The Everborn (31 page)

Jessica stood over him, motionless. Ralston was clearly trembling, his hands fidgety as he did not know what to do with them. “What happened?” she asked before she could take the option of not speaking at all.

“I should’ve gone through the book, I should’ve gone through the goddamn book before I delivered it!” Ralston spoke in muffled whispers.

“I thought you had Andrew go through it for you,” Jess said. “Did he slip his own stuff into the manuscript again without your knowledge? You told me he does that....”

Ralston couldn’t look at her. He was upset and vulnerable to his own betraying mouth and prey to the drugs that besieged his system. “Bill said some freaky shit and it didn’t make any sense. You know what? If Andrew rewrote the storyline and wants to take credit for book, I’ll stretch out his scrotum for my living room drapery and use his balls for drawstring ends.”

Andrew rewrote the storyline and wants to take credit for the book.
Brilliant top-of-the-head banter, though it made no sense as the actual truth. Andrew’s proven insistence on anonymity had always been Ralston’s guarantee that a potentially disastrous success secret would be taken to their graves. That, and a few deep dark secrets that Ralston kept even from himself, regarding memories of nightmare from more than a decade past. Even the people closest to the both of them had no idea that Ralston never wrote
shit
.

Andrew was up to something, being that it was
his
novel after
all
, and whatever he’d written in it
had
to be responsible for William’s panic attack.

Ralston rose from the bench and marched past Jess.

“What are you doing?” Jessica said.

“Stay put. It’s time I pay little Andy—man a cameo appearance to his rat hole dive. I’ll whip his ass to settle this, for goddamn sure. If there’s still a problem by the time I’m through with him, it’ll only be in where to hide the body before sunrise.”

26.

An Odd Distortion for Bari

I know who you are....

Much to Bari's knowledge, Melony
did
know who Andrew was. At least, to an impressive degree she did. Why, she was Maxwell Polito’s
wife,
for one thing, among many other things, which apparently displeased her lately. Bari had given careful attention to all that was said over Andrew’s Chinese feast, and there grew the increasing danger that Andrew was going to up and confirm just about every little morsel of information that Melony had on him.

Max Polito had always been to Bari a source of amusement and a nuisance and it would be unlikely for her to admit to Andrew that she admired Max’s perseverance. But she always steered Andrew clear of him, whenever she sensed that Max was on the heels of all those strange occurrences involving Andrew and Ralston in the past. Max was aware of way too much information lately more than ever, and had himself witnessed many things incredible to human eyes, but hadn’t collected even one shred of substantial proof to open the eyes of the world he was so passionate to convince.

There were many just like him, and they all fell short of convincing the masses due to their inabilities to produce anything concrete. And they all had to deal with it, too.

Bari knew that Max anticipated the day when his message in a bottle would fall from the sky and into his lap, just so he could uncork it and exploit the whole damn thing.

This was a big no-no in Bari’s book. She and her kind could not tolerate such exposure to a natural, physical, mortal Earth; human society was simply not yet ready for such a worldwide network premiere from beyond. Though it was well on its way to getting there.

Bari wasn’t going to be the one to allow that to happen.

Whatever Mr. Loose-lipped, Bleeding-heart Andrew felt he had to spill his guts over to Melony, it wasn’t going to be the truth.

There wasn’t time for the truth. Not yet, of course, for the truth never fails to be revealed in time. Neither Bari nor even the Sacred Ones who started this whole Everborn-among-mankind thing at the dawn of civilized man could do anything about
that.

Maxwell Polito’s wife was treacherous territory and an alarming risk for the role which Bari had red-carpeted for her, to be a mate for her Andrew. But in that also, was she perfect for him, for she would have no trouble in dealing with all those nasty repercussions her Andrew was guaranteed to eventually give. Almost no trouble.

Matching Andrew with Melony was poetically ironic. They had learned to like each other on their own, but since this was Max’s
marital spouse
Bari was dealing with, the whole romantic interlude had to be approached with extreme caution...Chinese feast, the inevitable interview, and all the brow-raising possibilities afterwards.

All in all, it was
all
meant to be.
Anyway
.

By the way, while on the subject of things
meant to be....

Up to this present time and for a while now, Ban had been acutely sensing an odd distortion from within her being, something instinctive, as tremendous instinct was after all one of her more exuberant qualities.

Time had been somehow unfolding and lately overlapping itself. Time was being manipulated, this present time and over the last day or so...in fact, ever since Andrew had awakened before his typewriter to that curiously disturbing finished manuscript he had labored in a marathon to complete on time for good buddy Ralston. Bari hadn’t exactly forseen this happening, but she was beginning to understand. She’d become increasingly convinced that whatever it was that was
happening
, that manuscript was the tootsie roll center in the sucker of a grander scale.

Bari was also certain that if indeed it was
time
being screwed with here, there was a Watcher behind it all. If she could bet, she would bet her copper-toned transparent butt cheeks on it. She was relatively young in this business of being a Watchmaid, possessing less experience than the larger lot of Watchmaids scattered abroad, and her enhanced awareness of the time continuum was nothing more than
knowledge
at best. Here on Earth, the Watchers were the ones who did the
Time Warp
again and again with controlled access to its password.

Time was being manipulated from a point in the future, in a benevolent effort it seemed, to obstruct the efforts of a sinister nature from imposing potentially climactic introductions between the secrets of the ‘born and billions of unsuspecting Homo Sapien folk.

Clearly her Andrew was an instrumental pawn in this, which was all the more reason for Bari to deprive Melony the courtesy of the truth, at least through Andrew’s lips. It was also all the more reason to jettison Andrew from this mayhem, and quickly, into the next chapter of existence, into the next life. Before the creature of the Magdalene and her dreg Simon BoLeve could get to him.

Before the evening began, Bari had decided to leave things concerning the interview up to Andrew, with Bari on her guard to regulate things if they got too hairy. She’d hoped that Andrew would give Melony the pre-rehearsed verbal view-master view of the answers Melony sought, developed for just such an occasion.

Bari's good old-fashioned bathroom chat with Andrew didn’t seem to go over well. He failed contemptibly to understand her insistence to waste Mel’s time with bullshit; he thought Mel was worth more than that, and it made no sense that Bari should pair him and Mel together and expect him to lie to her after all.

And after Mel had been so honest with him about
herself
.

When Andrew reseated himself at the kitchen table, he was reserved, yet refreshingly guarded, obviously testing the waters for the absolute surety that his own climactic introductions to the tales of his young-man life wouldn’t explode in his face.

And then she rose, stepped into the living room, only to return with a microcassette recorder which she set down upon the table, play/record buttons depressed and readied with red indicator light beaming.

27.

Andrew Is Not an Alien

The obscure configuration of a slender shadow stood still before Andrew Erlandson’s bathroom mirror. It was confoundedly obscure, to Melony, as it would be to anybody after downing over two medium-sized bottles of E&J brandy with a new drinking buddy.

Drinking buddy
.

She couldn’t believe she’d been allowing herself to drink. Like this and during an occasion such as this one, when her intentions behind the evening’s date were to remain inquisitive and aware and unbiased. For that matter, she’d gotten rather sloshed at
The Crow Job
Friday night, when she was first personally introduced into all of this, under the assumption that Andrew Erlandson was an alien.

Yet, apparently, Andrew wasn’t an alien after all.

Did that make it okay to be drinking?

The things Andrew had told her were nothing like she’d anticipated. They were neither incredible or fantastic, at least compared to the norm of earthly things, and they didn’t reveal any ultimate hidden secrets hidden beneath the guise of humankind’s superficial awareness. They brought Melony down to Earth with a mixture of disappointment and relief but with a lingering skepticism somehow. Andrew had stripped himself of the fanciful awe surrounding his nonhuman mysteries, made himself into an average guy with a past of outlandish but explainable circumstances, and lowered her professional expectations just enough to make him far more accessible to her romantic curiosities. It was a dangerous and frightening concoction, but so was brandy and coke.

Somehow, though, what Andrew had told her didn’t entirely ring true. But perhaps this was due to the utter let-down of how he was supposed to have been otherworldly and all.

She could hear Andrew out in the kitchen. He was talking to himself again.

Melony dowsed her face with cold water over the bathroom sink, resurfacing to meet her own glare within the wall mirror in front of her. She would go to great lengths to sober up about now, if only she could think of how to go about it. Anything for a comfortable frame of mind.

A little while before,
anything
could have happened.

Now,
anything
of a different sort could happen still, anything more down to Earth than she’d feared.

She wasn’t afraid anymore of that
anything
, but as she gave her face one last tidal wave splash of water, she found herself fearing all over again, fearing that certain
anything of a different sort
, and what it could ever be.

***

Melony had remained quiet and studious throughout the greater portion of the time Andrew shared with her the sugar-coated and carefully condensed tales of his life’s extraordinary highlights. He told her of the father he never knew and of the way he knew
about
him. Of his mother waiting in excess of several years, before she was engaged to be remarried to an inevitable stepfather for Andrew, after the pain of unexplained loss drifted into a celibate dormancy until the day arrived for her to accept the fact that her husband would never resurface from beyond stagnant yesteryear.

Andrew told Melony of an imaginary friend named Bari, and how Bari would spend time with him whenever he needed her to be there, whenever he closed his eyes and wished really hard for her to appear to him when he was all alone. No one ever saw Bari but him, regardless of the numerous episodes of his attempting to prove her existence.

No one ever saw, that is to say, but those unfortunate ones who blatantly threatened bodily harm to Andrew.

And in the aftermath of such instances, nobody believed what Andrew’s assailants saw, anyway.

And those were just
human
threats.

This most interesting friend had supposedly protected Andrew from threats of
another
nature also; by Andrew’s testimony, one had to assume that for every imaginary friend there were evidently imaginary enemies.

He slyly avoided giving Melony the courtesy of specifics. He bore a methodical rationality to his accounts, which swayed Melony towards believing that Bari existed solely within the mind of a fatherless child withdrawn into an irrational
WalterMitty
way of daydream living. It distracted her from all those theoretical versions of the truth that Max had compiled so convincingly for so long. She had slowly become unaware of forsaking even the more concrete examples of Andrew’s alleged nonhuman involvements. Whenever he made mention of an elusive twin, for example, whose existence could never be confirmed nor denied for the longest time, not even by Andrew’s own mother, Melony began to suspect that the elusive twin he spoke of was Simon BoLeve.

Simon’s enigmatic origins and history were scattered throughout Max’s research but always remained inconclusive. It was by accident that Max even learned of his name to begin with and death had always surrounded him.

Certainly the consideration of Simon’s dark deeds and manipulations was more sound by far than any conjured depictions of ghost—like women beasts and aliens.

Weren’t they?

Max claimed to know for sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt. And he held all the convincing data to back him up. Could he be wrong? If he was, he was wrong despicably. And because of him, Melony was wrong despicably, too.