The Sorrow King (27 page)

“
If this were my dream,” she said, “you wouldn’t be here.”

“
Well,” the hybrid walked slowly toward her, out of Steven’s light, and Elise could see the creature generated light of its own. It reminded her of candlelight. “There is room for change in your dream. You can get rid of me. Just like you can bring that dead boy back to life. All you have to do is listen.”

She didn’t want to listen to anything this thing had to tell her but, suspended there, she didn’t see she really had much of a choice. She could either remain captive and stay there or she could listen to the thing. Maybe if she pretended to be interested, decreasing her hostility, he would let her go.

Or maybe he was going to kill her.

Maybe she was going to die just like Steven before her.

“
Are you ready to listen?” he said.

“
Yes,” she said, not looking at it, looking down at the floor at the strange things scuttling there.

“
Okay,” the thing said. “First of all, let me tell you why you’re really here.”

She realized a lot of things had taken their toll on her over the past few hours. She couldn’t quite focus on the thing as it strolled around the room. It swam in and out, sometimes losing the form of the hybrid and going back to that other thing, sometimes becoming something even more nebulous, something without any definite shape or name. What had he called that other image? The Jackthief.

“
The most simple explanation is this: You are here because you know my secrets. You don’t think you know, but you do. It’s sitting there, in your subconscious, waiting to come out. And if you ever discovered that . . . If you ever discovered what I am about to tell you on your own, then I don’t know how much longer I could continue. If you ever
shared
that information . . .”

“
Continue doing what?”

“
That’s what I’m coming to. Your knowing my secrets leaves me with one of two choices. I can either kill you. And not kill you like I’ve killed these other people. I mean kill you so you are merely a spirit, locked in a dead body, waiting for the final death, the soul death. Or . . . you could become what I am.”

“
But what are you?”

“
I’m a harvester of sorrow. I am the Sorrow King.”

“
But why?”

“
Because I need it to exist. I need it to grow strong.”

“
You need it to become human?”

“
I need
you
to become human.”

“
But why are you doing this?”

“
The suicides?”

“
Yes.”

“
Think of the sorrow that comes from a teenage suicide. Over the past several months, I have grown fat off the sorrow of their deaths.”

As if to prove his point, he walked to another place along the wall. Again, there was that faint bluish light and this time Mary Lovell was illuminated. The Sorrow King, very dim against the light, moved closer to her. He held her head in his hands and leaned in, pressing his lips against hers and sucking. Elise watched as some of Mary’s brightness faded and the Sorrow King became a little more substantial.

“
I could never become what you are. I wouldn’t
want
to be what you are.”

“
Then you will have to die.”

“
No. I won’t have to die. You’re not human. You’re not real. And you can’t hurt me. What is not real cannot hurt me.”

“
Strange. It’s hurt a lot of people over the past year.”

“
No. I’ve hurt those people. You’ve put yourself in my body, in my head, and then you killed them. Without me, you can’t kill anything.”

At this the Sorrow King threw back his head and laughed. The echoes from the laughter reverberated around her.

“
That was true until this one. This last one. That made me as strong as I needed to be. Spending so much time in your body allowed me to re-create it. That’s what happened to your little boyfriend. I fucked him. Only . . . you fucked him. Before he killed himself. It’s interesting. How people’s fears always end up killing them. He was afraid of you. Maybe he was afraid of all girls. And then, after he fucked you, he wasn’t so afraid of you . . . he was afraid of something else. He didn’t know how real the Jackthief was. Change the name and a few details and he had me. It made me feel naked. Like I was dragged out of the dark. That was probably the reason for all the brutality.”

“
You’re sick.”

“
We’re all sick. We’re all sick and we’re all dying but, if you decided to become like me, then you wouldn’t ever have to worry about dying again.”

“
I won’t do it.”

“
You’ll change your mind. Become like me and you can take Steven’s sorrow away. You can drink it away. You can make
him
like
you
.”

“
You’re lying. Everything you say is a lie.”

“
Suit yourself. I’ll give you time to change your mind. Just let me remind you. Before him, before you, I had restrictions. Now those restrictions are gone. I can move on my own. I don’t need you. I don’t need to find the right person who’s going to bring me just the right amount of sorrow. I can take anyone. And every day it takes you to decide, every day it takes you to die, there is going to be destruction like you’ve never seen. You’ve already killed so many, Elise, are you sure you want to be responsible for that many more?”

“
Fuck you.”

“
You kids and your vocabulary . . . Oh, and I’ve got something else to help with your decision-making process.”

The Sorrow King reached down and picked up one of the scurrying things from the floor. It looked like a giant black cockroach only there was something a little . . .
drippier
about it. He approached Elise and put the thing on her foot. She screeched out. She didn’t like bugs and crawly things and now this huge sick thing was on her leg and there wasn’t any way to escape from it. The thing moved up her leg, its head moving so it almost looked like it was sniffing her. Then it slid some kind of stinger under her skin. She barked out in pain.

“
I don’t know how long it will take him to drink all your blood but I guess we’ll find out. Remember, you can end it all with the right words.”

And then the Sorrow King was gone, back into the shadows, back wherever he had come from and it was completely dark once again. Elise could hear the thing sucking her blood from her body. Occasionally, she heard a dry rasping sound and imagined it was rubbing its legs together, happy as it fed.

Twenty-six

The Clouds Over Gethsemane, Ohio

The life of a small town . . .

The death of a small town . . .

Gethsemane was a small rural town. As most small towns went, it was a sleepy little burg. It woke up to the sun. It went to bed to the moon. The fields had been planted and now the farmers watched them grow. They could use a little more sun or else they would be tending fields of mushrooms and fungi. Those who had jobs other than agriculture worked outside the town, driving to Alton or maybe even Cincinnati, leaving their houses quiet and shuttered all day. School had let out and that added another layer of sleepiness to the town. No longer were the morning roads clogged with cars and buses taking these children to school. And the teenagers who normally ran rampant about the town—fucking, drinking, and vandalizing away the days—were afraid to leave their houses.

The lack of school seemed to shatter some unity they had during the previous suicides. While school was in session, it didn’t matter who died, come Monday morning, the students were surrounded by their peers, the survivors. They were able to look at each other and say, “Yeah, we’re okay. That can’t happen to us.” And some of them were able to believe that.

But Steven’s suicide was different. The students weren’t able to communicate with one another. They could still go to another’s house. They had telephones and cell phones and the Internet. But it lacked that overall, full student body the previous suicides had met with. So, in a way, the town remained a sleepy small town but, in another way, it seemed frenzied. Like a moribund creature who knows its days are numbered. Like the period before the storm, not the proverbial calm before the storm, but that period where the wind has picked up and grown cooler, sweeping trash and leaves through the streets, the period where you know something is going to happen and you are left to wonder on what scale it will unfold.

Of all the crazy theories surrounding the suicides, the one that seemed to stick was that it was some kind of virus. This implied it could somehow be caught like the common cold. Parents kept their kids indoors. Workaholic parents stopped going to work so they could stay at home with their teenage children who were far too old to need a babysitter. Conversations between students were hesitant, each one thinking it was the other that could give them the virus. There was strain. There were breakdowns. Gethsemane was too small and puritan for the idea of psychotherapy to really catch on but, that summer, record amounts of teens were taken to counseling.

At first, news vans had patrolled the streets, looking for people to interview. It was not unusual to turn on the television at night and see the school officials answering questions from famous interviewers. There were photos of the dead. There was much speculation on what had caused this rash of suicide. Pictures of the dead were dragged out. Their home lives were questioned although the school officials feigned ignorance to most of those questions and the family members refused to be interviewed. Any family member had to feel a little guilty when one of their own took his or her life. Eventually, once people stopped leaving their houses, once the reporters’ prey had been exhausted, the news vans disappeared. To the outside world, Gethsemane was left as a curiosity. A year later, no one would even remember its name save for a few sociologists.

How could it be stopped?

That was the question everyone really wanted answered. No one had any answers other than a totalitarian restriction of all freedom. But it wasn’t right to think all the teenagers in Gethsemane should be put into padded rooms in straitjackets. So they could only wait. Hold their breaths and wait for the next one to occur.

They didn’t have to wait long.

The day after Steven killed himself, a thirteen-year-old girl swallowed some sleeping pills. The next day, a seventeen-year-old boy slashed his wrists. The day after that, a fifteen-year-old boy drove his mother’s car into a tree.

Police patrolled the empty streets. They had crisis counselors on call twenty-four hours a day, ready to actually go to the person’s house and intervene. They didn’t take a single serious call. But the suicides continued.

There was so much going on, so much to focus on, so much to worry about, no one really noticed the clouds. The sun had not peeked from behind the dark, heavy clouds since the day of Steven’s death. No one noticed except the farmers. No one really bothered to look up. If they had, they might have seen something interesting.

The sorrow did not stop with the suicides. It branched out. It blossomed. Suicide had become murder. Sorrow and death had choked the town. The clouds were not the Deathbreakers, as Steven Wrigley had once imagined, but the bearers of death. The blanket of cloud that had sat over Gethsemane for days reached out, reached down with malevolent fingers, digging its tips into the sorrow, longing for the sweet taste of it.

When the clouds touched the house of George and Gladys Payne, they had just sat down for breakfast and George had been slightly irritated Gladys had fried his eggs rather than scramble them. She knew all the grease really got to him. He didn’t know when the cloud touched his house. He only knew he was enraged. He threw his plate across the room. Gladys looked at him, open mouthed, startled.

“
Dammit, you
know
I can’t eat fried eggs!”

He came around the table toward her. Usually subservient, Gladys thought about offering to make him some more eggs but she didn’t like the way he had thrown the plate, breaking perfectly good china. Now she wanted to rip his eyes from his head.

She backed up from the table and ran at him, fingernails bared.

When the cloud touched Officer Chuck Bando’s house, he was strapping on his gun belt, ready to ride over to the station and begin another day of work. Then something came over him. He placed his hand on the destructive steel of his gun. Now the only thing he wanted to do was drive to the station and unload into his coworkers.

The cloud came to Amy Sanborn’s house. She sat on the couch next to Brian Anchor. They were in love. They didn’t give a fuck about the suicide virus. They were both good Christian youths and knew suicide was a mortal sin. They were discussing this fact when the cloud touched them. Amy had just told Brian she had prayed more in the past few weeks than she had ever prayed before.

Something came over Brian. He didn’t care what Amy was saying. He was only here, at her house, to see if he could get some of that sweet Christian pussy.

He moved over on the couch, covering her with his weight, and said, “Your prayers are only going to get you fucked.” Then he ripped at her t-shirt.