The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [161]
“...I haven’t had a good meal in a long, long time. You don’t eat as much, if you find yourself becoming a creature like me throughout the course of a couple months when you’ve spent a lifetime convinced you’re human. I’m starving, come to think of it. I know a certain diner in Carbon Canyon that just might suit all our needs....”
44.
Carbon Canyon
A congress of stars came forth through recessions of the Halloween Witching Hour’s cloudy sky, or what remained of it, bestowing Carbon Canyon with its first glimpse of the heavens of a new November. The parting clouds had drifted on opposing currents of wind from every direction as far as each horizon to gather here, rendering the neighboring regions cloudless with only the local weatherman paying any mind. At the height of the spectacle, they encompassed the view above with all the thickness of the inner cotton-white lining of a thermal jacket. Either by coincidence or by a higher power’s predestined omen, the cue for their dispersal came no sooner than when Andrew Erlandson and Ralston Cooper set foot on rocky ground as they vacated their cab.
As the cabby dismissed them, pulled back down the narrow highway and into the deep dark, his f.m. stereo’s Talkradio Newswatch host remarked about the climate in a relieved sigh over the diminished chances of rain. The cabby wasn’t listening, preoccupied as he was by the confounding uselessness of his high beams against the obscure road ahead; he was at the same time spellbound by his inability to remember where he was, or who it was that brought him here, or to radio in for assistance...
...it was going to be quite a perilous while before the sun would rise and allow the poor soul assurance of his bearings and of a way out....
***
Ralston knew exactly where he was, though in this life he knew just as well that he’d never been here before. He knew how it would come to be that Max Polito would be drawn here to inevitably meet him and assist him in writing the very book that he already read.
Andrew, on the other hand, had no clue: “What is this place?”
“It’s a place I had read about,” he answered. “A place where we need to be now. It’s not a bad place. Just a forgotten place, and the Watchers I’ve encountered took care to avoid any discussion I’d try to create concerning it.”
“How’d you know how to get here?”
“Bari knew.”
“You really believe Salvatia’s waiting for us here?”
“Without a doubt,” replied Ralston. Then, “Well, with little doubt. I’m almost absolutely sure. You ready for it, Andy-man?”
Andrew was never, ever, precisely, ready for it.
Andrew remained garbed in his black costumed disguise, so be it if the globule-eyed grey alien semblance from above the shoulders was genuine. It was genuine, as was Ralston’s; together they resembled an air-brushed portrait from some contemporary expressionist flaunting commercial new-age t-shirt art. Ralston, rolled-up jeans and sweatshirt and black trenchcoat jaggedly cut with scissors at the hem line of a five-year-old, felt himself the more hip of the duo...and in his wizened stature, at least he stood a hip inch-and--a-half taller than Andrew. This was still less than five feet.
Andrew’s persuasions toward Ralston teetered from trust to distrust and then back to trust since their departure from the Brea home and through to this very moment. During this period, the course of the ride, they’d shared little conversation. For one thing, given the nonhuman obviousness of their appearance, they did not want to be too animated for the driver, which might’ve upset the bewitched man further. The virtual silence was an opportune time for Andrew to mentally absorb everything.
All that Ralston was and all he had told him in the upstairs bedroom was true, to the greater extent, which was self-evident. The exception to this was the bit about the Watchers nabbing this now-infamous manuscript