The Everborn (55 page)

“Umm, Simon?” Andrew said to his Dreg twin brother, clearing his throat in introduction. “We’re all of us here pressed for time. For your information, Melony and I have been under the impression that you were about to kill me and Ralston, too. If you don’t, then your Magdalene Majesty surely will, unless she’s incapable. So if you truly have something to say, release Ralston and let us all free, and we can sit down and chat as soon as we get the hell away from here. Otherwise, get on with it and kill me now.”

Scratch hesitated, questioned himself and stretched an index finger to his chin to think.

Andrew, impatient and observing his brother’s pause as a waste of everyone’s valuable time, motioned a tug at Melony’s witches skirt and another at her arm, turning away and toward her.

“All right,” he resolved sternly to Mel, “let’s go. Come on...it’s okay to flee. Down the embankment, he’s letting us go...I’ll take care of you....”

It wasn’t clear to Melony whether Andrew’s assertions were serious or intentionally sarcastic as if to purposely invoke a response from Simon; hopefully, to invoke a quick resolution.

Melony would nevertheless refuse to budge; even though she did not know what to do at this point, she know what not to do, and that was to not escape down the embankment.

It was because of the unclothed
children
down there....

“Aaaah...goddammit Simon,” Uncle Maxy exclaimed, his patience exhausted from all of this, and all eyes turned towards him and his enervated prisoner. “You sonofabitch! At least
Andrew
mentioned one plausible thing and I say also, let’s get on with it! Here, I’ll even help you off to a fresh start....”

With that, and with no more effort than with a Diaper Dan doll, Uncle Maxy let go of his strangle-hold on Ralston, only to lift the protesting Everborn up and fling his body across the air, over the railing and into the darkness of the steep embankment. Ralston’s screams faded, then abruptly squelched.

“There,” Uncle Maxy said in accomplished relief, brushing his ghostly hands together as if after having discarded the daily garbage.

“
No!”
Andrew cried out after his friend. He quickly abandoned Melony and rushed past Scratch, knocking into his side, and went for the section of railing where Ralston went over. He gazed down into the direction where Ralston disappeared, speechless, eyes searching.

As Scratch turned to Mel, her body stiffened and her eyes returned a transfixed glare upon him, helpless and hopelessly afraid.

“What are
you
lookin’ at?” he barked.

Scratch then turned once again, over to one of the wrought iron tables, where he picked up his cherished straight razor.

***

That was when, just then, Salvatia herself materialized to join him at his side; a swift backhand to a space-constricting table served as a clamorous wake-up call to all for her presence to be known, as if simply appearing among them in itself wasn’t enough. She then spoke to Simon, coaxing him, “Now is the time, my beloved!”

Scratch looked over at her and into her diabolical scowl towering above.

“You see that over there?” the Magdalene spoke and pointed a twisted, black-nailed finger at Melony, who broke from her frozen aghast and became animated again, head darting for an alternate escape route. “That over there in her womb is your potential redemption. Your way out. To emerge into the next life you must destroy your successor into that womb. The longer you allow Andrew Erlandson to live, the more Melony’s womb serves as incubator for
his
next life and not yours. You will
cease to exist
, my troubled beloved.”

“She’s lying to you!” Andrew moved from the railing to sternly face him, challenging what emotions and sensible reasoning abilities Simon might have retained. “How do you
know
she’s telling the truth? She’s manipulated you throughout your life to suit
her
will, not yours! All she cares about is transforming into a Watchmaid again, so she could become limitlessly physical and manipulate the rest of the world as we know it!”

“My plan is a mutual plan, Evenborn,” Salvatia hissed at Andrew, “for both myself and Simon, my beloved. The end will justify the means for him and me. Besides, it will be a
better
world....”

“Where is Bari?” Andrew demanded hen, as if Salvatia was responsible for Bari’s absence.

“I wouldn’t worry, dear,” came Bari’s reply from seemingly everywhere, as it seemed always at first to Andrew.

But then as Andrew looked and saw back to where he’d gazed down over the railing and into the depths of the embankment, Bari’s shadow came forth into rapid view as she emerged trudging in upward climb through the tall grass, a delirious Ralston draped limp, and mumbling nonsense in her arms.

“Talk about being in the right place and at the right time,” Bari continued. “It was as if the poor guy had fallen into my lap from out of the sky.”

“That’s pretty goddamn ironic,” Ralston uttered. “Some of us
might as well
have fallen from the sky....”

“
Bari
!” Andrew responded, and by the sight of her was thoroughly relived. “As usual, you’re just in time....”

“...Time enough, I must say,” as Salvatia say, “to witness a death, and
my rebirth!”

“It’s my rebirth, too.” Scratch whipped out a verbal check mark.

“Oh, yes,” Salvatia corrected herself.

“Lets kill Erlandson," Uncle Maxy regained his side spotlight. “My Queen, your power here is so great that, as you’ve witnessed, I can achieve physical feats like pinning Erlandson into a diner table and tossing Cooper over the side. Mr. BoLeve is clearly flaking in our efforts, like he did the first time when he flaked at the school playground. The Dreg’s a wimp. Why can’t I....?"

“Hush, my spectral puppet,” Salvatia told him. She then turned to all the others in a display of mock modesty. “He’s a little overzealous. What can I say? There’s more of
myself
inside him than there
ever
was any of himself. Besides, this must be the work of a Dreg alone, if it’s going to work at all….”

“Bari,” Andrew called, his attentions this time not abandoning his brother’s opposing leering stance, Scratch’s mounting persuasions towards his Magdalene’s will drawing him threateningly closer.

Bari responded not to Andrew, but addressed Salvatia personally, almost arrestingly humbly, in an unbiased time-out, to ask Her Magdalene Majesty a most uncharacteristic question. “Salvatia, excuse me sincerely, but I, in the last recent moments before Ralston had fallen into my arms, had words with a number of your reclusive Magdalene sisters. Might I inquire, if I should allow your Dreg to take my Andrew’s life, and I become a dimensionally-challenged entity such as yourself, that I may become physical again through you like your sisters who anticipate the same redemption?”

“You wish to
join me
, Watchmaid?” Salvatia said with curious, brow-raised delight.

“At this point, yes,” Bari replied to her plainly.

Hearing this reply distracted Andrew promptly away from his overbearing brother. “What?”

Salvatia flexed her silvery-skinned palms and outstretched her arms as if awakened out of bed from a good night’s sleep, wrenching her dreamstate burdens away into a new morning yawn. Then, she addressed Bari stringently, black eye brows sunken together in fleshy folds over the glare of eyes blazing orange like pools of molten iron. She looked upon Bari this way, and imposed a vow to test her.

“Do you, Watchmaid Bari, who was once Bari Davenport, a very human young lady who chanced to fall in love with an Everborn, swear allegiance to me? I know more than you can fathom, Watchmaid Bari, and I certainly know more about you. Three of Erlandson’s lifetimes ago you were a woman who chose to take the place of his last Watchmaid, who now lives her final days human again and in a home for the elderly in Southhampton, England. You saw to him through his subsequent life as a popular film director and then through this one. Surely you’re aware of how important your ‘Born is, and of his true name as a Watcher from long ago, and how for three generations you’ve loved him so....”

“Enough,” Bari said to her. “It surprises me not that you know these things. You’ve been in your state for centuries as where I have barely a century to speak of. I’ve made up my mind, and you have nothing to lose. Simon BoLeve can go ahead and kill his brother, see if I care, and I won’t raise a single finger to stop him.”

“What?!” Andrew exclaimed, bewildered and betrayed.

“What?!” Ralston exclaimed, awakened fully and coherent in Bari’s arms, and Bari paid him no mind but to toss his body over her shoulders and back again into the depths of the dark embankment, his trenchcoat and limbs flailing through the air, his screams perishing into a haunted silence.

All this was at last enough to convince Scratch to abandon any lingering convictions and sentiment and to do the deed.

Andrew, whose slit of a mouth widened in horror suddenly, whose exposed alien-grey-skinned throat and neck diameter had decreased in size through the regression process, was easily beheaded in one swift stroke of his Dreg twin brother’s razor.

Andrew Erlandson’s severed head flung into the night, an airborne trail of liquid red blood hung and then fell in splotches to the terrace cement floor; his head fell the way of the embankment and down into the depths to where Ralston had vanished twice, where Melony had detected the first glimpses of the children down there. Andrew’s alien Halloween-disguised body collapsed before them all.

Salvatia cackled triumphantly, bellowing in delicious delight not only in the very execution of the murder, but at her own disbelief in how it finally came to pass. “Good, my beloved Dreg! Very
good
!”

Scratch exhaled a laborious breath, as like a gladiator victorious in the strenuous achievement of having stricken down an opponent, basking in a moment of thought-consuming glory before thinking twice about what he’d truly done.

Melony Polito fell to her knees just then in what could have been shock from having witnessed the traumatic act no doubt,she doubled oven in agonizing pain, her arms folded into her belly and hands clenching elbows.

Scratch, observing this, diverted himself back into his Magdalene’s rapturous glare, intensely troubled. “What’s wrong with her? If what you’ve been telling me all along is true, then what Polito’s wife carries within her womb is now me! So
do
something!”

“So do what?” Salvatia lulled in her euphoria for a disenchanted reply. “You’re on your own from here on out. No Magdalene has even in all of history known this day. Truth is, you
could
be reborn, then again you
couldn’t
. Who could tell what to expect ‘til it happens? I, on the other hand, am
guaranteed
to be
reborn,
for it has been my
prophesy....”

“What??” Scratch answered. Then, more profoundly aghast, “
What??!”

“Watchmaid Bari!” Salvatia turned away from the impassioned Dreg and called forth to her persuaded accomplice, “Are you still with me?”

But Bari, who remained remarkably unmindful and even humble to the otherwise dastardly turn of events, knew what she was doing.

And it wasn’t what anyone could’ve foreseen.

***

“Still with you?” Bari returned Salvatia’s query. “Not in another, say, thirty seconds...”

She grinned cleverly, and had she a wristwatch she would have given it a melodramatic lookover, just to set what she’d said in visual stone.

Salvatia looked upon Bari quizzically, until her attentions reverted to her subjugated phantasm Max Polito. Uncle Maxy dropped inanimate to the ground in all the instantaneity of a death angel’s call.

Scratch was both furious and perplexed, like an already caged lion surrounded on all four sides by the upturned chairs of whip-cracking lion tamers. Melony was paralyzed and arched over in a ball like a sow bug. On another front was the sight of Polito’s demise, the second to date. Before him, a traitorous Salvatia continued to ignore him, and behind him was the focus of Salvatia’s transfixed scrutiny.

Something was beginning to happen to Bari.

At the same time, something was beginning to happen to Salvatia.

Both of them began to glow a radiant orange hue about each of their waistlines, like luminescent hula-hoops at the point where their vaporous transparent lower torsos merged with their physical upper halves. As soon as this happened, a spark from the belt buckle region of both their glows ignited the bodies of the two entities as though they were two matchstick heads gone up in flames simultaneously. This proved to be a painful experience for both of them, albeit an experience short-lived. They emerged from the wrenching agonies of their mutual spontaneous combustions as opposites, yet opposites in colors alone.

Bari’s Everborn was dead, which in the supernatural scheme of things resulted in the inability for a Watchmaid-turned-Magdalene to materialize into the physical realm except in the presence of a Dreg. Salvatia’s Dreg brought about this death, resulting in her taking the Watchmaid’s place.

The Magdalene Bari.

The Watchmaid Salvatia.

The realization of this new premise, the dawn of her reestablishment into the physical realm with no rules and no holds barred, brought to Salvatia an invigorating breath of fresh air, a
top-o’-the-world, ma
kind of sense of invulnerability, and she basked in it.

“Come unto me, my sisters!” Salvatia cried out a summons to her anticipated regime. “All but for Bari, who I proclaim shall not carry the privilege of redemption. She shall suffer, and suffer alone while we shall rule!”