The Book of Counted Sorrows Read online

  Thirty-two years later, Bruno came to work on the Koontz estate as our Masseur Extraordinaire and Monkey Mechanic. His massages are so aggressive that they are not merely relaxing but nearly fatal. If you have ever received a rigorous traditional Japanese massage, which is arguably the most forceful massage in the world, then you might be able to understand the power of Bruno's treatments if you can imagine a Japanese massage performed by a tribe of methamphetamine-crazed gorillas wielding baseball bats and lug wrenches while driven into a frenzy by samba music played at full volume on 40,000-amp speakers. Bliss. As deeply relaxing as a massage by Bruno can be, the restful effect is further enhanced on those occasions when a short-term coma and hospitalization follow.

  You have no doubt noticed that I've left you alone here in my handsomely padded and tufted study for a mere twenty-one minutes and nine seconds, which is not nearly long enough for a complete massage, and being observant, you will have further noted that I have returned not in a coma, nor even disoriented, but only in a wheelchair and with a dreamy expression on my face. This is because my massage was interrupted by Mrs. Scuttlesby, who rushed to the massage theater to alert Bruno that a repair emergency had arisen regarding the robotic monkeys.

  Although I myself possess no other talent or skill besides a certain humble gift for writing fiction, we are fortunate that this world harbors some exceptional human beings who can do two - or even more than two - things with equal ability. Albert Einstein was not only the greatest physicist who ever lived, but also the highest-scoring professional basketball player of his time. General Douglas MacArthur, brilliant commander of our Pacific forces in World War II, also had a profitable and acclaimed career as a stand-up comic in the Catskills and later in Las Vegas, under the name Shecky MacArthur, and in addition, he wrote best-selling romance novels under a name that I am sworn never to reveal, under penalty of instant spleen removal by descendants of the general. Likewise, our highly esteemed Bruno Kronk not only gives the most strenuous and most exquisitely debilitating massages on the North American continent, but he also is to robotic-monkey repair what Jackie Chan is to martial-arts movies.

  Few estates in this country feature robotic-monkey displays, and I am burstingly proud to say that none - not even those vast sumptuous domains owned by Donald Trump, the Sultan of Brunei, Bill Gates, and Mick Jagger - none can boast as elaborate a collection of robotic monkeys as that which capers, tumbles, scampers, frolics, chatters, dances, and occasionally simulates copulation on our south lawn, albeit I will admit that Mick's collection, while smaller than ours, does contain more monkeys engaged in grossly obscene acts. Though if I were him, I wouldn't brag about this dubious distinction. Ours is largely a G-rated bunch of charming mechanical primates. On a warm spring afternoon, we enormously enjoy spreading a blanket on the south lawn and watching the monkeys pretend to pick lice out of one another's thick nylon fur, while we eat cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches and wash them down with fifths of bourbon.

  Will you please adjust my lap blanket? After even an incomplete massage from Bruno, I'm not at once able to control my arms, and in attempting to adjust my lap robe, I might spasmodically knock over that priceless Tiffany lamp or gouge off my nose.

  Thank you. That's just right.

  What?

  Where?

  Oh, be not afraid. No, really, there's no danger. That was nothing more than a robotic monkey flinging itself at the window.

  See, there's another one.

  Yes, I know they can be daunting, with their gnashing steel teeth, gnashing and gnashing, but they are merely malfunctioning machines, not possessed of malevolent intent.

  Well, you see, the windows will not shatter because -

  Now that was a furious little Curious George! What an impact!

  - because they are fabricated from inch-thick bulletproof glass.

  Really, please sit down.

  No, really.

  Good lord! Impressive noise, wasn't it?

  No, no, that wasn't a bigger monkey. They're all approximately the same size. That was just a pair of them, throwing themselves at the window while pretending to copulate.

  I would offer you a little Scotch to quiet your nerves, but when you had finished it, you would be required to floss and convey the used length to the visitor's window at the carriage master's cottage. Until Bruno has ascertained the precise cause of the malfunction of the robotic monkeys and has effected repairs, it would be unwise for any of us to venture outside.

  Where was I?

  8

  Everything Additional that I Know about The Cursed Book.

  I have told you heretofore and foursquarely that to track the ownership of The Book of Counted Sorrows is to follow a trail of frightful destruction.

  I was not exaggerating.

  I never exaggerate. The exaggeration nodule of my cerebellum was surgically removed when I was six years old, as part of a religious ritual performed on every child in the cult to which my parents had committed themselves and from which I didn't escape until I was fourteen. Though I sometimes yearn for my lost ability to exaggerate, I am most grateful that it was not the policy of the cult to neuter every six-year-old child.

  But allow me to return - which I must, as surely as the swallows return to Capistrano and occasionally fry themselves by perching on insulation-stripped power lines - to the subject of Counted Sorrows, and to the truly frightful destruction and the violent death and the madness and the severe dental crises that found those who came into possession of that tome.

  After Clete Reet swallowed himself in 1942, Sorrows eventually passed into the hands of Rupert Cling, of the peach-fortune family. In 1944, in a state of tremulous excitement, he told friends that he had discovered the meaning of life in The Book of Counted Sorrows and felt as though he might explode with the power of this knowledge. He did not explode - as you were no doubt expecting he would - but two days thereafter, he threw himself into the peach-handling equipment, whereupon he was peeled, sliced, processed, and canned in heavy syrup along with two million pounds of Georgia's finest.

  In 1946, Henry Dubonnet, an apprentice spittle-valve cleaner for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, came into possession of the book. One week later, during a performance of 101 variations on Ravel's Bolero, as Henry was standing by with his spittle-collection jar, his vacuum siphon, his spittle-sample camera, his log book, and the necessary legal forms requiring the signature of each donating musician, this dear man, this well-liked nonentity, suddenly began to spin. Faster and faster he spun, so fast that his spittle-collection jar and the other items vital to his trade were flung away from him at such high velocity that they decapitated and otherwise inconvenienced seven members of the audience. Yet faster Henry spun, faster, faster, churning ever faster, until he was a blur, and then something less clichéd than a blur (though the word eludes meà, faster. When at last he stopped spinning, he was no longer a man at all, but a column of butter in the shape of a man. The Enforcer of Official Orchestra Systems, one Lucifinda Scuttlesby, happened to be standing near Henry Dubonnet when this transformation occurred, and she is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, "It was most distressing. Our apprentice spittle-valve cleaner, whatever his name might have been, was such a huggable little chubby nonentity. I know everyone involved with the Philharmonic will pause this evening for perhaps a quarter minute of silence to honor his memory. But in spite of whatever grief we might feel sticking like phlegm in our throats, I believe that all of us would agree that the butter into which this humble little nobody spun himself looked as creamy and delicious as the finest spread you have ever seen served in any five-star restaurant in the world. Had there been muffins and scones handy, we would have slathered them at once. With great affection, we would have devoured what's-his-name in a New York minute, which is the most touching tribute I can imagine being given to a man with so little to offer the world prior to this event."

  (A parenthetical aside: Some of you, having read this far, are by now sophi
sticated enough to understand that what often appears to be a significant event is not in fact significant at all, and here I refer, of course, to the appearance of a fourth Scuttlesby in this saga. In this instance, I didn't even have to ask our Mrs. Scuttlesby if she were related to the Enforcer of Official Orchestra Systems who served the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1946, because, for one thing, that Scuttlesby had a first name - Lucifinda; and for another thing, nowhere in the Los Angeles Times account is either the title Miss or Mrs. coupled with her name. These variations from the pattern of the previous Scuttlesbys make it clear that this is but an anomaly, with no connection, and certainly not worth investigating at the expense of nine more detectives dead in nine more tornadoes. Although I never put the question to our Mrs. Scuttlesby, she came forth unsolicited to assure me that indeed she had never heard of Lucifinda Scuttlesby. For me, that put the matter to rest, because the assurances of our esteemed Mrs. Scuttlesby have the same quality of irrefutable finality as death by dynamite, and they are delivered with a sincerity that equals in intensity the ghastly pressure of those great oceanic depths that can crush the steel hull of a submarine as though it were tissue paper.)

  (Yes, this is another parenthetical aside. I sincerely apologize for the proliferation of these annoying interruptions of the main narrative. I am acutely aware of the stress you experience when you are required to read the parenthesis at the top and bottom of the aside, first the left-oriented convex "(," and then the right-oriented convex ")," which place considerably more demands on the mind than any letter of the alphabet or other form of punctuation. To compensate for this, I have attempted to use fewer italics than is usually my style, and I have edited out a slew of semicolons that I would have liked to include. We are in this together, you and I, and since you were kind enough to adjust my lap blanket, I feel obligated to make your experience of this narrative as pleasant as possible.)

  (You may be grinding your teeth at yet another parenthetical aside - or perhaps that is only the sound of the robotic monkeys gnawing at the bulletproof windows. In any event, if you will bear with me, I am sure that you will find this particular aside of some interest, especially if you are a classical-music buff. Were you aware that the Los Angeles Philharmonic, of which we've so recently been speaking, is the only symphony orchestra in the world that has a six-chair theremin section to provide eerie here-comes-the-monster moments where applicable in the compositions of Beethoven and Bach? No, I didn't think you were aware of that. Furthermore, no other orchestra can boast a two-chair gun section in which a pair of fine musicians are armed with everything from simple revolvers to fully automatic combat weapons to produce punctuations of sound that help the audience more fully imagine the bloody shootouts that are such important themes in everything by Tchaikovsky and George Gershwin.)

  You'll notice this paragraph is not preceded by a parenthesis, nor does one of those damnable things come at the end, for now we have returned to the primary narrative, where I will tell you about Buddy Vishnu, investment adviser to the criminally insane. Buddy came into the possession of Counted Sorrows in 1947, while on a trip to Colorado to purchase a 120,000-acre cattle ranch for the real-estate portfolio of the Cleveland Strangler. Not three months thereafter - in fact, it was only one month - at the opening of a new Manhattan art gallery owned by the Milwaukee Mauler, as Buddy Vishnu was engaged in a discussion about the merits of investing in antique codpieces, his head exploded.

  In June of 1948, Phylo P. Phillium, a world-renowned architect of vomitoriums, was given the fateful book by his niece, as a present on the occasion of the third anniversary of his successful buttocks-reduction surgery. On the ninth of August, Phylo entirely swallowed himself while having dinner at the beautiful Bel Air Hotel, an event covered extensively in a lovely article in that December's issue of Bon Appetit.

  In March of 1950, Sam Iam, the massively wealthy inventor of green eggs, who sold such volume every St. Patrick's Day that he could afford not to work the rest of the year, claimed to have gotten Counted Sorrows from a leprechaun, which is an obvious and despicable lie. The truth of his demise, however, is well known: He was found inexplicably emulsified and smeared across the ceiling of the model-train room in his mansion.

  You see, I am sure, that a tiresome pattern has developed. As dreadful as these deaths may be, and in spite of the fact that they provide the gruesome trail of frightful destruction that I promised you, they would have a numbing, not to say paralyzing, not to say coma-inducing effect on you if I were to recount the rest of them in the detail that I have heretofore provided. Consequently, I will convey you through the next half century of tragedy and mayhem in a more expeditious style.

  The following people came into possession of Counted Sorrows without the slightest suspicion that the consequence of ownership was considerably more serious than, say, the minimum purchase obligation imposed on members by the Literary Guild, an organization that can be plenty tough when compelling you to purchase the agreed-upon number of books, but that has never forced a recalcitrant member to swallow himself.

  1952. Vinnie "The Velociraptor" Taliferio, notorious Mafia pet nanny, was dandling Don Vita Corleone's cherished toy poodle on his knee, at the Don's birthday party, when his head exploded. Other guests, thinking that this was meant to be a hit on the Godfather himself, drew their weapons and killed eight innocent waiters. Well, seven were innocent, actually; the eighth was only moonlighting as a waiter and really wanted to be a film-studio executive.

  1954. Dr. Farn Lannaman, highly skilled surgeon and pioneer of nose-hair transplants, dropped his surgical tools and spun himself into butter in the middle of refurbishing the nearly bat d nostrils of the great actor, James Cagney.

  1955. The same year that he perished, Nestor Nada, of Tarzana, California, invented the shrub-and-tree blower, which preceded the gasoline-powered leaf blower by about two decades. The shrub-and-tree blower featured an early version of the jet engine, powered by nuclear fusion, and was meant to be a final solution to the annoyance of landscape droppings, tearing out all greenery by the roots and blowing it into the next county. Nestor was found emulsified and smeared on the ceiling of a public restroom in a casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, and it pains me to say that his death was celebrated by the usual environmentalist extremists who think trees are good.

  1956. Jimmy Crackcorn, an itinerant gerbil groomer, spun himself into butter, then past butter, finally coming to a halt when he was a soft cheese.

  1957. Jack Benimble. University professor and well-regarded Spam sculptor. Head exploded.

  1959. Jack Bequick. Buttermaker. Turned to butter. Some irony in this one.

  1962. Lars Ferndahl. Advance scout for a large extraterrestrial invasion force of intelligent giant insects from Andromeda, disguised as human. Head exploded, body continued to move for nine minutes.

  1965. Dr. Lee Sham. Practiced proctology by acupuncture, with

  many Hollywood stars on his patient list. Head exploded.

  1966. Bob Roberts. Fob fabricator. Head exploded.

  1968. Peter Piper. Pickle packer. Ceiling smear.

  1969. Peter Peter Pumpkineater. Pumpkin eater. Smeared on the dome of his pumpkin-shell living room.

  1971. Bllly-Bob Beauregard Bodeen. Professional Southern eccentric. Swallowed himself, but started with his left hand instead of his tongue, pausing twice to request another double side order of grits.

  1973. Unidentified hobo. Panhandler. Spun himself into Ripple marmalade.

  1976. J. Chandler Witherspoon. Singularly vicious book critic. Bludgeoned, strangled, stabbed, shot forty-seven times, hacked, and immolated. This is the only Counted Sorrows case of its kind, and none of the scholars in this field knows quite what to make of it.

  1977. Moses Posey. Saintly minister. He anticipated his fate and made suitable arrangements for the distribution of his remains: He spun himself into butter and on Thanksgiving, at his church-operated soup kitchen, was served atop 900 mounds of mashed potatoes with 900 turkey d
inners for the indigent.

  1979. J. Chandler Witherspoon. Singularly vicious book critic. His grave was found excavated, his casket open. His already battered, burned, and thoroughly punctured remains had been scattered on the cemetery grass, saturated with sulfuric acid, mixed with thousands of cloves of garlic, and covered with cow dung. Counted Sorrows scholars agree that this is the only known case in which the book's virulent curse continued to act upon one of its pathetic owners even after he was dead.

  Finally, in 1980, my Aunt Hortense purchased The Book of Counted Sorrows, intending to present it to me as an Arbor Day gift. Most people know nothing of the history of this volume, but as a novelist, it is part of my job to be well informed about an enormous number of subjects, many of them exotic, some of them arcane, and more than a few of them ridiculous. I was aware of the tome's deadly effect on the many fine and admirable people who'd had the bad luck to come into possession of it. [I'm sure you understand that I do not mean to include J. Chandler Witherspoon as one of the "fine and admirable people," for as everyone who ever knew him will tell you, he was a thorough prick.) I was also aware that although the book had been owned, at times, by women, and that although many of those women had read it cover to cover, and although many of them claimed to have achieved a singular enlightenment from their reading, and although eleven of them had been seen to rise off this earth and ascend in a shaft of golden light into heavens filled with singing cherubs, not any of these fine women had exploded or been violently emulsified, nor had any of them spun herself into butter or soft cheese, or swallowed herself. Consequently, I requested that Aunt Hortense retain ownership of Counted Sorrows and merely lend it to me for an unspecified length of time.

  I was also aware that everyone who read every poem in the book met an explosive, buttery, or strange end, and that everyone who read all but one poem managed to escape violent death but nevertheless went insane. You will recall our esteemed and adored former employee, Thelma Kickmule, who now lives in a chicken coop in Iowa and is known by her coopmates as the "Featherless Hen." With this in mind, and with good reason to believe that I would not have the social skills to be easily accepted in chicken society, I promised myself that I would read the entire collection of verse except for two poems, thus escaping both head explosion and insanity - though, sadly, this meant that I would fail to achieve the glorious enlightenment that had come to those who read the work complete. But, hey, I take solace from that old, wise saying: Glorious enlightenment and two dollars will buy you a latte at Starbucks.