The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [29]
What I was about to undertake was to write about what the Watcher had revealed to me and the entirety of what he was about to reveal to me still, which, according to our plan, should set the course of events that have already occurred but couldn’t have occurred unless I typed what the Watcher had yet to dictate.
I wouldn’t expect you to understand just yet.
The Watcher remained silent at first and for what seemed to be quite some time.
Then he spoke, his first uttered command before I was to actually start.
“Let’s begin with the son of A.J. Erlandson....”
I began to type, to work the Watcher’s magic.
To learn the whole story of how I ended up here.
To continue the story.
To find out where I’m going from here.
And you...you’ve followed me this far....
Follow me still, and keep close.
I’ve a story further I’d like to tell you....
PART TWO:
INFORMAL INTRODUCTIONS
“You shall find out how salt is the
taste of another man’s bread,
and how hard is the way up
and down another man’s stairs.”
-Dante
6.
Swapping the Story Again
—August 26, 1994—
The obscure configuration of a slender shadow stood still
behind the bathroom mirror’s misty residue.
A slight hesitation, a blurred agitation...a sudden, dark sweep....
And then there were eyes.
Smeared from the beads of moisture, yet visible and apparent.
The surrounding dimness provided a welcomed surreal backdrop rather than the otherwise sobering brightness of the vanity light, the nightlight’s orange lucidity reflecting first from pools in lampblack pupils and then from the mirror image itself.
From the image of the eyes.
Staring.
Andrew Erlandson took the towel and gave the mirror a second stroke, then a third.
He continued to stare at himself. At his face. At his stalwart chin and thickset eyebrows. At his pale nudity. At his dark brown hair cut modestly behind the ears giving him a juvenile semblance even more evident in baby’s-butt-smooth flawless skin and a face of innocent charm.
At his twenty-eight-year-old eyes.
Andrew held an ardent fascination for the mysteries behind those eyes.
Some of those mysteries, he believed, could be revealed at the right moments, at the quickest flicker or slightest dilation, if only he could ever just manage to notice those revelations some day.
Mysteries inhabiting the darkness beyond those eyes.
And the darkness itself was indeed another fascination as well. There was something oddly mutual about human eyes and darkness, something curiously ironic.
Andrew wondered what it was.
Quite often, he wondered.
But his thoughts scattered with a knocking at the bathroom door, and in the abruptness he answered; timidly, although thoroughly annoyed.
“What is it?”
A voice, Ralston Cooper’s half-drunken slur, echoed from behind the door. “I got the manuscript myself, Andy-man. Found it. On your desk, in your bedroom. You knew it was there, didn’t you? I got a gig at The Crow Job, man. You almost screwed it up, makin’ me wait for you to get outta the goddamn shower.”
Ralston’s voice trailed, faded. He was headed for the living room, possibly for the front door.
Impatient bastard, Andrew thought, but did not answer. Andrew threw the towel onto the toilet seat and lazily reached for the mound of clothes piled upon the hamper to his side.
He had risen a little more than an hour ago to an incessant ringing of the doorbell, finding himself seated at his desk and slumped over his typewriter, his head pillowed by the cradle of folded arms. He had been working undisturbed for hours and hours on end, hours which seemed like days, attempting to finish the newest novel ghostwritten for Ralston before he arrived to retrieve it. Today had been the day Ralston’s agent anticipated its delivery, and Andrew had laboriously slaved in preparation.
Slaved so hard, in