The Sorrow King (26 page)

Not much. That was the answer. Not much at all.

He pulled into the driveway and again felt that shiver of fear, that weight of doom when he didn’t see Steven’s truck parked out on the curb. He went to the house, fumbling with the key, and finally managed to get the door open. When he walked in, he went straight to the kitchen. The light on the answering machine blinked a few times and he hoped one of them was from Steven but figured it was probably just his own earlier message along with a couple of telemarketing hangups.

When he pressed the button to play the message and heard that he was supposed to call the Gethsemane Police Department, his first thought was that Steven had maybe gotten into some sort of trouble. Maybe he had gone on some sort of bender and took off driving. Maybe he had an accident.

After calling the police station, Connor’s world changed forever. The idea of a DUI or drunk and disorderly had never seemed so tame in his life. He had a brief conversation with an Officer Bando. Most of the conversation had slipped his mind by the time he turned off the phone and put it in the cradle. Only a few things stuck with him.

He had to go to the police station.

Identify Steven’s body.

Steven was dead.

Stab wounds.

Ten of them.

Self-inflicted.

Suicide.

Steven dead.

Suicide.

How could that be?

How could that be?

Why didn’t he realize things were coming to this?

He didn’t go to the police station right away. He didn’t think he could even focus enough to drive. His insides felt like they were sizzling, threatening to jump through his skin. He picked up the phone, the bearer of such awful news, and threw it as hard as he could into the living room. It hit the wooden front door and cracked apart. He thought that felt good. He opened cabinets forcefully, pulling out the ceramic plates and dropping them on the floor, throwing them against walls, listening to the satisfying pop and shatter, reveling when they loosed a chunk of drywall. The commotion was so much better than sitting there in silence.

Once the kitchen was demolished, he moved into the living room. He started with the bookshelves, pulling at first random volumes off and then raking away whole shelves, the books falling onto the floor where he kicked at them, hoping for a torn cover, busted spine or ripped page. Once the shelves were all cleared, he yanked one of the cases itself from the wall and beat the TV to hell with it. He cried the entire time he did this. He felt irrational yet knew what he was doing. He did it because it was the only thing he
could
do. To destroy everything in the house was to destroy everything that came before Steven’s death.

Steven’s death.
Those words were like vomit in his mouth. They shouldn’t exist. They were things dreamt up by a cruel sadistic god.

He went into Steven’s room and ripped down the parachute, a cloud of dust coming down with it. He pulled down all the posters of brooding rock stars and morbid artwork. He piled it all in the middle of the room and, when he realized he was seriously considering touching a match to the mess, he realized he had gone as far as he could go. He backed up until a wall stopped him. He slid down the wall, the tears flowing, his whole body shaking and, putting his head between his knees, he sat there for a very long time, smelling Steven around him. He wanted to take some kind of snapshot of that smell because, he realized, it would only get fainter and fainter over time before fading away completely.

He drove slowly to the police station. It wasn’t until he was in his car, pulling out of the driveway, that he realized he didn’t even know exactly where the police station was. He had never had a reason to go there in the past. But he thought he knew about where it had to be. Probably near the municipal building downtown. He had to go there a few years back to straighten out a tax situation. Hell, the police station was probably
in
the municipal building.

The drive downtown seemed to prepare him for the night of horror awaiting him.

There seemed to be more people outside than usual, especially this late.

He didn’t think any of them looked right. He thought about the deer he and Steven had seen. Jesus, that was just yesterday. It already seemed like a year ago. He thought about what Ken had said. About this town being poisoned. Connor had treated him like he was crazy.

Poisoned? Not
my
town, he had thought.

But now he saw that Ken was right.

The people who milled about the sidewalks were thin, pallid. They looked dead. Ken had seen the dead. Hadn’t he told Connor that? An eternity ago on a semidrunken morning of hooky while sitting on the park bench and staring at the water tower. Yes, Ken said he had seen the dead and he had said he had seen them go into the water tower.

And if the people who roamed the sidewalks were not dead, then they were at least very sick.

Poisoned.

There didn’t seem to be much life left in them and when Connor would check the rearview mirror, many of them were not there. By the time he reached the police station, he had convinced himself he had hallucinated the whole thing. There were not any dead people out skulking the streets of Gethsemane. He had created those dead people in his head and he had created them with the hopes he would see Steven amongst them. Hoping he would see Steven so he could stop the car and tell him to get in. Tell him he was going to take him back home and yes, true, the house was a little broken right now, but they would be able to put it back together and make everything okay . . . just like they had once before.

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.