No. She didn’t think she could ever really do that.
Maybe when she was older she could find someone she could confide in but she was only fifteen and still had a lot of growing up to do. Whoever she decided to tell all her secrets to would have to be there for life. She would have to know they were going to be there. And however exciting her teen romance was, she knew it was just that, teen romance. The thought of finding the person she was going to spend the rest of her life with at such a young age was unrealistic.
Once all the graduates took their places on the risers behind the podium, the principal, Mr. McFee, shared a few words before giving the microphone to Sasha Barnette, the salutatorian. Sasha read her prepared speech in an overly annunciated tone that told the audience she had taken a year or two of communications and drama. Her speech was about change and how the youth of America, especially small towns like Gethsemane, had to work to bring about change. Elise could sense the older people in the auditorium debating with the girl in their heads. Gethsemane was a town, Elise felt, that probably only reluctantly let black people live there. And not too many at that. “Change” was a bad word in Gethsemane.
To finish her speech, Sasha uttered something ridiculously corny like, “We are the future!” and went to take her seat to the right of the podium.
McFee returned, speaking again about the school year. About all the troubles both the staff and the students had faced and how they had worked through those troubles as best they could and how those troubles were, hopefully, over now. Then he introduced the valedictorian, Bradley Shank, making him sound like the well-rounded golden boy he no doubt wanted people to believe he was. Straight-A student all through high school. Starting quarterback for the Musketeers for the past two years. Involved in tutoring and community service. An active participant in the local Lutheran church. Elise knew all of that was mostly bullshit. Bradley was a guy who got drunk and stoned on the weekends and date raped as many underclassmen as he could get his apelike hands on. As for the grades . . . well, it was easy to cheat when most of the smart kids were afraid of him. But, Elise thought, this wasn’t a wedding. McFee wasn’t a reverend, asking if anyone objected. He made it seem like objection was unthinkable. Like this was clear cut, as simple as destiny or fate. It made Elise want to puke.
Bradley, smiling, shook McFee’s hand and approached the podium, continuing to beam out at the crowd. Elise would give him that much, his smile was certainly charismatic. He was probably one of those people you could spend most of your time hating but when they actually approached you all of the hate just melted away. She wouldn’t know, since he had never spoken to her. So that left her with just the hate and she was fairly comfortable with that. He was, after all, really just a member of the disappearing senior class. This would probably be the last night she would ever see him unless he became one of those losers who came back to the school to visit the football coach and all the other teachers who helped him pass without really trying at all.
Bradley began his speech. He had bothered to memorize his and didn’t even have a piece of paper or cards to read from. His speech was about duty, of all things. About how the youth had a duty to their school, their families, their church and their country. His speech was twice as long as Sasha’s and Elise thought she was going to have to get up and walk out into the hall just so she didn’t actually fall asleep.
And then Bradley Shank blew his head off.
Her first thought was that someone had shot him. She thought that was weird, wanting to assassinate the valedictorian. And then she saw the gun in his right hand as his body, a bloody pulp of head at the top of it, slumped to his left.
There was a moment of stunned silence that seemed long but was, in reality, probably less than five seconds.
Elise stood up, along with the rest of the auditorium. The crowd didn’t know where it wanted to go. Half of them ran up toward the stage, offering to help. Half of them ran out into the halls, just wanting to be away from it. This was the thing they had read about in the papers. This was the thing they had seen on the news. This was the thing that was happening at their children’s school. This was not a thing that was supposed to happen to them. This was not a thing they were supposed to see.
She couldn’t take her eyes from the stage. McFee had removed the gun from Bradley’s hand, a black pistol, and stood there staring at it, like it could go off again if he didn’t apply this appalled scrutiny. Someone else had taken a graduation gown and draped it over Bradley’s body. There was a cop on stage, speaking into a radio that seemed comically large, and Elise heard sirens rapidly approaching the school. The psychologists who had become fixtures milled about in their sweaters and tweed coats, their expressions predictably blank.
Through all of it, the only thing she could think about was Steven. Where was Steven? She wanted him close by her and realized she was terrified for him and she didn’t really know why.
On her left, Carrie nudged her. “We’re getting out of here.” Her face had gone pale and Elise remembered one of her more fevered accounts about how she had blown Bradley in the bathroom at a friend’s party.
Once in the hall, the air was one of confused shock. The hall was crowded with people but none of them seemed to be moving in one direction. They shuffled around under the fluorescent lights. Elise felt very faint.
“I need to go outside, Carrie.”
Carrie just kind of stared at her like she didn’t know what she was saying or even that she was talking.
Elise reached out and grabbed her arm, shaking it. “I need to go,” she repeated.
“Yeah, yeah, okay . . .” Carrie nodded her head, absently lifting her purse closer to her and digging out her cell phone. For a moment, Elise wondered what she planned to do with it—call all their friends? Then Elise realized Carrie probably didn’t know what she was doing. She was just doing something she had done a million times before. Something familiar. Something comfortable. The hall exited into the parking lot. It was conceivable Carrie fished her phone from her purse every day she passed this spot.
“You don’t need that right now,” Elise said, pressing her hands against Carrie’s, lowering them until she returned the phone to her purse.
“I was . . . I was just seeing what time it was,” Carrie mused. “It’s eight fifty-three.”
Elise thought that would probably be one of those moments she would never forget—how Carrie, in the middle of all this chaos, managed to focus on something as utterly mundane as the time. It’s eight fifty-three. Yeah, she would probably hear that in nightmares whereas Carrie was likely to forget she had said anything at all.
Shock was a funny thing.
Leaving wasn’t as easy as they thought it would be.
The police had sealed off the exits to the parking lot. They were getting the names and phone numbers of everyone who had been there, seeing as they were all potential witnesses. She guessed they were probably making sure everyone was okay to drive home, also. Shining the flashlight in their eyes to make sure they hadn’t slid off some kind of deep end. Elise thought, if they had tried to leave five minutes ago, when Carrie was standing in the middle of the hallway and mumbling the time, the officer probably wouldn’t have let them pass. Would have probably told them he didn’t think she should be driving and they needed to get out of the car until they had their bearings. She had seen the officers do this to a car that was farther ahead of them.
“My God,” Carrie said, as they pulled out onto Gethsemane Pike. “Can you believe that?”
Elise sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window. It was very foggy. “Yes,” she said. “It doesn’t really surprise me at all.”
But she had only said that to sound contradictory. Death did not surprise her. The other deaths at Get High did not surprise her. But this one did. She had known about the others before anyone else, but not this one. She was very confused.
Elise was a girl with secrets and if Carrie were, at this very moment, Steven, then
she thought she would probably have told him everything because the secrets were starting to hurt. But Carrie was not Steven so Elise continued to choke on the secrets, wondering how long it would be before the secrets forced her to self-destruct.
Eighteen
The Night Before the End of the World
Standing there, watching his dad watch the television, Steven felt like it was the night before the end of the world. A surge of emotions ripped through him and the only thing he could think was how much he wanted to be out. He wanted to be out in the night air where he felt comfortable. Where he could run and burn off some of the energy threatening to throw him to the floor and make him squirm. His dad must have sensed this, Steven’s impulse to bolt.
Connor turned away from the TV, reporting the breaking news of the Graduation Suicide, and said, “No . . . don’t . . . Steven . . .” And he reached out an arm to grab him but Steven was already gone.
Out the door and into the foggy night.
Yes, he thought, there are things out here in the night. But he wasn’t afraid of them. They couldn’t hurt him. They only wanted to make him dead. And he wasn’t so sure he didn’t want to be dead.
Connor came to the doorway as Steven went deeper into the night, but he just stood there, frozen. Everything he feared was out there. He knew he could face them if he let himself fall into that fog but his life had been filled with fear and he didn’t want anything else to do with it. Slowly, he retreated back into the house, closing the door and feeling something sink within him. He didn’t think this would be the last time he would ever see Steven. He only thought it felt like he had lost something. Maybe not the whole of Steven but some very essential part of him.
Outside, once nearly a block away from the house, Steven slowed his pace.
It was time to clear his head. It was time to figure out what the hell was going on. And there was, he was now certain of it, something going on. He needed to either figure it out or succumb to it completely. There wouldn’t be any middle ground. Decisions had to be made.
Walking along, now sucking on a Marlboro and loving it, he thought about the things he had written in his notebook.
Was it all just a bunch of semi-psychotic bullshit? That was entirely possible but not likely.
Was it there to foreshadow what was going to happen to him or was it there so he could help? And if he was to help, how in the hell was he supposed to do that? Stand guard over every adolescent in Gethsemane? That didn’t sound very practical. Unless the suicides were actually something like a virus. Something that could be stopped. If that was the case and he was there to help then he guessed that made him the cure. Or one potential cure, anyway.
Did Elise have anything to do with this? Of course she did. How else could a girl of her beauty want anything to do with someone like him?
So it seemed like the water tower would play some important role in all this, but he couldn’t figure out what that would be. He remembered what his dad said Drifter Ken had told him but he and Elise had been around the tower many times in the past month or so and hadn’t seen anything too interesting. The only time he had seen anything notable was when he was alone on that night of clouds and fog. And the only thing he had come away with from that encounter was an all-pervading sense of doom. If that was the kind of thing that happened at the water tower, he wasn’t sure if he was eager for it.
He had written the names of the dead and, at the time, that had seemed pretty obvious but he hadn’t written a single one since Jeremy Liven. Did that mean anything? It also occurred to him he hadn’t written a single one since noticing Elise for the first time. Perhaps that was just coincidence but perhaps it was something more. Maybe she had somehow blinded him to that bit of psychic power he thought he had. Maybe being around her had dulled it. If that was the case, he wondered if she was aware of it.
He had written the names of the clouds and, seeing them swirling over the water tower that one night, it had made sense, but he wasn’t so sure he saw the sense in it now. After close scrutiny, the clouds had revealed absolutely nothing to him. He wanted to believe they were Deathbreakers, there to keep the evil away, there to protect him, but now there was not a single cloud in the sky and the fog offered more dread than protection.
And he had written something about the Obscura. That could be anything. It could be a place or a group of people. For some reason, his mind seized on that because it made the least sense of anything. Maybe if he could find out what Obscura was then he would have all the answers.
Of course, there was the story. Maybe it was some kind of allegory, tying everything together . . . Or maybe it was just a story. Out of all the things he had written, that story was the only thing that had really given him the creeps. The content of the story aside, the alien genesis of it was unnerving. Like he didn’t even have control over his own mind. The story itself was something else. It unsettled him. It didn’t end happily and he didn’t know why he would have written it. And who was the villain in it, the Jackthief? He was mentioned by name but he was never actually revealed or described. But Steven had a face for the Jackthief.
When he was around ten, long after Connor had left his mother, she had taken a live-in lover, her first since Connor. He didn’t last very long, his mother had another, more permanent one after him, but he terrified Steven. He didn’t even know the guy’s full name. His mother called him Fisk and Steven was pretty sure this was his last name but he never really knew. He supposed he could have asked his mother about it but even bringing up Fisk frightened him.
Fisk had never really done anything to hurt Steven. It was mainly just the way he looked. He was tall and thin, his skin seemed to be stretched over his cheekbones. He was what his mother called a “hard man.” His hair was a little longer than most men’s hair and it was usually kind of greasy. The things that scared Steven the most about him were his eyes. Whenever Steven slipped up and made eye contact with the man, he felt as though he had lost something of himself. He knew Fisk’s eyes were brown but sometimes, in his memory, they were red—red irises, ringed with yellow.
The idea his ten-year-old mind had constructed was that Fisk was a vampire. Not necessarily the bloodsucking kind. More like a psychic vampire, there to suck the life from people. He didn’t speak very much. Hardly at all to Steven. It was like he didn’t quite know how to act around kids. At night, sometimes he heard Fisk making love to his mother. Steven didn’t exactly know what they were doing but it seemed to last a long time and he remembered hearing his mother sobbing when it was over. It would have probably been better for his adolescent mind to stand there at the door and watch them fucking rather than lying in bed and having his imagination tell him all the things they could be doing. At the time, he was sure Fisk was hurting her. In retrospect, it was all probably part of some game, something his mother had wanted.
Young Steven had imagined Fisk taking more from his mother than pleasure. Maybe he took her blood but, more than anything, he seemed to be taking some kind of essential life. And all of Steven’s fears were confirmed the next morning at the breakfast table when his mother served him with dark rings under her puffy red eyes. Yes, Fisk was stealing something from her.
Then, one day, he never came back. Except in Steven’s dreams. He would wake up, thinking he had seen that strange face pressed against the window. Every now and then, on his way to or from school, he would think he saw him, walking along the opposite side of the street, far away, and a shiver would run down his spine.
Now he walked through the fog. He hadn’t thought about Fisk in a long time and that story about the Jackthief had brought it all back. In Steven’s mind, there was no doubt Fisk was the Jackthief.
He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and shook his head.
What the hell was he doing? Maybe this was what insanity felt like. It didn’t make any sense. Normal people did not do this kind of thing. Normal people did not dig up faces from their past and try to tie them into some kind of impendin
g strangeness happening around them.
Around him.
That was key. When he really thought about it, it didn’t seem like anything had really happened directly to him. Tonight’s incident involving the crazed deer was the closest thing to strange, outside of his dreams and writings, that had happened to him. And what did that have to do with the suicides or his precognitions or whatever the hell they were. The intelligent thing to do would just be to forget about it all. He had always prized his ability to realize his flaws. This was just another flaw. Here’s how it probably was: He had been under a great deal of mental stress since the death of his mother. That stress was coupled and tripled by the fact that he changed schools and homes, living with his father who, let’s face it, was not one of the world’s greatest communicators. As much as the man wanted to believe Steven could come to him with any of his problems, Steven could only imagine a semi-blank stare and something vaguely therapeutic but ultimately pretty hollow coming from his father’s mouth. Something like, “I understand how you feel.” Then there were the suicides that had started back at the beginning of the school year. Suicides that seemed to occur without any real driving motivation. Suicides that happened to a select age group. Suicides that were just bizarre enough to leave any teen sitting around and wondering, “Could that happen to me?” And after they continued to happen the inevitable answer was, “Yes. It could just as easily happen to me.” And then Elise had come along and there were so many different kinds of tension there it made him feel like a very tightly stretched rubber band. Granted, he had become, briefly, a rubber band that was incredibly happy at times. The notebooks and the nightmares, probably just products of an overactive and paranoid imagination, had served as a subtext to nearly all of it. Throw the breakup into the mix and that probably explained the way he felt tonight. The only substantial thing that had come out of it was that he had written Jeremy Liven’s name on the night the boy had killed himself before he knew it had happened.
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