Chapter 30
Thirty
Colin stood behind the card table, and the rest of them sat across from him, spread out along the curved leather bumper as
if they were there to play blackjack and he was there to deal. He offered them whiskey but none of them wanted to be drunk.
Gwen made tea instead.
Arthur took in his friends’ faces. Gwen had recovered herself—a little. Her face had a washed-out, colorless quality, as if
she had recently come in from the cold or was recovering from a flu. Van perched awkwardly on the edge of his stool, a hungover
cowboy barely able to stay in the saddle. Allie waited in a state of almost military readiness, back straight, knees together,
little spots of color in her cheeks. Donna sat hunched and flushed beside her. The two of them were holding hands under the
table.
In the end, Arthur, Van, and Gwen had all gone together to the dorm room Allie and Donna shared on campus. When Allie had
seen her own tattoo blooming across her pale, delicate skin, she had begun to laugh hysterically, laughter that sounded dangerously
like screaming. Donna hadn’t laughed. Donna had hardly said anything in three hours. Arthur thought nothing made Donna angrier
than being afraid.
Only Colin was his usual self, serene and smiling, his bald Mr. Clean dome looking as if it had been recently waxed.
“How long have you known?” Arthur asked.
“I thought we all knew. I thought we had just silently agreed never to speak of it.” Colin paused, then shook his head.
“No, wait. I take that back. I thought some of you had blacked it out on purpose. Or decided it was something you dreamt. The mind resists knowing some things. The mind is an estate far bigger than The Briars, and it’s quite possible to switch the lights off in one room, shut the door, and never go there again.
We all smoked a lot of weed. We all drank too much Scotch.
Intoxication is a useful way to redact uncomfortable memories. ”
“But you didn’t black it out or forget,” Gwen said.
“No.”
“And it doesn’t scare the shit out of you?” Arthur asked him.
Colin’s eyes shone with inspiration, like an evangelical at his own baptism. “We brought a creature of the imagination out
of some realm of the impossible and into the real world. We smashed reality like throwing a rock through a window. I consider
the night we summoned King Sorrow to be the most important experience of my life. The most meaningful. I know how my grandfather
must’ve felt now, that first time Elwood Hondo came through.”
“But Elwood Hondo went away, didn’t he? This thing isn’t going anywhere. It’s getting stronger.” No, that wasn’t quite right,
Arthur thought. It wasn’t getting stronger . . . or at least, it wasn’t just getting stronger. It was getting closer.
Easter, he thought, and shivered.
“Yes. And you know why. You know what we asked him to do.”
“Jayne,” Van said, in a gravelly voice.
“And Ronnie,” Arthur said.
No one spoke for a moment. Donna exhaled, a thin, fuming breath. It was like sitting next to a teakettle in which the water
has come to such a high boil, the kettle has started to rattle on the stovetop.
“But we’re not going to let him obliterate Jayne Nighswander,” Arthur said. “We’re going to take it back, aren’t we?”
Colin poked his tongue into one cheek and seemed to consider this. “I think I’ll have a whiskey, even if no one else wants
one.”
Van said, “Deal me in.”
Colin busied himself at the bar. Ice clinked in glasses. He brought back a double for himself and a double for Van. He swirled
the liquid round and round, then tipped his head back and had a taste.
“You asked if we can take it back. Let’s set that aside for the moment and ask a different, better question: Why would we want to?
Jayne Nighswander and Ronnie Volpe forced you to steal thousands of dollars of books from the school library.
They blackmailed you and abused you psychologically, not to mention physically.
They assaulted us all. They threatened to maim and blind your mother.
They said they would kill her if you failed to keep them happy.
I regard them in much the same way I’d regard biting ants.
All they’re ever going to do is bite and ruin picnics and make little ants.
They’re going to go on hurting people, humiliating and degrading others, until one of these nights Jayne will climb into her car while she’s loaded on coke and steer it into oncoming traffic.
It might happen a year from now or ten years.
Sooner would be preferable, since it would limit how much damage she does to others in the meantime.
If we set something against her that wipes her out before she can do more harm?
We’ve probably saved lives.” He swirled the amber liquid again, watching it eddy.
“Morality has its own arithmetic. Two lives for ten is a good exchange. You know Nighswander and Volpe are slinging PCP. I wonder how many people have already overdosed on their drugs. Besides . . . animals have to eat. I wouldn’t feel bad if I read a newspaper report about both of them being eaten by a shark.
I’m not going to feel bad if they’re chewed up by our imaginary dragon either. ”
“You can’t aim a shark at someone like a rifle.”
“What changed, Arthur? Why are you having second thoughts? Is it because it’s not pretend anymore? I’m not criticizing. I’m
genuinely curious. What happened?”
What happened is he had felt her fear. He had walked into the smoke-filled kitchen and somehow passed straight through into
Jayne’s head, to live through something she had experienced only a few nights before. He had felt her terror as she crept
through the dark with her shotgun, afraid of what she was going to find. When she screamed, he had felt it in his own throat.
“Now I know what it’s doing to her,” Arthur said. “I saw it, somehow. I told you I saw it. I was in her head. We all were: Van and Gwen and I. She’s not just going to be killed. She’s being tortured first. I don’t want that on my conscience. I’ve got enough guilt already.”
“But we can’t stop it, can we?” Gwen said. “The only way we can save Ronnie and Jayne is for one of us to die in their place. And that’s
not happening.” She looked toward Arthur with a mixture of warning and affection. You don’t get to sacrifice yourself, old buddy. Not for the likes of Jayne Nighswander. He understood her as clearly as if she said it aloud. They were good at reading each other. They had been good at it since
the beginning, when she had known what was on each Zener card as soon as he glanced at it.
“Well,” Colin said. “Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“I’m not certain there’s no way out for them. To be clear, I’m sure there’s no backing out of our arrangement with King Sorrow. All sales are final. But I have doubts about the extent of his
powers. My grandfather thinks an egregore has a practical range.”
Van said, “How often do I gotta tell you to speak American, goddamn it?”
Colin said, “An egregore is a Philip. A noncorporeal being created by communal belief. Elwood Hondo couldn’t go far from the
people who generated him. It’s true, when one views the Hondo film, sometimes it seems to throw a little glitch into reality.
A bird will fly into a window, or a lightbulb will explode. But the people watching the film have expanded the circle of belief.
It’s still basically a local, close-range phenomenon. If Jayne and Ronnie get far enough away from us, they might also slip beyond King Sorrow’s reach.”
“Every king has his kingdom,” Van said.
“That’s right. And King Sorrow’s might—I only say might—be confined to our immediate stomping grounds. If Jayne and Ronnie got fifty, a hundred miles away from us . . .” He moved
his bony shoulders in a shrug. “Who could say for sure?”
“If Jayne slips out of reach, what’s to stop the dragon from taking one of us in her place?” Gwen asked.
“We have an agreement, and it binds him as surely as it binds us. We gave him Jayne and Ronnie. If they escape him, escape his wrath—well, then we didn’t disappoint him, he disappointed us. We aren’t to blame for what he can’t do.”
“Are you sure of that?” Arthur asked.
“Which part?”
“If he can’t reach them, he won’t turn around and chow down on one of us?”
Colin thought it over. “Yes-s-s. That part of the contract seems clear enough.”
“And you think if Ronnie and Jayne run far enough,” Allie said, “they’ll be okay?”
“Oh, not at all! That part is highly doubtful. But I think it would be fun to see them try!”
“What if we cast another spell?” Arthur asked. “To make King Sorrow go away? When we summoned him, we made the spell up as
we went along. You said all magic is particular magic. Can’t we just make up another spell to send him back to the Long Dark?”
A small dent appeared between Colin’s eyebrows. “Even if that was the case—and I’m not sure it is—there’d still be a problem.
Bringing him over involved magic particular to us. Sending him home would involve all of us working together again . . . including King Sorrow. He’d have to be a willing part of any ceremony. And I’d guess he won’t be so willing.”
“What about the book?” Gwen asked. “Was there anything in the Crane journal about getting rid of him?”
For the briefest moment, Arthur thought Colin’s eyes flashed with something like irritation. Arthur was struck suddenly with
the idea that Colin liked having a dragon and that all this talk of sending him away was threatening to ruin his fun. But when Colin spoke, his voice
was musing and reasonable. “Not that I recall. But I wasn’t really reading to see how to banish a dragon.
I was trying to figure out how to summon one.
I suppose there might be something. If we still had the book .
. . but it’s gone in the wind.” Colin finished his whiskey and set down his tumbler.
“So do we try and save Jayne or not? We could take a show of hands, but personally, my conscience isn’t up for a vote.
Arthur, if you want to try and help her, then I think that’s what we should do. If that’s what you really want.”
Arthur looked at Gwen . . . and Gwen surprised him by reaching across the table to take his hand.
“Save her,” Gwen said. “Save her if we can. I don’t like her—I hate what she’s done to Arthur—but I don’t want to be the reason she dies.” She moved her thumb across his knuckles, just once,
and let him go.
“But you aren’t going to be the reason she dies,” Donna said, speaking for the first time since they had gathered in the study.
“King Sorrow is.”
“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Arthur murmured. Everyone except Colin looked perplexed.
“No, hon. It’s on all of us,” Gwen said. “One way or t’other and there’s no fiddling around about it. If we dropped her in
a pit of alligators, they wouldn’t send the gators to jail for eatin’ her. They’d send us.”
“But we aren’t going to go to jail—no jury in America would convict us of having a pet dragon—so I say bon appétit,” Donna
said. “Fuck Jayne Nighswander. This bitch buys time to pay off her debts by letting men fuck her kid sister. She can roast.
And as far as I’m concerned, every man who ever fucked Tana can roast with her.”
Arthur felt a prickling across his torso that had nothing to do with the mark King Sorrow had put on him and everything to
do with the memory of Tana’s body against his.
Colin said, “Allie? You haven’t weighed in. I’m afraid we don’t have the polling data on the morality of feeding one’s enemies
to a dragon. Any thoughts?”
Allie said, “One thought, yeah. I keep thinking about this great old joke. You ever hear the one about the two guys who go camping, only when they get up in the morning, there’s a giant grizzly bear getting ready to attack them?
And the one guy, he starts lacing up his sneakers, and the other guy says, what are you doing, you can’t outrun a grizzly!
And the first guy says, I know, but I don’t need to outrun the bear, I need to get ready to go home with her, and pour her a nice drink, and watch some comfort TV with her until she feels better. ”
Colin stared, perplexed.
“I’m Donna’s roommate,” Allie said. “Whatever she votes, that’s how I vote. I have to lace up my sneakers and go home with
the grizzly.”
“What say you, Van?” Colin asked.
“You don’t point a gun at someone and then decide if you want to shoot ’em,” Van said. “That’s something you ought to decide before the gun is in your hand. But if
you don’t want her to die, Arthur, then that’s that. We’ll have to try and save her.” Then he looked across Allie at his sister.
“Come on, Donna. It’s fine to kill Jayne, but if we don’t do something, it’s gonna fuckin’ kill Arthur, and that’s a whole
’nother ball of cheese.”
Donna glared at him with watery eyes. “Fine. Let’s locate this nasty bitch and tell her to get the hell out of Dodge while
she’s got a chance.”
“Call her, Arthur,” Colin said. “We’ll back your play. As it happens, there might be something else to be gained, on a personal
level, from reaching out to Jayne and Ronnie. But if we’re going to meet with them—and I think we should all be there—it isn’t
going to be like Halloween. Not this time.”
“No,” Arthur said. “This time, we’re the monsters.”