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By Root 254 0

in college, I was earning my way as a security guard. I was making minimum wage guarding this old cannery, and some children I knew decided to take a tour of this condemned apartment building, God knows where they got the guts, on the other side of it. They got around me, and before I knew it, I was pulled from my post by one of them, this little girl. She told me her friend was in trouble. When I got there, deep inside the building, I came across a boy who had seen something. It turned out that another boy, a little black boy, had died in his arms and was taken away by that same something afterwards. The older boy who had come upon him went into shock and later said that he’d seen some sort of a monster. Their reason for going there was to see a ghost baby, a superstitious rumor the people in that area were nuts about. But what the older boy saw wasn’t any ghost. It turned out to be huge, whatever it was, and it was guarding an infant. That is, if you buy the story. I learned to buy the story.” I could not take my gaze from the Watcher. “And I guess you buy it, too.”

“News came in that the body of an infant was discovered in the back alley of a nightclub this summer,” I remembered I was now in January, “last summer. That news eventually led me to a church, and I was the only one who knew the child’s murderer went to that church. This toddler was verified as missing in 1968. And he was still a toddler. Dead. Talk about a ghost baby. But he wasn’t a ghost baby before he went looking for a ghost baby. I believed this other mysterious child grew to maturity, and eventually murdered this black child again, the one they found behind the club.

“Second, that thing I saw in the diner, when I came up here, before I blacked out and found myself here, looked exactly like what that boy with the spider bite described way back when. Jesus, I thought it was my wife, at first. I mean...”

“You thought Bari was your wife?” the Watcher asked. “You’ve been gone way too long, my friend.”

I did not appreciate this whitewashed ridicule. “You know exactly what I mean.” I bit my lip before any uncertain convictions drove me to ask, don’t you? And then, in effort to restrain that uncertainty and retain my focus, I added, or rather, forced, “You mean, I’ve been dead way too long.”

“No, gone too long. You’ve been dead long enough.”

There appeared suddenly a new cigarette between the fingers of the hand that dowsed the last. I had not noticed how it got there, had not noticed any movement for him to reach for one. But as soon as my eyes fell upon it, and this realization had sunk in, he lifted the unlit smoke and offered it to me. His hand reached out in mid-stretch behind his back, over his shoulder.

I declined. “Haven’t picked one up in eighteen years.”

“And you died anyway.”

“Am I still dead?”

“You want this?”

“If you were once human,” I half-challenged, half-reasoned, fully irate, “and if you know what I went through driving over here....hell, if you know all the shit I got into before I woke up tonight, you’d full as fucking well know I want answers, not a cigarette.”

“Listen, Uncle,” he told me, addressing me as such, perhaps to insult me further, “I was once human. I was human a thousand times over you. When a being as elusive and illustrious as myself offers you even a cigarette, you’d better take what he gives you. He might be preparing you for what kind of shit there is to follow. I full well know you had little to prepare you for anything until now, since you awoke tonight. You want it or not?”

I stood, leaned across the bed, and took it from him. My fingertips brushed against his, though the instantaneous touch was void of sensation. I dared not gaze beyond those fingers, for fear I might behold his full face unprepared. As I withdrew, a red Bic plunged upon the bedspread beneath me. I took it, sparked a light, inhaled. I took in the smoke, expecting to cough it out immediately. I didn’t. Exhaling, blowing a smoke stream upwards and to the ceiling, I felt admittedly refreshed. In thinking so, I felt like a cigarette