The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [93]
Drifting, drifting backward...
...returning...
....to wakefulness...
…awakening.
***
William Behn awoke from the dream.
Upwards and with a start he awoke, his alertness fine-tuning itself like an FM receiver to the waking world’s proper frequencies, adjusting with every thump of heartbeat. He was drenched within an icy bitter perspiration, which soaked his pajama top and the thick collar portion of his robe.
He was home again, home and amidst the serene late-night darkness of the bedroom and in the company of his restful and inanimate wife curled in deliberate isolation upon her side of the bed they shared still.
The statue garden balcony had surrendered to a now-peaceful dormancy, undisturbed by its recent affair with the luminous intrusion from above.
His senses were seized almost as suddenly as he’d arrived to them, by a single consuming thought which claimed him suddenly next.
It was of the new Ralston Cooper novel.
It was of The Everborn.
The diminishing weekend had delivered a comfortable wealth of demands, the foremost being the urgent necessity of reviewing his most valued client’s anticipated new project. Up until the final hour before bedtime, William had managed his way through the fifth chapter of the book. What he read proved masterful and provocative and captivating enough to generate a major publishing event.
Nothing astonishing for Mr. Cooper, of course.
Nor for William as well.
And yet, William now faced a wildly uncontrollable dread about the book, about the queer familiarities of its contents and its eerie flirtations with real people and events and crossbreedings of factual history. It contained subject matter, which hit too close to home, so close that it characterized the nature of William’s own bright lights to a chillingly descriptive “T.” His review of the book had been such a compelling experience and his dream had rendered him utterly displaced. It was plain to see how influential the book had been on the evening, and it was increasingly frightening to consider how difficult it was to separate one from the other.
To position a factual and renown personality into the role of a major character in a work of fiction was unorthodox in the least. Ufologist Maxwell Polito was no recent sensation to William’s prized industry of print-for-profit...a man indebted to his own unorthodox ideas for his claim to fame. But to join forces with a master of mainstream macabre would be a reputation risk if not prepared and marketed properly.
Damn Ralston’s insistence to keep a literary project under wraps until the day of its completion. It dug mercilessly into William’s nerves, especially when besieged by deadlines and multiple book contracts and deals in negotiation. Oftentimes, this sort of thing rendered the worrisome agent speculative, and scarcely sure that a given project was being written at all; Ralston always had so much time on his hands for other things.
What William had read of the book so far had generated enough mental mayhem to stimulate another debilitating anxiety attack, and this time it would not originate from repressed childhood horrors. Not only did the tale involve factual characters with potentially ugly libel suits had Ralston irresponsibly neglected to secure proper legalities, and not only did the story flaunt similar if not identical references to William’s blatantly obvious alien abduction-like episodes, but the time frame of the plot itself overlapped this present time.
What he had read was enough to make him call it a night, and he had retreated to the bedroom as though to avoid having to admit to himself that he’d unwittingly set himself up to be raped of all rationality. And that was before the night made it all the more worse.
Overcome by immediacy and the panic of bleak premonition, William fled the bedroom. He made his way down the lightless half-spiral of staircase and