The Everborn (46 page)

Regardless of Andrew’s motives, and perhaps regardless of anything sane, Ralston came to be hooked on the deal. He had nothing to lose.

The pact was eventually made, and reached its successful fruition. Ralston Cooper came to be a household name and Andrew continued to write and to make a decent, unnoticed living off it.

As for Bari....

She was able to maintain her promise to Camelia that Ralston would always be protected, would always be under close watch, by keeping him near her beloved Andrew by orchestrating a lifetime career of the two together.

A crucial part of the plan was that Andrew needed to write, for writing was his destiny, but to fall under the limelight of celebrity was not within an Everborn’s best interests, not with a Magdalene lurking about.

This was all the better for Ralston, for as far as Bari figured, what better place to hide an undetected Everborn whose Watchmaid had died than in the taboo of celebrity limelight?

SECOND INTERLUDE:

Max & The Watcher-

THE MOTEL UNTOLD AGAIN

40.

In The Waking World

I awoke again, one more time, to rediscover how I remain Maxwell J. Polito, resurrected from the dead, and that whatever dreams I dream from now on will never be as outlandishly surreal as the realities I live in the waking world.

Dreams could never possibly
compete
.

Not since I awoke from the dead, anyway.

This entire process of meeting with an alien being inside a motel room in Carbon Canyon...to get together in order to write a Ralston Cooper novel upon a magical time-travel typewriter that would whisk away the words onto another typewriter several months in the past...onto
Andrew Erlandson’s
typewriter...and this novel would consequently effect the chain of events which brought me to where I am now...

....it was like a thousand mirrors facing each other at once and I was a key figure captured in the vast reflective prism of the past several months.

The Watcher had taken it upon himself to slip a potent downer in my chocodile, causing me to fall into a deep sleep while he himself took over the helm and typed at the motel room desk rather than dictating the story to me. He confessed this to me, and having fully awakened I’ve resumed the helm at the desk to write about it and to press on with the forthcoming conclusions of the story the Watcher and I labor to tell.

The Watcher had permitted me a brief overview of what he’d written during my slumber, a verbal slide-show of condensed stories and explanations and answers presented like a one-sided prime-time interview. Gratifyingly enlightened and educated in little time, I am ready to proceed onward.

I’ve only but to make mention of what I dreamt when the Watcher had taken his turn at the desk. I dreamt of a pizza, for some reason beyond me, and of God kneading and flouring and shaping its dough and spinning it upon acrobatic fingertips in the window of an authentic pizzeria for passers-by to see. Perhaps I dreamt this because inwardly I remained hungry and I love pizza, or maybe the dream dealt with something to do with the process of creation...even if it was creating food.

You ask me what God looked like, flipping pizza in a pizzeria window?

He looked like my wife.

I realized within the dream that God wasn’t actually my wife. What I realized, before I awoke, was how obsessively
hurt
I was deep down, about what the Watcher revealed to me while I was typing...about my death, about...

...about my wife…

...so much
about
my wife that even a psychedelic vision of God couldn’t keep me from seeing her face.

Sooner or later this bitter hurt was destined to fall smack into my lap, if even in dreams.

After all, my wife slept with the major subject of a carefully-maneuvered research assignment to tap into the hidden truths firsthand of the evidence of an alien race interwoven through the history of human society.

What follows are the chronicles of all who remained involved, of Salvatia’s second and final attempt at freeing herself from the shackles of Magdalene-hood by seeking the life of Andrew Erlandson once more, and with a vengeance.

Needless to say, I’ve something further to show you...

...
the most important part....

PART FOUR:

THE MASTER MAGICIANS

“
....And all the world is wild and strange:

Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite

Shall bear us company tonight.

41.

Company for Scratch

-
September 30, 1994
-

...ethereal trails spilling about the space of air within the central rooms of the house....a soundless gambol of cigarette smoke, intrusive as though its origins were not from
inside
but from out.....

***

Simon BoLeve, who’d come to call himself Scratch as of late, held a unique history of skillfulness in the art of lying low. It came naturally to him like an inherent introversion, and throughout his life he never consciously carried the drive to be as social as anyone around him.

This was a good thing, to remain virtually unnoticed all these years, to maintain a status of unsung nothingness while the busy beehive of society slaved for their dollars and gods and ideals.

It was a good thing for Scratch also, considering the overwhelming mischief he had on his head. Why, his own foster parents, dear Brother and Sister BoLeve, would have been better off adopting some other little auspicious lad, and never would’ve eventually lost their lives to him.

Scratch had been very clever at lying low for
that
.

Indeed, miraculously, Scratch proved himself a slippery sucker. But, as Jacob Bradshaw often quoted from the Good Book,
your sins will surely find you out.

And Scratch’s sins were to find him out in a big way.

***

Smoke....

Scratch could smell it in the living room, could smell it in the kitchen. Someone had been smoking a cigarette; he could still catch sight of its cloud-white traces stretching higher into the air then tumbling downwards as he flicked up the wall switch of the kitchen light.

The kitchen was long and narrow and at its opposite end, the door to the side of the house hung ajar. Odd thing, considering Scratch had locked and bolted the door from the inside, and it had remained that way a month now...a month since he’d set out with the emphatic initiative to pay a house visit on a couple of church acquaintances-turned meth dealers, the idea being to take up latent residence there with his hosts sent on a restful vacation buried beneath the cement of a backyard tetherball pole.

A month that he’d been
lying low
.

He seized an elongated knife from the pile of utensils and dishes soaking in the stagnant sink dishwater and sprinted for the door. The identity of whoever had intruded was a mortifying mystery. Whoever had intruded, once he found him...Scratch would strike first at his face, thrust him before a mirror to see if the sneaking sonofabitch could stand the inability to identify
himself.

Quietly, subtly, he slowed past the door and prowled the outer side walkway, sidestepping the row of garbage cans and cardboard boxes of decomposed lawn trimmings. He scanned the backyard, dusk-lit and vacant save for the tetherball pole and sheltered patio and then doubled back to inspect the padlocked side gate.

His developing conclusion was, whoever violated his sanctity had fled and hopped the fence. Whoever it was, Scratch reasoned, had to have known the previous occupants of the house intimately enough to have in their possession a key, to know their way around. That much was certain.

And they smoked.

On another hand, the uninvited guest could have been nothing more than a vandal, a sketched-out tweeker tempted into a little burglary by the prolonged absence of his connects, spooked by Scratch’s presence. Surely this enigma hadn’t caught full sight of Scratch, hadn’t caught sight of him and recognized him by some nonsensical twist of chance. Of course, Scratch was the man wanted for questioning on the murder of Jacob Bradshaw, the once-pastor of the previous occupants and the presumed abduction of ufologist Max
Polito. After all, both events took place within his own previous attic home at
The Rock.
Aside from that, there was the unavoidable ordeal involving the kidnapping and rape of Bradshaw’s daughter Alice and the slaying of her dear boyfriend Benjamin. It was all over the papers and the lips of the Eyewitness news team on channel seven.

But however the intrusion or his suspicion of the intruder, nothing could explain to Scratch how anyone could’ve penetrated the Bondo he’d applied to the side door’s keyholes. And, as he observed, the Bondo was still intact.

Wary and substantially paranoid, he retreated into the kitchen, closed and rebolted the door. He spun around with the sud-soaked kitchen knife poised within his left-handed grip. His intuition warned him like an acutely aware predator that someone might still be remaining within the house.

Hiding.

Contriving.

He resolved to canvass the inside of the house, just to make certain he was again alone. He cautiously entered the living room, sidestepped towards the shoddy thick wall of curtain concealing the inner house from the outer patio. He lifted his free hand, parted a corner section of the curtain in ill attempt to inspect the tenebrous shadows of post-dusk beyond the awning. This was not a good idea; if his visitor indeed escaped but chose to hang around for awhile in a concealed stake-out, Scratch risked complete visibility peering out as he was.

But his own reflection in the sliding glass window became at once an appalling distraction, and he swiped the curtain shut before he found himself drawn into the decaying features surrounding his own hollow eyes.