The Everborn (34 page)

The being at the hallway entrance was a perfect female humanoid from the waist up. It was adorned with flawless coppery-gold skin which changed a shade or two in color as it reflected images when it moved. It was crowned with a thick black flow of waist-length hair, richly black, far more than Melony’s own, and its hair fell down the sleek slope of its back and draped across perfectly formed and firm adult breasts and dark-toned nipples, calling forth to Melony’s mind an eerily distorted recollection of the golden girl body in
Goldfinger
. She bore no eyebrows. Her eyes and more precisely her pupils were like orange black-hole whirlpools, aglow with the piercing alertness of an owl. Its expression was that of sober intent and displeasure, but her ambiance emitted a purposeful serenity which seemed to melt away any dangers of harm.

At least harm towards Mel. Mel completely forgot she herself was naked there, for a short while.

Mel completely forgot everything else also, for a shorter while.

The being’s lower section disintegrated from the waist down into a misty torrent of gaseous translucent streams which altered in its degree of turbulence as the being drifted into the room.

This is Bari
, Melony had no chance to epitomize.
Max had been right the entire time. The interview with Andrew had been nothing but a cover-up of lies.

Now that the truth was apparent before her, she wanted to get the hell out of there and re-evaluate her experience. If she could only move to do so.

Bari made her way past Mel and towards Ralston, who slid away from Bari and toward the door in a feeble attempt to escape further contact with her. His t-shirt clung to his shaken form as it readily absorbed his sweat; one hand raised against the sight of Bari fluttered uncontrollably.

Andrew re-appeared at the hallway entrance and held his place there, choosing to remain out of Bari’s way. He then shot his gaze at Melony, who scurried past him as soon as she was well clear of Bari. Ralston and Bari were drifting nearer towards the yawning front door.

Andrew wasn’t sure if Mel at least noticed him standing there, but she ignored him and did not give any impression that she noticed him at all. She could not keep her eyes off Bari...and if she could, she circled in on the foot of the sofa and on the spot where she’d left her clothes. But when she did, she ended up squatting motionless with her awed attentions immersed into Bari all over again.

Andrew was the gong in the Gong Show of astonishment from his own standpoint of the situation, from the unforeseen guest appearance of a raging Ralston to the spotlight on Bari for Mel. He wasn’t concerned with Ralston’s reaction towards Bari; Ralston’s seen Bari a few inevitable times before.

She saved Ralston’s life once. And Ralston never even knew it.

The arch of the door frame connected with Ralston’s right shoulder blade, cutting short his convulsive retreat from Bari as he slid towards the outside second story walkway. Bari lunged forward and gripped the sides of his chest and hoisted him up from the carpet, and tossed him across the arm of the couch and shut the front door. Melony hopped backwards and into the curtains of the sliding glass doors.

“Don’t be so dramatic over me, you laughable vermin,” Bari told Ralston, not so much angrily but with a calm effectiveness, which communicated plainly. “You know full well not to mess with my boy! Look at you, all wretched and drugged-out and miserable. If you only knew your own potential, and who you are...besides, the deal’s still on with the books. There’s just...something happening lately beyond my control. Mine
or
Andrew’s. He’s not responsible. Go, now....”

Bari backed away and Ralston scrambled to his feet. He didn’t glance at Andrew, or Melony, nor even Bari herself, as he charged the front door, opened it, and fled. He left the door hanging wide open and Bari floated over to it and shut it again.

Then she turned to Melony. “And you,” Bari said to her next in the same manner, “Everything you thought real, as it turns out, isn’t it now? So be it, deal with it. But you have another urgent matter to deal with: your husband. Like it or not, your life has embarked on a new and very different course. Go, deal with your husband....”

Bari reverted into the hallway, causing Andrew to revert even further towards his bedroom. He wanted to bid Mel a heartfelt goodbye, but Bari’s purposeful obstruction suggested it was best for him not to and he did not contest it.

Melony’s weak and debilitating faculties made it quite a chore for her to hurriedly pull her jeans up her legs and gather her remaining clothing to her naked breasts, but she certainly gathered the courage to fetch her fallen microcassette recorder before she snatched her purse and lingering belongings and fled in turn. Likewise as Ralston, she left the door hanging wide open.

Bari hovered from the hallway and moved out into the living room to shut the door again and disappeared, leaving Andrew to emerge alone and remorseful again from the hallway entrance.

He retired soon afterwards with not a word spoken in an effort to re-summon Bari. It all had overwhelmed him, the night and the events it contained. He would discuss the entire catastrophe when Bari saw fit to appear and discuss it, and it probably wouldn’t happen any other way.

He retired in thought.

He wondered why, with Bari’s prophetic foresight and all, did she convince him to lie to Melony though the truth was destined to meet Mel head-on just as soon?

He also thought about what Bari had meant when she spoke to Mel of dealing with her husband, how Bari had sent her away on that note.

29.

A New Recruit for the Magdalene

It happened in the rear alley of a corner retail complex in a seedy sliver of Lawndale.

It happened there, but it began within the attic of
The Church On The Rock
, when the silvery beast claimed not only Maxwell Polito’s body but took a lease on his own soul.

To the human soul, death had regularly proven to be no big deal at all once one dies, regardless of the manner of death. It’s always curiously peaceful, at least at first, when the shock of emerging into a new and wondrous dimension pacifies it so. To bid farewell to the physical chemistries of the brain becomes quite automatic, just as automatic as one greets the brain and all the workings and thinkings of its flesh when one is born.

When your soul is separated from your body, you can no longer think with your brain, and the essence left over that is
really
you is all at once sexless and disoriented and profoundly mystified at what you suddenly face.

And what you face is not merely a
great beyond
, but a
great eternity
. When you die, you not only forget the time, but you
forget
time
entirely. Time is informational data stored within a living brain, and since there no living brain, time becomes boundless and the sole remnants of what was the human you turns into feelings of what was.

There was no time for
what was
with Max. When he died, and he beheld his surroundings with the eyes of a spirit followed by a peculiarly buoyant sensation, the silvery beast was there to greet him.

He knew instinctively that the silvery beast wasn’t an angel, for when one dies, the concepts of angels and demons hold no meaning; those are concepts used to relate to thinking humans. What Max could
feel
were the
feelings
of good and evil.

This was evil.

He felt the evil when the silvery beast touched him, drew his soul back into his dead and bloodied physical remains and held him at bay there.

His soul imprisoned again in that body, the beast stole his body out into the drizzling rain and a great beyond the likes of which no one that was human or once human had rarely known.

Except, perhaps, someone who was once human like the little boy Nigel, who against his will got Max Polito into this entire mess in the first place.

***

The late night sky was spackled with various shades of grey cloud, which upon the horizon turned a sooty black. Below, in the retail complex’s rear alleyway and concealed within the beige brick walls of a dumpster, the silvery beast concluded the laborious process of resurrecting Max’s body to suit her imperative will.

It was a bitch to steal away Max’s human remains this far from the attic of the holy place, though the alley was only two blocks from the church. If the silvery beast was human herself, the whole thing would’ve been dramatically easier; she could’ve taken it farther in the trunk of a stolen vehicle of her choosing...hell, she could’ve placed it in the shopping cart she’d spotted upon a sidewalk and bound it inside a soiled sleeping bag and newspapers and carted it many more blocks away like one of those wretched church-going Jesus-freak homeless degenerates at
The Rock
.

But the silvery beast wasn’t the human being that she once was a few centuries ago, wasn’t even the Watchmaid she’d become in that time of distant past.

She was a Magdalene.

And being a Magdalene wasn’t easy.

Being a Watchmaid hadn’t been easy either, with all its instinctive and inhibiting rules, but it was a hell of a lot easier than what she’d been forced to put up with for the last four hundred year or so.

And being human in comparison was a piece of cake.

That was a fleeting memory.

There was certainly something to be said about an existence as a vulnerable mortal; no fantastic marvel that every being the silvery beast had encountered throughout those numerous years wanted to be one, to either be one again or to know what’s like to be one if they’d never been before. What remained of the human the silvery beast stole away was about to feel that way too, though she had made damn sure he would remember as little of his life as possible. The less he remembered, all the better for her.

He had experienced his own death, which was enough in itself to make him forget what he was. It was her mission to keep him lodged in that forgetfulness.

She’d succeeded with Nigel in that way, for a good portion of his undead service to her.

Pity Simon BoLeve had finally managed to lay that one to ultimate rest. For this reason, the silvery beast required a new recruit.

This one would serve her well, even better, far better than a little boy ever could. The silvery beast would make sure of
that
.

Little Nigel’s death had been a necessary convenience for his resurrection to do her bidding, but the need for him recently expired and Simon’s intervention, was timely in the matter of expiring the boy-thing’s life fully, at least what was left of it. Which was no great loss. The time was ripe for a fresh resurrection, and the required circumstances had made it possible for the silvery beast to bring a new undead man-thing into the world.

Reawakened, Max would be a half-breed essence of herself, combined with a few of her special attributes and a few of what was once his own.

Indeed, the man-thing would serve a far greater purpose than Nigel did.

There was a storm brewing upon the horizon. The Watchmaids of the world were beginning to sense its advent and likewise the world’s banished Magdalene.

Max Polito had beheld a bright light and turned towards it, almost immediately after his experience of what it was like to die. But a powerful force restrained him, the church attic swirling into a blurry vision of wooden beams crisscrossing the ceiling to his own bloodied corpse to an utterly woeful Matt McGregor, to dusty furniture, to his own bloodied corpse again, and, lastly, to the silvery beast who stole his body away.

He looked upon the beast once more, upon its flowing blue-black hair and into her widened orange eyes.

And the beast spoke to him in a grisly whisper, which could have been feminine, could have been eerily soothing, could have been the unnatural substance of the primordial childhood fear of the darkness beyond the bedroom nightlight, “I am Salvatia. Welcome to my will.”

The first and foremost inkling the Max-thing had known afterwards, for perhaps the remnants of Max at any rate, was the obsessive desire for a cigarette.

And Salvatia was determined to oblige him.

Anything for her precious newborn.

INTERLUDE:

Max & The Watcher—

A RETURN TO THE MOTEL UNTOLD