The Everborn (30 page)

They took him away, only to borrow him for awhile.

He’d be returned in no time.

Drifting
....

***

They stole him away and into a dream far more fathomless, a dream where he found himself somewhere not many miles away, somewhere northeast, upwards from his Balboa Beach-front domicile and into the backwoods hill country beyond the town of Brea and behind the neighborhood of Ralston’s home.

The lights carried him to a place that existed or did not exist, he would never be sure, but it was a place he remembered visiting on occasions long ago.

It was a lone diner roosted upon the gravel roadside of fleeting consciousness like a way station checkpoint between two dimensions, an ultimate landmark for the cosmic chasm of netherworld manifested in the hidden terrain beyond it.

From this point, there came a period of dense oblivion, a hollow blank fog, which drifted numbly through events and experiences, constructing a vacuous emptiness that would remain so, never to be recalled into waking memory, not even by the glossy-eyed man’s suggestive sorceries.

…
awakening
.

***

William Behn awoke from the dream.

Upwards and with a start he awoke, his alertness fine-tuning itself like an FM receiver to the waking world’s proper frequencies, adjusting with every thump of heartbeat. He was drenched within an icy bitter perspiration, which soaked his pajama top and the thick collar portion of his robe.

He was home again, home and amidst the serene late-night darkness of the bedroom and in the company of his restful and inanimate wife curled in deliberate isolation upon her side of the bed they shared still.

The statue garden balcony had surrendered to a now-peaceful dormancy, undisturbed by its recent affair with the luminous intrusion from above.

His senses were seized almost as suddenly as he’d arrived to them, by a single consuming thought which claimed him suddenly next.

It was of the new Ralston Cooper novel.

It was of
The Everborn
.

The diminishing weekend had delivered a comfortable wealth of demands, the foremost being the urgent necessity of reviewing his most valued client’s anticipated new project. Up until the final hour before bedtime, William had managed his way through the fifth chapter of the book. What he read proved masterful and provocative and captivating enough to generate a major publishing event.

Nothing astonishing for Mr. Cooper, of course.

Nor for William as well.

And yet, William now faced a wildly uncontrollable dread about the book, about the queer familiarities of its contents and its eerie flirtations with real people and events and crossbreedings of factual history. It contained subject matter, which hit too close to home, so close that it characterized the nature of William’s own bright lights to a chillingly descriptive “T.” His review of the book had been such a compelling experience and his dream had rendered him utterly displaced. It was plain to see how influential the book had been on the evening, and it was increasingly frightening to consider how difficult it was to separate one from the other.

To position a factual and renown personality into the role of a major character in a work of fiction was unorthodox in the least. Ufologist Maxwell Polito was no recent sensation to William’s prized industry of print-for-profit...a man indebted to his own unorthodox ideas for
his
claim to fame. But to join forces with a master of mainstream macabre would be a reputation risk if not prepared and marketed properly.

Damn Ralston’s insistence to keep a literary project under wraps until the day of its completion. It dug mercilessly into William’s nerves, especially when besieged by deadlines and multiple book contracts and deals in negotiation. Oftentimes, this sort of thing rendered the worrisome agent speculative, and scarcely sure that a given project was being written at all; Ralston always had so much time on his hands for other things.

What William had read of the book so far had generated enough mental mayhem to stimulate another debilitating anxiety attack, and this time it would not originate from repressed childhood horrors. Not only did the tale involve factual characters with potentially ugly libel suits had Ralston irresponsibly neglected to secure proper legalities, and not only did the story flaunt similar if not identical references to William’s blatantly obvious alien abduction-like episodes, but the time frame of the plot itself overlapped
this present
time.

What he had read was enough to make him call it a night, and he had retreated to the bedroom as though to avoid having to admit to himself that he’d unwittingly set himself up to be raped of all rationality. And that was before the night made it all the more worse.

Overcome by immediacy and the panic of bleak premonition, William fled the bedroom. He made his way down the lightless half-spiral of staircase and hurried through the stretch of downstairs corridor. He emerged into his business office/study and arrived at a far corner desk.

There, below his gaze,
The Everborn
lay centered and divided into two uneven stacks beside an open notebook containing review notes. Stepping aside, he gathered his reclining leather desk chair from beneath the desktop work space, positioned it, and seated himself. He lifted a hand to wipe the sweaty droplets from his face and receding brow and from the saturation of wet sweat about his neck and upper chest. He wished he had a handkerchief for times like these, like the one the balding Nazi officer in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
always seemed to have handy.

It was then when he noticed his pajama leg bottoms and the hem of his bathrobe, and his feet. They were soaked with a dewy wetness and soiled with streaks and clumps of mud and yellowed grass-confetti as though he had taken a sleep-induced stroll across the outside grounds of his home.

He remembered the bright lights once again.

He remembered stepping into them.

He remembered dreaming of a journey, though not of the journey itself, but of its purposeful and imposed destination...a snapshot of memory, as it was, of a canyon much like the one described within the...,

....described, within the
book
.

It was time to telephone that most valued client of his, and
pronto
.

One rude awakening deserved another.

25.

A Telephone Call for Ralston Cooper

Out of the chrysalis of late evening came forth emergence of the new day upon the stroke of twelve. Ralston Cooper was wide-eyed and wired inside the recreation room of his Brea home, lounging restlessly amidst weight sets and exercise machines and intermittently drawn towards the enclosed spa he spied from time to time from the opposing side of a spacious window of glass.

He had disrobed fully from whatever he’d been wearing, if anything at all, in the hours before. He was stretched nude upon his back across a padded benchpress, his eyes glazed and his attentions darting from the spa to the ceiling to Jessica saddled atop a thin stretch of bar surface protruding past the dart area and towards the pool table. In turn, Jessica’s view shifted from Ralston to the bar she straddled, then to the overhanging glassware secured and suspended upside-down and inches from her now-habitually bobbing head. She would have been nude also if not for the XXX-tra large tank top of Tweety-bird logos shrouding her body down to her upper thighs.

Her gaze returned to her boyfriend across the room.
Whew! What a goddamn whirlwind weekend
, she awed. When Ralston chose to party with her, he chose to
party
, and he did so ten-fold when he had good enough reason to.

They had been alone together for seemingly numerous hours in the aftermath of full-fledged indulgent celebration and would not wind down for at least another day. Ralston wanted to be rested and coherent by the time William Behn had absorbed the new novel and summoned his presence for the all-important business luncheon and propositional chit-chat. More green bud would take care of the come-down, and that would start by dawn. That was a promise. Or the intention.

Jessica enjoyed the considerably free lifestyle Ralston had provided for her from the get-go, though emotionally rocky and unstable as it was. But she had witnessed the lives of girlfriends past and present devoted to a wide variety of men who used them for financial crutches and as scapegoats for their abusive temperaments; Ralston could very well have been one of those bastards, but he was secure in his own rights and he didn’t give a shit how Jessica was to a certain degree using
him
for a financial crutch.

She had grown to care for him and to love him even more so than she had in the beginning, and her only two cares in the world boiled down to keeping a safe distance on bad days and through violently moody mind trips, which rarely included her if she wasn’t conveniently around to take the rap, and to the threat of Ralston tiring of her company and getting himself hooked on fresh meat. He
did
have more than his share of passing escapades. God forbid he ever found out about the three-some-odd men over the past year she’d been callously intimate with to spite him. And two had been close friends of his. No one could ever compare to her Ralston, however, over all. And she found no desire to be this close to anyone else.

She studied him with alert amusement as his erection rose to hardened attention, stretched upwards at an incline towards the ceiling and reaching the space above his naval. He appeared unresponsive to this.

She’d given his new novel another try after their passionate last screw within the steamy shower cubicle to the right of the backyard poolside. She’d ventured upstairs to dry off and to succumb to another white line of instant wakefulness, but she was way too spun to pay reasonable attention.

She’d soon given up and ventured downstairs, to discover him here among the weight sets. She’d fixed herself a drink at the fully stocked private bar, and had climbed upon the bar itself to engage in a fanciful mental sideshow and for deep thought. All the while, she had the nagging tendency to engage herself in crossword puzzles.

And then the phone rang.

The broken silence startled the both of them.

Jessica dropped to her feet from the bar while Ralston watched unmoving, as she scampered to the cordless wall phone near the room’s entrance. She straightened her tank top and answered eagerly.

“Hello?” She waited, listened. “Who is this?”

“Who is it?” Ralston arched himself upwards in a mildly irritable curiosity to study her responses.

Jessica snickered into the receiver and proceeded around the pool table and towards her boyfriend. “Hold on,” she spoke to the caller, “I’m bringing him the phone as I speak, okay, so mellow out. No, I haven’t read much of it, I’ve been...kinda distracted...here he is...”

“Who is it?” repeated Ralston as he accepted the phone and muffled its lower half briefly to privately question her. “They better not burst my happy bubble, better be a broad hot for a threesome, ‘cause I ain’t...hello?”

Happy bubble
, Jess mused.

“It’s Billy Behn,” Ralston then said to her, partially less stressed. “You shoulda said....”

Then, Ralston spoke into the phone, “Hey, William, ol’ pal ol’ pal. It’s past the witching hour. What’s up? You couldn’t put my new wonder of modern-fucking-imagination down, could you? Ask me about my latest project, go ahead. It’s about a threesome on a bench press with weed and wire and woody-wood wood like a lubricated Lincoln log to a couple of tinker toy twist-lock holes.”

Ralston then shut up as he began to listen, his feisty sense of humor retreating into the somber shades of undivided attention and then into mounting alarm.

Jessica watched with increasing concern as her boyfriend’s happy bubble burst. He became stern and then defensive as he bellowed into the phone.

“
Of course
I know my own fucking novel...no, it wasn’t co-authored...it’s about UFO aliens, whaddya think and it’s
supposed
to fuck with you. It fucked with you, apparently. How do you know that...? Listen, I wrote the goddamn book. You been talkin’ to Erlandson? We’ll discuss that later. Goddammit, Bill, what are you on? All because of a
dream,
for chrissake? Mellow out, take a valium. Get some sleep and finish the book in daylight hours, when the boogie man can’t get to you. Whaddya say,
Uncle
Bill, huh?
Geeezus.!”

Ralston angrily switched off the connection and rather than return the phone to Jessica, he hurled it across the room. It landed intact between two treadmill bars.

“Just like my goddamn uncle,” Ralston breathed bitterly, “a paranoid know-it-all spaz case. They’re all my uncles, those manic depressive assholes who get delusional over their own professions.....they make it big with their dreams, and when they make it, they’re afraid they’re going to lose it all overnight. Now he’s got me thinkin’ it!”