The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [142]
He heaved suddenly, the arch of his back shook once, twice, in a tumult of despair, and Bari deadened the overhead ceiling lights by a click of the wall switch to eliminate the weeping boy’s view of the grisly spectacle of the room.
There, even in darkness and shadow, the room flaunted the stone cold pungency of death.
Bari moved to the boy, the gentle currents of her hovering body brushing over the remnants of things now embedded forever in the past. She lulled him to sleep. Tenderly.
And she caused him to dream.
Comforting dreams.
Impressionable dreams, dreams of forgetfulness.
Time to move on.
39.
The Big Deal
-1984-
The dismal garage smelled of alcohol and reeked with the tainted odor of stale cigarettes. Ralston strummed gently upon the amplified strings of an electric guitar, the strumming interwoven by the quiet hum of blacklight.
Fluorescent posters poked from the three-dimensional dark like otherworldly intrusions upon Ralston’s somber reality. All he cared about in this world, right about then, was plucking those goddamn electric guitar strings...no matter how badly they resounded against his fingertips. He sang into a microphone situated on a metal stand. His off tone soprano regurgitated the way a deep-sea fish would do its young. He was bad...despite, alas, the confidently tranquil way he carried himself. If he had a great voice and a natural ability to play, he would’ve got it made musically at an early age...just on the merits of his eagerness and stubborn reveries to rock n’ roll and to do nothing else but rock n’ roll for the rest of his life.
This music was sadly enough the wrong professional direction for him, clearly, logically...
...though the same had been said for many a rock n’ roll legend at the beginning.
But Ralston never carried a drive for perfection. He simply carried a drive for fame.
Perhaps he’d be better a writer.
Today, things were about to change.
***
Andrew hadn’t expected to be so thoroughly amused with the sight of Ralston as he rested against the opened frame of the side door of Ralston’s garage. It was from there Andrew stood, cross-legged and cross-armed, straining to give the impression of bold confidence should Ralston catch sight of him; Ralston would, sooner or later. And Andrew had to be ready for him.
Andrew knew that to Ralston his unannounced presence in the doorway would generate quite a shock. Who knows? Ralston might even go into a seizure, right then and there, causing the poor soul to choke on his guitar strap and die just before Andrew had any hope of talking to him.
Well,it wouldn’t be all that, but nevertheless his presence would prove to be quite a shock just the same.
Andrew and Ralston hadn’t sociably seen each other since the night four years ago at the elementary school playground. Sure, they had continued through graduation at the same Magnolia High School, saw each other in unavoidable passing, but one fearfully steered clear of the other. For two years since Ralston’s graduation, he and Andrew hadn’t seen each other at all.
Only in haunted memories, memories of that night. Memories of...
...of a nightmare…
…shady, veiled sketches of memories.
Only Andrew knew all the better than Ralston. Ralston, for one thing, never had been aware of the presence of Camelia in his life...with the exception of dreams and distant influence. Andrew, comparatively, was well acquainted with things out of the norm.
Bari continued to be important to Andrew since the scene at the playground and the deaths of his mother and stepfather, on through the years until now. She’d been with him throughout the aftermath of the events of that day, when the bodies had been discovered, when police concerns and speculations and probings added both to his trauma and to theirs, and eventually to Ralston’s. In the end, if there was ever an end, the occurrences of