatant before him, he’d expected a great deal of things but not that, and though it now made perfect sense given his suspicions and instincts, he didn’t know what to do.

Simon Boleve
was
responsible for what happened at the motel.

But for one thing Max had been wrong. Dead wrong.

He should’ve brought Matt McGregor with him.

He found himself hurrying forward into the room then, just steps behind the distraught pastor, when something grabbed at him, something caught a firm hold of his jacket with such sudden surprise and with such force that it propelled him forward and into the pastor, sending them both toppling headlong one on top of the other and onto the hardwood floor, flailing and stunned and several feet short of the brass-knobbed corner of the bed.

The door behind them slammed shut unto pale damp darkness.

And something attacked them. The same confounding grip, which sent them falling now dug into Max’s shoulder blades and wrenched him from atop the pastor and spilled him to his side. He felt someone’s foot press dead center into his abdomen and he cried out as the back of his neck collided against something hard and painful, like the blunt corner of a low wooden table. His vision was a blur of incoherent helplessness.

And then he began to see.

His eyes focused, and what he beheld was a dismal figure, abhorrent and nude, bearded, wretched, stick-like fleshy thin and crouched over an impossibly bent-backwards silhouette of Pastor Bradshaw, who to no avail kicked and writhed and flung his arms in a contorted effort to free himself of the horrid oppression which pinned him down against his backside and which seemed to hold him fast by his neck with one attenuated hand until....

...until a swift series of see-saw strokes sent liquid gushes of thick black outwards from his throat in a grisly spew spanning for what appeared to Max to be several feet ahead of the two, rippling and splashing across the floor and upon the side of the bed, and within the next moment afterwards the figure abandoned the pastor and went for Max.

Max impulsively thrust one foot forward to fend the figure away, successfully, locking his foot onto the figure’s midsection and the pushing against it with every ounce of strength and agility any one man could summon in a bout of chaotic confusion, and it sent the figure plummeting backwards across the gasping and weakening mass sprawled out below him.

The figure spared no time in managing himself to his feet and he lunged towards Max once more, and alertly Max flung his body forward and into him, seizing his grip upon his assailant’s left arm. But to his outright dismay, the figure’s right came down upon him briskly, and something searing and sharp cut into his side beneath his jacket and dug easily below the right portion of his rib cage, releasing a debilitating abundance of agony and wetness as his elbow braced against it and he slid into a deadlock embrace against a towering piece of furniture immediately behind him.

Max wailed.

The figure’s right arm came down on him again. Pain roared across his upper chest and underneath his left collar bone. Across his chest again, in the opposite direction. The misshapen tower of dark furniture which braced his upper torso gave way and went crashing backwards onto the floor with a tremendous
thud
and the back of Max’s head fell with it into what now seemed to be the base of a short wooden bookcase riddled with hardcover books nestled snug between three rows of shelves.

A short handful of minutes from the onset of the ambush had seen Max catapulted into a state of sheer terror and dismay until then, until the realization of what was happening came together like a magnet to his senses and he became capable of commanding his body to fend for its very life. Yet in his struggle, his foe was confounding his frenetic efforts to the point of madness and this pissed him off just enough to disregard any slightly mounting awareness as to who or what his foe actually was. If he allowed himself to give into the fears of the knowledge of what brought him here, he would’ve been defeated just as easily as the poor, pitiful pastor.

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.