The Everborn (29 page)

She pulled the chair from the table. The gritty screech-scratch of four wooden chair leg bottoms against the no-wax floor could have unnerved her had
Fleetwood Mac’s
merry-go-round of stereo symphony slipped into that still small void in between songs.

She forced herself slowly to her feet. She wasn’t sure whether to move or stay put, and part of her even worried about whether she should gather her purse and leave for fear of what would happen next.

But that was precisely what kept her there. She wanted to see
what would happen next
. That, outside of the abruptly inconsiderate rudeness Andrew might gather from her actually leaving.

This was supposed to be considered a date, after all was said and done, no matter what else it was
. This she felt sincerely, because no matter else
he
was, she liked him.

Perhaps he didn’t
know
what she had been talking about, after all. If this was the case, he must be by now perceiving her as a certified wacko cosmonaut and he’d probably want her to leave. If she was utterly wrong about him, she might as well hang her hat and flush everything that was thrilling about Max’s research down the way of the Tidy Bowl Man.

She grabbed the half-empty brandy bottle from the table and took a few swigs.

She crept around the table, slowly, towards the hallway entrance. She caught sight of the bathroom door, which remained shut, and of the thin horizontal line of soft light at the slit between the carpet and the bottom of the door.

His talking ceased. Somehow, within the following few moments, the music coming from the living room silenced abruptly as well, as though someone had cancelled the CD selections and switched the power off.

The apartment was calm, almost tomblike. The light clicked off in the bathroom as the door opened and Andrew emerged.

By then, Melony had managed several backwards paces into the kitchen and was standing, swallowing another mouthful of brandy from the bottle when Andrew returned.

He returned serene and sober and amused at the sight of her drinking. He took his seat at the table once again, pushed aside his half-finished plateful of grub, seized his grub-stained chop sticks and proceeded to play with them, making them dance like puppets across the place mat.

Melony swallowed and simply looked at him, amused herself and inquisitive.

“So,” Andrew began with mannered distraction, “where would you like to take the evening from here? Wanna watch a movie? Have you seen
War of the Worlds? Strange Invaders? Communion
with Christopher Walken? I got
Invaders From Mars
, the original
and
the remake. I’ve always been drawn to movies like those. You think you can tell me why?”

Melony didn’t know what to say. At first, to her, Andrew sounded as though he was purposely allowing the subject that sent him from the kitchen to drift over his head and the next minute he sounded downright sarcastic. Then she answered, “
I
enjoy those kinds of movies, too. You think you can tell
me
why?”

Andrew set the chop sticks down upon the table, coolly, crossed his arms, leaned into the table, and gazed at her. “Two possibilities here: either you know things about me that I’m not aware of or you don’t know shit. That’s not to offend you and I’m not angry. I figure the only way to carry on this evening is to discuss this topic frankly or to not discuss this at all. We could watch a movie and carry on with the
date
portion of this..., unless you wish to leave right now, in which case I will be convinced that there really is no date portion of this.”

“So...” Melony responded after little thought, “...if we speak frankly about this topic, and I remained here, would that mean there still
is
a date portion of this evening?”

“There is,” Melony said. “You don’t have to believe me. I’ve said enough to make you believe otherwise, so if I leave, it will be because
you
want me to. I admit there are numerous questions I have for you, some to satisfy personal curiosities and some questions preplanned for literal
years
. I take it that by now it’s occurred to you who my husband is.”

“Now that we’re choosing to speak frankly, I prefer you’d do most of the speaking. The more insight you can give me on my life, the more I’d be able to try to relate to what you know. You tell me something about myself and I’ll be able to see where you get that I’m a UFO alien out of all of it. A ridiculous assumption, but my life has been so abnormally bizarre that it merits some insight from an outside observer such as yourself. Such insight has always been a rare thing for me. Truth is, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this. And I’ve been waiting to sit down to dinner with a beautiful woman in my own apartment and I’m glad it turned out to be you. It sucks that you’re married, though, which decreases my chances with you dramatically, I’m sure. But, hey, I still gotta try. I’m open to affairs. Hell,
I
should be open to
anything
, considering
my
pathetic social life.”

He was a strange brew of personality, Andrew was, that was certain. But he sure talked a great deal for someone insisting that
she’d
do all the speaking. Somehow, it was eerie that Andrew seemed to pick up on how she was attracted to him against all the odds of the situation. Either that, or he was hard up enough for a woman to tolerate it.

Somehow, suddenly, it appeared quite clear that Andrew was capable of reading her with a keen accuracy. Was it simply due to the fact that he was a writer, or....

She found herself overwhelmed with the same uncomfortable sensation as one would have being scoped out by undercover security in a department store.

She waited for him to speak again and he remained silent. It came to her that he was waiting for her to begin the
most of the talking
rule he’d just laid out for her.

She began with the incident at the school playground, when Andrew met Ralston Cooper for the first time more than a dozen years ago and with the grisly murders which followed afterwards and again and again throughout the years to follow.

Then she would ask him about the very things which drew her husband into the eye of this enigmatic hurricane, of the things that attracted him so and into his obsessive pursuit of its answers, of luminous female beasts and of a little boy named Nigel lost within the void of circumstance and time.

24.

A Rude Awakening for William Behn

Drifting...

Sleeping
.....

You see bright lights
, said the glossy-eyed man with the tick-tocking pendulum, staring straight through the eyes of the man who now sleeps...

...of the man who now dreams; the man who now dreams of repressions stripped naked, exposed and uninhibited by the pendulum’s spell and the commands of the glossy-eyed man.

Bright lights from the lacey-thin fabric of curtains midway drawn; bright lights from the sliding glass doors slid open in a foot-length yawn to the welcomed cool breeze from the broken showers of post-sunset.

Drifting
...

It was a rotation of lights, bright as they were but in intervals of brightness, which blinded and then became tolerable again in the outer abyss of nighttime sky. It was as if something from above and beyond the second-story outer balcony of the Behn residence descended and dangled and swung by an umbilical cord to the heavens, like a massive and curious spider with luminous eyes teeter-tottering from a strand of starlit web, like an aerial militia in spotlit pursuit of a dodging renegade.

Sleeping
...

The bright lights played upon the statue garden of the balcony patio, its canvassing radiance calling gargoyles forth from shadow, war-ready knights and trolls and toadstool elves from their unlighted sanctuaries. They caressed a stone maiden whose frozen gaze backwards always reminded William Behn of the pillar of salt Lot’s wife turned into, when she looked back upon the world she left behind.

William Behn’s world remained mute, and he viewed the spectacle from the confines of his bedroom as though viewing with a tense numbness a silent movie he was about to step into and over through the rectangular movie screen of the balcony’s glass double doors.

The lights called out to him within this silence, rendered him vulnerable to his own primal fears yet at the same time helpless against the lights’ irrepressible summons.

If he were indeed dreaming this, it occurred to him that this was one of those dreams, which deprived the dreamer of control, the kind of dream in which you have no choice but to let it take you out to its sea like a tide’s powerful undertow, to make you drift in its currents until it runs its course and until you awaken.

He had told the glossy-eyed man this once, maybe more than once, during a questionable number of sessions of drifting and sleeping to a pendulum’s lullaby.

Perhaps this wasn’t a dream at all, but in fact
was
one of those sessions....

William Behn sat alone at his bedside, alone but for his slumbering wife nestled beneath the bedcovers they shared. But Agatha was unaware of all this, wasn’t even a part of it really, and in their isolated positions there was a plainly ironic symbolism to the isolated positions they held within their marriage. In fact, they both were aware of the other’s unspoken yearning to separate from nine years of their decaying union. They would get around to discussing it if only there were enough words spoken between them to strike a conversation in the first place. They each had developed daily routines and held separate occupations, one avoiding a bitter confrontation with the other by staying out of the other’s way, uniting only as glorified roommates for the routine responsibilities of bill payments and sugar-coated family gatherings.

William had two sons from a previous marriage, Agatha one son and two daughters, all of them married successfully and faithfully, all of them ignorant to their parents’ unmentionable turmoil. Perhaps William and Agatha would have had children together, if they hadn’t been so busy early on seeing their own teenagers through junior high and high school, and if only Agatha hadn’t had her tubes tied before they met.

William had become to his wife quite detestable and, if she dwelt on the issue long enough, quite insulting. She knew of his secrets, of his carousing perversions and betraying liaisons with the bar sluts and the tight-assed party caterers and the occasional whores-for-hire his paychecks attracted. And her husband wasn’t exactly pleasant to look at, particularly lately. He must’ve gained sixty pounds in the past year alone.

He hadn’t always been this way. He evolved into it. In fact, he’d just begun to evolve into it around the time he’d first signed on Ralston Cooper as a client. He’d been Editor of a regional subsidiary publishing company and part time literary agent to small time writers with a few good stories and deals under their belts, and when he took on Ralston no one had a clue as to the skyrocketing success it would bring to all.

And no one had a clue to the way William would come to react to such a success. Sure, it was as predictable as a generic horoscope when regarding
Ralston; Ralston
had always been the Asshole Of Ego. But William was once focused and personable, though he’d been raised amidst the trauma of abusive parents living hand-to-mouth and in denial of their allegiance to sour mash and cheap wine. He grew to be a man determined to lead a life in opposition to his dismal upbringing, and now....well, now his own ideals were shot to shit.

For William, whatever charades they wielded for secrets’ sake or suspicions they harbored, there were no closet skeletons profound enough to succeed in importance over the
sessions
.

The sessions brought with them the bright lights. The glossy-eyed man had said that the lights were an implanted diversion from deeply repressed memory. A goal of the sessions was to induce a confrontation with those lights in hopes of liberating the demons imprisoned within them. Fervent attacks of anxiety and depression had plagued William’s recent years for hours or even days at a time with no explanation but for a vitamin deficiency or chemical imbalance. But it was the glossy-eyed man who knew better, who disclosed to him those periods of time unaccounted for, episodes dispersed throughout his youthful years like black-outs, concealing the unimaginable origins of a scared psyche.

Lately, the bright lights were coming to him on their own and apart from the sessions. They revealed themselves only to him, for certainly their presence would evoke the attention of the entire coastal community around them.

They were the very same lights that had come to him before, long ago.

Whatever it was, it was happening again.

He lifted himself from the bed and tied his bathrobe tight about him. He stepped towards the lights, becoming one with the silent movie presentation of his outside balcony.