The Sorrow King

by Andersen Prunty

  Steven thought about saying the anal sex would have been too rigorous but then decided against it. Even though his dad would have probably found it funny, there were just some things that shouldn’t be said. Who knew what would happen if their generation gap were truly bridged? Anarchy would probably follow. He didn’t want the world’s ruin to be in his hands at the expense of a joke.

  “So, you’re just going out walking, huh?”

  For a second, he waited for Connor to tell him he was coming with him. If that happened, he would have to tell him the truth. That he wasn’t so much going out for a walk as he was going to creepily skulk around the neighborhood and wait for a certain nameless girl to make an appearance.

  “Yeah, I’ll probably go through the park and then swing back. That usually takes it out of me. Then I’ll go to bed.”

  “And you’ll be ready for school in the morning?”

  “Yeah. Of course. Did they ever call you at work today?”

  “Nope. Not a word. I guess you’re in the clear.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to take a note tomorrow though.”

  “What, you want me to lie for you?”

  “You can leave it on the table.”

  “Can I tell them your gout was flaring up?”

  “I doubt they would even know what that is.”

  “Fine. I’ll tell them you had the plague but you’re all better now.”

  “Okay. Just so long as it has your signature on it.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night, Stevie.” Connor reached out and ruffled his hair. Steven could feel what the man wanted to say, he heard it in the silence—“I love you”—but it never came from his lips.

  “Be careful,” he said instead.

  “Sure thing. Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  His father turned and disappeared into his bedroom, his fat book tucked under his arm.

  Steven stepped out into the cold damp night air, turned on his CD player and pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, lighting it up and looking at the clouds.

  Stratus clouds tonight, blanketing out the sky. Because it was almost a full moon, the clouds glowed, looking like some kind of silvery fabric. Or an upside-down ocean, something liquid about them. Breathing smoke into his lungs, the nicotine beating away the fog of craving, he studied the sky, looking for anything unusual in the clouds.

  But the only thing he felt was heaviness. Like the clouds weighed him down.

  He trudged on through the night, looking at all the houses locked against the darkness, wondering if the red-haired girl lived in any of them. Voyeuristic to the core, Steven stared into every half-open curtain, looking for movement. This was natural, healthy voyeurism, he reassured himself. More like curiosity really. He couldn’t see himself actually approaching any of the windows and openly staring into them.

  But what if he saw something really spectacular happening?

  What if he saw someone taking their clothes off or having sex?

  What if he saw someone being murdered?

  What if he saw someone committing suicide?

  It was that last thought that would surprise him the least. He was sure he was not the only one who was just waiting for the next suicide to happen. At this point, it seemed more like an inevitability.

  But there wouldn’t be any of that tonight. And there probably wouldn’t be any of the red-haired girl either. He wondered where she was. Did she even live in Green Heights? He now knew she went to his school and wondered why he had never noticed her before. Had he been so locked into his self-pity he hadn’t noticed this perfect specimen of girlhood? It was possible but he didn’t see how that could happen. It seemed like his teen hormones overrode his self-pity at just about every turn. In fact, his lust seemed to drive his self-pity. The lusting, the stiffness in his pants, was usually followed by the thought, “I could never have that. She wouldn’t talk to me in a million years. And if she did, I would probably just find out that she is a vacuous waste.”

  He turned right onto Woodlawn, walking toward the narrow blacktop path that led to the park in the middle of the block.

  The water tower loomed over the park. It didn’t have anything painted on it. It just stood majestically over all the humble houses, that strange lunar white paint seeming to glow along with the clouds, a little red rod at the top blinking to alert any low flying planes it was there.

  His shoes crunching on the blacktop, he looked into the park, a thin fog developing along the damp ground. He realized just how creepy deserted parks were at night. He half-expected it to be filled with the ghosts of children, laughing their spectral laughs as they played on the equipment that seemed so useless just sitting there motionless.

  He tossed his cigarette on the ground and crushed it beneath his foot. He thought about how nice it would be if the red-haired girl were here with him. They would be all alone. He could find out about her. He could tell her some of the things bothering him. Like the dreams. And the name. Hell, not just the name. The notebook in general was beginning to disturb him.

  Should he destroy it?

  This evening, when he had awakened from his nap, he had written something else in it:

  the water tower was scrawled in the fat top margin and somewhere below that he had written, obscura.

  He didn’t know what any of that meant although he was beginning to think there might be a grain of psychic power or something in the scribblings.

  Or the boy’s name he had written could have just been a fluke. Maybe he had seen it in the paper or something. Maybe Jeremy Liven had made the honor roll or earned some kind of award and he had read about it. The mind did that, absorbed all kinds of things into the subconscious that the conscious mind was totally unaware of. Although he desperately wanted to believe in such things, he remained on the skeptical, cynical side. He had trouble placing any kind of faith in something he couldn’t prove. Never had he known himself to possess any kind of psychic power. In fact, the words “psychic power” made him want to laugh.

  He wasn’t totally closed-minded on the subject. That was why he was here now. He didn’t know what the hell “obscura” meant so he had come here, to the water tower, thinking it had probably only manifested itself in his mind because he saw it every day. Okay, there was the water tower but there was also just the tiniest chance of seeing the girl. But he knew if he had not written anything in the notebook then he would not be here now, would have just put in a quick lap around the neighborhood, smoking and tiring himself out and distantly hoping to run into the girl rather than coming here to the park and thoroughly creeping himself out.

  A swing creaked and he thought that was odd because he shouldn’t have been able to hear the swing squeak over the music.

  But the music wasn’t playing. It must have stopped without him even realizing it.

  Why would it have stopped? The CD wasn’t over and, even if it had ended, it would have looped back to the first track. And he knew the batteries were good. He hardly ever even used the player.

  Pulling it out of his pocket, he squinted his eyes to look at the LCD readout. It was, technically, playing. There weren’t any kind of error messages and he could hear the disc spinning around inside it. He turned the volume up all the way. Still nothing.

  Maybe my headphones are just fucked up.

  He heard another sound and forgot all about his player.

  Standing at the foot of the water tower, he stared up at it, the sound filling his head, rising in volume.

  It was a loud hum, deep and trembling. He felt it beneath his feet and behind his eyes, vibrating just below his skin.

  The wind picked up, swirling the mist around the empty playground, sweeping it over the damp, richly scented earth. The mist caressed his chilled cheeks as he stood, hypnotized, drinking in every detail of the mammoth water tower.

  The base was fat enough to drive two trucks into. Widely corrugated metal. A utility-type door.
A ladder led up to the mushroom-like top of the tower. Standing there, he thought he could almost see inside it, through the metal. Only it wasn’t filled with pipes and pumps and water, all the things he thought would probably be inside a water tower. Rather, it was filled with blackness. Emptiness.

  Inside the water tower was a void.

  Maybe not just any void, either. Maybe The Void.

  Suddenly, he felt very cold. He turned to look behind him, at the rest of the park, certain something horrific was going to sneak up behind him. Yes, sneak up behind him and force him into the tower.

  What he saw was something else entirely.

  The sky dropped.

  The heavy blanket of clouds slowly closed down over him, kissing the lighter mist of the playground, joining it, mingling with it, and then, just as quickly as it had fallen, it picked itself back up, swirling around the tower.

  He breathed in the cold air and his blossom of fear exploded. He couldn’t take it anymore. The sense that something was going to swallow him up was overwhelming. He took off running back toward his house amidst a din of barking dogs and night birds chirping in the distance.

  Only it wasn’t night anymore.

  It was very early dawn and school would be starting in a couple of hours.

  How had he been out here this long? He hoped his father wasn’t aware of it. He would be freaking out right now if he was.

  The only thing he wanted to do was go home and crawl into bed. He thought about not getting up for school in the morning but knew he would.

  There was someone there he had to see.

  Five

  What Ken Saw at the Water Tower

  The bleating alarm woke Steven up. Actually, it didn’t so much wake him up as rouse him from his stupor. After coming home from the park (the water tower) he had sat in his bed and thought very hard about not thinking. It didn’t work as well as he had hoped but eventually his brain settled down into something that was slightly vegetative without being as satisfying as real sleep. Now he figured that was probably a good thing. If he had actually fallen asleep he didn’t know if the alarm clock would have woken him up or not.

  He looked down at his clothes, making sure they didn’t have any offending stains on them, went into the kitchen to get a Coke and some Doritos remains, and rushed out to his truck. His dad’s car was still in the driveway and he didn’t think much of it. It was after seven now. Bookhaven didn’t open until ten but his dad was normally there by nine. He was usually up at this hour but maybe he had decided to sleep in. Or maybe he was off today. That was one of the perks of being manager. He worked long hours but was able to take random days off when he could grab them.

  Realizing he forgot his note, he dashed back into the house to grab it off the kitchen table.

  He must have woken his dad up while leaving because Connor was wandering around the kitchen in a daze, his tattered brown bathrobe hanging from his slight frame.

  “Forgot this,” Steven said, raising the note. “In a hurry. See you later.”

  “Have a good day at school,” Connor called.

  Steven hopped into the truck, the vinyl seats cool against his skin, and sped off to Gethsemane High hoping he would be able to stay awake all day, hoping he would get to see the girl, and hoping no other students had killed themselves.

  Connor decided he didn’t need to go to work that morning. There were three people on the schedule and one of them was the assistant manager, Lori. He felt perfectly comfortable leaving her in charge. She didn’t sound surprised when he called to tell her he wasn’t coming in. This was usually the case whenever things were all caught up.

  He lounged around the house, finishing the bad fantasy book and sipping coffee. After he finished the book, he sat in his old brown chair, staring around the room. He was capable of doing this for hours at a time. Just letting his brain go completely empty and staring at his surroundings, waiting for some kind of inspiration to strike. Usually, this inspiration was nothing more grandiose than cleaning the house or preparing a dinner more elaborate than pizza.

  But he didn’t think he was going to do any of that today. Today he thought he would go to the park and chat with Ken Blanchard if he was still in town. Ken Blanchard was better known around town as Drifter Ken. He was an older guy, a wino, probably, who drifted from town to town. There was something about him that reminded Connor of Tom Waits. Maybe it was the roughness of his voice, the way he sucked at unfiltered Camels, or his hair that rose from his scalp in insane brown-white curls. Normally, he wore a faded black trench coat and Connor had thought he was just some pervert the first time he had seen him a number of years ago. He had seen him in the park last week but was in too big a hurry to stop and talk.

  He hoped he was still there. Ken provided nice, earthy conversation and was always grateful for the Thermos full of Irish coffee Connor brought with him. Eventually, the authorities would hassle Ken, usually for dozing off on the park benches, and he would move onto the next town. One time after catching Ken asleep on the bench, Connor had offered to let him stay at the house but Ken had told him he had a room at a seedy hotel on the edge of town, the Hide-a-Way, and that he had just drifted off because he was old and tired and possibly a bit narcoleptic.

  Connor brewed another pot of coffee, a black espresso roast he had stolen from the bookstore, poured it into a large stainless steel Thermos, and added a couple generous shots of whiskey before capping it and giving it a little shake. Then he was out the door and headed to the park, the midday sun bright against his eyes.

  A few minutes of walking, enjoying the early afternoon light, brought Connor to the park. He had always wondered why they had chosen to build the park around the water tower. It was an eye sore. There was something altogether rather “unpark” about the utilitarian nature of a water tower. The tower was on the north side. The whole park was fenced in with a rusted chain link fence. Winter was still hanging on and the park was not the most attractive of places. The grass had yet to fully green. It was a muddy yellow-brown. The baseball field was overgrown and also muddy. The swing sets and merry-go-round, not having been painted for the summer, were dingy and looked cold, more mud gathering under them in the ditches worn by the feet of children.

  He spotted Ken sitting on one of the park benches facing the tower, his back to the playground and the baseball field. Connor waved his hand in a greeting. Ken waved back.

  “It’s a beautiful day, huh?” Ken said as Connor drew closer.

  “Yeah, it sure is. I just couldn’t bring myself to go to work.”

  “I know the feeling. Sometimes I think I’m lucky being retired. I get to enjoy as many days like this as I can before I die.”

  “Yeah. Lucky.” Connor pressed his hand to the bench, inspecting it for moisture, before sitting down. The sun had yet to burn the morning damp out of the air and it was still cold. Ken had his hands tucked into the pockets of his coat. He looked exactly the same as when Connor had last spoken with him, probably a year ago.

  “So, how you holding up?” Connor asked Ken.

  “Oh, you know. I’m gettin on.”

  “Seen a lot of the country?”

  “Yeah, I’m doublin back now.”

  “Headed home?”

  “Somethin like that.”

  “Where is home, anyway?”

  “Back east.”

  He decided not to press the subject. Ken had a ridiculously cryptic way of speaking about his past, like anything he said could get him into trouble.

  “I brought a little something to warm you up.”

  He sat the Thermos on the bench between them, unscrewing the outer cap that doubled as a cup and pulling a second, chipped ceramic mug from his roomy coat pocket.

  Ken looked at the Thermos and rubbed his hands together. “Ah, some of that Irish coffee of yours?”

  “You bet.”

  Connor poured the coffee into the cups, taking his and sipping it, the whiskey adding another dimension of warmth to it
. More than just his hands and his stomach, the whiskey spread through his entire body. He crossed his legs and leaned back on the slatted wood bench. The two men sat in silence for a few minutes, Connor looking at the water tower and all the low ranch houses around the neighborhood. He had always enjoyed the aesthetic diversity amongst the structural similarities. Some of them bordered on being run down, others were kept immaculate. His was probably somewhere in between.

  “So how long you in town for this time?”

  “Can’t say for sure but I don’t think I’ll be here too much longer.”

  “Gotta move on?”

  “Somethin like that. I don’t like to stay any place too long. Besides, the police usually start hassling me after about a week.”

  “Yeah. Why is that?”

  “They say I’m loiterin but I sorta thought parks was made for that kind of thing. I guess they have other ideas. You know, the park ain’t really for outsiders. I guess that’s what they’re really trying to say. These small towns. Always suspicious of strangers.”

  “Yeah. We’ve had some bad times lately.”

  “The suicides?”

  “You’ve heard about them?”

  “Yeah. I mean they ain’t exactly made national news yet. Hadn’t heard about them ’til comin back here. Once I got back it was kinda hard not to hear about ’em.”

  “So what are people saying?”

  “I don’t think they know what to think, let alone what to say. It might be the first time in the history of small towns when the folk don’t have a strong opinion about somethin.”

  “It’s not so black and white, is it? Are they blaming rock music, yet?”

  “Course. Rock music, Satanism . . . them’s the usuals, I guess. Then there’s other things—conspiracy stuff, you know. Government’s testing somethin in the waters. Subliminal messages on the television. Then there’s the moral stuff—divorce, homosexuality . . .”

  “Which kid’s parents were divorced and which one was gay?”

  “The first one’s was divorced, apparently. I didn’t hear which one was queer.”