The Everborn (3 page)

But even as our little green men mutated into seemingly less hostile, greyish, often coverall-clad beings (as in Whitley Strieber’s accounts and so many others all across the globe, from Budd Hopkins’ research to the Hill and Walton abductions) who traded their ray guns in for anal probes, much of this UFO business remains the same: there have always been believers, and there have always been non-believers, with various shades of believers and skeptics in between. Some claim to have physical contact with UFO entities, while the majority of us are left with no other choice but to develop personal opinions based upon a mixture of what we read or view on educational cable channels, inherent common rationality, religious persuasions and our understanding of the way the world is supposed to work. But none of us are exempt from their influence, their nostalgia, their ability to challenge both our imaginations and realities.

Most importantly, I am impressed to add, is that significant ingredient, which makes this entire matter the head-turning, blue light special that it is. This ingredient is the fact that there is not one shred of concrete, out-in-the-open, eye-popping proof for the masses.

After a hard day of “right to know” rallies before government buildings, it’s enough to drive the more fervent believer to drink. And to make the skeptics laugh.

I stopped laughing way back; in Sunday School, in fact. Moses, Adam and Eve, baby Jesus and those silly felt board wise men the instructors displayed while all us impressionable youngsters sat littering the carpet with cookie crumbs.....somehow these stories were all missing something. I, for one, longed for yarns containing wondrous and even frightening imaginings, stories of witches in flight, of tree fairies and ghouls and giants at the end of beanstalks, of mythical lands both over the rainbow and at the center of the earth. When other kids would ask where Jesus was, I wanted to know if Bigfoot was real, whether ancient serpentine sea creatures exist in modern lakes surrounded by a populace who swears to their existence, and, of course, if physical beings exist upon other planets somewhere, out there, beyond the vastness of the outer space between our worlds.

But as I matured something struck me, an observance the clergy folk sort of overlooked among the tedious fundamentals. It was a little tidbit in Genesis chapter six concerning the “sons of God” falling from the sky and sleeping with the “daughters of men” to create races of unearthly beings. This youthful discovery marked for me the beginnings of a lifelong obsession, and I uncovered truths which proved there was more to the Genesis account than dangerous angelic liaisons.

And in plunging myself into the depths of mankind’s folklore, I found similar “sons of God” embedded within the tales and legends of cultures both familiar and ancient. In them I beheld their offspring, the very ghouls and giants and fairies of whose stories I had so passionately longed to hear.

They were everywhere, and they had been with us all along. In many different ways, doing many inconceivable deeds, in many forms.

As we take pride in the comforts of modern technology and civilized intellect, they are there to humble us with the reminder that there still exists within our culture the power of primitive folklore.

They do exist, inhabiting that point where human imagination meets that strange movement of shadow in the corners of our eyes.

I am a believer. And this, in my opinion the most rational explanation of my belief, was the course in which things were supposed to have happened. I expected everything to amount to something else, and now nothing appears to make any sense. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

But it happened for me on the evening of January second, 1995, when I awoke into nightmarish chaos; when that movement of shadow chose to step into full view and return my gaze as I turned to behold it.

Follow me now, and stay close.

I’ve something further I’d like to show you....

PROLOGUE

The Wraith-child

---1968---

The driver of the ice cream truck hadn’t expected much money changing hands, particularly with
his
hands, today. It was
supposed
to be a slow day, and kids were
supposed
to be in school, but this was his only income and a good drive down Poverty Lane beat listening to his woman bitch about him staying at home scratching his crotch watching a full-figured female genie materialize out of a bottle to rescue her master from yet another weekly sitcom situation gone wrong below the rabbit ears of a black and white television set.

It seemed these days that Popsicle pushing was the hip thing to do, all of his relatives were doing it, and the area around the Los Angeles International Airport was infested with new trucks. They had begun their invasion as suddenly as though they had parachuted from the descending air traffic like fallen angels, forcing the truck further southeast and into a decaying portion of the city of Hawthorne. The truck slowed into virginal territory, splashing remnants of the late morning rain onto a litter-ridden curb. The ghetto children leaked onto the sidewalks like snails in a rainwashed exodus that livened to the truck’s serenade, its loudspeaker painted like a cherry atop a metal carriage of rust coated with chipped white and faded stickers.

As it crept along, rounding a corner, it met the fanfare of children’s cries with an abrupt halt so as to avoid serious injuries to the oncoming brigade. Two bicycles, then a training-wheeled third, burst from the depths of an alley behind the corner’s towering brick building.

“Sons of bitches!” its driver bellowed after them, and the children continued ignorantly with a destination in mind that had nothing to do with tasty treats, peddling their ways to the street’s opposite side and over the puddles of a driveway. An onslaught of other children, short of a two dozen count, various ages, hands waving and stretched upwards above their heads bills and coins to flag down the attentions of the ice cream man, surrounded the truck from every direction until the driver vacated his seat and opened a side window to greet them with a freshly lit cigarette hanging from his lips. The truck soon commenced its laggard crawl, all said and done, its cherry speaker fumigating the neighborhood with an
Old MacDonald
that drifted and hung in the air like a vaporous dirge.

The three bicycles raced faster, over dampened concrete and past the graffiti of a lengthy wooden fence. Missing boards revealed vacant lots beyond and between the overlooking doleful buildings; crabgrass shot out from broken sidewalk and crept beneath the rusty metal of an old abandoned Ford, and beneath a slumbering transient. The reflecting tones of an overhanging billboard sported a gleaming medieval knight which, despite its spray-painted Spanish profanities, boasted that the detergent suspended from its lance was stronger than dirt.

“Jesus, guys, hold it a second,” declared the oldest of the children, the jolting
KER-THUMP
of a pothole meeting his bike’s front tire in a drenching splash. Threadbare Hushpuppies slid from spinning pedals and ground to a muddy halt, the other children stopping in turn. He was a haughtily streetwise nine-year-old, a bubblegum renegade whose appetite for daring mischief proved an enticing retreat from an asylum of dull poverty.

“What? What is it, Matthew?” breathed Dabby, disheartened by her friend’s startled aversion. She was second youngest, a pudgy elf of a girl whose emerald Asian eyes peered out from beneath a tattered grey baseball cap.

Matthew had silently fixed his gaze attentively upon something ahead. The three children were midway down a small cul-de-sac now, which jetted into several alleyways surrounded by still more decaying buildings. Directly before them loomed the rusty remnants of Rothchild Cannery, shut down and dormant since a month ago, about the time when Fall had announced its annual migration of lunch-pail juvenilities for the initiation of another school year.

It took a moment or two before the girl caught sight of what had drawn her friend’s attention. Throwing off a succinct giggle and proceeding forward with her bike, she informed him, “If it’s the s’curity man you’re wining over, it’s only the same man as last week. Gave me that groovy spaceship, remember?”

Imprisoning Rothchild Cannery was a tall chain-linked fence garnished with barbed wire. Behind this fence and no more than a few yards from it sat a secluded Volkswagon Bug, the rainwashed orange paint of its back end reflecting pale sunlight. Inside, facing sideways with an arm propped lazily against the steering wheel, Max Polito struggled against the remaining hours of uneventful guard duty. From his AM radio, the shrill monotone of a newsman babbled methodically about the Mexico City Olympics and the Apollo 7 spacecraft. Then, a bit more than dazed, Max upped the volume with the stroke of his thumb: A.J. Erlandson, a less-than-famous B-horror director, was once again a newsworthy notable. And, if only lightly, a concern to Max.

A.J. had directed several rather cool midnight movies before he disappeared without a trace in ‘66, a handful of months to spare before he was father to a set of twins. Both of Max’s parents had been employed by the studio which financed most of A.J.’s features, Max’s father having served as a camera operator on three of those, his mother production coordinator on the director’s last. That was two years ago, and the missing director was just as missing beneath even further mystery, for it seemed as though one of his twins had vanished now as well.

No one had a clue as to how or why, but Max supposed his folks would bombard him with theories upon his return to their Santa Monica home. Regardless of what anyone thought, Max carried his own concerns. And they had nothing to do with his parents or with Tinsel Town.

Max flexed his wrists suddenly and gazed at his watch. Webs of smoke rose softly from a cigarette crushed minutes before, and he reached into his ashtray to stifle the resurrected butt. He failed to notice the three kids wandering along outside the fence until their friendly waves met his sight at the rearview mirror. Without turning, he forced a wave in kind. He then returned his arm to the steering wheel and resumed to nod off, his ruminations of the missing director lulled by Simon & Garfunkle’s
Mrs. Robinson
from the dashboard speakers.

Yes, A.J., wherever you are, Jesus probably loves you more than you will know, too. We all do, but you better have a damn good tale to tell if ever your ass ever pops up somewhere alive.

To suffer through an otherwise promising Friday night for the sake of crude earnings was indeed a bitch, a sinister shrew of a bitch. This was particularly true for a fair-haired and attractive nineteen-year—old with an itch to socialize. But Max’s parents were among the ass-kissers of Hollywood, struggling for stability in a competitive cosmos where, in their eyes, the sole explanation to any livable income attained was because superior others simply weren’t available. They brewed over a low fire in the whopping caldron of the industry’s second best.

Unlike others, they were content with their son’s choosing to stray from the field. He mirrored their combined flair for science with a passion, and his potential was never hindered by the usual worrisome pleas for a more reliable trade choice. But the encouraging allegiance under A.J.’s direction had collapsed into a setback; regrettably, they could scarcely afford anything beyond textbook or gas moneys for Max’s education.

But Max was a diehard visionary, and sometimes this meant sacrificing the celestial curves of an astronomy major for an intimacy with the crampy universe of his V.W.’s front seat. His hard—earned dues were just beginning compared to the dues paid by his idols, the many notable professors and madcap mythology nuts he’d so often envied and now studied under. He would soon join their ranks, surpassing them and pocketing their wildest pursuits like a set of keys that could, and would, open an endless boulevard of doors.

He would better them in ways they had dared to dream, even if it took the donning of a dopey uniform and staring half-alert down a desolate demolition sight on a double shift.

It was five past eleven, and at noon another dopey-uniformed watcher-for-hire would arrive with the anticipated gift of relief. Max leaned forward once more, this time seizing a hard-bound book and opening it to a folded page, smoothed over the crease, and began to read about UFOs.

***

“He gave you a spaceship?” Matthew said. “That’s stupid.”

“Not a
real
one....” argued Dabby.

“I
know
not a real one, lunkhead. He gave you a piece of aluminum foil. It can’t fly, you told me yourself.”

“I like looking at it.”

“Awe,” remarked Matthew, glancing back through the fence at the guard, “He’s no different than a bum from the ghetto. Only thing is, he gets
paid
for sleeping in his car.”

“Idiot. Bums don’t have cars.”

“Really,” agreed the third smallest, to which the girl nearly snapped back, irritable from Matthew’s cruel remarks, but instead quieted. He was also a pudgy one, this other boy, although much smaller than even she. He was a cheerfully innocent boy of African heritage with skin of the darkest kind, as spunky as a Saturday morning cartoon, with a smile which inflated his cheeks to the extent that they appeared to be stuffed with cheeseburgers. His oversized clothes hung about him like toga-type drapery, and at times his walk would catch the ends of his drooping pant legs beneath his shoes, sending him tumbling forward.