The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [34]
Wondering, as usual, what Bari had meant, Andrew clenched his blazer tight against him and commenced his departure out the front door, this time his spirits free of forgotten hostility.
The being within the hallway retreated into the bedroom, for but to catch sight of her young one as he would minutes later stroll across the sidewalk three stories below and disappear down the darkness of the nighttime street towards The Crow Job.
7.
The Watchmaid Bari
Empty shades of night idled upon the tenebrous presence within Andrew Erlandson’s apartment’s hallway.
The Watchmaid remained there, unmoving. She enjoyed the stillness of the apartment, hushed with the exception of the systematic ticking of the living room wall clock. Often, she considered this solitary sound welcomed and even necessary.
It reminded her of her whereabouts.
It reminded her of her duties.
It reminded her of time.
And time always reminded her of the days when she was human, when she had been but a young woman Andrew’s age, many ages past, when she and he were once lovers, and she became pregnant with his child.
That was when things changed. That was when she was first made aware of what her lover truly was, what he became before the rebirth, reborn through her into another succession of lives.
That was when she became the creature she was destined to be.
She decided to move. Hovering, she made her way from the mouth of the hallway and through the living room. As she went, a mild current of air brushed across a ceramic vase containing outstretched peacock feathers, fluttering and flipping the covers and pages of several nearby magazines. In a similar way, her mind’s eye browsed through pages of the past.
Memories of the past, echoing prophecies of the future. Sensual, yes. But also horrific. Also cataclysmic.
Time always tended to play those games, flip through those pages.
The Watchmaid arrived at the patio doors. Drapes parted, no longer obstructing her third-story view of the night and the quieted street below.
An occasional vehicle drove by.
At first, Bari silently regarded the scene, regarded the surrounding apartments, the mid-evening’s overhanging stars.
The stars.
Her thoughts shifted again, retreated inward, into herself, resuming inward thoughts, again into distant memories. How very soon things were going to change again, as they always did before.
But as destiny was about to unfold another time around, Bari had the strangest feeling that another time was beginning to unfold over the present. Perhaps this feeling, this foreboding aura encompassing both young man and guardian, was merely generated by the apartment’s claustrophobic setting.
Or perhaps this feeling dealt with Ralston Cooper’s latest novel, ghostwritten by Andrew, ghostwritten in turn by the hands of the very near future, the very hands responsible for Bari’s insistence of Andrew’s anonymity, his freedom to create and to continue creating under the guise of secrecy and behind the name of a very real and unsuspecting identity. Perhaps this was why Andrew worked so relentlessly before his typewriter and for so long to meet Ralston’s deadline.
Perhaps it wasn’t for Ralston’s deadline at all....but for another deadline entirely which Bari had foreseen years ago, but had little idea until now when it would be and how, or of the magnitude of its significance upon herself and so many others.
8.
Melony Polito at the Crowjob
It was not supposed to happen this way, not any of it. And certainly not to Melony Polito. Yet she was a part of it, immersed in it, immersed into every sort of chaotic and intriguing encounter a private investigator could ever dream of cramming into his or her career, even for the wife of a UFO researcher.
And she never thought she would end up here, in a two-bit dive of a bar, as a result of a joint effort between her and her famous UFO-freak husband. It made her miss the days when the only real joint effort worth enjoying was when she and a few close college friends would pass around joints and get high off