The Everborn (26 page)

“Maxy......oh,
Maxy....”

Matt unbuttoned the thin black strap which overlooped the base of the CB’s fat black antenna, slid the radio from its holster and clicked a switch at its top. As he did so he noticed how it shook by the jittery nervousness of his hand. The radio came alive with static.

Suddenly there came a voice, from his right, from his immediate left, from behind him, from anywhere, from everywhere at once, “He is not dead, but sleepeth....”

He surmounted his gun in an extended arm’s grip, his gaze darted and fell in every direction. The voice was clearly female, and his first notion was that it originated from young Alice upon the bed. Yet the girl remained unconscious and silent and the voice to him held the distinct impressions of an older woman, almost an elderly woman, yet it hadn’t been a weak voice but a voice of cold authority.

The next moment afterwards, from behind a dusty row of furniture to the extreme right of the room and at the misty borders of the desk lamp’s radiance sprung the half-nude and bearded figure of a man, making a mad dash from hidden cover towards the opened exit door to the roof...but the door to the roof was not his destination as he avoided it completely and instead made for the pillowed corner of the room.

This took only a millisecond as Matt spun, his gun quick to take dead aim. “
Freeze
!”

In the instant he did so and dropping his radio to the floor to steady his tightening grip, the weapon was wrenched easily and suddenly out of his hands by an unseen force which rendered Matt into such unexpected and overwhelming dismay it left the officer with a senseless disbelief. He fought powerlessly to comprehend the fact that his weapon was no longer in his hands.

His vision blurred and in a torpid degree of terror he was certain he was losing his sight. But as his eyes looked about and around him he became more aware that the blur remained contained within the space directly before and above him.

Until the blur which occupied that space rapidly became more and more solid, more expansive, materializing into tangible nightmare far more real and more terrifyingly familiar than anything else he’d encountered within the room, even above finding Max’s body, above anything else he could have ever imagined or experienced in his own lifetime up until then, and back...way back since that one dreadful episode of his childhood which occurred deep within the shadows of a condemned building in an industrial area of the neighborhood of his youth.

Back since the days of the
Wraithchild
.

Back since the days of little Nigel and when the teenage s’curity man saved him from his own relentless shock and from the beast that stole Nigel away into the fathomless dark of forever.

And his most suppressing fears had offered him a golden platter of promise that the beast would one day return for him, in his waking hours, would disrupt the daily routines of his sober and rational way of life with the disorienting intoxications of inept horror.

Yet, ironically, with Max’s obsessive pursuits, he’d for the past dozen or so years had learned to face his fears and aided Max in the search for any signs of its existence and for the existence of beings like it.

***

Once again, it happened.

As he watched, this thing of shady silver, this ancient beast, this darkly-breasted legless being abandoned her attentions to him and moved towards the blood-drenched inanimate Max, took him up into her arms, and disappeared with him out the exit door to the roof.

And she’d given Matt scarcely more than a minute’s notice or care.

By that short time, Matt was becoming slowly and languidly aware that the figure that had been Simon was gone, too, as was whatever Simon had come to collect in the room’s pillowed corner.

It was a good hour or two before anyone else gave him attention, before Mr. Yellowjacket came upon him with speculative curiosity as to how their meeting was coming along, before the officers arrived to find the pastor’s body and young Alice barely alive, and to find Lieutenant Matthew McGregor like a child again, like a child who had witnessed something so unspeakable that the stupor, which so encompassed him for a long time afterwards, left him incapable of speaking.

For a long time afterwards.

21.

A Refresher Course Brush-up at the Office

Melony had arisen that Sunday morning not long after her husband sprung alive and awake from beside her and responded to Matt McGregor’s telephoned summons away from her and to a crime scene investigation at a motel down the street from
The Crow Job
.

She had been more than curious about that, curious like an obsessive gossip-hound tabloid reporter in the midst of a news breaking Hollywood story she was personally involved in, but powerless to do anything about but sit and wait.

And then she realized one thing:

Today was the day she would engage in her first date with Andrew Erlandson.

Andrew Erlandson
.

Well, not today, but
tonight
. Today, she must prepare for it, while waiting to hear the outcome of Max’s own engagement with Matt.

An hour after she awoke, she showered, all the while thinking to herself how she would prepare, how she would handle it when it happened, this date with Andrew, at Andrew’s own apartment.

It didn’t seem like a professional interview with a suspected nonhuman being. And then it did. But then again, it felt oddly titillating in a butterflies-in-the-stomach kind of way, as though she were a high-schooler on the threshold of a first date, a first and nearly intimate date, with a young man she’d had a crush on since her pubescent focus on a desire for men began to blossom.

She was confused as to how to feel emotionally, yet something told her there was nothing to be confused about. She wasn’t sure if that something came from her professional side or her romantic one.

She thought she heard the phone ring while showering, but her first instincts were to
let Max deal with it later
. She’d been feeling that way lately and was so engrossed in her thoughts as she showered, until she realized,
hey, that probably
is
Max calling.

When she emerged and dried herself, she didn’t think at first to check the answering machine but instead checked her pager. She was so used to being paged by numerous people including Max that it was a force of habit, although Max himself rarely carried a pager and thought it to be trendy, which was what he thought of her allegiance to it. She’d afterwards listened to the answering machine’s recordings of his two messages to her while at his desk in the upstairs office, but by the time she returned his call to his cell phone there was no answer. He’d said to call her immediately or she’d miss the boat and would have to wait.

So setting that matter aside on the backburner of anticipation, Melony proceeded to spend that afternoon in preparation for the imminent evening with Andrew.

She sat in shorts and an oversized white t-shirt parading the words “I (heart) My Attitude Problem” engulfed by Maxwell’s U-shaped desk. There was a series of file cabinets to the far right of her and she rolled her husband’s wheeled desk chair over to them and opened one of the drawers. Each drawer was comprised of a portion of historically sequenced, documented information of the events and misadventures of Maxwell Polito’s industrious career, each tidbit in pale, plain folders indexed by year and then alphabetically by subject. The revised and condensed versions were available via Max’s computer CD ROM files, but Melony preferred the physically tangible old-fashioned way.

She let her fingers walk to 1980.

She withdrew a file captioned with the words ERLANDSON, ANDREW (COOPER, RALSTON). The file was an inch thick, the second file in the system’s year-by-year sequence to mention the name Erlandson, the first to mention Cooper. She knew what it contained, but she was in need of a refresher course brush-up.

When she opened it and studied the separated the pages, she got more than that.

It was almost like reviewing outdated police files. If there ever was such a thing as outdated police files. Maxwell Polito files, nonetheless, were never
outdated
. Melony’s husband always collected and stored information and historical data relevant to his personal interests to the point of obsession. This file was not an inch thick for nothing. Maxwell-authored reports and second-page newspaper clippings with paper-clipped notes stamped with Post-its like leeches containing nearly illegible scribblings. All pertained to a remarkable occurrence at an elementary school playground in Southern California’s Anaheim, home of the
Happiest Place On Earth
, home of the location of Andrew Erlandson’s and Ralston Cooper’s initial confrontation together, on a night when Ralston himself witnessed the deaths of his closest eleventh-grade buddies by a creature described as a “woman-like thing with arms and a chest but no legs, with golden skin, like a genie that kid Erlandson conjured up to defend him when we were giving him a hard time.”

They were giving him more than just a hard time.

A young Ralston Cooper had given that quote to Maxwell, who was immediately drawn to investigate after simply coming across a report of the incident on the second page of the “A” section of the
Orange County Register
, when he swiped the paper from his doorstep and read it with toast and coffee. Ralston had given a similar quote to the Register, and to several other local papers, discredited as being hallucinatory while under the influence of marijuana and alcohol, and the official police investigation had never been conclusive since.

What the papers and police reports failed to mention, however, was that a young Simon BoLeve had been involved, too and that there was a sighting of
another
creature, similar to that of the golden legless one, though this other creature was silvery and ghostlike and faded into nothingness whenever it strayed more than several yards away from Simon.

As Melony continued to peruse this and other files, files of related mysterious and unsolved deaths and occurrences, she further grew re-acquainted with the links and patterns, which made the Erlandson case what it was today.

She couldn’t deny the fears she had in tonight’s date with Andrew and in the sketchy possibilities of its outcome.

She reverted back to the file on the elementary school incident.

There were marks and notations and phone numbers of law enforcement officials Melony had never been acquainted with and references to other files.

These references sparked memories and they in turn sparked references to other files stored within memories.

Memories of somehow having seen Erlandson before back then, memories as vague and as elusive as dreams.

Melony had been exposed to much information concerning UFOs and cover-up theories and things concerning the Great Beyond of the unknown since her personal and professional alliance with Max, a great deal of which dealt with matters not necessarily related to the “aliens-among-us” Erlandson case, but on the other hand the Erlandson case affected not only Max’s personal obsessions with the unknown but Melony’s as well, in a way she failed to completely understand. The accumulative data and experiences of Max was to Mel nothing short of the truth and she was just as determined to expose the answers that would turn all those theories into downright fact.

And there was nothing like a good one-on-one with the very man in the central eye-of-the-hurricane focus of it all to make fact those theories.

Now, of course, there was an added complication to the one-on-one.

One was attracted to the
other
one. And the other way around.

Which led to an enlightening and alarming approach to this evening’s investigative plan of action:

Be open, Mel. Tell him who you are, and deal with the consequences. If he can deal with them also, you can ask him anything you want to. Directly. If you are honest with him, then he will be honest with you
.

The question was: would that approach
work?

And what would happen if it didn’t?

It almost sounded insane.

Ultimately undecided, she eventually got dressed and prepared to depart for the important and inevitable meeting, maintaining in her mind, her attraction to the man, avoiding the overwhelming other aspects which would otherwise make her very much afraid.

22.

The Interview at Andrew’s Apartment

The polished silver of the candelabra reflected the incandescent glow of candlelight from the center of a dining room table set for two. The tablecloth’s decorative ocean of glitter scintillated around and below the candles in a majestic presentation of rich-and-famous etiquette like an elegant woman’s evening dress falling short of its modest surroundings.