The Suicide King

by Kevin Ahearn

part 1 of 2

Long live the king!

Ladies and gentlemen, and peoples young and old, rich and poor, healthy and unfit all around the world, it is my esteemed honor to present to you, for your contemplation...

Especially to you-- the frustrated and the frightened, the depressed and the despondent, and above all, you who are about to lose all hope...

Yeah, you, you damn dog!

“’Tis a joy to live forever. To have been around the world countless times through a dozen ages. To have known innumerable women, many of them my wives who bestowed upon me so many beautiful children. Life is the only treasure that lasts. What’s worth anything without it?

“Yet there are so many who no longer want to live at all. Finding that forsaken individual is my eternal quest, and then there’s the timing.”

October 27, 1929 would be the last day of John Winston’s life. That he had decided. The Stock Market Crash had cost him everything. His wife had left and taken the kids. The bill collectors would be repossessing his house and car. At age 35, it was over. Yesterday morning he had watched as his fellow stockbrokers leaped from windows up and down Wall Street. And when they hit the concrete or the tops of cars or bounced off lampposts, their bodies, smashed, bloody and twisted grotesquely, became a public spectacle.

John Winston had long lost his money, his pride, and his dignity, but he would have his privacy. He had bought the gun a year ago when he began to feel rich. No one was taking his money without a fight. It was almost funny-like a thief in broad daylight, he should have seen the Crash coming.

The money had blinded him. All of it on paper. All of it gone to ashes. He didn’t even have the price of a gravestone.

The gun felt cold in his hand. As cold as John Winston would be very soon. Or so he thought.

John lay back and for a moment studied the cracks in the ceiling of his wifeless bedroom. He thought about looking back over his life-a definitive review, the final exam at the end of the course. No. He’d failed from the very start. There was absolutely no hope.

He put the gun to his right temple. John expected to be shaking with fear, but an eerie calm enveloped him; he had committed.

With just a gentle pull, his escape would be complete...

At the moment of finality...

Had a phantom power spirited into the room and suddenly seized control of his body? John Winston withdrew the gun from his head and threw it aside. For a moment he stared at his hands as though they were no longer his own. Before he could speak, he flew into convulsions and fell to the floor, shaking like a dollar bill in the wind.

Then all was still. John Winston smiled hopefully. How wonderful it was to still be alive.

John Winston would live another 30 years, marry three more times, fathering six children and becoming a grandfather to 16. From the depths of the Great Depression, he would rise from financial ruin to create a corporate kingdom worth billions at the time of his passing.

“The classic story of a man at the brink of self-destruction who miraculously turned his life around,” one of his biographers would later write. A second exhaustive volume would cite Winston’s “Intense and relentless love of life, as if each day was his last.”

Neither could explain the bowl of evergreen needles at his deathbed. How little did they know...

Nearly 800 years before, in the latter half of the 13th Century, the wise and mighty King ordered his royal guards to stay behind as he descended the winding stone stairs into the gloomy bowels of his mammoth castle.

‘Hector the Hope’ had ruled for a generation and under his strong and fruitful reign, his people had prospered with the peace and confidence he had secured them. His loyal subjects thought of him as courageous and brave; none of them knew that their beloved ruler, deep in his heart, was terrified of what had befallen so many around him and would one day fell him: death.

Hope never dies.

So deep was the royal panic that he could barely cope with it.

Hope lives forever.

“Good evening, Your Majesty,” the Royal Sorcerer bowed sincerely, emerging from the eerie cloud of vapors that hung in the dimly lit cavern. “You are most welcome here.”

“Only if I have something to thank you for,” said the King, his royal personage undiminished in the mist. “Will I?”

“I believe so, Your Majesty, for you are the Crown of Life and the Emblem of Humanity.”

“I am,” replied the Hope. “Cast your spell and be done with it!”

“Hold forth, My Lord. Be advised that to challenge death, one must fully understand the process, and the stakes.”

“You would have me immortal in an aging, decrepit body?” asked the King.

“On the contrary,” said the Sorcerer. “You will live in a succession of bodies of your own choosing, with a certain prerequisite.”

“Explain, wizard!” demanded the King.

“No one I’ve ever known cherishes life more than you do. Though many of your subjects have deserved to die with but a word from you, you have spared the lot, holding that a man can somehow change and live a good and meaningful life.”

“Many have.”

“Indeed, Your Majesty,” the Sorcerer bowed in agreement. “But your immortality will not come at the cost of another life. Instead you will live the lives of those who forfeited their own.”

“And whenever and wherever there is Life, there will be Hope.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. No one should have the right to decide when to die, but so many have and probably always will, offering you chance after chance to correct these foolish and needless infractions. That which is unlawfully given away, you will take unto your royal possession.”

“I’d be ‘correcting’ the fates?”

“Making royal adjustments,” said the Sorcerer. “When an individual takes it upon himself to kill himself, his offended spirit will abandon his body moments before the act of self-murder. For a split second you may enter the body and claim the rest of its life for yourself.”

“The scraps from another’s table?”

“Life can only be what the living make of it, Your Majesty. To turn the most worthless of ‘scraps’ into a royal banquet is a challenge fit for a king.”

“Set the table for me,” came the command.

“Once under the spell, your spirit will be empowered to leave your body when you will it, but once gone it can never return because without it, your body will die almost immediately.”

“I will be outside myself?”

“In spirit. And you will have one hour to find another vacated body to enter.”

“Sixty minutes. Not nearly enough time. How fast can my spirit travel?”

“One as strong and as fiery as yours, Your Majesty. Hope flies like a shooting star. And when you’ve chosen whose life will be yours to live, always remember that it was about to be thrown away by a man who no longer wanted it.”

“Like pure gold, I will see that is wisely spent.”

“Once renewed. You will need some of these with you at all times,” said the Sorcerer, showing the King a bowlful.

“Evergreen needles? From magic trees grown only in a special forest?”

“The most ordinary evergreen will do, Your Majesty. They serve as the symbolic conduit to your everlasting life.”

“The incantation will work then?”

“As only I shall perform it.”

The King raised a royal eyebrow. “Wait. As you have forged this chain of immortality to bequeath unto me, why have you not yet cast this eternal spell upon yourself?”

“My skills are formidable, Your Majesty. It is my privilege to serve the kingdom. But I am a mere mortal. Magic comes and goes while Hope...”

“Who would oppose me? You are aware of the power I can muster.”

“Yes, but there are those who seek to squash you forever. To wipe your presence, your very notion, clean from the Slate of Existence.”

“Never!” declared the Hope.

“So be it,” said the Sorcerer. “I will grant you entrance to the lives of others in this world whose spirits have fled them. But in the next world, in the afterlife, you will be on your own.”

“Enough!” exclaimed the King. “Do your worst!”

The King was commanded to lie on a cold granite slap. The cup of evergreen needles was placed at his side. The Sorcerer took the royal right hand and sank it into the “symbolic conduit.”

“Close your eyes and dream of a hundred lives lived beyond, beyond your kingdom, beyond your life and your time,” said the Sorcerer, raising his arms high as the deep mist swirled around him.

When the King again opened his eyes, he did not know how long he had been asleep. Or where?

“The spell has been cast, Your Majesty,” said the Sorcerer, handing him a pouch full of evergreen needles. “May the lives beyond your own be worth living.”

The King lived for another twenty-years and was found one morning to have seemingly passed peacefully in his sleep, his right hand deep in a bowl of evergreen needles.

“They say my funeral was greatest in the history of all kingdoms, but I was very much alive again before my beloved queen shed her first tear, my spirit thriving in the healthy young body of a brokenhearted farmboy who’d put a noose around his neck after the love of his life had run off and married his uncle.

“I would later take over the farm and by working from dawn to dusk seven days a week, mine became the most valuable land in the kingdom. I then bought more and married the daughter of a knight and fathered five wonderful children, all the while, my trusty pouch of evergreen needles close at hand.

“For nearly forty years I lived the life that young man was desperate to destroy, and when the time came to move on, I fingered the needles and well within an hour, I found yet another fresh life about to be ended and made the most of it.

“Man after man I became, lords and peasants, teachers and artists, factory workers and farmers, artisans and doctors, but never soldiers or policemen. As much as I wanted to serve the country of my latest life or defend its society, there was too much risk-to be suddenly struck and killed before I could finger my evergreens...that I remained deadly afraid of.

“The greatest joys of all my lives were the women who loved me, especially my wives. Of course, there were a few exceptions, but such is life. It was not my good looks that attracted and won them, though I always made an extra effort to choose strong, handsome bodies to live through. Nor was it my worldly ways and accrued knowledge or my lovemaking skills, which got more intense and passionate with every relationship, and fun, but that I knew, as no man who had ever lived, how precious life was. And with every woman I was with, I made each feel that she alone had given me my inexhaustible love of being alive.

“Yet I refused to fall so much in love with one special woman that’d I want to grow old and when the day came, death would do us part. This I refused to bear. Hope must live forever.

“Maybe only a couple didn’t bawl their eyes out when they discovered my lifeless body, my right hand in a bowl of needles, but I never stayed too long. Some I bequeathed great wealth and vast estates, but even the poorest life I lived was full of loving memories each woman took smiling to her grave.

Proceed to part 2...