The Everborn (5 page)

A black widow.

“Did you take out its teeth?” asked the boy now, taken aback by the infant’s gesture, a move which suggested a bid for Nigel to handle the menace himself. Dismayed at his own temptation to oblige the infant, Nigel scrubbed his hands into the knees of his trousers in sweaty preparation to accept the offering. “Is it your friend? Is it really?”

As it lifted the spider persuasively closer, the infant opened its mouth to speak. It spoke in a faint, slurred whisper. “Reeeeally.”

Reeeeally
.

It was imitating him. “I’ll be your friend, too....okay?” And with that, Nigel fearfully extended his arm to receive the creature. Very, very carefully...

The spider’s soft, bulbous body tumbled from the infant’s overturned hand and plopped dead center, onto the yielding flesh of Nigel’s, its legs recoiled by the sudden turbulence.

And then came the screams.

***

Matthew and Dabby had been calling out for no more than a handful of minutes before they heard the screams. Matthew’s first impulse was to escape into another room and away from a second assault of Dabby’s hysterics, but she had stiffened with the cries in suspenseful expectation. It was not very often that Nigel so much as cried, let alone screamed and the two youngsters feared their own mounting suspicions that these were Wraith-child cries. Or worse.

The Wraith-child got Nigel
.

Without a second to spare, the two raced toward the sounds, up and over plywood and broken concrete and piles of bricks, past torn walls and jet streams of light, to the opposite wall’s gaping hole.

Matthew peered inside. He could see nothing. “Nigel?”

Another scream, this time less distant, but nevertheless quite faint.

Quickly, the boy lunged through the torn hole. His feet fumbled onto an angled plywood board and he came crashing down, sliding, vaguely attentive to Dabby’s shrill outcries behind him. Within the next instant, he found himself face-down upon icy cement. Rising rather awkwardly to one side, he flinched at the sudden jolt of pain within his left elbow. Turning, the pain subsided as his attentions riveted to the convulsing specter of his friend. Matthew leapt over to the small boy, seizing him immediately, turning him onto his back.

“Nigel,” Matthew bellowed, “Nigel, what’s wrong?”

Just then something distracted him, and he repelled against the unexpected vision of another presence in the room beside him. A hand, a baby’s pale, dirty hand, was groping for an object on the ground several inches shy of Nigel’s feet. Dwarfish fingers fumbled and found their grip, lifting the object into full view and suspended before the boy by a single tenuous leg. Its remaining limbs protracted, twirled and caressed the air.

A spider. A black widow spider
.

As Matthew gazed upwards, he beheld an infant, clutching the spider carefully and proudly, an infant of bloodless white and sooty with filth, retreating into a dimly lit corner. It sat there with its vile plaything, withdrawing into a curious stupor and ignorant now to its mettlesome guests.

Without further thought, Matthew called out to the darkness behind him, gathering his friend hastily into his arms.

“
Get someone!”
he shouted, he bawled, “Oh please...the security man, hurry, go get the security man, he’s dying!”

Tears flooded the boy’s face now, tears which anguished for his little friend’s life, of grief over the woeful fact that it was he himself who brought the boy here, that it was his
own damn fault
.

He turned, called out again behind him, but Dabby did not respond. Did not, or could not. Perhaps she had heard him and his pleas for the security man. She would bring him, and he would know what to do.

Nigel’s spasms and breathless gasps weakened sedately within Matthew’s arms. Matthew struggled feebly to keep him alive by rocking him almost furiously, instinctually believing the boy would remain conscious if only he was kept in constant movement.

At first, he did not notice the massive pool of shadow which now towered over and above him, nor did his senses reveal the currents of warm air against the sudden rankness of the decaying room surging into the back of his shirt and rippling against his skin.

And the shadow moved.

His face met the malodorous rush as he pivoted into it unexpectedly, alarmingly. The dark silhouette of what now filled his vision was shrouded by a warm and wispy blur. Matthew stared into it, glaring, his thoughts racing then slowing then numbing like a ferris wheel grinding to a stop. His fear and panic ceased as though the currents of warmth had snatched them away, sucked them up the way a drinking straw drains the contents of a cola cup.

And Matthew remained that way, even after the echoes of the security man’s shouts announced the advent of what could have been salvation if only by then they were still not too late.

Max Polito would not sleep that afternoon; and for many years afterwards, languished dreams would remind him of the confoundment beheld in the moments to come. He would remember the first hazy mutterings of a nine-year-old treated for shock, the boy who sat silent and totally alone when Max had discovered him just beyond the ramshackle walls of unsettling memory.

The Wraith-child got Nigel
.

These dreams would come to involve and encompass him, in time, and in them he would discover his own desperate dreams.

And perhaps he would live to regret them.

PART ONE:

MAX & THE WATCHER SWAP STORIES

“
What we call the beginning

is often the end and to make an end

is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.”

-- T.S. Eliot

1.

A Message of Untimely Importance

-
January 2nd, 1995
-

Let me take a moment to properly introduce myself. I am Maxwell J. Polito. At the time of this writing, I am forty-six years old. I am three years into my first marriage, and my wife and I are happy together. My full head of light-brown, greying hair gives me a rather scholarly appearance when I slick it back with protein gel. I keep a slim, athletic build with daily exercise routines and by avoiding red meat, and I drink water from small, expensive, corrugated plastic bottles. From the way I dress to the way I vote I am methodically conservative in style, and I carry a keen business sense by which, like an aggressive newspaper reporter, I let nothing stand in my way.

If my parents had not sought careers in the film industry early on, I can only envision myself encompassed within a life of priesthood and pasta in a Queens, New York neighborhood where they hailed from, where their parents would still be hailing Mary and taxi cabs from if they were alive today. This would probably have been better for my own eventual good, and my folks would’ve given me brothers and sisters rather than being so excessively preoccupied with making film features. Instead, I was raised in and around Los Angeles, and if it had not been so, I would not be where I am today.

And I wouldn’t be telling this story.

Over the years, I have been regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities concerning the unknown, and more precisely on the subject of UFOs. Most of you may find yourselves familiar with my public television series, with my books and lectures, or through distastefully written one-liners by late night talk show hosts. I hold a Ph.D. in Psychology from Hawthorne University and have undergone extensive studies in the fields of physics, parapsychology and ancient history. I have worked in eleven different countries and speak five languages fairly fluently. When people think of the cosmos, they think of Sagan; when they think of UFOs, they think of me.

I owe much of my success to only a few very human simplicities. I know how to appeal to the common sense of the average skeptic by remaining candidly honest and persuasively rational. An open mind has earned me the respect of the fanatical. My success could never have been possible, however, if it were not for that basic universal human trait we all share differently: a belief in the unknown.

The way I see it is this: I have always believed in the existence of myself. Before I could ever believe in the unknown or in anything else, I became aware I was alive. This self-awareness is a kind of introductory courtesy bestowed upon us by the powers that be, a “welcome-to-the-planet” free parking pass for a global theme park that still requires “E” tickets if you wish to enjoy the rides.

The second thing I ever believed came along so quickly afterwards, my awareness and I were left with scarcely time enough to become remotely acquainted.

That second belief was, you guessed it, the unknown.

The unknown hit me as early as when I coughed out my last spew of womb water upon the hospital floor, allowing me that first inverted view of objects and beings I then could not understand.

***

When the truth of the events I am about to describe were made known to me, my rattled senses still hadn’t adjusted to the remarkable realities of what I was already experiencing. It was as though some maniacal prankster had subtly slipped LSD tabs between my lips as I slept, soon rousing me into this madness.

That was how I felt when I did awake, quite literally, on what should have been a dismally rainy Sunday evening, the twenty-eighth of August, 1994. But it wasn’t. And for that matter, nothing else was as it should have been, either.

I awoke in startled alertness to the chill of an icy breeze, and to the pale contortions of my own arms which had cradled my buried face a moment before. I found myself struck the next instant with the impression of having been jolted out of a nightmare. I felt both distressed and exhausted just then, as though I had somehow overslept, perhaps having slept for days.

No; I felt like I had slept
through
something, something important, something I was supposed to do or attend. If I had missed an important business event, missed it by
oversleeping,
for chrissake, I could have risked a hefty dent in my reputation.

Sonofabitch
.

It would have occurred to me how crazy I sounded, how utterly witless it was to panic over something so uncertain and improbable. I realized, instead, that the nightmare I may have had was
still
going on
.

I realized this, because I suddenly could not believe where I was. Or how I got there. I could not remember
anything
, and in my mounting disarray I found I could not attain a sober reality to do so. Not even if my sanity depended upon it.

Perhaps I was so accustomed to the upstairs office of my Malibu, California, home that I had failed until then to comprehend the profound absurdity of my very presence there. If I woke up to find myself in bed, it wouldn’t have been as much of a shock; if Melony, my wife, was there with me, I wouldn’t have been so disoriented, so overcome with dread. And if it were ever possible for me to sleep through an important event, she would have made damn sure I wouldn’t.

I awoke in my upstairs office, not the bedroom. I had fallen asleep at my wife’s desk, slumped over her typewriter, and I somehow was not supposed to be there. All I could do was sit there mindlessly and hope reality would trigger my memory once I gave it the chance to sink in.

And then I noticed the letter.

The white page drooped lazily backwards and wound loosely within the typewriter before me, its freshly-typed contents exposed as though I myself had depressed the concluding letter keys in my slumber.

Reaching, I held the page upright and in full view. If I had indeed typed this, my memory of doing so had gone the way of the forgotten nightmare and the unknown, slept-through business engagement. The word URGENT hung isolated in its top left-hand corner and it appeared both rushed and personal.

As I scanned the opening salutation and then the date, it struck me as dizzying nonsense. The letter was written
to
me, and dated more than
four months ahead
from what I would have naturally acknowledged as that final August Sunday when I awoke:

URGENT 1/2/95

To Maxwell J. Polito, world

renown investigator of

UFO phenomena:

This was as far as I read before I abruptly pulled the sheet from the machine and withdrew from the desk. The sense of dull reality which lingered with me still had cowered against my newfound conviction that I was the object of some ridiculous put-on.

If this was proven to be true, that some psychotic wacko whom I somehow offended was wreaking his vengeance behind it all, I had much more to fear than the possibilities of having been knocked out and tossed before a typewriter with a funky message. Where was my wife? Was she home?