The Everborn (4 page)

Before the three children, stood yet another building of brick, heavily boarded at its windows and entranceways, embellished with billings and advertisements which even the oldest child found difficulty reading, with the exception of....

“I know this sign,” exclaimed the girl. She pointed to a bright red series of words spread across the boards of what apparently was the building’s main door. “NO TRESPASSING. You know what that means?”

“Of course I do, lunkhead,” spat the oldest, “I go to church.
And lead us not into trespassing as we forgive those who are trespassing against us.
”

“But we
can’t
go in there.”

“Like hell we can’t,” said the boy eagerly, climbing from his bike, his irregularly-cut brown hair falling into his face like stringy tendrils. The two others dismounted as well, joining him in momentary awe at the monster of brick and board. “This is where the Wraith-child lives.”

“Really,” challenged the smallest inquisitively.

“Yes
really,
” said the oldest with a mystical sincerity. “People get killed here. That’s what they say. People get killed, because there’s this baby that lives here. People hear it crying, and they go inside, and they never come out. Never!”

“Really,” replied the other boy, and his cheeseburger smile faltered in halfhearted disbelief.

“And you want us to go in there,” Dabby acknowledged frigidly. Then, “I’m not going inside.”

But Matthew was going inside. Defiantly, he abandoned his bike and proceeded toward the building’s side walkway. He gave the two a quick look back, after which he exclaimed, “This is what we came here for, Dabby! You’d think after coming all this way, bein’ such good friends and all, you wouldn’t let me go in alone like this....”

Dabby swallowed. She wanted to call after him, tell him to stop if only to postpone the sudden nagging persuasion to give in. She ignored the temptation to tell him to go to hell, for she feared hell was precisely where he wished to go. She pressed forward in pursuit, the other boy nearly stumbling over his pant legs as he hurryingly waddled to catch up.

Dabby halted to wait for her waddling friend, sighed, straightened her cap. “Come on, Nigel. There’s probably no Wraith-kid anyway.”

“Really?” replied Nigel, as he joined her, stealing an anxious look back upon his lonely bike sandwiched safely between the other two.

Lingering impatiently beside a boarded section of window, Matthew was tempted but hesitated to pry apart a medial opening from loose splinters of wood. His companions arrived, the girl folding her arms and slouching against a corresponding wall with equal impatience at Matthew. Nigel imitated her, his melancholy eyes fixed in playful preparation of her next move.

Matthew gazed within the child-sized porthole he had created the next moment. He listened. His fellow adventurers joined him at his side. Dabby was about to speak, but obeyed Matthew’s sudden command of silence, surrendering to her own curiosity and the dare to continue.

“I heard it once,” Matthew turned to them, prematurely disappointed at the inner calm. “I heard the crying. I swear to God. I passed by here a day last week to check it out....”

Dabby cowered back. “And...?”

“Hearing those cries made me forget I even planned on stopping at all. I kept going. Hearing them was good enough.”

This would surely have frightened away the girl if not for the sly impression Matthew was pulling her leg. “Hearing’s not good enough now, though, is it?”

“Whaddya think, lunkhead?” he chided. “We’re goin’ in.” Feeling all the bolder, Matthew crouched over and into the perilous wooden porthole.

The girl responded with confounded silence, gingerly removing her grey cap, lowering it down before her as though lowering the safety bars of a rollercoaster car.

And Nigel was no longer smiling at all.

***

For as long as any of the children remembered, this had always been the local haunted house. Its prolonged desolation had fostered a progeny of wild hearsay, though not much different than the unsettling gossip it knew back when it stood as purveyor of lower-class apartment dwellings.

But until the rumored ghostly cries, it had never known murder. Not like this. Not like the corpse of the young man discovered twisted and slumped against the muddy overgrowth of hedges at the building’s most remote side. The man’s head had been found resting sideways and sunken into the mud, appearing to almost float within the basin of blood formed by its shallow imprint. The real treat that impressed the coroner, however, was how the face of the skull had been crushed so far inward that the nose played peek-a-boo with the back upper neck in protruding cartilage.

No evidence of a weapon. Not one hint aside from the very corpse itself, betrayed the identity or methods of the force behind it. No one had seen the ill-fated prey wandering about before-hand, and no one had heard his screams. No one would know anything,
period
, until the officials and authorities chose to release this enigma from its bottle.

But it wasn’t due to the grisly shape of the corpse or any of these trivialities that enforced their decision to wedge the cork in tighter, and to keep it that way. What concerned certain authority figures most were the numerous, bewildering footprints all about the hedges. Clusters and trails of tiny footprints no larger than those left by a child.

In their eyes, these puzzling leftovers were no more made from a ghost than they were a Wraith-child. And whatever they
were
made from, it was somewhat unlikely that the makers of the prints were responsible for a slaying of such proportions.

For one thing, the prints had not appeared at all until six hours
after
the body was gurneyed away, at a time when surveying eyes were about to reap the misfortunes of having turned their attentions elsewhere. For another thing, these authorities claimed to know what it was that made those prints.

***

They were within the shadowy labyrinth now, sidestepping bits of decaying lumber and exposed dusty wiring wrenched from the structure’s inner framework, the results of previous intruders’ scavenging the grounds for useful hardware.

The inner reaches of the apartment building provided a perfect eerie landscape for the alert imaginings of neighborhood children, and the three huddled close as they inched across concrete and torn carpet. They carried with themselves no flashlight and regretted not having prepared for the unexpected, not to mention, numbly enough, the degradingly obvious. Luckily enough, streams and jets of mild sunlight managed their invasion through boarded window cracks and sections of missing brick within the walls. Partitions between the rooms had somehow crumbled, rotted through, or fallen prey to the mallets of vandalizing pranksters. Portions of ceiling had fallen through, providing partial glimpses of the overhanging floor and added lighting from unboarded second-floor windows.

The possibility suddenly occurred to the girl of the building collapsing around them in a quake of deadly plaster boulders, and her paranoia gorged hungrily upon the illusion that the ground floor walls were weakening with age beneath the floors above. She replaced her crumpled baseball cap upon her head as though this could shelter her and her hand darted for a portion of Matthew’s shirt and held tight for assailable comfort. Physical contact with girls annoyed Matthew as he found no remedy to the unfailing tension brought along with it, and he swung a hand to self-consciously fend it away. She responded with an irritable tug and wound his shirt tighter around her fingers.

Nigel let out a solemn yawn. As young as he was, he knew that anything called a Wraith-child could not possibly be as monstrous as what he heard. The fact that it was a
child
in the first place was a sure indication of harmlessness. Even if the Wraith-child didn’t exist at all, this outing certainly topped remaining at home with Ma. Ma was a penniless sexoholic and willing groupie to any rock-and-roll band passing through town toting needles to share; where Nigel was now couldn’t possibly be any worse than being with her, at least on weekends when she was most deliriously dreadful.

Without warning, Matthew screamed in terror. This abruptness could have come at no better time for Dabby’s poor, persecuted nerves, which reacted like the inner coils of a pocketwatch wound too tightly, propelling her forward and into Matthew’s side. The impact sent them both tumbling, her deathgrip on Matthew’s shirt stretching the material up and over the back of his head and into his face. The boy fought to wrench free, his cries muffled against the force of her smothering grasps. The wrestling ceased soon enough, and Matthew sat up from the decaying carpet to look at the girl.

“You lunkhead.”

“You
buttwipe.”

Matthew smoothed over his shirt and brushed the dust from his jeans. Gazing absently around, he rose to his feet. “Where did Nigel go?”

Dabby sprung from the carpet and darted her head. They were both alone. Desperately, she began to call out for him, and Matthew joined her.

The panic was real now, and little Nigel had vanished completely into the oblivion of the building’s shadowy, broken innards.

***

Matthew’s inept scream had sent Nigel running; a suddenly frightened, scurrying vision of baggy clothes darted across sleek cement and into the blackness of an open section of wall opposite the direction where the three had journeyed.

He had been more excited than frightened. His first impulse was to run, and as he did so he squealed in frenzied glee as his two friends wrestled yards behind him. His second impulse was to hide.

And hide he did, right straight through a gaping hole surrounded by brick and plaster. It was like entering a giant, opened mouth, much the same as the uncanny entrance of a carnival funhouse. He once visited a funhouse, with its mirrors and bellowing mannequins and multi-colored mists. This, however, was much different. This was real, and a real friendly ghost was lurking about, waiting to be discovered.

If the Wraith-child was real, Nigel thought, then maybe people were scared of it because it cried. Matthew himself admitted to have heard its crying and fled. If Nigel could make the Wraith-child stop crying, then perhaps it would befriend him.

Perhaps, except...no one was crying here. No one yet.

Maybe the Wraith-child was hiding.

But when Nigel entered the gaping section of wall, he hadn’t counted on falling, tumbling; apparently his feet met with a floor board which sloped into the darkness at an angle. His chest met with smooth concrete, and if he had been arched differently his chin would have felt the impact with a sharp and painful
slam
. Instead, he skidded, unharmed, to a halt within the center of a large and empty room, absent of carpet and nearly totally absent of light.

At first, within the abrupt confusion of the fall, he felt the tremendous urge to cry himself. And cry he would have, upon the sudden overwhelming impression that he was lost. But he wasn’t lost entirely; deep, deep into the walls behind him, he heard the faint sounds of his friends calling his name.

That, however, did not stop him from crying.

What stopped him from crying was the unexpected vision to his side, to the wall at the corner of the room beneath a boarded windowpane. A broken portion of bare glass allowed a slanted stream of vaporous afternoon sunlight to illuminate the corner.

And within that corner sat silently a naked baby boy.

The Wraith-child.

It was not much less than four years younger than Nigel, perhaps merely a couple of years old. The child was Caucasian, but aside from this he in many ways bore facial features which resembled Nigel’s. And he was dirty, he was
filthy
, as though he was a cartoon character and a grenade had just went off in his hands, as though he’d been dragged through a coal mine.

“Do you live here?” he asked the infant.

The baby was silent, squatting diaperless, within the surrounding blackness under the filtered beam of sun. He glanced up at his visitor, then down again at something he appeared to be playing with, something he held within his hands. Whatever he held, it seemed to be moving. Something small, no more than the size of a human eye.

Nigel picked himself up from the stretch of concrete floor and patted white plaster-dust from his clothes. The dust rose upwards and around his face like a cloud and he swished it from his eyes. He coughed once, twice, from the dust, stepped forward little by little to the baby. He entered into the dim sunlight stream just enough to cast a shadow...

...and just enough to view the thing which captivated the infant’s attentions so. It was shiny black, rounded at the body into a slick polished teardrop tip, eight legs contracting around a ruby red hour glass.

Nigel knew what it was. He had been taught what bugs to touch and what not to. And he knew big black ugly spiders could bite. Could kill. Like snakes. Like strangers. Like crossing the street without looking both ways.

Just then, slowly, the infant raised its hand, palm upwards, exposing a candid presentation of the creature crawling deliberatively upon a bed of fleshy pink and five outstretched digits.