“I have enough faith in you to know you are not going to kill yourself.”
“Then why are we having this conversation. Are you as guilty about Mom dying as I am?”
“We’re having this conversation because I thought it would be a good thing for us to sit down and talk because we haven’t really done much of that over the past couple of years.”
“Well, we’re really talking now.” He didn’t know if Steven was more upset or angry to be opening up.
“There’s another reason we’re having this conversation, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll get to it. I went to the park and saw Ken yesterday.”
“Ken?”
“Yeah, Ken Blanchard. I’m sure you’ve heard me mention him before. He’s that old guy who comes through town about once a year.”
“Yeah . . . Drifter Ken. I think I remember you mentioning him once or twice.”
“Well, he always has some pretty interesting things to say but it’s all usually pretty down-to-earth. You know, hillbilly wisdom or something. But yesterday he said something I found a little odd.”
“What’s that?”
“He said he thought Gethsemane was poisoned.”
There was silence again. Connor could tell Steven was thinking about this, much like he had just yesterday.
“Did he elaborate at all?”
“As a matter of fact, he did. He said he was sitting in the park and swore he saw ghosts going into the water tower. What do you make of that?”
“Yeah, I’d believe that.”
“So, without even really thinking about it too much, you immediately believe some old guy who may or may not be crazy saw ghosts going into the water tower?”
“Yes. You didn’t tell me he was crazy. Did you think he was crazy before he told you this or after?”
“After.”
“If he hadn’t said crazy things before then I’d believe him. That makes a big difference. A preacher tells you he sees God and that’s just an occupational hazard. An atheist tells you he sees God and your belief muscles flex a little.”
“What the hell have you been reading?” Connor waved the question away. “So why would you believe him?”
“Because believing in things like that makes the world a more interesting place. Besides, it’s not like he was saying it to get attention or anything. He wasn’t talking to a reporter. He was telling you what he saw. There’s nothing wrong with that. People see things in different ways. Some people see war as a way of obtaining peace. Others see war as murder. Some people see clouds in the sky. Other people see objects . . . people.”
“So if he really saw these . . . ghosts, then what do you think it all means?”
“It means the dead are restless.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. The world of the dead is a separate world than ours.”
“The veil, right?”
“Yeah . . . the dead live beyond the veil.”
“That’s what Ken said. He said there must be some kind of trouble in the world of the dead or they were trying to warn us of something.”
“So you don’t believe in that kind of thing?”
“Well, I really didn’t want to believe in that kind of thing. In fact, more recently, I’ve treated that kind of thought like poison. But, as I was walking home, I wondered why I felt that way. Why I so vehemently didn’t want to believe him. Then I put it together. There was an incident that happened before Ken had ever mentioned the ghosts and I had tried so hard not to think about it I just kind of dismissed anything remotely related to it.”
“What was the incident?”
“It involves you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It was during your mother’s viewing. You know, where the relatives come to look in the open casket?”
“I know what a viewing is. I was there.”
“Yeah, I know you were there. Anyway, almost everyone else had left and I had just finished walking old Uncle Charlie out to his car when I came back in and saw you standing by the coffin and looking down at your mother. I don’t know how long I stood there, watching you. And while I was watching you, I thought I saw something that just didn’t look right. You had kind of like some bluish aura around you. Almost like fog or something and I saw something rise from your mother’s body. It made all the hairs stand up on my arms because I swear I thought it had to be her soul or something. It didn’t last very long. This thing rose from her and mingled with that aura that was around you and the look in your eyes terrified me. And when it was over you were still standing there . . . Just as normal as ever.
“That, in a strange way, is why I didn’t want to believe Ken. I had myself so convinced what I had seen at the viewing wasn’t anything at all, I couldn’t believe Ken because if I believed him then it would make that previous ghost more real . . . And then . . . And then I’d be one of the crazy people who believe in ghosts. I don’t know, I’ve never really thought of the dead living amongst the living. It’s a creepy thought . . .” Connor could have gone on but Steven interrupted him.
“I remember that.” He drew himself up on the couch. His eyes had gone kind of blank. They had, Connor supposed, turned inward as the boy looked to his past. “You saw some ghost of Mom rising out of her. I talked to it. I was never really sure if it happened or not. I wouldn’t have mentioned it to anyone. I talked to the ghost and it told me something.” Something had broken in Steven. His eyes were wet, a tear welling at the duct.
“What did it tell you?”
“It told me I would be dead in two years. It was Mom, telling me she knew I was going to die. And she told me she couldn’t stand to see that but she didn’t think she could do anything to stop it.” Steven stood up, wiped tears from his eyes and fixed the blank expression back over his face. “I need to go to my room now.”
“Steven . . .”
“Don’t, Dad. Just . . . don’t. We can talk about this some other time.”
And then he was gone, disappeared into the confines of his room. The Conversation was over.
Eight
Waiting
Spring was the season of waiting. Steven was ready for winter to be over, ready for the cold to move on, ready for school to end and the days of warm freedom to begin. His senior year would be over and he knew the approaching summer would be the last truly free one he had. His father hadn’t mentioned getting a job but he knew he would be expected to work after he graduated. He could put actual work off until the end of summer, under the pretense of searching for a job. He was just glad his father respected his slack for the time being.
On the day of Jeremy Liven’s funeral, clouds had moved in. Deep, low clouds that contained an abundance of rain. It had been a fitting day for a funeral and the clouds stuck around for the next few weeks.
During that period of time, Steven fell into a kind of lazy routine. He was far enough ahead in most of his classes so he didn’t have to try very hard. That meant he only did the necessary homework, moderately paid attention in class, and did absolutely no studying whatsoever. This gave him more time for his afternoon naps, which had become something of a ritual. He was sure an outsider might view his naps as typical teenage sloth but he saw them completely differently.
They were research.
Part of the search for that hidden Gethsemane, for that hidden part of himself he had only caught in glints and glimmers until recently. The dreams exorcised some part of his subconscious he had never really acknowledged. Each time, upon waking, he wasn’t sure whether he was happy or angered he hadn’t scrawled anything in his notebooks. Either way, they were blank every time. Maybe the naps weren’t working. Or maybe he was just trying to force it.
After his nap he would usually leave his bedroom and hang out with his dad. He seemed lonely. Steven thought, maybe, he needed a woman in his life. But he knew his dad well enough to know he just didn’t have that much interest. His dad had divor
ced his mother when Steven was four and, as far as he knew, had never seriously dated another woman since. So that left Steven to play the role of companion. It didn’t matter what they talked about, Connor’s face immediately brightened when he saw that Steven was going to sit down in the living room and take time out of his busy sleeping schedule to be with him.
They didn’t talk about anything too deep or heavy. There wasn’t a return to the conversation of earlier. He didn’t think either of them had fully digested what had been said and he wasn’t sure what they should do if all those things were true. In a way, it felt wrong to just ignore it and move on with their lives but, in another way, it felt like the only thing they could do.
And he wasn’t really running away from anything. He just wasn’t talking about it with his dad because he didn’t want him to wonder about him any more than he already did.
He still took the evening walks, hoping to see Elise. He thought if they just “coincidentally” ran into each other again, words would be exchanged. But the only place Steven saw her was at school. That left him, most nights, winding up in the park and staring up at the huge water tower, wondering what the hell was going on with his life.
He didn’t doubt what Ken had said in the least. He was certain the old man probably did see ghosts going into the water tower. And he was pretty sure he knew what was in the water tower. It was a place for ghosts. It was black and empty, the perfect confines for free floating souls that didn’t have any sort of afterlife. He wasn’t even sure if he believed in the concept of an afterlife. It only reassured him that, sometimes, his thoughts were not entirely his own.
Some nights, staring up at the water tower, he could hear that deep and powerful hum he had heard the first night. Other times, there was nothing.
And always, every day, Steven studied the clouds. He studied them outside as much as he studied Elise in the school. That was when he began to imagine the Deathbreakers. He couldn’t put faces to them and he knew they were pure fiction. Nevertheless, he imagined them just behind the surface of the clouds, waiting to come down and stop the impending suicides. Or maybe they were there to take the souls of the dead to a happy place. Some kind of heaven. Anywhere except inside the water tower. The Deathbreakers. He liked the idea.
During the spring days, the clouds were mostly stratus, low and thick, dripping with rain more often than not. These were the least interesting clouds. He wanted the cumulus clouds, the fluffy ones, or cumulonimbus, the thunderheads. But they wouldn’t come until the later days of spring. The warmer days.
Studying the clouds, he thought they looked different over the water tower. They seemed to collect in the sky above it. Thickening. And, hovering over it, they turned in a slow spiral, reaching down toward the tower. The first time Steven had seen this, it had scared him because he thought maybe it was a tornado. But the clouds moved much too slowly and it wasn’t really warm enough to have a tornado anyway. In his new mythology, this was where the Deathbreakers were most heavily concentrated, because whatever was in the water tower was their greatest threat.
He went about his days thinking of Elise, water towers and clouds, the Deathbreakers and his dreams. He teased himself into thinking all this craziness was just a sign of him becoming more mature, putting his adolescence behind him. What he really wanted was some kind of change.
In his own way, Connor also waited.
After his conversation with Steven, he didn’t know how to feel. It wasn’t as cataclysmic as he thought it might have been. Maybe he had even wanted it to be cataclysmic. At least then he could have somehow gauged how it had gone. What he was left with was a sense of confusion and something like dread.
Yes, that was it.
Dread.
Something bad was going to happen. Was Steven really going to die? Were there really such things as ghosts and, if there were, could they communicate with the living like Steven had said Alison had? He didn’t know if he was able to make that spiritual leap. He didn’t know if he was ready to give up that one final grip on reality he had. If he did, it would be a major shift in his viewpoint. He had always considered himself a humanist, a rationalist. He placed his faith in humankind and reason. If he chose to believe the dead were wandering around Gethsemane, what else did that leave him open to believe?
He couldn’t bring himself to any kind of philosophical conclusion. He didn’t even know if a conclusion was necessarily important. How important was a conclusion if it made you realize you no longer had control over anything, including your own mind?
Almost without realizing it, he had put Steven under suicide watch. He didn’t figure it could hurt and he tried to be stealthy about it. Of course, he didn’t know what other signs to look for when the obvious signs had been there for the past two years. Unless Steven was going to leave a trail of razorblades and pills or wander around with a rope hanging out of his pocket, he didn’t know what to look for. There weren’t any guns in the house so he didn’t have to worry about that.
So he paid more attention than he normally did. He asked Steven how he was feeling. When Steven was in his room, he kept the television or the radio turned down low so he could hear him if anything strange happened. Steven probably didn’t know it, but Connor was awake when he went out for his evening walks and he was usually still awake when he came back. He felt bad about the increased vigilance. He felt guilty. Like he thought Steven was actually capable of doing something like that even though, deep down, he was almost a hundred percent certain he wasn’t. It was like he was accusing the boy before the crime.
But, he thought, as the old saying went, “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
And that was better than Steven being hurt by whatever unknown mechanism it was that caused people to do the things four other children had done before.
To busy himself, to try and take his mind away from all that morbidity, Connor embarked upon what had become his spring ritual—cleaning and fixing things around the house that needed to be cleaned and fixed. More so than reading or watching movies, this kept him alert and aware of Steven’s comings and goings. He could spring into action at any moment rather than dropping off into a fictional oblivion.
He worked room by room. He was very obsessive about his cleaning, not stopping until he was finished and he wasn’t finished until every surface was sparkling and clean. He threw a lot of stuff away—old papers and bills and pay stubs, junk mail that had been pushed into the corners. Piles of books were finally filed alphabetically onto the shelves and he had even bought a new shelf he managed to work into the living room. The books were a hazard of working in a bookstore. The generous discount allowed him to bring home anything that struck his fancy rather than enticing him to contemplate if he could really afford it or not. He told himself he would read them all one day. If he didn’t, somebody would. He had never been able to bring himself to sell or throw away a book.
He worked at the store a little bit less, generally coming home shortly after Steven returned from school. Spring was the slow season at the store. The Christmas fervor had completely died away and the college kids were not home for the summer yet.
Outside, day after day, the rain came down and Connor stayed in the house, organizing, telling himself he was finally going to put together a home he and Steven could be perfectly happy in and maybe even proud of.
And, still, there was that dread. Once the house was clean it seemed to make the dread that much more obvious, exposing it. Like it had always been there, lurking just below the clutter.
Then, in the middle of April, it happened again.
Nine
Suicide #5—Asphyxiation
Mary Lovell thought she’d seen a spider.
Her parents were on vacation. A second honeymoon sort of thing. They were in Paris. Her mother had, for years and years, gone on and on about springtime in Paris. She guessed her stepfather had finally saved up enough money to give that present to her. It made Mary happy they got along. She had ne
ver known her real father—he had died while her mother was still pregnant with her—but Mary knew her mom had been absolutely miserable until meeting Tom. Mary figured some women needed another person to make them feel whole.
She had been given permission to drive her mom’s SUV while they were away. And she had made plans for a large party tomorrow night. She didn’t figure it would hurt. She only planned on inviting people she knew. She trusted her friends not to trash the house too much.
She had just pulled the lumbering SUV into the garage, a tight fit, when she thought she saw a spider.
She closed the door of the vehicle and saw it scurry beneath the front tire. She thought it was a spider, anyway. She guessed it could have been a mouse. It seemed to contain a lot of mass. If it was a spider, it was a freaking huge one.
She hated spiders.
She didn’t know if she should hunt the beastie down and bludgeon it to death or if she should just let it be, go into the house, and try to forget about it. If she did that, then she would know it was out there . . . waiting for her to come back, spinning its sticky webs, maybe even laying eggs so more spiders could hatch. She imagined a multitude of them, hiding under the car, myriad eyes staring out at her.
Relax, she told herself. It’s just a spider.
Right, it was just a spider. Trying to shake the thought out of her head, she decided to go into the house and forget about it. The spider wouldn’t be able to knock down the door or anything. And if she had to go anywhere in the near future, she could just take her own car, sitting in the spider-free environment of the driveway. Somehow, this made sense to her, even though she knew outside was just as rife with spiders as the garage.
She entered the house, pushing the creepy spiderthoughts from her mind. She threw her purse and backpack on the couch and went into the kitchen to make a snack. She took the snack into the living room, flipping on the television and staring absently at it while she ate.
The Sorrow King Page 7