The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [107]
Bari backed away and Ralston scrambled to his feet. He didn’t glance at Andrew, or Melony, nor even Bari herself, as he charged the front door, opened it, and fled. He left the door hanging wide open and Bari floated over to it and shut it again.
Then she turned to Melony. “And you,” Bari said to her next in the same manner, “Everything you thought real, as it turns out, isn’t it now? So be it, deal with it. But you have another urgent matter to deal with: your husband. Like it or not, your life has embarked on a new and very different course. Go, deal with your husband....”
Bari reverted into the hallway, causing Andrew to revert even further towards his bedroom. He wanted to bid Mel a heartfelt goodbye, but Bari’s purposeful obstruction suggested it was best for him not to and he did not contest it.
Melony’s weak and debilitating faculties made it quite a chore for her to hurriedly pull her jeans up her legs and gather her remaining clothing to her naked breasts, but she certainly gathered the courage to fetch her fallen microcassette recorder before she snatched her purse and lingering belongings and fled in turn. Likewise as Ralston, she left the door hanging wide open.
Bari hovered from the hallway and moved out into the living room to shut the door again and disappeared, leaving Andrew to emerge alone and remorseful again from the hallway entrance.
He retired soon afterwards with not a word spoken in an effort to re-summon Bari. It all had overwhelmed him, the night and the events it contained. He would discuss the entire catastrophe when Bari saw fit to appear and discuss it, and it probably wouldn’t happen any other way.
He retired in thought.
He wondered why, with Bari’s prophetic foresight and all, did she convince him to lie to Melony though the truth was destined to meet Mel head-on just as soon?
He also thought about what Bari had meant when she spoke to Mel of dealing with her husband, how Bari had sent her away on that note.
It worried Andrew.
And he hoped, though he doubted, that things would be all right.
When sleep did come upon him, many dark dreams arose from his soul to meet him there, to have their ways with him until morning.
Many dark dreams....
29.
A New Recruit for the Magdalene
It happened in the rear alley of a corner retail complex in a seedy sliver of Lawndale.
It happened there, but it began within the attic of The Church On The Rock, when the silvery beast claimed not only Maxwell Polito’s body but took a lease on his own soul.
And what a soul it was.
To the human soul, death had regularly proven to be no big deal at all once one dies, regardless of the manner of death. It’s always curiously peaceful, at least at first, when the shock of emerging into a new and wondrous dimension pacifies it so. To bid farewell to the physical chemistries of the brain becomes quite automatic, just as automatic as one greets the brain and all the workings and thinkings of its flesh when one is born.
When your soul is separated from your body, you can no longer think with your brain, and the essence left over that is really you is all at once sexless and disoriented and profoundly mystified at what you suddenly face.
And what you face is not merely a great beyond, but a great eternity. When you die, you not only forget the time, but you forget time entirely. Time is informational data stored within a living brain, and since there no living brain, time becomes boundless and the sole remnants of what was the human you turns into feelings of what was.
There was no time for what was with Max. When he died, and he beheld his surroundings with the eyes of a spirit followed by a peculiarly buoyant sensation, the silvery beast was there to greet him.
He knew instinctively that the silvery beast wasn’t an angel, for when one dies, the concepts of angels and demons hold no meaning; those are concepts