The Everborn (9 page)

I expected his body to be hairless and sleek, with skin of slate, or skin of creamy-colored off-white as his hands and visible facial features appeared to be against the lamp’s soft glow. Standing, he could not have been more than four feet in height. He sat with legs crossed, silently but for a series of ill-repressed coughs. I could not yet see his eyes, could not strain my own should any attempt at deliberate observation prove offensive to his company.

He spoke to me, and in the reflection in the window I could see the fleshy, horizontal slits of his mouth which indented vertically, then expanding into a diamond-shaped cavity in much the same way the top flap of a milk carton would open. When he spoke, he did so in a voice completely unexpected to me, for I hadn’t anticipated anything less alien than a high-pitched sort of intonation or a bass-low royal utterance of authority.

Instead, he spoke with the voice of a man. A contemporary human male, no less, with a kick-back slang spoken almost lazily, almost in depressed sorrow, hinting of a certain sarcastic resentment I could have taken personally if I hadn’t noticed immediately that it was directed not towards me but towards circumstance. There was an air of confidence, not in how he spoke but in the words themselves, which he used, carefully chosen, and in these words I found the underlying pronouncements of a being agelessly knowledgeable yet somehow human enough to remain at odds with that knowledge.

“Do you love your wife?” he asked me.

I did not expect this to be his first words, and I placed myself in check to expect the unexpected. Feeling subjected to a surge of humility in his presence, I instead gave in to my own professional instinct to question and not to simply kiss ass. And I had many questions. “Why do you ask?”

He answered with a shrug, and was silent, but his shrug displayed an indifference which assured me there was no cause for alarm, although the apparent lack of concern pissed me off.

Maybe this was his way of breaking the ice, because my sudden indignation reduced my awe considerably and I felt free enough to speak on human terms. But before I could answer, and quite demandingly I might add,
yes I love my wife, what of it
, he spoke again.

When I chose to keep silent, not knowing what to say to this, still absorbing my delight in his words and anticipating more, waiting for him to go on, he continued.

I had forgotten about that. I remembered my M&Ms feast on my way there, and I couldn’t believe I was as hungry as I was. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t the least bit hungry now. This reminded me for crazy reasons not of food but of my equipment I had brought with me, the microcassette recorder, and I cringed as this in turn reminded me of my clumsy pratfall at the diner entrance.

“You don’t talk very much, do you, Mister UFO Investigator? Or is it
detective
UFO Investigator?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The
Church On The Rock
. Lawndale. Remember? You went there looking for my kind. You couldn’t very well tell the pastor of that holy place that you were there on official UFO business now, could you? You
were
the sly one, weren’t you? You could tell, Uncle....”

Again, the detestable sarcastic cool. Wasn’t there a more reasonable method to pacify my butterflies than to pique my temperament?

“
Private Investigator,”
I found myself answering, “I did not impersonate an officer.” I also found myself remembering. Remembering
more
. I thought to tell him, purely out of offense,
I am not your Uncle
, but the thought
why did he call me Uncle
distracted me, and instead I found myself dumbfounded, and I asked him, “Who are you?”

“I am a Watcher.”

I waited. In waiting, I noticed he had not changed his position, but remained in a half-turn, leaning toward his ashtray and I got the self-conscious feeling he was scrutinizing me from the corner of an eye that appeared to be bulbous and black.

He continued, “Don’t ask me why I’m called that. That is what they call me. Why they call me that is a long story. What matters now is that I’m watching you.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t say
anything
.

“And you are watching me,” he said. “I must be very new to you, yet I’m very old. Older than you may suppose. Older than what I supposed when I thought I was human. Does that surprise you? That I thought I was once human?”

This time he waited for an answer and, mesmerized, I gave him one. “I don’t know what surprises me anymore. When I was still in college, I was earning my way as a security guard. I was making minimum wage guarding this old cannery, and some children I knew decided to take a tour of this condemned apartment building, God knows where they got the guts, on the other side of it. They got around me, and before I knew it, I was pulled from my post by one of them, this little girl. She told me her friend was in trouble. When I got there, deep inside the building, I came across a boy who had seen something. It turned out that another boy, a little black boy, had died in his arms and was taken away by that same something afterwards. The older boy who had come upon him went into shock and later said that he’d seen some sort of a monster. Their reason for going there was to see a ghost baby, a superstitious rumor the people in that area were nuts about. But what the older boy saw wasn’t any ghost. It turned out to be huge, whatever it was, and it was guarding an infant. That is, if you buy the story. I
learned
to buy the story.” I could not take my gaze from the Watcher. “And I guess you buy it, too.”

“News came in that the body of an infant was discovered in the back alley of a nightclub this summer,” I remembered I was now in
January
, “
last
summer. That news eventually led me to a church, and I was the only one who knew the child’s murderer went to that church. This toddler was verified as missing in 1968. And he was still a toddler. Dead. Talk about a ghost baby. But he wasn’t a ghost baby before he went
looking
for a ghost baby. I believed this other mysterious child grew to maturity, and eventually murdered this black child
again
, the one they found behind the club.

“Second, that
thing
I saw in the diner, when I came up here, before I blacked out and found myself
here,
looked exactly like what that boy with the spider bite described way back when. Jesus, I thought it was my
wife
, at first. I mean...”

“You thought
Bari
was your
wife
?” the Watcher asked. “You’ve been gone way too long, my friend.”

I did not appreciate this whitewashed ridicule. “You know exactly what I mean.” I bit my lip before any uncertain convictions drove me to ask,
don’t you?
And then, in effort to restrain that uncertainty and retain my focus, I added, or rather,
forced
, “You mean, I’ve been
dead
way too long.”

“No,
gone
too long. You’ve been
dead
long enough.”

There appeared suddenly a new cigarette between the fingers of the hand that dowsed the last. I had not noticed how it got there, had not noticed any movement for him to reach for one. But as soon as my eyes fell upon it, and this realization had sunk in, he lifted the unlit smoke and offered it to me. His hand reached out in mid-stretch behind his back, over his shoulder.

“If you were once human,” I half-challenged, half-reasoned, fully irate, “and if you know what I went through driving
over
here....hell, if you know all the shit I got into before I woke up tonight, you’d full as fucking well know I want
answers
, not a cigarette.”

“Listen, Uncle,” he told me, addressing me as such, perhaps to insult me further, “I was once human. I was human a thousand times over you. When a being as elusive and illustrious as myself offers you even a cigarette, you’d better take what he gives you. He might be preparing you for what kind of shit there is to follow. I full well know you had
little
to prepare you for
anything
until now, since you awoke tonight. You want it or not?”

I stood, leaned across the bed, and took it from him. My fingertips brushed against his, though the instantaneous touch was void of sensation. I dared not gaze beyond those fingers, for fear I might behold his full face unprepared. As I withdrew, a red Bic plunged upon the bedspread beneath me. I took it, sparked a light, inhaled. I took in the smoke, expecting to cough it out immediately. I didn’t. Exhaling, blowing a smoke stream upwards and to the ceiling, I felt admittedly refreshed. In thinking so, I felt like a cigarette billboard slogan. I flung the lighter back to him, and he snatched it from between the white cotton crease of his bathrobe and where he sat. I returned to my wooden desk chair.

“In all actuality,” the Watcher continued, “you smoked quite a great deal when you were dead.”

I gagged on my half-inhaled smoke.

“In fact,” he added, “you smoked a great deal just before you died. Like an oil refinery. Took up the nasty habit again not long before, when tension in life and more precisely in your marriage lured you to return to the habit. Shortly after your death, Melony had an affair, you know, before she found out what happened to you. You worked her ass off, in that business partnership of yours.”

I did not like where this was leading. I was recalling more and more of the truth in the words the Watcher spoke of and I detested more and more both what he said and how he said them. I had not been summoned here to discuss my marriage nor cigarette smoking, had not been prepared to be grilled beneath the thrift-store-flowery lampshade of a motel room I did not enter on my own accord. The recurring fears of my wife’s safety were becoming replaced with a swelling conviction that it was
I
who had been kidnapped, if anyone was at all. I slid a pink plastic wastebasket I found at the desk’s side across the carpet with my shoe to catch my ashes.

Then I spoke my mind.

“Just a minute. Just a goddamn sixty seconds. Can I say something, here? Are you
through
? I can’t believe I’m here to listen to this, can’t fucking
believe
I’m sitting here, smoking a fucking
cigarette
, with you talking to me like this, smoking a fucking
cigarette
yourself! Hell, I can’t believe I’ve finally
met
one of you, and I’m talking to
you
like this! Is that what you do to people, how you abduct people, ‘cause
I’ve
been under the impression it had nothing to do with smoke sessions in motel rooms and goddamn electric typewriters and letters to meet somewhere at Joe-Billy Bob’s Breakfast in the Boonies if you survive the Death-diesel Brigade getting there---.”

“Are you finished speaking your mind?” the Watcher spat an interruption of smoke and words from an exhaled first drag of a new cigarette, another of which I had not noticed until it made an announcement all its own by a flaunt between fingers.

And then he rose from the bed and turned to face me fully.

He stared straight into my own eyes; I knew he did, yet his eyes bore no pupils, therefore this knowledge was more of an
awareness
than anything, yet this awareness was so strong I felt his glare blazing headlong through my own, locked into mine. If it were laser beams they surely would have blinded me and pierced clear the hell out of the back side of my fragile human head. His head appeared even more flimsy, almost ghostly white, yet darker, an off-white, almost grey, although I do admit the color of his skin, particularly the skin of his face, played with the shadows of the lamplight and the perceptions of certain dull reality within my mind.

I witnessed infinity in those eyes. I do sincerely mean infinity...those two optical crevices, slanted diagonally as decades of research and even more decades of reported encounters have made me come to have expected, those two eyes drew me
into
them, and the further they drew me, the more I found I could not escape their gaze, or at least the ultimate attention their gaze commanded me into. Those black, glossy,
infinite
eyes were hypnotic unlike any human hypnotist I had ever encountered, almost impossible to describe on human terms because
human
was most definitely what they
weren’t,
yet, somehow, in that motel bathrobe getup, standing still and silent and facing me as he did, he looked like Yoda. Even still, Yoda’s white, earless, second cousin.
Smoking
second cousin, the one out on parole.

“In speaking your mind,” he told me as I sat, forgetting my own cigarette, the one I wasn’t smoking now, its ashes falling where they may within the pink wastebasket or the shaggy shabby carpeting, I didn’t care or notice at that point which, “have you taken into account that I can
read
your mind? That I
know
your thoughts? That you haven’t really
said
anything to me at all yet, haven’t told me anything I didn’t really already
know
, let alone told me
anything?”

I could not release my gaze from his. I understood what he was saying to me, yet I could not feel any reaction to what he was saying, like the occasional times past when someone would talk to me and I was so incredibly tired or dazed I would find myself more attentive to who was talking rather than to
what
they were talking about. His words were seeping into me, however, and I would remember them enough to carry them with me as though what he said were to remain a part of my very existence for the remainder of my life and beyond into eternity.