The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [92]
William had become to his wife quite detestable and, if she dwelt on the issue long enough, quite insulting. She knew of his secrets, of his carousing perversions and betraying liaisons with the bar sluts and the tight-assed party caterers and the occasional whores-for-hire his paychecks attracted. And her husband wasn’t exactly pleasant to look at, particularly lately. He must’ve gained sixty pounds in the past year alone.
He hadn’t always been this way. He evolved into it. In fact, he’d just begun to evolve into it around the time he’d first signed on Ralston Cooper as a client. He’d been Editor of a regional subsidiary publishing company and part time literary agent to small time writers with a few good stories and deals under their belts, and when he took on Ralston no one had a clue as to the skyrocketing success it would bring to all.
And no one had a clue to the way William would come to react to such a success. Sure, it was as predictable as a generic horoscope when regarding Ralston; Ralston had always been the Asshole Of Ego. But William was once focused and personable, though he’d been raised amidst the trauma of abusive parents living hand-to-mouth and in denial of their allegiance to sour mash and cheap wine. He grew to be a man determined to lead a life in opposition to his dismal upbringing, and now....well, now his own ideals were shot to shit.
If he was aware of this at all, he sure as all hell didn’t care.
Agatha learned not to care, either.
And by now, she possessed a few good infidelities of her own.
For William, whatever charades they wielded for secrets’ sake or suspicions they harbored, there were no closet skeletons profound enough to succeed in importance over the sessions.
The sessions brought with them the bright lights. The glossy-eyed man had said that the lights were an implanted diversion from deeply repressed memory. A goal of the sessions was to induce a confrontation with those lights in hopes of liberating the demons imprisoned within them. Fervent attacks of anxiety and depression had plagued William’s recent years for hours or even days at a time with no explanation but for a vitamin deficiency or chemical imbalance. But it was the glossy-eyed man who knew better, who disclosed to him those periods of time unaccounted for, episodes dispersed throughout his youthful years like black-outs, concealing the unimaginable origins of a scared psyche.
Lately, the bright lights were coming to him on their own and apart from the sessions. They revealed themselves only to him, for certainly their presence would evoke the attention of the entire coastal community around them.
They were the very same lights that had come to him before, long ago.
Whatever it was, it was happening again.
He lifted himself from the bed and tied his bathrobe tight about him. He stepped towards the lights, becoming one with the silent movie presentation of his outside balcony.
They took him away, only to borrow him for awhile.
He’d be returned in no time.
Drifting....
***
They stole him away and into a dream far more fathomless, a dream where he found himself somewhere not many miles away, somewhere northeast, upwards from his Balboa Beach-front domicile and into the backwoods hill country beyond the town of Brea and behind the neighborhood of Ralston’s home.
The lights carried him to a place that existed or did not exist, he would never be sure, but it was a place he remembered visiting on occasions long ago.
It was a lone diner roosted upon the gravel roadside of fleeting consciousness like a way station checkpoint between two dimensions, an ultimate landmark for the cosmic chasm of netherworld manifested in the hidden terrain beyond it.
From this point, there came a period of dense oblivion, a hollow blank fog, which drifted numbly through events