The Sorrow King (29 page)

“
At whose hand then?”

“
Fate’s.”

“
You won’t kill me. Not if I really am what stands between you becoming a human. You won’t let me die.”

“
And I won’t let you go until you do what I want. Outside . . . you wouldn’t believe the destruction. In two days, there will not be a single living person in Gethsemane. And then I will have to focus all my attentions on you. You think my little creature is horrible. Just wait until you see what I have left.”

He moved closer to her, ran a finger down her cheek, along her jawline and behind her ear.

“
Ever been raped?” he asked and then, not waiting for her to answer. “Raped by the person you would least like to be raped by. And not just once. Again and again. I can administer an unlimited supply of pain. You can tell yourself you will grow numb but that will only make the pain worse and then, one day, you’ll wonder why you’re still alive. Alive long after you should be dead. And then you will come to me but you’ll be so mentally and physically wasted that you will not be able to do anything with your death.”

Elise imagined it. What the Sorrow King described was very like the Christian idea of hell, she figured.

“
And what if I agree to become what you are? What then? How can you be so sure that fate will do me in?”

“
Fate is not completely blind.” He ran his finger over her spiderleg eyelashes.

“
Imagine this,” he said. “You leave here and go straight to the Obscura. And you lose yourself in it and then you just . . . never come back. How good would that feel? It’s either that or eternal pain. The choice is yours. The only real consequence is that you would be dead but you haven’t always thought death would be so bad, have you?”

He ran his hand down her arm, tracing the secret scars that ran vertically along the veins. Plastic surgery and make-up made them unnoticeable. But he knew they were there. He brought them to life. They throbbed beneath his fingertips and Elise cried, not with the physical pain, but with the memory of how she had felt when she made those scars. A week after her mother had disappeared. The evening her father had said, in so many words, that Elise had ruined his life.

“
No,” she said, choking it out. “I will not die just so there can be another one of you.”

“
We’ll see,” said the Sorrow King.

Time passed. Elise became even more outside of herself.

Once again, the Sorrow King came to her, speaking softly, begging her to agree with him. Begging her to become him.

“
So if I agree to become you, then what happens?”

“
I’ve already told you. I set you free. You go back to the Obscura and then it begins.”

Elise was very conscious of the thing on her leg. It now felt like it weighed as much as her leg. The Sorrow King had told her that, when it finally burst, he was going to feed it to her. The rope dug into her wrists forming a constant loop of screaming red pain. She could feel the wetness from where the rope had turned her skin to pulp. She passed out from lack of sleep and food and blood every few minutes or so. Each time her body gave in and slumped, the rope was there to tug at her and hold her up. She felt like her muscles had been exposed and flayed. They were either stiff or burning. She wanted out. She wanted away. If only for a brief amount of time.

“
I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll do anything you ask.”

The Sorrow King breathed a deep breath and said, “Good.”

With a slash of one long sharp fingernail, he cut the rope. Elise collapsed onto the ground and he bent to remove the thing that suckled at her leg. It squealed with a very unhappy noise and the Sorrow King threw it against the floor causing it to erupt in a shower of blood.

“
Rest,” he said to Elise.

But she had no intention of resting. She was going to lie here and wait. And when she could force her muscles to move, she was going to try and bring about the end to this tragic saga.

Twenty-nine

Blood Graffiti

On his way to the park, on his way to the water tower, Connor realized this Gethsemane was not the one he had turned his back on. He wondered how it could have changed so rapidly. He wondered how the anger, hostility, and despair that had been locked inside the suicides’ minds could have come spilling out, infecting the rest of the town. What he should have been wondering was: where were all the emergency vehicles? Where were the police? Hell, where were the SWAT teams?

The neighborhood was rife with violence. Something had erupted. The citizens had been snapped by sorrow. He didn’t have to think very hard, didn’t have to wonder very much to know that was what it was. The pressure had broken them. The strain, the constant fear had worn them down. It had beaten them. Shouts of pain and panic came from the houses. Neighbors attacked neighbors. He heard gunshots and cries . . . but no sirens. It was what he had always imagined the end of the world would be like.

Connor looked at the clouds.

Above him, there was a multilayered dark gray sky. Spirals of lighter gray came down from the darkness. An individual spiral swirled above every house as though the spiral connected it to the larger black mass of cloud. He wondered if there was one of those over his own house but didn’t think it even warranted looking back. He knew the answer.

Was that really the reason he had left? The anger, hostility, and violence these clouds were causing? Had he come out on the prowl, looking for whatever caused his son’s death?

He still didn’t
really
know if anything
had
caused his son’s death. But the spiraling clouds were not natural. Let strange things explain the strangeness, he thought. Given that Steven had written about clouds in his notebook and Connor was headed toward the water tower amidst these strange miniature tornadoes (maybe
they
were the Obscura) he didn’t think he was so far off track.

He had left the house with a mission and he couldn’t betray that now. Jesus, he was even thinking in terms of combat. He thought “mission” was typically a word reserved for religious zealots and marines.

There were other things he thought about on his way to the park.

Part of his mind kept going back to Steven’s autopsy report. He had read over the thing several times. There was only one thing that seemed unusual and he figured it probably wouldn’t be looked into that deeply because of the fact the death was a suicide. The report had noted multiple abrasions on Steven’s right index finger and that his fingernail had been partially torn away. Even though the report had come after his viewing of Steven’s body, he remembered how that finger looked. He hadn’t really paid much attention to the injury itself. What he
had
noticed was the shade of green highlighting the fingernail before it reached the part that had been torn away. Even in that time of blurry distress that color had immediately made him think of the park bench in front of the water tower. Now he wondered why he hadn’t mentioned something about that to Officer Bando at the time.

He had recognized the color right away but it wasn’t until later, sitting in the attic and trying to put things together that it had actually clicked. Of course it had something to do with the bench in front of the water tower. Wasn’t that where it had all started for Connor? That strange conversation with Ken that had spurred the later conversation with Steven. He remembered his disappointment at The Conversation, thinking not that many things had come out. Now he realized everything had been right out there in the open and both he and Steven had chosen to ignore it. It was worse than either of them could have possibly imagined.

Steven was right. Or maybe it was Alison who had been right.

One of them, be it Alison’s ghost or Steven’s hallucination, had predicted it correctly.

It had been less than two years and Steven was dead.

Connor turned the final corner before the park. He passed a house with an old woman lying out in the front yard, clutching her stomach and murmuring, “Oh God please stop,” as her husband towered over her, ready to land another kick. And Connor didn’t even contemplate stopping to help.

What was
happening
?

That was
the
question. All this time, that was the question that had plagued him.
What was happening?
And he felt like he was rushing toward the answer. He felt so close to finding out what was happening, what
had been
happening that a sense of giddiness flooded him. Would he really be around to find out what happened or would he be sucked into the madness if he wasn’t there already?

Ah, madness! That madness seemed to hold only death as the answer.

Once at the park, he did not run to the water tower as had originally been his intention. He no longer even knew what he could really do with it, anyway. Approach the door and start banging on it, hoping for an answer? And when none came—what then, was he supposed to tear it off with his bare hands?

Instead, he rushed over to the park bench, thinking of the green paint around Steven’s mutilated fingernail. A fresh bout of rain hammered down onto his head, the wind hurrying it along so it almost slapped at his skin.

There, on the back of the bench, something had been scraped into the wood and Connor knew it had been Steven, using his finger to do it. It was a message. A message or something like a message, etched into the soft wood.

This is what it said:

Over time, the Jackthief continued to thrive, becoming the Sorrow King, a more powerful evil for a more sorrowful time. And the landscape changed around him. The woods were taken down, suburbs replacing them. And while he had traditionally hid in the tallest tree in the woods, he now found other structures to hide in, structures that towered over the towns and the cities—skyscrapers, radio towers, cell phone towers, water towers.

That was inscribed along the top slat of the bench and, below that, there was more:

These are the names of the dead

And there was a list. A staggering list and Connor wondered how many of these people were dying around him, how many more would die while he stood here in the driving rain and did the only things he had ever seemed to know how to do—think and contemplate and read.

True, he was thinking but no longer was it an excuse for inactivity. Now, it was with a purpose.

He thought about the end.

He thought of a way to bring about the end.

Thinking of endings, he read the end of the list, the final name on the list thinking, if there was a final name on the list then there had to be a finale to the death. There it was. The name, barely legible in the wood, pushed there with what had been left of Steven’s fingernail:

Elise Devon

And there was something after that, even more illegible, but which Connor was pretty sure said:

Elise Devon must be stopped. Kill her and the death ends.

He couldn’t believe it. His instincts were right. They had led him here to this place and he now had an answer. He knew how to stop the suicides and all the senseless murders happening around him now.

Now that he had a name, he had to find this person.

Kill
this person.

His heart raced as fast as his head. He suddenly, for the first time in his life, wished he had a cell phone so he could call information.

Yes.
That was it. Information. He needed a phone. There had to be one around here somewhere. He never really had to use a payphone before, this close to his house.

Shouldn’t a park have a pay phone? he thought.

Frantically, he looked around, finally spying something he thought
could
be a pay phone on the far side of the baseball field.

He took off running for it, dashing as fast as he possibly could. Reaching the phone in under a minute, he cursed his luck. The phonebook had been stolen. The dangling piece of segmented chain flattened him. With shaky hands, he searched his pockets for change. Luckily, he found two quarters and, hoping that would be enough, plugged them into the machine and dialed information.

The operator came on and asked him what city and state.

“
Gethsemane, Ohio,” he said breathlessly.

“
Go ahead,” she said.

“
I need a listing for Devon.”

“
Do you have the first name?”

“
No, I’m sorry.”

“
There’s an Albert Devon on Albany. A Marcia Devon on Royal. And a Buck Devon on Chicken Bristle.”

“
Uh, uh,” he stammered. “Albert Devon, do you have the specific address?”

“
1411.”

“
Okay. Okay.”

“
Would you like the number?”

“
No. That’s fine.”

He slammed the phone down and took off running across the park again. He had never before felt like he had such a sense of purpose. He didn’t even know if he was going to the right house and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with this Elise Devon if he found her. He hadn’t bothered getting information about the other Devons because the first one was the closest. And he hadn’t heard any of them named Elise Devon as he had hoped. If it turned out that wasn’t the one, then he guessed he would just have to go from there.