The Everborn (16 page)

When they returned to the table and received their sixth round, Andrew, in repositioning himself in his seat, slammed a kneecap into the table’s underside with a start. Melony was quick to rescue her cocktail from a toppled descent, though the glass escaped her grip with a splash and a pirouette until it rested upright and half empty before her.

And, for the greater part, neither one of them really
were
. Andrew had limited his sizeable Foster’s to two, in favor of the less demanding Coors twelve ounce longnecks, while Mel had stuck to fuzzy navels, with a zombie shared between the two of them.

Melony had come for reasons of professional pursuit and intense curiosity, Andrew because he was expected to and because he didn’t know what to do with himself otherwise. Yet there they were, as fantastically unreal as it seemed to the both of them but for fantastically different reasons, each having a surprisingly fantastic time.

“Is your knee okay?”

“Didn’t feel it,” said Andrew. Then, with a blunt calmness, he said to her following another beer swig, “So...wouldn’t they allow you to at least bring a friend?”

Melony looked at him. “Who?”

“Your newsletter people. You know, you’re probably the only one here who came alone, which is nuts, what with the dirtbags who normally hang out here and all. And with that kid they found in the alley

“I heard about that. And how inappropriate to have a raging party event like this right next door, with not even a mention of caution or of what happened at all. All these people and with a maniac out running around....”

“They don’t care,” Andrew moaned. “They don’t care because Ralston doesn’t care. Ralston probably gets off on it, probably sees an angle of novelty in a murder so recent and so close to the premier gig of a horror geek.”

“For a personal assistant, you sound like you hate the guy.”

Andrew cast a questioning gaze at her, reminded himself that his services to Ralston, at least on the surface, were no great secret. He toyed with his beer bottle label as he replied, “Personal slave. Doing everything for him is all I ever do. And he’s a pompous rat bastard, except for when he’s passed out.”

“Sounds familiar,” Melony admitted. “I’m a personal slave and you might say for the same kind of rat bastard, except for
my
rat bastard isn’t pompous and he doesn’t pass out. He’s always on the go and for what he’s known for, you might say that between him and Ralston the celebrity status is equal. I know what you go through now and I never knew you went through that....”

“What are you talking about...?”

Melony caught herself. She could not believe the height of witless idiocy she had just displayed to herself.

She had never considered the notion that Andrew Erlandson could be anything but disturbingly mysterious and alien to her; contrary to any expectations, she found him intensely enjoyable, personable, intelligent, and shy, and not to mention, increasingly handsome. She began to sense that he quite possibly had no knowledge of what he was and sensing this in turn lead to a new and foreboding impression that she might be wrong about him, that he may be human after all.

And what an upset that would be! She would quit this queer career for sure if that were the case, go back to painting. Maybe she should have been painting all along....

These were the things which now made her careless, that Andrew’s company actually was making her forget what she was there for. This was indeed a headache, for Andrew himself was what she was there for.

Andrew was waiting for an answer, his puzzled expression growing all the more intense while she was growing all the more distressed.

She needed an instant escape route, a trap door tunnel to the fun they shared moments before. Perhaps she should give it up, come clean, reveal everything. Perhaps she should knee-smack the table, should spill her drink again.

Squid Friction
erupted into a boisterous bastardization of
Highway To Hell
just then.

Melony bolted from her seat.

For what it’s worth, thank God
....

And she took Andrew by the hand, once again leading him to the dance floor.

And they danced.

11.

Scratch At the Crow Job

The lovely couple rose from their center table. The young man assisted the girl, with her coat and downed the remainder of his drink simultaneously. The girl grabbed her purse.

They were leaving.

The shabby grey shape waited patiently as they found their way to the exit. His heart then began to race. His fingers shook. He brought them to his face along with round-rimmed spectacles and pushed his spectacles into place.

It was just...about...time.

He abandoned his table, taking with him a red plastic cocktail straw from a nearby empty glass. He began to take his first steps toward the exit the moment the lovely couple disappeared into the outside air. Swiftly now...even more swiftly....

When he reached the outer walkway, pushing restlessly past a handful of others exiting and a handful of others entering, he spotted the lovely couple as they strolled arm-in-arm across the parking lot, down the sidewalk, beneath the bright lamplight of the solemn street.

He kept his pace steady and slow, careful to turn the other way or sidestep into the shadows should one or both of them take a glance behind and his way. As they crossed the adjoining intersection, he waited for a moment’s time before he did the same.

Halfway across and from between the faded yellow crosswalk lines, he paused to gaze back himself, back to
The Crow Job
, back to the gaping black mouth of
The Crow Job’
s
rearside alley. He thought recent memories.

For a moment.

Then he continued onward, chewing the tip of his cocktail straw nervously and discarding it to the street curb.

At first, he thought the lovely couple were returning to their grey Mercedes, the Mercedes the young man had borrowed earlier from his church choir leader on the half-lie that his date with the pastor’s daughter would be an innocent dinner-and-movie one. The shabby grey shape was prepared to follow, prepared to go in turn for his own shabby-shaped vehicle across the street, until the lovely couple strode past the Mercedes and continued further over the crabgrass cracks of severed sidewalk, down the street and further away from the happening nightclub.

He stood still the next moment, resting against the riddled graffiti of a garbage dumpster, placing his fingers, now trembling and anxious, into his trench coat pockets. Two raggedy young men approached him from behind, mooching for a cigarette or three. He replied coldly that he didn’t smoke. They offered him unseen other things that they insisted would mellow his harsh disposition, with only a small price to pay in return. He replied, again coldly, that the only unseen things controlling his disposition would be resolved by himself very soon, adding that the young men had better get lost should they find themselves involved personally in that resolution. With a
high
price to pay.

He abandoned the young men and the dumpster to continue his endeavor on the lovely couple, who were now much further down the street, their sojourn interrupted by a kissful embrace. They vanished soon into the distant dark of a building’s sharp corner. He knew where they were headed. Together.

Up and across he went past the mouth of a narrow alley, splish-splashing shoe soles up and across drainage water, dodging a car’s gleaming headlights, over and onto the continuing walkway and patches of wet grass. In a careful rush he scurried past the stubble-white stucco of an old building and rounded the sharp turn in pursuit. Steering subtly through the thick shaded hues of the other side and its parking lot, he followed the lovely couple past the front entrance of a weathered motel.

***

Alice Bradshaw led her boyfriend down the walkway, past the quieted, gated swimming pool and a series of juniper bushes stretching out like a multitude of hands, mossy and splintery from digging upwards and out from the ground. They arrived at the lightless front doorstep of room 06.

She turned to her boyfriend and beckoned a pleasant second kiss and he obliged her, pinning her sleek-figured body gently but firmly against the door. The pressure loosened the number “6” plate from the metal “06”, knocking it onto the padded doormat below and making it room number 0.

“This is your bright, bargain motel room?” her boyfriend laughed.

“Ben,” she sighed, “it’s better on the
inside
. Besides, no churchy parents to hide from...you’re with a
pastor’s
daughter for Pete’s sake...and we don’t have to go all the way to
your
place now, do we?”

“No,” he said to her slyly, tilting them both into the failed front lighting. “But we can still go all the way....”

Alice playfully nudged him backwards. “Wait a sec, Ben, what if he’s
watching?”

He pulled away smirking. Then, “Can you
believe
him? You think your dad sent him, you know, to watch us? You know how paranoid he gets over you....”

“He’s not my dad’s right-hand man, Ben. He’s only a handy-man. And he’s a cool
friend.”

“A cool friend that
follows
us???”

“He helped us be able to come out here,” Alice told him. “He covered our asses...hell, he even
told
us about this thing tonight.”

“He told us about the concert, yeah, and he showed up to catch the show, which I think is great. But he’s
following
us!”

“Maybe out here, in this neighborhood, he’s looking out for us. And if he sees us go into the room, he won’t tell. He’ll maybe
lecture
us later....”

A purse rose between them, breaking them apart. She dug into the purse, retrieved her room key. She had to jiggle the lock; she turned the knob and opened the door.

In an instant, an abrupt flash, a spectral blur and Ben had no time to react. Alice could not contain her senses long enough to scream. Something collided with her and she found herself crashing down into and past the opened door, through the shabby carpeted entranceway, against the table in the nearby kitchen abyss. There was a distant distortion of light cut to the quick and in it she caught a vague glimpse of the door as it slammed shut behind dancing blackness.

She reached in a desperate but feeble attempt to grasp for some stable support, her mind just as desperate to grasp reality. Blindness overtook that reality. . . she fought against it as though it took prominence over fighting for her life. . . and her hand fell onto the entranceway carpet. In abhorrent confusion she mistook the carpet for a heavy dampness...

...her own blood....

...but it was then, that her eyes came into focus with the twisting, contorted mass of what she knew to be her boyfriend, his throat severed and gaping, spewing a black formlessness.

Still, Alice could not scream.

Though she knew she was about to die.

A gripping force overtook her from behind, lifting her from the kitchenette tile floor suddenly, her vision clearing further as the gripping hands flung her around to a full view of her assailant’s figure.

She caught the gleam of a knife, a
razor
and the sight of the lurid shape behind it, the shabby grey shape shrouded in silhouette by the moonlight streaming through the curtains beyond.

“
I need you. I need you reeeeeeal bad.”

It lowered the blade closer, almost until it reached the skin below her line of vision.

“
Not for love, not for sex, not for death. My needs are beyond these trivialities. My needs are for a more important cause...a more
noble
cause
.”

He lowered his face and the rugged bristles of his beard brushed against Alice’s nostrils and across the smoothness of her cheek.

“
I’ve been watching you for...oh, I’d say for some time now. Ever since your father took me in and gave me a job, which was very nice of him, by the way, I don’t think I ever showed the gratitude he deserved. I’ve been wanting you, Alice
Bradshaw
. But things are different now. Now, I
need
you. Reeeeeal bad....”

And that was when she noticed, in the midst of horrid disarray...

...the
scars
.

His words fell into place upon the nightmare bed of her conscious understanding. Her eyes widened in gradual realization.

“Good girl,” he breathed. “It’s Simon. It’s me, Simon. Simon BoLeve. That bearded behemoth you see seated in the back left row of each one of your daddy’s Sunday social services. The one who jerks off toilet plunger handles and scrubs graffiti-smeared pussie drawings from the parking lot brick walls. The one who scares away the pussies that put them there. The one who roosts up in the church attic. Not that I’m complaining; it’s comfortable up there. Comfortable...but also lonely. So lonely. But not anymore. Something better has come along. Something special is going to happen. Something reeeeeeal special. Reeeeally special. Soon, lovely Alice Bradshaw. Soon. And until then, I’m not Simon anymore. Until then, you can call me....