The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [124]
When Simon glanced back, he found the boy there, down the hall, at the bend where he’d turned the corner with the Chinese woman and was led past the boy’s restroom door. The little black boy was standing still as clear as the outside day, wearing a t-shirt of red and white stripes over a mild brown pair of corduroy-type trousers, both three times over his size, and dirty-white tennis shoes garnished with soiled shoelace loops long enough to evoke a fall if the pant legs didn’t do it first.
The boy stood dead center upon the white-colored shag carpeting of that semi-far section of hallway behind, facing Simon, staring upon him with fixed eyes and eyebrows lifted devilishly about the edges, smiling at him with two rows of impossibly revealed teeth encompassed by windshield-wiper rubber lips. His presence there appeared to be disproportionate and vague, almost plastic, nearly dreamlike, as if the way he appeared was merely an interpretation of another side of him that had once perhaps been physical.
The sight of him vanished when the boy himself turned to the door with the generic stick-man and escaped towards it and into it, rendering the hallway empty and bare where not even the voices of the inner classrooms could be heard.
Another opportunity arose for Simon to confront the little bastard. He made a mad dash for the restroom door where the boy disappeared through, careful firstly to excuse himself from the company of the Chinese woman with a desperate plea to drain his bladder. She in turn directed him to the location of his Children’s Study classroom which lay two more doors further to the left, then she continued onwards without him.
Simon raced back, right straight up to the door of the blue and white man-sign, pushed it open, and moved inside.
At the far end of the boy’s restroom, the metal door of the handicapped stall swung shut and bounced against its frame. Simon went for that door, past a wash basin and two urinals and the only other stall, slamming the stall door’s backside against the tiled wall as he entered.
***
When Simon entered the stall, not a soul was there. He was alone and the quiet within the restroom was tomb-like.
And then came a voice from behind....
Simon did a three-sixty, and still the voice came from behind, though he could not connect with its origin...
....and the voice said, in a childlike frailty with an accentuated sinister hush behind its vain innocence:
“Do you really want to find me, Simon, as I find you? Do you reeeeeally?”
“Yes,” Simon said to the voice, his gaze darting in rapid surveillance. “Show yourself!”
“I show myself the way I need to. I show myself in dreams, in my whispers, too close for you to see me and to far away to catch when you do. But don’t worry, Simon. Our Beloved One needs your help and she will clear things up personally with you reeeeal soon.”
Simon found himself speaking to the stall’s metal door now; the voice seemed to be coming from behind it. “Who is ‘Our Beloved One’? What are you talking about?”
“Are you prepared to do what I asked you to do for me last night in your sleep?”
“I have what I found in my slippers this morning when I woke up.”
“And you know what to do?”
“Yes.”
“If you do it for me, Our Beloved will come to you and she will reveal to you face-to-face the answers you seek, herself.”
“I’ll be told everything?” Simon asked, his heart pounding, his impulses throwing him forward to re-open the stall door and when he did, no one was there on the other side. “Will I really?”
“Reeeeeeally,” said the voice, growing ghostly distant, leaving behind an audible trail of fading retreat towards the restroom door and then silencing.
***
Today’s edition of Children’s Study for all the kids in the (loosely) eight-to-ten age bracket was to take up more than two hours’ time and Simon was informed of this beforehand. On any other day it would have mattered to him, but without realizing it he’d become entangled in the distracting