The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [66]
Yet it was complete, in a way, despite its many missing pages and deletions. It was complete, because after he managed the black boy’s death, finally the boy’s death, it arrived not long afterwards. It was like the boy’s death was the end of a long haul and the script was a magical trophy, a revelation on paper, in black and white.
And it told him what was going to happen. It made him know what he was supposed to do. It opened his eyes to things meant to be. To the rebirth.
He was going to be reborn. And he was going to make it happen.
Right there. Within the church attic.
Of all places.
He had always been a disillusioned madman of sorts, confused in a bitter world, never knowing his real father, barely knowing his real mother, unless infancy counted for anything, with the exception of a later nocturnal visit or two....
It was a nocturnal visit that changed his life when, long ago in his infancy, the Unhuman Thing took him away from his mother, out into the dead of night, out into an identity that never was supposed to be.
Oh, but it was supposed to be, now, wasn’t it? When I killed the little ghost-boy, and the typewriter spoke, that proves it was supposed to be, young Alice proves it was supposed to be, after all.
Despite the sins the Unknown Thing imposed upon him throughout his life, despite the burdens and agonies of broken realities and self-inflicted wounds, self-inflicted both on others and on his own person, on his body...
...and on his face. It was this self-infliction in particular, which relieved him, made things seem all better afterwards, cleansed him of all sin, made the world a brighter place after all...the sweetness of the blood, the beauty of the sharpness piercing the surface of his skin, producing a clean crease, which bulged droplets of crimson that flowed to the beckoning of gravity. All for blissful penitence. All for rapture, for forgiveness.
All for shit, now.
Now, he was to be reborn and nothing of what he used to do or be mattered anymore. He was purchasing a second life, a chance to erase everything and start over, becoming born again without having to accept any other Lord and Savior but for his own self.
Alice Bradshaw’s body was motionless, naked, spreadeagle across the disproportioned and sunken mattress of the corner bed. The rain-speckled beams of light avoided the body but reached the brownish tiles of the floor beyond, producing a turpid glow over pale skin. Her ankles and wrists were bound almost enough to cut short blood circulation, with electric extension cords wrapped around the wooden headboard and the tarnished brass posts at her feet. Her chest rose and fell at dilatory intervals beneath apple-sized breasts. Manifold beads of sweat glistened across the surface of her body, spread like transparent pigmentations of disease.
In a silhouette, Scratch emerged from the curtained enclosure, which contained the mirror, wash basin, toilet and makeshift shower receptacle, abandoning the glow of the light bulb behind him. His shadowing nakedness straggled forward, past a cluttered dining table, past a two-door wooden clothes closet, past a white refrigerator and stacks of navy-blue milk crates. There was a shabby maroon sofa facing a Zenith color TV, and amidst a piled array of videotapes on the lower shelf of the television stand sat an older-modeled video recorder, built before knobs were replaced with buttons. There was a minikin table situated under one of the windows that held a four-burner hotplate, beside which was a dismal green metal stand supporting a microwave oven. To the left of the refrigerator was a medium-sized cabinet full of various knick-knacks flanking jelly jars containing thick, gelatinous grey shapes afloat in transparent liquid.
Eyes. Dismembered. In jars displayed for the moment to beckon a certain