The Sorrow King (23 page)

She moved off the mattress and onto the floor of the barn, onto her knees.

Then she vomited.

He scooted to the edge of the mattress and ran a hand along her back, ignoring the stink coming up from her. He looked at her, seeing everything differently now. The gentle slope of her back became her buttocks and he could see blood there, trickling down the inside of her leg. He looked down at his shrunken dick, now crusted with a thin coating of blood, and hated himself for being a man. He continued to rub the middle of her back as she retched again. His fingertip wound must have broken open sometime during their act and he had inadvertently wiped some blood in a scraggly line down her spine.

She retched again and he felt something strange. He felt her spine move . . . or
bulge
 . . . or something.

She swiped his hand away and stood up, wandering dazedly into a darkened corner of the barn.

The rain had stopped.

The thunder had stopped.

The lightning had stopped.

“
The storm’s over,” she mumbled to the darkness in front of her. “I’m not yours anymore.”

“
What do you mean?”

She turned around and it was his turn to feel sick.

Her sex looked like it had been mutilated. A giant blossom of red, blood flowing freely.

He didn’t believe what he was seeing. For the first time he realized this was not Elise. Her body was doing something strange. It was quivering but, more than that, it seemed to be growing smaller and larger, a kind of strange vibration.

“
What’s going on?” he asked.

“
You really don’t know, do you?” she said but the voice was not hers. He thought he knew who that voice belonged to. “Boy, you sure did fuck me hard.”

Her body grew thinner and taller. Her hair fell away from her scalp in clumps. Her eyes rolled down her cheeks and landed with a wet plop on the floor of the barn.

“
You had every warning sign you could have and you still fell into it.”

In front of him stood the Jackthief. Steven knew it was the Jackthief. And this wasn’t his mother’s old boyfriend at all. This was something far more hideous. This was not a person but some construct of his mind. Only . . . it seemed too real to be just a construct. And Steven didn’t think he was dreaming. He didn’t see how he could be dreaming. His dreams were never
this
real.

He didn’t know exactly what he should do. Part of him wanted to grab his clothes and put them on but another part of him felt like he was in great danger and knew he had to get away. So he compromised. He grabbed his clothes up from the floor and ran to his left, toward the hanging door of the barn that flapped weirdly in the dying breeze. But before he could get to the door, the Jackthief was there, blocking his way.

“
You’re not getting out,” the Jackthief said. “You have your father to thank for this.”

“
What do you mean by that? My father didn’t do anything.”

The thing in front of Steven was now fully clothed in something resembling black rags. He moved toward Steven, hypnotically slow, but there was a quickness there as well.

“
Come with me, Steven. What do you have to live for?”

“
I have a lot to live for.”

“
Name one thing.”

“
Elise.”

“
You just saw her change before your very eyes. She never was. Elise never was. There has only been me. I can tell you about the things you told her and I can tell you about the clouds and the water tower. I can tell you about everything. Want to hear about the undoing? Want to hear the name of suicide number seven?”

“
I don’t want to hear it.”

Hot anger flashed within him. This thing in front of him was what had been driving him mad these past months. It was fear and it was fear given the name of the Jackthief. A thief of life, come to take him away. Yes, he was angry. If he could kill the Jackthief then he knew the suicides would stop. He knew the fear would go away. He charged at the skeletal man, thinking he wouldn’t be that hard to take down.

But the Jackthief moved quickly out of the way and seemed to disappear.

Steven turned around, looking for him in the gloom of the barn. He knew he wasn’t going to leave until the Jackthief was dead. This was the confrontation . . . this was the
something
he had wanted. And it was packaged up so nicely for him. Somewhere in this barn. He quickly pulled on his pants and his shirt, foregoing his underwear and remembering his shoes and socks had been left out in the rain.

“
I’m up here,” the Jackthief said and Steven looked up to the second level of the barn, the hayloft, and saw the man looking down at him. “If you’re going to run, you should probably do it.”

“
I’m not going to run.”

“
Then you’re going to die.”

Steven stalked over to the wooden ladder propped against the hay loft, wondering what he was doing. He had no weapon of any kind. Whatever this thing was, it was more monster than human. God only knew what it would be capable of doing to him.

The farmer’s implements were lined neatly along the board the ladder was propped against, leather thongs holding them onto wooden pegs. Near the top of the ladder, Steven reached out and grabbed a sickle. It had a large rusted blade but a short well-worn wooden handle.

He pulled himself up to the hayloft and stared at the Jackthief.

“
Are you sure you want to use that?” he said.

“
I’m going to get you out of my head forever.”

“
If you do that, then Elise dies.”

“
You just told me Elise doesn’t exist.”

“
That was a lie. See for yourself.” The Jackthief nodded to his right and Steven saw Elise.

She stood at the end of a board, dangling out over the rest of the barn, a noose around her neck. The Jackthief stood at the far end of the board. If he moved from the board, Elise would drop. There was a moment when Steven thought it might actually be Elise. Insanity kept him second guessing himself. He had just seen this thing in front of him transform from Elise into its current state so he thought it was just as plausible Elise had been here the entire time and he hadn’t noticed or the Jackthief had somehow conjured Elise to be here at this exact moment. Steven wondered how long it had been since he had had a thought that wasn’t crazy.

“
No,” he said. “That’s not really her. If that’s really her . . . If you have somehow managed to bring her here then you can kill me without any problem at all. So if she dies and I die trying to save her, I think I’ll be better off than walking away from you.”

“
Well,” the Jackthief said. “Then I should probably just kill her now.” And he stepped from the board, Elise dropping into murk.

Steven took this moment of hesitation to lurch forward, swinging the sickle in a large roundhouse, aiming at the Jackthief’s neck. The Jackthief reached out a thin arm and grabbed the sickle, pulling Steven close to him so he could smell the scent of burning wax and dead leaves. The Jackthief reached a hand around the back of his neck and shoved him over to the edge of the loft so he was looking down at Elise.

“
I don’t think I did it right,” the Jackthief said. “She’s not quite dead yet but soon . . . soon.”

Steven bucked against him but the Jackthief picked him up and slammed him down on the wooden floor, standing over top of him with the sickle. Steven heard Elise’s choked breaths from below and looked up into the crazy no-eyes of the Jackthief as he brought the sickle down into his chest. Steven heard the sick wet pop of the blade penetrating his breastbone and found it difficult to breathe.

“
You wanted me here,” the Jackthief said as he swung the sickle again, point down. “Just remember that. You wanted this. Of all the people I’ve done this to, no one has wanted it as much as you.”

Steven tried to sit up but the sickle came down again, taking him through the heart. There was a fresh explosion of pain and everything went black.

PART

THREE

Twenty-two

Secrets

On the day of Steven’s suicide, Elise walked out the back door of her house, down the sloping backyard until she reached the woods. At the edge of the woods, she had constructed a sort of hut out of old branches she had twined together. It was a low structure, built with its back to the house. She liked to come out here when her father and stepmother were fighting. She called this hut the Obscura.

Today’s argument had been over something as stupid as most of the other arguments. Her stepmother, Rachel, had returned home from her job at Gethsemane Merchants’ Bank and began picking at her father. Her father had invested in a local store that looked like it was going to go belly-up in a couple of months. This was a side project for her father and she guessed he made maybe one bad investment out of ten. Most of their arguments were about money. Given their professions, Elise thought that was probably only natural. Her father was the president of CashSmart, one of those check cashing places that loaned money to people who shouldn’t have money loaned to them.

Elise thought they were both predators. That’s what she imagined them as, giant birds of prey, stalking around the kitchen and arguing over the one truly unimportant thing in life.

But she didn’t have to hear it anymore. Now there was the tranquil silence of the Obscura.

Her family moved a lot. At least once every couple of years and, everywhere they moved, Elise had an Obscura. A little hiding place that wasn’t really so secret but she thought maybe the things that happened inside them were. The last one had been a shed made from particle board her father used for lawn equipment and Rachel used for gardening tools. She hadn’t liked that one so much. It was always hot and smelled like gasoline and oil. Before that, during her family’s brief stay in the country, a barn had served as the Obscura. That was in Indiana. One of the more memorable ones had been when they lived in California. Elise had claimed a kind of cove on the beach as her Obscura.

It didn’t really matter what the structure was, the interior was always the same. Calm, relaxing, like a dream. Nevertheless, she found she was using the Obscura with lesser frequency than she used to. But maybe that was because of the strange idea she had. Maybe that was part of the secret.

It wasn’t until moving to Gethsemane that Elise noticed a direct correlation between the Obscura and the deaths. More specifically, the suicides.

After the first one, she started paying attention.

Suicide Number One had been a boy named Alan Stanton. He had committed suicide by hanging himself on the same day she was in the Obscura. At first she didn’t really think anything of it. Then she read about it in the local paper and found his death had also occurred at roughly the same time she had been in the Obscura.

There was also one other important detail she couldn’t seem to overlook.

Alan Stanton had smelled bad. He had smelled very very bad. If Get High had a smelly kid, all fingers or maybe, all
noses
, would point to Alan Stanton. It seemed as though he had a double dilemma of not using underarm deodorant and not washing his ass.

When she had come out of her dream state in the Obscura, she had noticed this smell. She had not immediately placed it as Alan’s unique brand of stink. She just knew it was awful and all permeating and she had to leave because of it. But there was something familiar about it. She thought about that pungent stench for days but didn’t make the connection even after hearing about Alan’s death at school.

It didn’t strike her until Carrie brought it up. She had been at Carrie’s house and Carrie was talking about how completely crazy it was someone they knew actually killed themselves and she had said something about bad hygiene being a sign of suicidal tendencies. Elise had laughed, thinking bad hygiene was probably more the result of laziness than any sort of deep seeded psychosis and it hit her and her laughter died away.

Yes, Alan had indeed smelled.

And, on the day of his death, the Obscura had also smelled.

When she had gone back home, rushing into the Obscura, not to hide this time but to smell, she breathed in and there was still just the faintest hint of that stench and she was able to place it perfectly. She shared a gym class with the unfortunate Alan Stanton and there really was no worse time for a person with body odor than gym class. But that was where she had smelled the scent before.

And then she began wondering if she had somehow killed Alan Stanton.

In fact, if that were the case, she wondered how many people she had killed over the past several years. She had been hiding in some Obscura or other for as long as she could remember. And, when she was a kid, she used to do it all the time. She used to do it just to get attention. She would go out there and hide and, eventually, her father or her mother and, later, Rachel, would come out to look for her. But she didn’t know of any way she could put the two together. She had never attached her visits to the Obscura with death before and she couldn’t remember any of the exact dates of when she had gone into the Obscura. She was either too young and unobservant to notice, or it had never really happened before.