The Everborn by Nicholas Grabowsky

side of my fragile human head. His head appeared even more flimsy, almost ghostly white, yet darker, an off-white, almost grey, although I do admit the color of his skin, particularly the skin of his face, played with the shadows of the lamplight and the perceptions of certain dull reality within my mind.
    I witnessed infinity in those eyes. I do sincerely mean infinity...those two optical crevices, slanted diagonally as decades of research and even more decades of reported encounters have made me come to have expected, those two eyes drew me into them, and the further they drew me, the more I found I could not escape their gaze, or at least the ultimate attention their gaze commanded me into. Those black, glossy, infinite eyes were hypnotic unlike any human hypnotist I had ever encountered, almost impossible to describe on human terms because human was most definitely what they weren’t, yet, somehow, in that motel bathrobe getup, standing still and silent and facing me as he did, he looked like Yoda. Even still, Yoda’s white, earless, second cousin. Smoking second cousin, the one out on parole.
    “In speaking your mind,” he told me as I sat, forgetting my own cigarette, the one I wasn’t smoking now, its ashes falling where they may within the pink wastebasket or the shaggy shabby carpeting, I didn’t care or notice at that point which, “have you taken into account that I can read your mind? That I know your thoughts? That you haven’t really said anything to me at all yet, haven’t told me anything I didn’t really already know , let alone told me anything?”
    I could not release my gaze from his. I understood what he was saying to me, yet I could not feel any reaction to what he was saying, like the occasional times past when someone would talk to me and I was so incredibly tired or dazed I would find myself more attentive to who was talking rather than to what they were talking about. His words were seeping into me, however, and I would remember them enough to carry them with me as though what he said were to remain a part of my very existence for the remainder of my life and beyond into eternity.
    He continued, and in doing so, he proceeded to explain what I did not know and what I already knew, my past, present, future, my situation with him and my destiny in the tasks which I have even then performed by my very presence there and the tasks that I was to perform still, for his sake, for the sake of my wife, myself, and for the sake of time untold.
     
    ***
     
    He explained to me a few things. Only a few. Everything else I needed desperately to know would be explained to me soon, over the course of time and over the hours I would spend in the endeavor I was about to undertake, with his help, for his benefit and for the benefit of all involved. He was about to explain to me that I was about to do this for him and willingly, I might add, though the way he imposed this upon me came about so naturally that likewise naturally I could not refuse him. To refuse him was inevitably to refuse what I had come there for, or rather what he summoned me there for. I had come there for many reasons, but he, I found, had summoned me there for a matter of utmost importance, a matter I was as of yet very much unaware.
    I was about to become aware.
    And this was how the Watcher made me thus.
    This was what he explained:
    “Although you may not have said very much, you must have thought a great deal, ‘cause I’ve gotten a Goliath of a headache from your thoughts, Mister UFO Busybody, Mister Detective or Private Investigator or whatever you call yourself. For starters, don’t get the idea that I’ve achieved this mental capability from something as mundane or universal as evolution. I am not a being as simple as having been evolved from humanity’s future, am not an example of what you guys are gonna look like a thousand years from now, am not a volunteer space cadet on a rescue mission to preserve the species, any