The Everborn (45 page)

And if
anyone
needed a catalyst, it was Andrew. Bari vowed to see him through the loss of his family.

When she lifted her gaze from her bosom friend, she saw that Ralston remained to her far left and solitary upon the grass...

...and Andrew was gone.

Quickly, Bari departed from Ralston and from the bodies of his friends and hers, for the moment, to return to them and to reconstruct the scene for the humans who would most certainly come upon them by morning, before even the first child set foot upon the grounds. School, today, would be canceled, for sure. Bari had to return. But first, there was her own Everborn to deal with.

When Bari found Andrew, she discovered him inside his house, in his parents’ bedroom, in the corner of the room alongside the open door and several feet from the foot of the bed where his parents’ bodies lay. He had curled up and into himself, arms clenched and head tucked between quivering knees, squatting, paralyzed by the impact of the horror of his apprehension.

He heaved suddenly, the arch of his back shook once, twice, in a tumult of despair, and Bari deadened the overhead ceiling lights by a click of the wall switch to eliminate the weeping boy’s view of the grisly spectacle of the room.

There, even in darkness and shadow, the room flaunted the stone cold pungency of death.

Bari moved to the boy, the gentle currents of her hovering body brushing over the remnants of things now embedded forever in the past. She lulled him to sleep. Tenderly.

39.

The Big Deal

-
1984
-

The dismal garage smelled of alcohol and reeked with the tainted odor of stale cigarettes. Ralston strummed gently upon the amplified strings of an electric guitar, the strumming interwoven by the quiet hum of blacklight.

Fluorescent posters poked from the three-dimensional dark like otherworldly intrusions upon Ralston’s somber reality. All he cared about in this world, right about then, was plucking those goddamn electric guitar strings...no matter how badly they resounded against his fingertips. He sang into a microphone situated on a metal stand. His off tone soprano regurgitated the way a deep-sea fish would do its young. He was
bad
...despite, alas, the confidently tranquil way he carried himself. If he
had
a great voice and a natural ability to play, he would’ve got it made musically at an early age...just on the merits of his eagerness and stubborn reveries to rock n’ roll and to do nothing else
but
rock n’ roll for the rest of his life.

***

Andrew hadn’t expected to be so thoroughly amused with the sight of Ralston as he rested against the opened frame of the side door of Ralston’s garage. It was from there Andrew stood, cross-legged and cross-armed, straining to give the impression of bold confidence should Ralston catch sight of him; Ralston would, sooner or later. And Andrew had to be ready for him.

Andrew knew that to Ralston his unannounced presence in the doorway would generate quite a shock. Who knows? Ralston might even go into a seizure, right then and there, causing the poor soul to choke on his guitar strap and die just before Andrew had any hope of talking to him.

Well,it wouldn’t be all that, but nevertheless his presence would prove to be quite a shock just the same.

Andrew and Ralston hadn’t sociably seen each other since the night four years ago at the elementary school playground. Sure, they had continued through graduation at the same Magnolia High School, saw each other in unavoidable passing, but one fearfully steered clear of the other. For two years since Ralston’s graduation, he and Andrew hadn’t seen each other at all.

Only Andrew knew all the better than Ralston. Ralston, for one thing, never had been aware of the presence of Camelia in his life...with the exception of dreams and distant influence. Andrew, comparatively, was well acquainted with things out of the norm.

Bari continued to be important to Andrew since the scene at the playground and the deaths of his mother and stepfather, on through the years until now. She’d been with him throughout the aftermath of the events of that day, when the bodies had been discovered, when police concerns and speculations and probings added both to his trauma and to theirs, and eventually to Ralston’s. In the end, if there
was
ever an end, the occurrences of that night remained unsolved to all.

It was only much later that another witness was attested to have been there with them that night; as far as Andrew had heard, the enigmatic figure he’d seen that night upon the playground blacktop had even been present in his own home, though the linking evidence to this boy they called Simon BoLeve was beyond him...it was either through fingerprints dating back from a juvenile record, through bragging to his friends, hell...maybe someone else saw him that night and had taken a Polaroid. The next and last thing Andrew learned was that this Simon had soon afterwards vanished without a trace.

Through all of this, Bari had been there for Andrew still, from his adoption into the household of his Uncle Kenny and Aunt Jamie on until now.

Ralston might likely make a
big deal
out of it in his own way, but that was okay.

A
big deal
was to be made.

***

Andrew had many stories to tell, especially by the age of ten and carried enough ambition to actually execute them onto paper. He nurtured several of these stories, the ones he saw fit to let survive because he believed enough in them, and with dedication and discipline he perfected them. By his second year in high school, he submitted all of his perfected stories for publication to a handful of science fiction, fantasy and horror magazines. In a short period of time, one of those magazines, the Chicago-based
Fantastic Escapades
, purchased and published
The Lure of the Cauldron
for two hundred dollars. Needless to say, the Halloween issue of the mag made Andrew quite a popular guy with his eleventh grade classmates.

Two more of Andrew’s stories were published and circulated by the beginning of the following year. For a high-schooler, any writer would have only but to dream of such sweet acceptance and response.

And then...early within that same year, there came a telephone call and an offer for Andrew to pen the novelization for the sequel to a successful film.

Into The Grave II
was released in trade paperback a mere month before Andrew’s high school graduation.

***

No more than five to ten minutes had passed and Ralston still hadn’t noticed Andrew poised against the opened side doorway of his garage.

Andrew was in no hurry for his attention; Bari was indeed becoming a nuisance with her coaxing Andrew a mere few yards away, visible only to him and hovering about along the walkway on the outer side of the garage wall. She was engaged in ceaseless coaching, very distracting for a young man like Andrew who held no desire to be there at all. Sometimes she was like this with Andrew...like a bronze, half-transparent female version of Burgess Meredith harshly instructing Rocky Balboa on
the right things to do
.

Ralston climaxed his vocals in a crescendo of rape against the microphone head when he glanced Andrew’s way. He recognized Andrew like a trauma patient to a revelation of the end of the world. His happy moment burst in the way a needle would meet a balloon and his music silenced in mid-twang.

“Holy mother of shit,” Ralston exclaimed, his eyes ablaze and fixed upon Andrew. A tumult of instinctive fright resembling demonic possession overtook him just then, like a nudist bather suddenly under assault by killer bees. He frantically wrestled his guitar strap up over his shoulders and stumbled away from the microphone stand. He flung his guitar onto the ground before him like a spooked soldier relinquishing his weapon in defenseless retreat at the face of the enemy.

He turned to flee, his palm thrusting onto the wall button of the automated carport door, which couldn’t quite seem to respond to his demands and cursings. The door managed only to open partway, enough to expose a small portion of driveway, then clicked in reverse and shut altogether again, confoundedly. Ralston was trapped like an animal.

Andrew entered the garage fully, was closing in upon him in effort to speak his peace. “Aren’t
I
the one who’s supposed to be afraid of
you
, Ralston?”

“Fuck you,” Ralston barked.

“But then, I guess there’s other things to be afraid of. Don’t worry, I’m afraid of them, too. I know there’s been this fear between us, but I have a deal to make with you. You can take it or leave it.”

“Fuck that,” Ralston said to him, “you were a part of something way too trippy for me, man. How did you know where I live?”

“Listen to me,” Andrew cut to the chase, “I’ve got a proposition for you, a deal that may make you very successful. I’m not promising riches here, but who knows?”

Ralston’s mood swung into a mild but jittery restlessness and he stood there, perplexed. “You tryin’ to sell me something?”

“I’m trying to sell
myself.”

“I want to let you know right now, if this is
a gay
thing....”

“That’s not what I mean. But for the record, guarantee you that I shall never be naked anywhere in your presence ever again.”

The obviousness of Ralston’s panic was diminishing rapidly like the burning wick of a candle in a puddle of liquid wax. It was in his nature to be confrontational, and in spite of his swollen fear it was this nature, which kicked in; he had no choice, for he was backed into a corner with no escape. If he only knew how badly Andrew was intimidated by him and how excruciating it was for Andrew to convey what he’d come to tell him, Ralston would surely have held the upper hand.

Andrew exerted somewhat of an authority nonetheless and had calmed Ralston enough to speak casually. He was confident, but confident in the knowledge that should any mishap occur, Bari would reveal herself to his defense.

Ralston would certainly not appreciate
that
.

And after all, this meeting was Bari’s idea in the first place. Andrew wouldn’t be here, doing this, if he didn’t have faith in her. Not for
any
other reason.

Andrew continued, “I’ve been writing...you know, writing stories for a while. I’ve been on a lucky streak, with getting some of my stories published and I did the book to
Into the Grave II
. You can buy it at any book store or the corner Joe’s Market and find it selling right there at the check-out stands, and I’ve got a lot more to write.”

“You wrote
Into the Grave II?”
Ralston responded, with no more fear than he’d have remarking to the achievements of an old buddy at a high school reunion, at least for the moment.

As far as Bari perceived of the meeting at this point, things were going to be just fine.

“I didn’t write the
story
, someone sent me the screenplay with the offer to write the book. What I published before impressed another publisher enough to come to me to do it. Now look,” Andrew said, “...you will never understand this. I’m the one who’s coming to you with this and I don’t understand all of it myself. Let’s just say it has something to do with what you think happened at the school playground the night you and your friends decided to play ‘let’s pick on the naked kid’ and leave it at that. I love to write stories, and for reasons beyond both of us I
have to
write because something important is supposed to ultimately happen because of it, so I’m told. But I
cannot
be the one to take credit for it anymore. I can’t achieve public notoriety of any kind, for, because of that night my life is in danger. So, basically, since I’m writing...I need you to take the credit. I’ll write and everything I write will be published under
your
name. Make no mistake, though...you must understand, if
you
get famous, I get to make a decent living off of it.”

“A decent, but unnoticed, living off of it,” Ralston considered, at odds with the overwhelming ridiculousness of it all. Yet Andrew’s mention of the playground was sobering enough to take him seriously, if not for a fool.