The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [11]
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