The Sorrow King (28 page)

She screamed for her mom who came into the room, grabbed a heavy vase, and began smashing Brian over the head. Once he fell off the couch, bloodied, limp and unconscious, Amy stood up and flew at her mother, the overprotective bitch.

Bobby and Alex Regal had been playing in their room when the cloud came. Now Bobby was on the floor and Alex was shoving a wooden block boldly emblazoned with the letter “S” down his throat.

Ken Blanchard sat in his motel room on the outskirts of Gethsemane, alone and straitjacketed, his door locked tight, screaming because he was filled with so much murderous rage and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. He had come back because he knew Connor and his son were in trouble. But he had been too late. He knew that. The rage was all for himself. He hated himself. He cursed God for the foresight to put on a straitjacket. He ran into a wall until he fell unconscious.

No one complained about the noise.

Twenty-seven

Attic Days

Connor was oblivious to what had been happening in Gethsemane after Steven’s death.

The phone didn’t ring because he had broken all the phones in the house. People came to his door and knocked furiously for a few minutes before leaving. They always left. No one broke down the door to see what he was up to. To an outsider, it wouldn’t have looked like he was up to much.

He hadn’t really moved in those days that followed the funeral. He had sat in the attic, on a box of old books, looking through the small semicircular windows at the water tower and reading through Steven’s notebook.

Steven had known things.

Connor convinced himself of that.

Even if Steven had not been aware of that knowledge, it was there, ready to burst through the surface. Perhaps that was why he had to die.

He had written the names of the clouds. He had written the names of the dead. He had written about the water tower and something called Obscura. He had written quite a few things, some of them nonsensical.

And he had written a story.

This had been one of the things that sent Connor into his stupor. Reading Steven’s story sent shivers down his spine, raised his skin.

Because it wasn’t Steven’s story Steven had written. It was his. He had written it when he was seventeen. He had written it for a creative writing class at Glowers Hook High School. After reading Steven’s story, Connor had searched through the boxes in the attic until he came across the yellowed, badly typed copy of his own story. Even the title was the same. He read through both of them and they were, word for word, the same story.

He didn’t know how that could happen. He held in his hands the only existing copy of that story. Steven had never even seen it and Connor knew he had not been up in the attic, rummaging around.

He didn’t know
why
Steven had written the story.

Sitting in the attic, he realized a number of things.

He was tired of logic. All his life had been spent adhering to one form of logic or another. He either did things because he didn’t want to hurt someone or he did things because it would help someone. It was always because because because. Whatever had been happening, he hoped there wasn’t a because behind it. There
couldn’t
be any logic behind it. Logic wouldn’t take his son away. Logic wouldn’t steal the only thing he had left.

He did a lot of thinking in those few days, the attic days, much of it abstract. He didn’t even bother to move. He pissed himself until his body ran out of the fluids necessary for manufacturing piss. He sat on the box, hunched over and stinking, closing his eyes for only brief moments at a time, staring out the window at the water tower and feeling logic slip away. Feeling some other part of his brain take over. He came to his conclusions and it was only a matter of time before he acted on them. That was the debate he had locked into, whether or not he should act on his feelings or sit there until he died.

These were his conclusions:

Something was happening. While that may have seemed obvious, it was also liberating. If something was happening then it could be stopped. He knew it didn’t have anything to do with psychology or sociology. While it appeared these kids were killing themselves, something was making them do it. Something that went far beyond sociology or biology.

Steven had known something. Or, if he hadn’t
known
anything, then something was communicating with him, forcing him to write these things in this notebook. Maybe he wrote the things in the notebook knowing Connor would read them. Perhaps Connor was the one who was supposed to act. Maybe he was the one supposed to do something about all the suicides. But stopping the suicides wouldn’t bring Steven back.

Or could it?

If there
was
something supernatural happening, then it wasn’t that off-the-wall to think Steven could be brought back, was it?

Continually, he came back to the story, “The Jackthief.” Was that who was doing it? Was that who had caused these kids to commit suicide? He thought it was impossible. Maybe it wasn’t the Jackthief that he had originally depicted in the story. But maybe it was something like the Jackthief. If Steven was able to channel something he had written nearly twenty years ago, then it wasn’t that big of a stretch to think he could have written something someone somewhere had wanted written.

It was a warning. A warning and, quite possibly, a guide. It had to be. It had to serve some purpose.

Because that was really the only thing that made sense and he reminded himself things didn’t have to make sense anymore because nothing made sense.

Yes. The only thing that would want to see children dead was something that fed on sorrow. The Jackthief. What was more sorrowful than a young suicide? When a person dies of old age, the family and loved ones of that person grieve, they feel sorrow, but a whole
town
grieves for a death of the young. Especially a tragic death like a suicide. A teenage suicide was sorrow and consternation and fear. Fear because it made people remember how scary it was to be young and it reminded them it was possible for your brain to turn against you.

The people of Gethsemane were like the old lady in the story. After each death they told themselves it wasn’t going to happen again. They prayed it wouldn’t happen again. And when it happened again, there was all the sorrow reborn, bleeding out into the open.

Whatever it was Connor was going to look for, it wasn’t human. That was another conclusion he had reached. Five days ago, he would have laughed at himself for having that thought. He wasn’t even sure he believed in God. How could he believe in a monster? No. He knew it was much easier to believe in monsters than gods. In a world where things like disease and war were in far more abundance than miracles, monsters seemed inevitable.

Sitting there on his box, he knew he was going to go looking for this monster.

If it drove him insane to do it, then he didn’t figure it mattered anyway. He was the one. He had to do it. Because he was the only one who knew. He already felt crazy just thinking a thought like that. But there was a truth to it. He felt the truth, somewhere in his bones. He was not going to let death swallow him down without finding some answer to this mystery.

Now, the only question was where to begin.

The names of the clouds. That was where Steven had started. First he had named the dead and then he had named the clouds.

He leaned forward on the box, craning his neck up to look at the dark gray sky.

What was up there?

Was
any
thing up there?

How much of Steven’s notebook should he believe? Was it all equally valid?

These were not questions he thought he could answer himself. Certain things stood out and he focused on those.

Steven had written about the water tower. If Connor intended to start from any particular spot, he knew it had to be the water tower. Besides, that was the only thing remotely resembling a physical location. Flipping to where Steven had written the word “Obscura,” he had the faint sensation that it could be a place but, hell, he figured it could be just about anything. It could, after all, just be a word. For that matter, the entire notebook could possibly be words that meant nothing.

But the time for deciphering was over. He knew where the water tower was and it made sense to go there since he had been staring at it for days, completely unaware of what he was doing, never quite making the connection. Ken had even
told
him he had seen dead people walking into the water tower. Ghosts, locked in the tower. Perhaps Steven was among them.

Connor stood up from the box and woozily sat back down. His head felt light. His bones felt stiff. Moving wasn’t going to be as easy as he had thought it would be. Even the adrenaline he thought he could summon for such a reason wasn’t there. His whole body felt weighed down by a thick quilt of doom.

Finally, he managed to stand up, going through the trashed house and out into the unusually cool summer air. Something else was bothering him but he decided not to think about that. He couldn’t think about that yet. His brain was too full of crazy thoughts and he figured he would be able to find out for himself in a few minutes anyway.

It felt good to be outside. It did not feel so good to be walking toward the water tower. That black, pervasive wall of doom came from it, driving him away and pulling him closer at the same time. That was the only way he was going to be able to end this, wasn’t it? To trudge right into that black heart.

Looking up at the clouds, he walked on.

Twenty-eight

The Agreement

Time ran together like a sloppy oil painting.

Elise had no idea how long ago it had been since she was first dragged to this place. This place with that
thing
, the Sorrow King.

Lack of food, lack of water, and lack of sleep caused her surroundings to take on a hallucinatory quality. Of course, she had thought it was all pretty hallucinatory to begin with.

The Sorrow King’s creature, whatever it was, still clung to her leg. She wondered how much blood she had lost. At first, she had tried kicking it from her leg but stopped when she realized that only caused it to stick its sucker in even deeper. Now she could feel its weight on her leg.

It had grown heavier since first latching on. Now it was full of her blood and its increasing weight constituted the only thing resembling the passage of time.

She wondered how much longer she had left. How much longer until she died from hunger or blood loss or exhaustion? While she had never heard of a person dying from fatigue she was so tired she thought it might just be possible.

The Sorrow King came to her, came to all of the dead, bringing more sorrow. Bringing even more death. She could smell it on him like being downwind from a slaughterhouse.

The last time he had come he had spoken to her for the first time in what had to have been days, saying, “You could stop all this. You know that, don’t you?”

“
How? Stop it by becoming what you are? That doesn’t seem like it would be stopping anything.”

“
But you would have control over it. You could do with this death what you want to do. I don’t have to do what I’m doing. I do it because I like it. And becoming human is my one great challenge.”

“
That’s what I don’t understand.” She spoke softly. She had done a lot of thinking since her time here but the various deprivations gave it a fevered, nonsensical quality. Nothing really made sense to her anymore and she didn’t see any point in trying to make it make sense. “What I don’t understand is . . . I’m going to die anyway. One way or the other I’m going to die. And then what benefit will I have to you? What benefit do I have to you now? Why me?”

“
I already told you that. Because you know everything. You know how it’s done and, while you don’t want to admit it to yourself, you have a real passion for it.”

“
A passion for killing people?”

“
A passion for
sorrow
. Look at the way you clung to Steven. You sensed it, the sorrow on his collar. If you die, you’re right, you’re worthless to me. You are only good for the sorrow you create. But, at least that way, then you will not be tempting me.”

“
How do I tempt you?”

“
Because you are the last thing standing between me being what I am and me being human.”

“
What do you have to do to make me like you and why haven’t you done that yet?”

The Sorrow King seemed to hesitate.

“
You have to
want
to become. You’re the only one that can transform yourself.”

“
And I have to die?”

“
Yes.”

“
Then . . . I’m still confused. Why don’t you just kill me?”

“
You have to die in a very specific way. Not by my hand.”