The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [64]
The attic was structured by the same basic dimensions as its lower predecessors, with the exception of the fact that it was half the size. The inner stairway situated at the sanctuary’s rear led clear through to the second floor and then ended at the door of the third. The only other access to the third floor attic was from the outside, a white-rock backyard of rooftop terrain, of aluminum air vents and a caucus of telephone cable hookups, laid flat between the deactivated rear emergency exit door and an opposing steel fire escape ladder scaling the building’s side.
Hazy afternoon sunlight filtered into the bowels of what had been once the church storeroom, beams stretching to join with the brownish tile floor like the ground ropes of a carnival tent. Each of the four solitary window panes hung at the side wall facing the street, projecting rain-speckled images at oblong angles. Outside, the morning showers had ceased; inside, showers of a dismal nature, a dark and silent nature, issued incessantly into the dreary ambience.
Scratch, nude and slumped, contorted by shadow, welcomed the ambience, thrived in it...had fashioned it, tamed it, bathed in it. The dim lucidity of an overhead light bulb dangled in the open air between him and the rectangular mirror. Strands of spider web clung from the bulb and neighboring chain, casting a shady network of disjointed lines across the grim features of his face, and upon his neck and shoulders.
There was a spider there and it caught Scratch’s attention. It had caught his attention a while ago and he was still trapped within its awe and spectacle, as though it were nestled there just for him.
That spider....he thought.../I’m like that spider. That spider...a black widow...I’m like it...I’m a black widow. Only in reverse. I’m the male, not the female. The king, not the queen. For me, there is no queen. There never has been. There never will be. Bradshaw’s daughter is my whore. She’s using herself for me. And I’m using myself for her. I have to, because I’m a black widow...it’s in my nature...it’s in my destiny, my right to live...my right to live free again, my right to live whole again. And her right has been given to me, because I am special.
Because I can be reborn....
***
Each Sunday, the former auto center garage was filled to maximum capacity with more varieties of humanity than the varieties of vegetables in a victory garden and The Crow Job combined. The music...the music of the Rock...was like every soul was in harmony and together with the vibrant preaching, the passionate preaching, the loud and radiant verbs and commands, the rich organ and vibrant soul of the piano, and even the saxophone...the scene was almost like a backwoods gospel extravaganza.
In the farthest row to the rear on the left side facing the pulpit, where the padded plastic seats dwindled to metal multi-colored folding chairs, the hunched and bearded figure of Scratch had wedged himself between a young black woman miserably attempting to hush her Power Rangers-studded infant to sleep and a leather-clad pimply-faced teen. In joining the congregation in a jazzy rendition of When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder, Scratch found himself wishing to hear more of the infant rather than the music, completely contrary to the other fellow souls around him. Whereas other people became profoundly annoyed, Scratch took a certain delight in the infant’s screams.
At least someone else is in misery besides me, being here, he thought.
And oh, how he loved the screams.
But the infant had ceased as the woman began to sway the child to the beat of the music, slowly to its rhythm, slowly to its rhythm, slowly to the music’s own mesmerism. The child was soon busily sucking the tips of its fingers, amused eyes directed towards a threesome of skinheads over and beyond his mother’s shoulders, passers-by pausing to take a lengthy peek at the scene.
Scratch then reverted his attentions back to the front.
At the front of the