Free The Everborn by Nicholas Grabowsky Page A

I thought to tell him, purely out of offense, I am not your Uncle , but the thought why did he call me Uncle distracted me, and instead I found myself dumbfounded, and I asked him, “Who are you?”
    “I am a Watcher.”
    I waited. In waiting, I noticed he had not changed his position, but remained in a half-turn, leaning toward his ashtray and I got the self-conscious feeling he was scrutinizing me from the corner of an eye that appeared to be bulbous and black.
    He continued, “Don’t ask me why I’m called that. That is what they call me. Why they call me that is a long story. What matters now is that I’m watching you.”
    I said nothing. I couldn’t say anything .
    “And you are watching me,” he said. “I must be very new to you, yet I’m very old. Older than you may suppose. Older than what I supposed when I thought I was human. Does that surprise you? That I thought I was once human?”
    This time he waited for an answer and, mesmerized, I gave him one. “I don’t know what surprises me anymore. When I was still in college, I was earning my way as a security guard. I was making minimum wage guarding this old cannery, and some children I knew decided to take a tour of this condemned apartment building, God knows where they got the guts, on the other side of it. They got around me, and before I knew it, I was pulled from my post by one of them, this little girl. She told me her friend was in trouble. When I got there, deep inside the building, I came across a boy who had seen something. It turned out that another boy, a little black boy, had died in his arms and was taken away by that same something afterwards. The older boy who had come upon him went into shock and later said that he’d seen some sort of a monster. Their reason for going there was to see a ghost baby, a superstitious rumor the people in that area were nuts about. But what the older boy saw wasn’t any ghost. It turned out to be huge, whatever it was, and it was guarding an infant. That is, if you buy the story. I learned to buy the story.” I could not take my gaze from the Watcher. “And I guess you buy it, too.”
    “News came in that the body of an infant was discovered in the back alley of a nightclub this summer,” I remembered I was now in January , “ last summer. That news eventually led me to a church, and I was the only one who knew the child’s murderer went to that church. This toddler was verified as missing in 1968. And he was still a toddler. Dead. Talk about a ghost baby. But he wasn’t a ghost baby before he went looking for a ghost baby. I believed this other mysterious child grew to maturity, and eventually murdered this black child again , the one they found behind the club.
    “Second, that thing I saw in the diner, when I came up here, before I blacked out and found myself here, looked exactly like what that boy with the spider bite described way back when. Jesus, I thought it was my wife , at first. I mean...”
    “You thought Bari was your wife ?” the Watcher asked. “You’ve been gone way too long, my friend.”
    I did not appreciate this whitewashed ridicule. “You know exactly what I mean.” I bit my lip before any uncertain convictions drove me to ask, don’t you? And then, in effort to restrain that uncertainty and retain my focus, I added, or rather, forced , “You mean, I’ve been dead way too long.”
    “No, gone too long. You’ve been dead long enough.”
    There appeared suddenly a new cigarette between the fingers of the hand that dowsed the last. I had not noticed how it got there, had not noticed any movement for him to reach for one. But as soon as my eyes fell upon it, and this realization had sunk in, he lifted the unlit smoke and offered it to me. His hand reached out in mid-stretch behind his back, over his shoulder.
    I declined. “Haven’t picked one up in eighteen years.”
    “And you died anyway.”
    “Am I still dead?”
    “You want this?”
    “If you were once