The Sorrow King (2 page)

“
They won’t be able to hear you.”

“
They’re right down the hall.” Jeremy was already wondering if Fitzer had done something to them. Maybe he had killed them but . . . why would he do that?

Probably for the same reason he’s standing in your room and threatening to kill you.

“
Why can’t they hear me?”

“’
Cause it’s just you and me. We’re in the Obscura.”

“
The what?”

“
Never mind. I didn’t want to come here either. But I had to. Just like you had to.”

Okay
, Jeremy told himself,
this kid is fucking nuts.

“
Dad!” he shouted, but his voice sounded pitifully weak, his vocal cords tightened by fear.

Fitzer moved in on him, swinging a large fist into his forehead, driving him down to the floor. Blackness swirled around him. His teeth hurt from bashing together and he felt the warm wetness of drool sinking in through his pajama top.

He stood up, suddenly wanting to feel alive, realizing all his fears from earlier were just that . . . fears. Things that would go away given some time and maturity.

He lunged to his left, going for his aluminum Louisville Slugger in the corner. He grabbed the leather-taped handle. Fitzer moved in on him, trapping him in the corner, disallowing him to gather enough momentum for a really good swing. Jeremy jabbed the bat at Fitzer’s knees but it didn’t have any effect. They might as well have been made of rubber.

Fitzer kicked the bat out of Jeremy’s hands and rained down with his murderous fists.

Jeremy’s skin opened up, weakening and then splitting over his skull, his lips and nose mushrooming with each blow. He tried to stand up but his head felt too swollen.

Fitzer grabbed the cloth of Jeremy’s pajamas, dragging him across the room.

Oh, God, please let him be done with me.

Fitzer pulled Jeremy closer to him, turning him to face the window he had stared wonderingly out of only hours before. Fitzer threw him against the window. It cracked but didn’t break all the way. Jeremy moaned and fell into a heap on the floor. Fitzer picked him back up, backed away from the window, and propelled him against it again. This time it shattered, most of the glass falling outward, but Jeremy managed to stay in the room.

With one last effort, one last attempt to hold onto a life he couldn’t believe was ebbing away, Jeremy swiped with his right hand to grab his bedside lamp. He felt its thin brushed steel surface in his hand and, tightening his grip as best he could, took a wild and lunging swing at Fitzer. The lamp shade flew off, the bulb breaking over Fitzer’s nose, the remnants carving a jagged gash along his face. The skin opened up but blood did not come out. Instead, there was an awful
stink
. Jeremy couldn’t find anything to even compare the stench to and it was while having that thought, standing there for just a moment wondering what the hell was going on, that Fitzer struck him with all his force, lifting Jeremy off his feet and sending him through the window.

Jeremy was already so overcome with pain he did not feel the spike from the top of the fence punch into his back and puncture a lung.

Fitzer, who wasn’t a boy named Sam Fitzer at all, but something much worse, stood for just a moment in the room before becoming transparent and then disappearing completely.

Two

Steven Names the Clouds

Two miles away from Jeremy Liven’s fresh corpse, Steven Wrigley awoke from a horrendous dream. Sweat stood out on his forehead. He slept fully clothed (it made it easier for him to make it to school on time) and those clothes now stuck to his skin. Heart racing, he peeled the thin blanket from his body and clicked on the small desk lamp next to his single bed.

Nightmares were not something he had very often. Especially not ones he could remember. But this one stood out vividly in his mind. He didn’t think he would be able to sleep for the rest of the night.

The nightmare had taken him into a dirty hospital filled with an absurd multitude of corridors. The walls of these corridors were not solid. They were made of canvas sheets stretched between chrome tubing. He was going to find the doctor. That was the only thing racing through his mind. He had to see the doctor. He had to find the doctor. And this search led him down these dingy corridors, lit up too brightly from overhead.
Why would someone use such intense lighting on a place so filthy?
he wondered.

He came across a gurney, shoved into the corner. A patient lay on the gurney, old bloodstains covering his stained smock. He looked dead, the twitching nub of his amputated right leg the only animation on his body. It made Steven think the stump was full of something—insects or a small animal—trying desperately to get out.

He continued his voyage.

Around another corner and there was a nurse dressed in crusted scrubs and wielding an instrument that seemed far too heinous to benefit anyone’s health, staring longingly at him. She licked her lips and something inside Steven actually stirred. Some part of him that knew if he took this seductive nurse in her disgusting outfit no one would know and no one would care.

Did dreams make rape permissible?

But he couldn’t stop, no matter how much his throbbing sex begged him to. He had to keep moving. He had to keep going, moving down another corridor and along rusty grates, thickly caked with blood and excrement. He had to see the doctor. He had to see the doctor.

Down a short flight of stairs and there stood a chubby little boy, also filthy, with a bloodstained eyepatch over one of his eyes. The eyepatch had once been white and Steven thought most eyepatches were black. Perversely, he wondered what was behind that patch, regretting he did not have the time to stay and find out.

The doctor was close. The doctor was close.

Steven opened a steel door onto a very bright room, the light so bright it stung his eyes as they strained to find the doctor who seemed to be doing some utterly horrible experiment. The doctor, huge and looming, worked on a girl at the operating table. She was completely opened up, a bloody flap of skin hanging down from her side. Steven moved closer, wanting to see what was inside . . .

That was when he woke up.

Now he sat on the edge of his bed looking around at his dim surroundings, taking stock of reality.

Last summer, he had purchased a parachute at an Army surplus shop and had stapled it over his ceiling. The room was not very large and the parachute draped down, covering a good portion of the walls. It made him think of being in a tent and the parachute had a certain smell to it that now made him think immediately of home and this room. This room where he spent so much time.

He took a deep breath and pulled a steno notebook from a drawer in the desk beside his bed. Uncapping a black felt tipped marker, he wrote in the notebook:

cumulus

stratus

cirrus

nimbus

cumulonimbus

these are the names of the clouds

And, below that:

Alan Stanton

Serra Glover

Danny Wickham

Jeremy Liven

these are the names of the dead

destroyed (?)

But something didn’t seem right about that. What was it?

He ran a shaky hand through his sweaty black hair. He wanted a cigarette. He thought about the crumpled pack of Marlboro reds stashed in his desk. He needed one because he felt like there was a lot of junk he wanted to clear out of his head.

He didn’t know why he had written in the notebook. He had never done that before other than really pathetic attempts at poetry that inevitably found their way into the trashcan. He didn’t know where the writings had come from. Why was he thinking about clouds? Maybe it was something they had gone over in science class earlier that day but he couldn’t remember Mr. Parker lecturing about it. He was pretty sure they weren’t covering weather at all.

The second part . . . He recognized those names. The first three were kids from the high school, fellow students. That wasn’t, however, the only thing linking them. Over the course of the school year, they were the ones who, for whatever reasons, had committed suicide. This was earth shattering news in Gethsemane where there had maybe been one adolescent suicide in the past fifteen years.

And that last name . . . That last name, he didn’t recognize that at all. If this Jeremy character was one of the suicides then surely he would recognize the name. For each of the other suicides, there had been memorials in the gymnasium and public funerals most of the school had attended.

And ‘destroyed’? Why had he written that?

Nearly eighteen and already fucking nuts
, he thought, reaching into the desk drawer for the forbidden pack of smokes.

Not in the house. That was his rule. He knew his dad wouldn’t punish him if he caught him smoking. Ever since the death of Steven’s mother he and his dad had been more like friends than father and son but his heart would definitely be broken if he knew Steven smoked and he didn’t think his dad could handle any more heartbreak in this lifetime.

He grabbed the crinkly pack, pulled on a pair of tattered black Converse and a sweater that was wadded up on the floor, half-under his bed, and slipped out of the house.

Slipped out of the house, thinking about the clouds.

He stood there in the doorway, tugging his tattered moss green sweater down over his waist so the chilly air couldn’t snake across his skin. He thought maybe he would just stand there and smoke his cigarette but, looking up at the bloated moon in the cold depths of space, some magic was worked on him and he decided he would go for a stroll around the neighborhood.

Green Heights was the middle-maybe-lower-middle class suburb of Gethsemane. A step up from the apartments sprinkling the outskirts of downtown. A long way from Shade Terrace, the suburb on the other side of Gethsemane. Here, in Green Heights, the cars were American or cheap Japanese, many of them purchased secondhand. If the family unit was intact then the chances were pretty good both parents worked. Most of them worked in retail, middle-management, restaurants, warehouses, or factories.

He liked the little suburb. He liked walking through the neighborhood at night. It filled him with a sense of secret knowledge. The houses all sat quietly, most of the blinds drawn, some of the windows emitting the soft yellow glow of a night owl or the flickering image of a TV most likely left on for comfort more than entertainment.

The chilly air smelled nice. March in Ohio, winter teetering madly on the brink of spring, creating some kind of wild and schizophrenic season that could bring seventy degree balm one day and snow the next. Tonight it was somewhere in between. Just cold enough to be slightly uncomfortable. Just enough warmth in the breeze to remind him that summer wasn’t far away. People had already begun cutting their lawns and that smell was pervasive, along with the clean scent of laundry being dried and blown out of a vent.

He walked slowly along, looking up at the sky. The clouds were milky, swirling around the moon, formless and drifting over a darker sky.

Cumulus
, he thought. And then,
Jeremy Liven
.

Who was
he
?

Steven didn’t know. He didn’t have a clue. Over the past year, he had taken to thinking about stories. While he never wrote any of them down, he constantly thought of ideas and characters. Maybe Jeremy Liven was a character’s name, waiting to be used.

Or maybe . . .

Maybe Jeremy Liven
was
the latest suicide.

He dismissed that thought. That was just his mind trying to creep him out.

Far enough away from his house, he stopped and lit the cigarette, pulling smoke into his lungs. It seemed acrid after wandering around in the clean night air but it was the nicotine he wanted. It had a way of perking up his blood and clearing out his head and he thought his head would desperately need some clearing out if he had any hopes whatsoever of going back to sleep later tonight.

First there was the nightmare and then there was the naming of the clouds and then there was the naming of the dead.

And now there was a person walking on the other side of the narrow street.

At first glance, he thought he just imagined the person. Now, looking closer but trying not to stare, he saw that it was a girl. Younger than him, he guessed and, from this distance, very cute. He looked at her just long enough to capture a picture in his head—long straight hair he thought of as reddish but knew could be brown in this light, a bulky gray sweatshirt and jeans that hugged her hips nicely—before looking down at the sidewalk and pretending he didn’t see her.

But not before she had noticed him, not before that brief eye contact that sent his nicotine-infused heart beating even faster.