Free The Everborn by Nicholas Grabowsky Page B

human,” I half-challenged, half-reasoned, fully irate, “and if you know what I went through driving over here....hell, if you know all the shit I got into before I woke up tonight, you’d full as fucking well know I want answers , not a cigarette.”
    “Listen, Uncle,” he told me, addressing me as such, perhaps to insult me further, “I was once human. I was human a thousand times over you. When a being as elusive and illustrious as myself offers you even a cigarette, you’d better take what he gives you. He might be preparing you for what kind of shit there is to follow. I full well know you had little to prepare you for anything until now, since you awoke tonight. You want it or not?”
    I stood, leaned across the bed, and took it from him. My fingertips brushed against his, though the instantaneous touch was void of sensation. I dared not gaze beyond those fingers, for fear I might behold his full face unprepared. As I withdrew, a red Bic plunged upon the bedspread beneath me. I took it, sparked a light, inhaled. I took in the smoke, expecting to cough it out immediately. I didn’t. Exhaling, blowing a smoke stream upwards and to the ceiling, I felt admittedly refreshed. In thinking so, I felt like a cigarette billboard slogan. I flung the lighter back to him, and he snatched it from between the white cotton crease of his bathrobe and where he sat. I returned to my wooden desk chair.
    “In all actuality,” the Watcher continued, “you smoked quite a great deal when you were dead.”
    I gagged on my half-inhaled smoke.
    “In fact,” he added, “you smoked a great deal just before you died. Like an oil refinery. Took up the nasty habit again not long before, when tension in life and more precisely in your marriage lured you to return to the habit. Shortly after your death, Melony had an affair, you know, before she found out what happened to you. You worked her ass off, in that business partnership of yours.”
    I did not like where this was leading. I was recalling more and more of the truth in the words the Watcher spoke of and I detested more and more both what he said and how he said them. I had not been summoned here to discuss my marriage nor cigarette smoking, had not been prepared to be grilled beneath the thrift-store-flowery lampshade of a motel room I did not enter on my own accord. The recurring fears of my wife’s safety were becoming replaced with a swelling conviction that it was I who had been kidnapped, if anyone was at all. I slid a pink plastic wastebasket I found at the desk’s side across the carpet with my shoe to catch my ashes.
    Then I spoke my mind.
    “Just a minute. Just a goddamn sixty seconds. Can I say something, here? Are you through ? I can’t believe I’m here to listen to this, can’t fucking believe I’m sitting here, smoking a fucking cigarette , with you talking to me like this, smoking a fucking cigarette yourself! Hell, I can’t believe I’ve finally met one of you, and I’m talking to you like this! Is that what you do to people, how you abduct people, ‘cause I’ve been under the impression it had nothing to do with smoke sessions in motel rooms and goddamn electric typewriters and letters to meet somewhere at Joe-Billy Bob’s Breakfast in the Boonies if you survive the Death-diesel Brigade getting there---.”
    “Are you finished speaking your mind?” the Watcher spat an interruption of smoke and words from an exhaled first drag of a new cigarette, another of which I had not noticed until it made an announcement all its own by a flaunt between fingers.
    And then he rose from the bed and turned to face me fully.
    He stared straight into my own eyes; I knew he did, yet his eyes bore no pupils, therefore this knowledge was more of an awareness than anything, yet this awareness was so strong I felt his glare blazing headlong through my own, locked into mine. If it were laser beams they surely would have blinded me and pierced clear the hell out of the back