The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [80]
His vision blurred and in a torpid degree of terror he was certain he was losing his sight. But as his eyes looked about and around him he became more aware that the blur remained contained within the space directly before and above him.
Until the blur which occupied that space rapidly became more and more solid, more expansive, materializing into tangible nightmare far more real and more terrifyingly familiar than anything else he’d encountered within the room, even above finding Max’s body, above anything else he could have ever imagined or experienced in his own lifetime up until then, and back...way back since that one dreadful episode of his childhood which occurred deep within the shadows of a condemned building in an industrial area of the neighborhood of his youth.
Back since the days of the Wraithchild.
Back since the days of little Nigel and when the teenage s’curity man saved him from his own relentless shock and from the beast that stole Nigel away into the fathomless dark of forever.
He knew the beast had been real.
And he had seen her again only in the pit of restless slumber.
Again and again.
And his most suppressing fears had offered him a golden platter of promise that the beast would one day return for him, in his waking hours, would disrupt the daily routines of his sober and rational way of life with the disorienting intoxications of inept horror.
Yet, ironically, with Max’s obsessive pursuits, he’d for the past dozen or so years had learned to face his fears and aided Max in the search for any signs of its existence and for the existence of beings like it.
And there it was, before him now, colossal and towering, facing him and into his soul, and its existence was as real as his own.
After all these years, he still hadn’t found it and it hadn’t found him.
They had found each other.
***
Once again, it happened.
A second time, for perhaps the last.
His good, good friend was taken.
By the beast.
And Matt was left alone, but not unharmed.
As he watched, this thing of shady silver, this ancient beast, this darkly-breasted legless being abandoned her attentions to him and moved towards the blood-drenched inanimate Max, took him up into her arms, and disappeared with him out the exit door to the roof.
And she’d given Matt scarcely more than a minute’s notice or care.
By that short time, Matt was becoming slowly and languidly aware that the figure that had been Simon was gone, too, as was whatever Simon had come to collect in the room’s pillowed corner.
It was a good hour or two before anyone else gave him attention, before Mr. Yellowjacket came upon him with speculative curiosity as to how their meeting was coming along, before the officers arrived to find the pastor’s body and young Alice barely alive, and to find Lieutenant Matthew McGregor like a child again, like a child who had witnessed something so unspeakable that the stupor, which so encompassed him for a long time afterwards, left him incapable of speaking.
For a long time afterwards.
21.
A Refresher Course Brush-up at the Office
Melony had arisen that Sunday morning not long after her husband sprung alive and awake from beside her and responded to Matt McGregor’s telephoned summons away from her and to a crime scene investigation at a motel down the street from The Crow Job.
She had been more than curious about that, curious like an obsessive gossip-hound tabloid reporter in the midst of a news breaking Hollywood story she was personally involved in, but powerless to do anything about but sit and wait.
And then she realized one thing:
Today was the day she would engage in her first date with Andrew Erlandson.
Andrew Erlandson.