The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [109]
He looked upon the beast once more, upon its flowing blue-black hair and into her widened orange eyes.
And the beast spoke to him in a grisly whisper, which could have been feminine, could have been eerily soothing, could have been the unnatural substance of the primordial childhood fear of the darkness beyond the bedroom nightlight, “I am Salvatia. Welcome to my will.”
The first and foremost inkling the Max-thing had known afterwards, for perhaps the remnants of Max at any rate, was the obsessive desire for a cigarette.
And Salvatia was determined to oblige him.
Anything for her precious newborn.
INTERLUDE:
Max & The Watcher—
A RETURN TO THE MOTEL UNTOLD
30.
In The Watcher’s Own Words
-January 2nd, 1995-
To Maxwell J. Polito, World-renown
Investigator of UFO Phenomena:
It was a night of a thousand hours, you would’ve written at this point had you continued to write and had you written it. I’ll give you that. Just to get me started.
I expect to provide you with an update when you awaken, re-energized and good to go eight or nine hours from now and this is a record of that update. I write this not only for the sake of the manuscript, which you and I both labor towards completion, but for the sake of your fragile sanity as well.
One wonders what torrid pains afflict you so, knowing how any man of your caliber would possibly feel...I mean, having awoken within your home to my original typewritten letter, which summoned you to this Motel Untold and to this room you and I share now, to meet with a Watcher, to meet with me.
To encounter nothing you would normally never come to expect in a lifetime.
In that initial letter of mine you awoke to in your upstairs office, I laid my cards on the table when I told you, you awoke from death. And I promised you two things: an explanation, and a mission. No one knows where you are, not even you, except you know you’re in an unknown vicinity in the Twilight Zone of Carbon Canyon. And no one knows you’re still alive, sans yourself and I. No mortal human, at any rate.
Sounds like what happened to Jim Morrison.
You were exceptionally overwhelmed by me and still are, which is to be expected and I’m deeply flattered. But at the onset of the conclusion of my explanation of the events leading to your death, you clearly panicked. And you can be so atrociously panicky.
It was my responsibility to put you at ease enough to complete the written account of that bit concerning your death in the church attic, clear through to your resurrection as Salvatia’s Max-thing. Believe me, I myself was obliged to look back face-first into a few events that disconcerted me.
When we ultimately arrived at the present point, the point which we’re at now, I found myself deeply moved into an equal responsibility to see to your human needs. Firstly, you truly needed to eat. I had lured you all this way, driven by my instruction to keep going until you get hungry. I can see why you lost your appetite, but I didn’t at all give you a chance to eat anything before the encounter with Bari in the lobby of the diner rendered you unconscious, only for you to reawaken here in my presence.
After we worked out the finalities of the last chapter we together wrote, I directed you towards the port-a-fridge in our room’s rear vestibule below the clothes rack. I had waiting there for you, a ham and Swiss cheese on rye, and an apple.
What put you to sleep could’ve been the apple and how Snow White it would’ve been. But it was the appropriately stashed Choc-o-diles that did you in. I knew you’d open the crisper to discover and devour them, the snack slave that you are. How poetic