The Sorrow King

by Andersen Prunty

  But he didn’t see Steven. Probably hadn’t seen anyone at all.

  Then he was in the police station. At least his body was in the police station. His mind was in some far away land of mourning where every other sensation was dulled. Dulled by some form of black heaviness. That was grief, he thought. It was like a thick blanket that, while keeping many of the joys of life away from you, also staved off a lot of the world’s prickling jabs.

  He answered the questions that Officer Bando-call-me-Chuck-please robotically asked. He followed Bando to his cruiser and rode up front with him to the county morgue in Alton.

  There, Connor stared down at Steven’s body, covered to the neck with a plastic sheet. He wanted Bando to go away but he didn’t. He just stood there, staring at Connor staring at Steven, doing his job, hoping Connor wouldn’t take too long. Connor lowered his head toward Steven. He was not going to let him go into the ground, he was not going to let him leave the physical realm, without a hug and a kiss, signs of affection he hardly ever showed him in life. Death changed people, he guessed.

  He was thankful Bando did not have anything to offer in the way of conversation. He didn’t know what he would say to him. He would probably have told him to shut the fuck up.

  He didn’t know how long he held Steven, smelling the last bit of life clinging to him, a little bit of the thunderstorm’s freshly electric scent caught up in his hair. He would have stayed there forever if it would have been possible, bent over the dead body on the slab and crying, holding the last thing he had left in the world. Eventually, he straightened himself, pulling the sheet back up over Steven’s head and telling Bando that he was ready. He asked if Bando could take him directly home, telling him he was too tired to drive. He wanted to ask Bando if he had seen the dead people. If he had seen the dead people doing their slow dance beneath the stars that were always dying, always winding down. He wanted to ask Bando what he had to go home to. But he didn’t ask the cop any of these things. Only if he would drive him home, which Bando agreed to do.

  On the way, Connor stared down at the floorboard of the car. If there were dead people out there wandering around, he didn’t want to see them. He didn’t want to know they were there. Connor had his fill of death. Now he just wanted to be alone.

  He walked into the demolished house and collapsed into his bed.

  He didn’t sleep but he wasn’t necessarily awake. He lay there with his eyes open, a slow drain of tears running down his cheeks, and when the sun came up, he got out of bed, using the phone in the bedroom to call Bookhaven and tell them he would not be coming back for a long time. Then he smashed the phone on the headboard, cutting his knuckles as the tough plastic split apart.

  The days following took place in a gray dream. There was Steven’s funeral and faces, mostly family, he had not seen in a very long time. There was a lot of grief. Sometimes there were dead people outside the window, staring in at him, but even those grew faint with the passing of each day. The gray was made even grayer by the absence of the sun. It had not shone since the day after Steven’s death and this seemed to mute anything Connor felt even further.

  He gave up sleeping in his bed entirely. He had wrecked that room as well, eventually.

  One day, when he decided to further wreck Steven’s room, he came upon the notebook. He didn’t open it right away. He carried it with him as he paced listlessly through the trashed house. He carried it tucked into the back of his pants. He got tired of looking at the inside of the house so he decided to go up into the attic to peruse the notebook. There was a window in the attic, below the eave of the house, and he could see the park from it. He had never really known this view existed. There was the park and at the end of the park was the water tower, lording over all those laughing kids during the day and blinking its red wink at night.

  He had lost all sense of time. Sleep and food deprivation had lifted him from his body completely. Eventually, he opened the notebook and started putting things together.

  Twenty-five

  Elise in the Dark

  She didn’t like the smell.

  She didn’t like the sounds.

  She didn’t like the feeling of the things brushing up against her. She didn’t know what they were. She didn’t think it was whoever or whatever had brought her here trying to cop a feel. No. She knew it was something different. Whatever she had felt closing in on her over the past several months had finally caught up with her. It had sucked her down into its mystery and this place, wherever it was, was the heart of that mystery.

  When she first regained consciousness, she thought she would just open her eyes and be back in her room or, more likely, the Obscura . . . just like always. Then she remembered she had already awakened in the Obscura and went to that field to try and find Steven and then it all came back to her.

  She was a prisoner now.

  Her arms were bound together and suspended from some distance above her head. She stood on a platform or some kind of stool or something. She had tested the grounding with her foot. If she moved too much either way, she was going to be left completely suspended by her arms. That seemed even more uncomfortable than her current position.

  A voice came out of the dark.

  “You’re awake.”

  She didn’t speak. She didn’t want to speak to whoever was speaking to her. Just coming upon him at the barn, that single sight of him, had explained so much. He was the one who had poisoned the Obscura. He had been using her. He was the reason so many kids had died. And maybe she was partly to blame for that too. And that thought sickened her.

  “You can’t hide from me. I can see your eyes are open. I bet you’d like to see, wouldn’t you?”

  As he asked that, she became aware of a steady dripping sound and thought she heard something small and slimy scurry close by. She wasn’t so sure she wanted to see at all.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “That’s a difficult question.”

  “I want to get out of here. That’s what I want.”

  “I wasn’t asking you what you wanted.”

  He was closer to her now. She could sense him. “Besides,” he said, “are you really sure you want out? What waits for you at home? Do you want to go back to that? This is the place of dreams. This is the place of your dreams.”

  “That’s bullshit. And yes, I want to go home.”

  “But look who’s here with you.”

  She tried to focus her eyes, thinking she could see some kind of bluish illumination in front of her. She squinted, trying to make out a shape in the light. Eventually, she was able to see what the blue light enveloped.

  It was Steven.

  Maybe not dead but not fully alive either. He was shackled to the wall, his feet up off the ground, his head lolling down, his chin resting on his chest.

  The thing that had taken her had moved beside Steven. Looking at him, Elise thought he had changed. He no longer looked the way he had looked in the barn.

  “Just think of what you could do in your dreams. And if this isn’t your dream, then how come I look so familiar?”

  She squinted even harder to better see him. No, he certainly wasn’t the horror show villain she had seen in the barn now. He was like a hybrid of her stepmother and her father. It made Elise think of that one late night talk show where they had taken the faces of two people and generated a hideous picture of the combined images, taking the most negative features from both.

  “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 capti
ve 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. Conversat
ions 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.