Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
“How’s it going with Enoch Crane?” Van asked. “He stick it in anyone’s contrawhatum lately?”
“Every chance he gets,” Colin said, still reading.
It was after midnight and they had put America’s Most Wanted behind them. They were on to MTV now, Headbangers Ball. The window was open because the blue fug had started to make their eyes water and it was as hot as being under a pile of
blankets together. Allie hung her head out into the night.
“What about burning down his neighbor’s house? They going to hang him for it?” Van croaked. Van was smoking like a house afire
himself, blue haze spilling from his lips, from his nostrils, from his clothes.
“He says that was King Sorrow.”
“Who’s King Sorrow again?” Gwen asked.
“A creature summoned from the Long Dark, sort of a demon. No—a dragon. Enoch Crane calls him all kinds of things: proud worm, cunning serpent, armored devil. But I think he’s describing a conventional
dragon, your basic Smaug-class creature. Sired by Father Ruin, the most ancient and powerful of dragons.”
“How do you summon a dragon?” Donna asked.
Colin turned another thick, cottony page. “They made their own spell from scratch. All magic, it turns out, is particular magic. Unique to the people casting the spell. Enoch Crane would starve himself for a week and then eat cakes made from binder
weed seeds, which I assume was your basic backwoods hallucinogen.”
“Morning glory, I bet,” Van said. “Hillbilly LSD.”
Colin said, “Then he’d fill a pail with water and talk to his reflection.
He called it the Other Face. The Other Face knew all about sorcery.
He told Crane that reality is a brightly lit cage, everyone kept in their own cell.
The Long Dark is on the other side of the bars, an infinite space full of frolicking spirits.
Those bars aren’t there to keep us prisoner.
They’re there to keep us safe from the stuff out in the Long Dark.
The creatures that dwell there are irresistibly drawn to reality. They envy our actuality.
If you want to open the cage and let them in, you need to make a kind of magical key, and everyone’s lock is different. Crane
cast spells with these Cobbett sisters. To summon King Sorrow, one of the sisters carried a dead crow in her arms until it
flew. The other sister went around with a bonnet full of eggs, describing everything she saw to them. Then she cracked them
one by one and the last one held an eyeball. Crane opened his chest as if it were a cabinet, removed one of his kidneys, and
made a meal of it, an offering for the King. Once they had each broken reality in their own individual fashion, they joined
in a circle and the world went dim and they bargained with King Sorrow.”
“Sounds like they made a Philip,” Gwen said. “An Elwood Hondo.”
“Yes. I surmised much the same thing.” Colin turned another page.
“Allie? Allie, are you sick?” Gwen asked, stirring, sitting up.
Allie had been leaning her head and shoulders out the window for almost the entire conversation.
“There’s some guy walking through the backyard,” Allie said.
Van drifted to the window, put his hand on the small of Allie’s back, and looked out. “What’s up, man? Yo!”
Allie and Van pulled their heads back into the room at the same time.
“He disappeared around the corner of the house,” Allie said. “Wonder where he’s going.”
“At two in the goddamn morning?” Donna asked. “In the middle of the goddamn Maine winter? There’s nothing out here to walk
to.”
On the TV someone played a guitar with sparks flying out of the neck. No one could seem to sustain any interest in the man who had crossed through the yard.
“So are we gonna go for it?” Van said.
“Go for what?” Arthur asked.
Gwen shifted her gaze to him. “What we’ve been talking about for the last however many hours—summoning King Sorrow. What do
you say, Arthur? Do you want to bargain with a real live dragon?”