The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [65]
In the midst of praise and worship, Scratch suddenly spied one of the ushers, an older black man garbed in a rather tacky thin yellow jacket, hastening through a crowded aisle towards the front, where the clergy sat facing the congregation. Scratch swung his view towards the rear, in the direction where the man had emerged, at the far left entrance. A uniformed policeman stood momentarily in the center of the opened doorway before he disappeared outside. Curious heads darted from the doorway to the usher as Mr. Yellowjacket quickened his anxious speed, conscious of the attention drawn and slowing awkwardly because of this, fearful to alarm anyone. Clearly, he was doing a bad job of that. He arrived at the chair of Pastor Jacob, knelt and whispered into his ear.
The whispered words of Mr. Yellowjacket were few and to Scratch it seemed as if the pastor was spared the gory details of the news itself of the apparent discovery that morning. Pastor Jacob was escorted towards the rear church entrance, where the awaiting officer reappeared and then disappeared with Mr. Yellowjacket and the pastor out into the cloudy Sunday morning air.
How nice, how delightful, Scratch mused, and like Mr. Yellowjacket, the congregation turned to one another, whispered into the ears of one and then the other. How reeeeally delightful that events should all come down this morning, right smack in the middle of Sunday morning service. They could’ve come down yesterday, but they didn’t. They came down today. They came down now.
Scratch knew what was coming down.
And he smiled a razor-scared, bearded smile.
***
Later in the service, the assemblage of taciturn worshippers listened with distress and disbelief as their associate pastor, a pasty white man with a tacky thin black jacket, released the news of the calamity: Pastor Bradshaw’s daughter, twenty-one-year-old Alice, had left for an evening out with her boyfriend Friday night and hadn’t returned since. She was by now officially declared missing, leaving only her boyfriend’s blood-ragged body behind in a motel room several cities away.
The thing that Mr. Blackjacket failed to mention, or rather, what the authorities had failed to mention to him, apparently, was that the boyfriend’s eyes were missing. Scratch had hoped in the announcement that he would include the eyes. He longed to hear about the eyes. He craved to feed the anticipation of the congregation’s reaction to the eyes.
Oh, well. No goddamn big surprise.
***
After the service, alone in the church attic...
...well, almost alone....
He continued to stare in the rectangular wall mirror at his rough nakedness beneath the dim web of light, into his own eyes and beyond. His self-inflicted scars trailing his face and brow, creating blackened furrows beneath his growth of beard, were now absent in his mind’s eye. In his mind’s eye, he was a newborn baby, readying to emerge into the world once more, to emerge anew. His ambitions, his dreams, his realities of what was meant to be swelled from within his soul and they had done so since he was revealed the mysterious secret of who he was and what he was supposed to do to be who he was.
Ever since a handful of days ago...
...when he woke from a deep sleep and his typewriter spoke to him.
He never had been much of a writer at all, although the desire to write had swept over him time and time again; he was always into other things, his typewriter had been old and dusty, had been that way for a very long time.
But that all changed not long after the little black boy had come along for the last time, for the last of several dozen times, had come to haunt him, to taunt him, and about a week ago he had taunted and haunted his last. Scratch never dreamed he would catch him, would put him out of his own wretched misery, but he had. And it was not long