The Everborn Read Online Free PDF

off in his hands, as though he’d been dragged through a coal mine.
    “Do you live here?” he asked the infant.
    The baby was silent, squatting diaperless, within the surrounding blackness under the filtered beam of sun. He glanced up at his visitor, then down again at something he appeared to be playing with, something he held within his hands. Whatever he held, it seemed to be moving. Something small, no more than the size of a human eye.
    Nigel picked himself up from the stretch of concrete floor and patted white plaster-dust from his clothes. The dust rose upwards and around his face like a cloud and he swished it from his eyes. He coughed once, twice, from the dust, stepped forward little by little to the baby. He entered into the dim sunlight stream just enough to cast a shadow...
    ...and just enough to view the thing which captivated the infant’s attentions so. It was shiny black, rounded at the body into a slick polished teardrop tip, eight legs contracting around a ruby red hour glass.
    Nigel knew what it was. He had been taught what bugs to touch and what not to. And he knew big black ugly spiders could bite. Could kill. Like snakes. Like strangers. Like crossing the street without looking both ways.
    And he knew this spider was a bad one.
    Or was it?
    Why wasn’t it biting the baby?
    “Is that a pet?” inquired Nigel. “Is it? You shouldn’t play with spiders, you know. Is it a pet?”
    Just then, slowly, the infant raised its hand, palm upwards, exposing a candid presentation of the creature crawling deliberatively upon a bed of fleshy pink and five outstretched digits.
    A black widow.
    “Did you take out its teeth?” asked the boy now, taken aback by the infant’s gesture, a move which suggested a bid for Nigel to handle the menace himself. Dismayed at his own temptation to oblige the infant, Nigel scrubbed his hands into the knees of his trousers in sweaty preparation to accept the offering. “Is it your friend? Is it really?”
    As it lifted the spider persuasively closer, the infant opened its mouth to speak. It spoke in a faint, slurred whisper. “Reeeeally.”
    Reeeeally .
    It was imitating him. “I’ll be your friend, too....okay?” And with that, Nigel fearfully extended his arm to receive the creature. Very, very carefully...
    The spider’s soft, bulbous body tumbled from the infant’s overturned hand and plopped dead center, onto the yielding flesh of Nigel’s, its legs recoiled by the sudden turbulence.
    And then came the screams.
     
    ***
     
    Matthew and Dabby had been calling out for no more than a handful of minutes before they heard the screams. Matthew’s first impulse was to escape into another room and away from a second assault of Dabby’s hysterics, but she had stiffened with the cries in suspenseful expectation. It was not very often that Nigel so much as cried, let alone screamed and the two youngsters feared their own mounting suspicions that these were Wraith-child cries. Or worse.
    The Wraith-child got Nigel .
    Without a second to spare, the two raced toward the sounds, up and over plywood and broken concrete and piles of bricks, past torn walls and jet streams of light, to the opposite wall’s gaping hole.
    Matthew peered inside. He could see nothing. “Nigel?”
    Another scream, this time less distant, but nevertheless quite faint.
    Quickly, the boy lunged through the torn hole. His feet fumbled onto an angled plywood board and he came crashing down, sliding, vaguely attentive to Dabby’s shrill outcries behind him. Within the next instant, he found himself face-down upon icy cement. Rising rather awkwardly to one side, he flinched at the sudden jolt of pain within his left elbow. Turning, the pain subsided as his attentions riveted to the convulsing specter of his friend. Matthew leapt over to the small boy, seizing him immediately, turning him onto his back.
    “Nigel,” Matthew bellowed, “Nigel, what’s wrong?”
    Just then something distracted him, and