The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [26]
“In all actuality,” the Watcher continued, “you smoked quite a great deal when you were dead.”
I gagged on my half-inhaled smoke.
“In fact,” he added, “you smoked a great deal just before you died. Like an oil refinery. Took up the nasty habit again not long before, when tension in life and more precisely in your marriage lured you to return to the habit. Shortly after your death, Melony had an affair, you know, before she found out what happened to you. You worked her ass off, in that business partnership of yours.”
I did not like where this was leading. I was recalling more and more of the truth in the words the Watcher spoke of and I detested more and more both what he said and how he said them. I had not been summoned here to discuss my marriage nor cigarette smoking, had not been prepared to be grilled beneath the thrift-store-flowery lampshade of a motel room I did not enter on my own accord. The recurring fears of my wife’s safety were becoming replaced with a swelling conviction that it was I who had been kidnapped, if anyone was at all. I slid a pink plastic wastebasket I found at the desk’s side across the carpet with my shoe to catch my ashes.
Then I spoke my mind.
“Just a minute. Just a goddamn sixty seconds. Can I say something, here? Are you through? I can’t believe I’m here to listen to this, can’t fucking believe I’m sitting here, smoking a fucking cigarette, with you talking to me like this, smoking a fucking cigarette yourself! Hell, I can’t believe I’ve finally met one of you, and I’m talking to you like this! Is that what you do to people, how you abduct people, ‘cause I’ve been under the impression it had nothing to do with smoke sessions in motel rooms and goddamn electric typewriters and letters to meet somewhere at Joe-Billy Bob’s Breakfast in the Boonies if you survive the Death-diesel Brigade getting there---.”
“Are you finished speaking your mind?” the Watcher spat an interruption of smoke and words from an exhaled first drag of a new cigarette, another of which I had not noticed until it made an announcement all its own by a flaunt between fingers.
And then he rose from the bed and turned to face me fully.
He stared straight into my own eyes; I knew he did, yet his eyes bore no pupils, therefore this knowledge was more of an awareness than anything, yet this awareness was so strong I felt his glare blazing headlong through my own, locked into mine. If it were laser beams they surely would have blinded me and pierced clear the hell out of the back side of my fragile human head. His head appeared even more flimsy, almost ghostly white, yet darker, an off-white, almost grey, although I do admit the color of his skin, particularly the skin of his face, played with the shadows of the lamplight and the perceptions of certain dull reality within my mind.
I witnessed infinity in those eyes. I do sincerely mean infinity...those two optical crevices, slanted diagonally as decades of research and even more decades of reported encounters have made me come to have expected, those two eyes drew me into them, and the further they drew me, the more I found I could not escape their gaze, or at least the ultimate attention their gaze commanded me into. Those black, glossy, infinite eyes were hypnotic unlike any human hypnotist I had ever encountered, almost impossible to describe on human terms because human was most definitely what they weren’t, yet, somehow, in that motel bathrobe getup, standing still and silent and facing me as he did, he looked like Yoda. Even still, Yoda’s white, earless, second cousin. Smoking second cousin, the one out on parole.
“In speaking your mind,” he told me as I sat, forgetting my own cigarette, the one I wasn’t smoking now, its ashes falling where they may within the pink wastebasket or the shaggy shabby carpeting, I didn’t care or notice at that point which, “have you taken into account that