The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [146]
So follow me farther than this and continue to keep ever close:
What follows are the chronicles of all who remained involved, of Salvatia’s second and final attempt at freeing herself from the shackles of Magdalene-hood by seeking the life of Andrew Erlandson once more, and with a vengeance.
Needless to say, I’ve something further to show you...
...the most important part....
PART FOUR:
THE MASTER MAGICIANS
“....And all the world is wild and strange:
Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
Shall bear us company tonight.
For we have reached the Oldest Land
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.”
-Kipling, “From the Dusk to Dawn”
41.
Company for Scratch
-September 30, 1994-
Smoke...
...ethereal trails spilling about the space of air within the central rooms of the house....a soundless gambol of cigarette smoke, intrusive as though its origins were not from inside but from out.....
***
Simon BoLeve, who’d come to call himself Scratch as of late, held a unique history of skillfulness in the art of lying low. It came naturally to him like an inherent introversion, and throughout his life he never consciously carried the drive to be as social as anyone around him.
This was a good thing, to remain virtually unnoticed all these years, to maintain a status of unsung nothingness while the busy beehive of society slaved for their dollars and gods and ideals.
It was a good thing for Scratch also, considering the overwhelming mischief he had on his head. Why, his own foster parents, dear Brother and Sister BoLeve, would have been better off adopting some other little auspicious lad, and never would’ve eventually lost their lives to him.
Scratch had been very clever at lying low for that.
Indeed, miraculously, Scratch proved himself a slippery sucker. But, as Jacob Bradshaw often quoted from the Good Book, your sins will surely find you out.
And Scratch’s sins were to find him out in a big way.
***
Smoke....
Scratch could smell it in the living room, could smell it in the kitchen. Someone had been smoking a cigarette; he could still catch sight of its cloud-white traces stretching higher into the air then tumbling downwards as he flicked up the wall switch of the kitchen light.
The kitchen was long and narrow and at its opposite end, the door to the side of the house hung ajar. Odd thing, considering Scratch had locked and bolted the door from the inside, and it had remained that way a month now...a month since he’d set out with the emphatic initiative to pay a house visit on a couple of church acquaintances-turned meth dealers, the idea being to take up latent residence there with his hosts sent on a restful vacation buried beneath the cement of a backyard tetherball pole.
A month that he’d been lying low.
He seized an elongated knife from the pile of utensils and dishes soaking in the stagnant sink dishwater and sprinted for the door. The identity of whoever had intruded was a mortifying mystery. Whoever had intruded, once he found him...Scratch would strike first at his face, thrust him before a mirror to see if the sneaking sonofabitch could stand the inability to identify himself.
Quietly, subtly, he slowed past the door and prowled the outer side walkway, sidestepping the row of garbage cans and cardboard boxes of decomposed lawn trimmings. He scanned the backyard, dusk-lit and vacant save for the tetherball pole and sheltered patio and then doubled back to inspect the padlocked side gate.
His developing conclusion was, whoever violated his sanctity had fled and hopped the fence. Whoever it was, Scratch reasoned, had to have known the previous occupants of the house intimately enough to have in their possession a key, to know their way around. That much was certain.
And they smoked.
On another hand, the uninvited guest could have been nothing more than a vandal, a sketched-out tweeker tempted into a little burglary by the prolonged absence of his connects, spooked by Scratch’s presence. Surely this enigma hadn’t caught full sight of Scratch, hadn’t caught