The Everborn (42 page)

The problem was, he was never utterly convinced this was his own brother, his own family, the family residing in this house.

Correction.....

The family who now
once
resided....

Now, after five years of wondering but never having been granted the opportunity to find out for certain, this
was
his family.
For certain.

And somehow, for some reason, his brother was nowhere to be found and remained alive. Simon had considered the possibility that Andrew wouldn’t be there, but he never expected to be as relieved over his absence as he was.

He never expected the photographs in the living room, never expected to be pitted against the truth.

He never anticipated the plan to go this way, to bring such enlightenment, to bring such woe.

Salvatia was there, though, in the house, and by now anywhere. Having discovered Andrew’s absence, she took it upon herself to do away with the mother and the stepfather anyway...perhaps in rage toward a plan ultimately failed, perhaps to partially complete a plan already initiated if nothing more. From what Simon had gathered, Salvatia could materialize within a perimeter of twenty meters of him, being that he was special and all that. He was in the house and that was all it took for her to invade their bedroom and to kill them.

Thus generated his first scar. It was
his
fault, for he never even knew the woman who was his own mother.

The scar made him feel better, a little better.

Held in the opposite hand from his razor was a children’s book, a ten-page flip-book depicting a monster upon each page, a cartoon scribbling per page for every childhood nightmarish atrocity a kid could imagine, each one an allegory for a child to understand and overcome. There was a monster in the closet, a monster under the bed, and on another page, even a monster among the dustballs behind the couch. Andrew must’ve enjoyed this book.

Upon the opened page which Simon held within his lap and facing him was sketched simple beast, its contorted green body grimacing and awkward. The caption below its depiction read, plainly typed,

SCRATCH

...the monster from outside.

36.

The Son of A.J. Erlandson

Throughout the accumulated years of the average fourteen-year-old, one can experience many changes. Andrew Erlandson was, overall, no exception to this, but for him there had always been a small handful of constants.

He had always lived within the same one-floor, three-bedroom Gilbert Street house, situated across the street from the Dr. Jonas E. Salk elementary school and the grass field posterior of Magnolia High.

He had never known his father, A.J. Erlandson, the Hollywood B-movie director who disappeared from the world without so much as a fleeting farewell mere months before Andrew was born.

Andrew’s mother was always there for him. She had raised him, bonded with him, took care of him, would’ve died for him. Andy’s mom shared with him the bewildered, empty grief of personal loss, the feelings of being only half a family...the lost other half nothing more than a perished void. That void was filled to a healing extent when his mother succumbed to a marriage proposal a handful of years ago making Dan Risselbërgen Andrew’s inevitable stepfather. And he was a good man. Andrew and his mother, however, chose to stick with their own last name.

Bari was always there for him, too. When someone has lived with a presence like Bari since the first day he began to observe the world around him, that presence simply settles into it all and takes its place within the varied mental categories of normalcy. When Andrew was very young, he took it for granted that
everyone
knew about Bari as well as he did. He soon learned the contrary, that no one else knew about Bari but himself and decidedly his relationship with Bari was best kept secret. In the eyes of those around him, Andrew oftentimes retreated into a reclusive fantasy world, a world where Bari solely existed, and oftentimes Andrew himself questioned his own sanity during the long periods when Bari chose to remain quiet and unseen even by him.

The remaining constant in Andrew’s life was, together with the absence of his father, the likewise mysterious absence of his brother. His brother had played an intimate role in the first two years of Andrew’s life, the only years Andrew could never truly remember at all. The sole remnants of his brother dwelt within his mother’s latent memories, a stagnant police report, and the lingering possibility that he may still be alive.

Then again, the same could be said about A.J. Andy’s mother had suffered for years with that possibility. Others, including her, attributed Andrew’s periodic reclusion into fantasy to the traumas of his lost father and brother. To them, Bari and those related fantasies were invented to replace the loss.

Andrew hadn’t the faintest idea what an Everborn was, nor that he
was
one, to say the least, nor that he
was
his own father reborn, nor that his brother
was
indeed alive...and that his brother was currently involved in a conspiracy to kill him.

***

Andrew retired to his room early that night, around about nine o’clock. He replaced the clothes he wore all day with sweat pants and a white t-shirt, pulled down his bedcovers, switched off the room light and clicked on the knob of his table lamp. It was the usual routine on a typical Sunday night, but he was unusually tired and bored.

The entire weekend had proven to be uneventful. The small circle of friends in his life had been unavailable, having parent-decreed matters to tend to and Andrew himself had been stuck with yard work alongside his stepfather, Dan. The greenhouse he and Dan built together the previous summer next to the backyard patio was growing increasingly depressing, since the weather had grown cold and his Venus fly traps had blackened and withered. Those plants were his prize and how he’d loved feeding them chunks of ground, beef and struggling red ants with tweezers.

His high school homework was completed and rested in folders amidst textbooks beside his table lamp, below shelves of multitudes of read and reread paperbacks. Emerging into high school was easy academically, but the social complications for a newly initiated ninth-grade introvert expanded way too many unwanted horizons.

Andrew wasn’t exactly hating life; he was merely in post-pubescent purgatory.

He sat upon the edge of his bed and sedately surveyed his room. His bedroom presented a curious feast for the eyes, a feast for a boy or girl of any age. Posters of movies and movie monsters matted the otherwise antique-white walls. The overhead ceiling dripped rubber spiders and space figures of various shapes and sizes, held suspended by shoe laces and string. At the corner desk, a typewriter came up for air amidst a sea of typewritten pages and drawings of original stick-figure-like cartoons. A pile of notebooks upon his bedside table near his school textbooks harbored a handwritten collection of completed and half-completed short stories. Earlier in the day, he’d determined to work a few pages of short story scribblings before he went to sleep, but tonight this just wasn’t going to happen.

Tonight, he was tired and bored. He switched on his clock radio, but even
Doctor Demento
could not give him solace.

This was a weary, lonely night, and Andrew eventually called it one, and fell into a deep sleep.

Even Bari hadn’t shown herself for weeks.

He hadn’t a clue that Bari would show herself
tonight
, finally, not to mention a few special guest stars that would make him anything but tired and bored for the rest of his life.

37.

The Playground

Andrew awoke from a dreamless void with a start to find himself shivering from the outside frosty air. Yes, he was
outside
. Disoriented, his senses gathered to absorb the situation. It was difficult to grasp, being that he was freezing his ass off, being that the last thing he knew was the pillow of his warm and comfy bed in the darkness of his room.

Now, not
only
was he outside, but as he looked down upon himself where he was sitting, he saw that he was naked.

He was
naked
.

He sprang upwards in an immediate panic upon seeing this, only to knock his head into a vertical metal pole situated beside him, sending him back down again with his head lowered and into his lap, his hand raised towards the now-throbbing pain coursing above his right ear.

He could not fathom how he got there or why, and since he lacked clothes of any sort, he was frightfully apprehensive. Despite the outrageous lack of reason or sanity in it all, it occurred to him that behind this obscene practical joke Bari lurked in the shadows.

The school grounds were still and quiet and graveyard-dead, save for an occasional breeze responsible for a greater part of the chill. Where he found himself was in the center of the first-thru-third-grade playground’s jungle gym, seated with legs outstretched before him and embedded within the inner patch of tall grass impossible to be mowed by the groundskeepers’ mowers. His bare buttocks and legs were drenched with the remaining wetness caused by late evening sprinklers, and in the distance he could view the
sprish-sprish
of the sprinklers at work past the lengthy asphalt of basketball courts and tetherball poles and foursquare spaces at the grassy opposite end where the fifth and sixth-graders of the daytime world engaged in recess and soccer and kick ball. He could see the distant sprinklers, but for some reason despite the quiet he could not hear them.

To his right there was another field of not only grass but a dozen or so tall evergreen trees, their branches swaying to the rhythm of the wind. Below them were the wooden lunch tables he recalled chasing friends around when he was younger and attending school here, swapping childhood roles from
Superman
to
Star Wars
characters to teasing the objects of long-lost crushes. This was all bordered by the rickety fences of the backyards of homes at the rear of the school, their lights now off and dormant to the milieu of the late late night.

To his left and past the obstruction of the water bead-strewed jungle gym bars he could see the extensive plateau of the school building itself, sectioned by rows of hallways and hedges and grass, obscuring the outer stretch of parking lot and Gilbert Street beyond, and the adjacent row of homes where he resided. By the look of things, the time was an hour or two after midnight, or easily perhaps more, for the timer running the exterior lights of the school had clicked to an energy-saving semi-darkness where the moon and the stars generated more illumination to the grounds than the two remaining lights perched around the center main office.

To Andrew’s rear, past the plain metallic merry-go-round and the row of swings, stood the chain-linked fence encompassing the school’s kindergarten playground. Beyond that there was a dry cement river of gutter reaching from the curb of the street in one direction and extending past the homes at the school’s rear; chain-link fenced on either side, it served as a partition between the elementary school and the expanse of field and running track leading to the high school next door.

There was a portion of this section of gutter and fence, which held an opening and a wide wooden plank for the young people of the high school to sojourn across on their trek toward home.

Andrew scanned the area, his thoughts running rampant towards a quick solution to this nightmare. Technically, he was only across the street from his home. If all remained quiet as it was, he might get away with a simple jaunt away from the school, away and to the safety of his house. He merely hoped that when he’d arrive there, he wouldn’t be locked out. Then what would he do?

The answer lay right behind and beside him. Upon the wet grass as he turned to his extreme right were his sweat pants and t-shirt, tossed into an inside-out mound in the middle of the first inner segment of jungle gym bars.

Had he walked here in his sleep and disrobed during some incredibly wet dream? This was unheard of for him, to have done such a thing. Still, it was a relief to discover he hadn’t abandoned his clothes. As he moved to collect them, he called out Bari's name, softly, in hopes that she’d appear with assistance and insight into all of this.

“
Bari
?“

His gaze darted about him and into the encompassing darkness as he gathered his sweat pants and proceeded to straighten them out.

Suddenly, as he cast his gaze behind him, his predicament escalated into something much worse. Three....no, four...figures were strolling his way from the grass field of the high school, making their way across the wooden plank of the cement gutter between the two schools.

Andrew called out for Ban again, this time in desperation, albeit just as softly so as not to be heard.

“Bari....
Bari
!"