The Sorrow King (30 page)

To walk would take nearly half an hour. He thought he could probably make it in less than ten minutes if he ran hard.

His heart hammered in his chest.

Did he really intend on killing this person if he found her? He had never even thought about murder before, figured that was usually reserved for psychopaths and soldiers, and now he was contemplating killing someone he didn’t even know. But if it would bring back Steven and stop the rest of the deaths then he figured that, yes, he would do it in a heartbeat. Never mind he didn’t have any kind of weapon.

Was he really doing this because he thought he could bring Steven back?

No
, he told himself.

That
had
to be impossible.

People do not die and come back.

But he had once believed dead people did not leave behind ghosts and that belief had been shattered.

Like the belief that murder, for whatever reason, was wrong.

And that was when he knew he would kill this person if he found her.

Kill her to stop all the other names on that list from dying.

Steven had scraped those names in there as some kind of warning memorial and Connor wasn’t about to let all of that be in vain.

What if Elise Devon was dangerous? What if she was just waiting for someone to try and kill her? What if she
was
the Jackthief or the Sorrow King or whatever the hell he was being called now?

None of that slowed him down.

He saw the house, at least he was pretty sure it was the house, just across the street now. It was a house he had passed just about every day on his way to work. Sometimes there was a cute redhead standing out front, waiting for the school bus to come and pick her up. Maybe that was Elise, he thought crazily.

But insanity was in the air. It was nearly palpable. He was going to knock on the door and if she was there, he was going to tell her she had to come with him and if she refused he was prepared to take her apart with his bare hands.

He stood at the bottom of the porch steps, staring up at the thin funnel cloud swirling above the house. It hypnotized him, coming close to lulling him but, at the same time, filled him with a righteous anger.

He didn’t know why.

He didn’t even
want
to know why.

It canceled all rationale.

No. He didn’t want to know why.

He only wanted to make death.

Rain continued to beat down.

He walked up the wet steps and knocked on the door. There was a decorative brown wreath hung under the arching window. He knocked on the door again and heard some muffled shouts from inside. He stood and waited. He would not wait much longer. He was prepared to grab a rock from the garden and hoist it through the front picture window if he had to. Eventually, the door opened and a haggard-looking man stood in the doorway. He had a large black eye and a gash across his forehead. He stared angrily at Connor.

“
Does Elise Devon live here?”

“
That’s my daughter,” the man snarled. “I haven’t seen her in days.”

“
Do you know where she is?”

The man sucked in a deep breath, pulled back his fist and hammered it into Connor’s nose.

Connor reeled away from the door, slipping on the steps and landing on his ass on the walkway.

“
If you see her,” the man cried, “tell her to get her fucking ass back home so I can rip her throat out and staple her cunt to the wall!”

The man flipped him off and slammed the door. Connor’s first instinct was to grab the aforementioned rock from the garden and charge into the house, attacking the man as he had been attacked. Yes. He wanted to destroy this man. He wanted to kill him even though he hardly knew him. The rage was huge and blinding until he remembered his purpose.

Of course Elise wasn’t there, he thought. She was probably in the water tower because that was where the Sorrow King lived. It had to be where the Sorrow King lived. And it was entirely possible that
she
was the Sorrow King. He grabbed the rock, just in case, and began jogging back to the park.

Thirty

Fate

Elise staggered out of the water tower, the Sorrow King giving her a nudge as though to help send her on her way, to expedite her in her quest to seal both their fates. Although, once out of the tower, not even knowing she had been in the tower, she turned to look, desperate to know where that horrible thing had kept her prisoner. Desperate to answer at least that much of the mystery. Once she had turned around, she was surprised to see the water tower looming there in front of her. Hadn’t Steven told her something about dead people coming in and out of the water tower? And she thought he was just sharing ghost stories at the time.

It was almost like she had been pushed through the door of the water tower without it even opening. If it had been opened, it had shut impossibly fast and without making a sound. But there wasn’t any time to stand and wonder. There wasn’t even any time to take in the brutality around her.

She had to get to the Obscura.

On the playground, in front of the merry-go-round, a group of three teenagers had the ride filled with other children, gleefully spinning them around and shooting at them with a BB gun. The children on the merry-go-round cried out when the small copper pieces slapped their skin. Strangely enough, Elise didn’t even think about telling them to stop. She didn’t think about telling them she was going to call the police.

There was just too much happening around her. She felt overwhelmed.

And she had things she had to do.

She began walking home, not really knowing if she had reached some kind of decision. Her mind felt as battered as her body and, observing the chaos around her, she wondered if she might be better off surrendering herself to the Obscura for one final time rather than trying to somehow outrun or escape the Sorrow King.

He will find you,
a voice said in her head. It was a voice she didn’t want to believe but knew that it spoke the truth.

She only had the trip home to think about it. That was all the time she was going to give herself. That was all the time she had. She knew she would not be able to defeat the Sorrow King.

The violence and insanity happening around her proved to her that everything the Sorrow King said was true. Well, maybe not everything but she believed him enough to know she wouldn’t be able to run away from him. She wouldn’t be able to just hop in one of her parents’ cars and take off driving. Wherever she went, he would find her. Whenever she lost control of her thoughts, he would be there, waiting to creep inside of her head, waiting to enter the world through her head. No. She remembered that he didn’t even need her now. He didn’t need her head anymore. Now the only thing he needed was her body. Her body to be human.

She still didn’t know why.

She still didn’t understand.

Except, maybe she did.

She was, quite possibly, the one person in this town he could not kill. He didn’t need her simply because he could enter her mind. He had entered everyone’s minds. Every person who had died, she knew, the Sorrow King was responsible, sitting in their heads, telling them life was not worth living, telling them to die so they could plant a seed that would one day grow into a tree of sorrow.

He needed
her
because he was afraid of her.

Now she just had to figure out how to use that against him.

Besides, running wouldn’t solve anything anyway.

Maybe the whole world had gone mad.

The rain beat against the back of her head and she noticed these funny swirling cloud-type things above each of the houses. At first she had mistaken them for chimney smoke before reminding herself that it was June and no one built fires in June. Not in Ohio. Especially not every house in town.

Out of the rain, a man walked rapidly toward her. She found herself excited at first, thinking it was Steven. Thinking maybe the dead Steven she had seen in the barn and in the water tower had been another of the Sorrow King’s hallucinations. Another of his lies. But, while this person walked a lot like Steven, as he drew closer, she saw that it wasn’t Steven at all. It was someone else. Someone she didn’t recognize.

The man continued to approach very rapidly. Only a few feet away, he seemed to recognize her and she saw how his eyes burned with a wild ferocity.

Then she saw the rock in his hand.

She watched in horror as he brought the rock over his head.

It didn’t take her long to figure out what he intended to do.

Instinctively, she threw her arms up in front of her.

Turned away.

Slid in the grass.

Tried to scramble.

Her legs were too tired.

Too rubbery.

Her whole body already felt beaten.

The heavy rock came down on her left shoulder, driving her to the ground.

Spikes of pain tore through her already tortured body. Her face was in the wet grass. She could smell it deep in her nostrils. She heard her breath rasp in her ears, the rain trickle underground and the fevered grunting of the madman above her.

The man fell upon her and slammed the rock down again, this time onto her lower back.

His madness had made him impossibly strong.

And Elise was so tired.

So very tired.

She knew the man meant to kill her and, as her mind entered some sort of pain fugue, she thought it was unfortunate she had to die because she was quite possibly the only one who knew the Sorrow King’s secrets.

Faced with death, the answer came to her.

She needed only to get back to the Obscura.

She wanted to tell the madman that his fate was death.

Death and sorrow.

He could kill her but it wouldn’t be long before he was met with his own death.

She could save him. She knew. She could save them all. If she could just get back to the Obscura.

Elise closed her eyes, knowing there wasn’t any arguing with fate, knowing she would die if it was death that was intended.

Thirty-one

Vortex

Connor saw the girl stumbling toward him across the windy park. At first, he didn’t think much of it. She could have just been one of the battered. One of the victims of this ultraviolence that wreaked its havoc on the town. She certainly looked injured and maybe bleeding from the head a little. From this distance, he would have never recognized her as the cute redhead who he had seen waiting for the bus.

He planned on simply moving past her, on his way to the water tower. On his way to the girl or the Sorrow King, whatever evil lived there. But this girl seemed to angle herself toward him and he planned on shoving her out of the way if that was necessary until he noticed her hair was red. And there was something on her forehead.

It wasn’t an injury as he had at first thought. It was her name, written in blood.

“
Elise,” Connor said under his breath.

That was when he raised the rock and bashed her with it.

Something overcame him. Some urge to destroy this frail girl who was now beneath him. As he brought the rock down again and again, he just kept hearing a voice in his head telling him that if he killed her then all the other deaths would stop. And he knew that, if caught, he might go to jail for a very long time. Might even get the death penalty. But he didn’t care. What did he have to live for anyway?

Nothing. That was the answer. He was old enough to know happiness was going to elude him for the rest of his life. He would have probably taken care of himself if Steven hadn’t come along. For a while he had seen he could give Steven joy and that made him kind of happy. But something, the suicide virus or whatever the fuck it was, had come along and taken Steven from him and now he had nothing.

Nothing except this violent red purpose beneath him.

He wanted to cave her skull in with the rock. That’s what he was going for but each time he brought it down she squirmed just enough so the rock hit some other, less vital part of her body.

Then something distracted him.

A group of people had gathered around the scene. Any hopes he had of getting away unnoticed were now completely gone.

Something else swept through him.

What the fuck was he doing?

He couldn’t kill anybody.

My God,
he thought.
I don’t even know who this is.

The rock tumbled from his hand and he collapsed back onto his ass, the wet grass soaking through his already soaked jeans. He looked at the faces surrounding him, expecting to find accusation. He had become a piss-smelling crazy man.