Chasing the dead

by Joe Schreiber

  "Isaac Hamilton," she says. "That's you, isn't it?"

  "Ah. Now we're getting somewhere."

  "It's been you the whole time."

  "The whole time," the voice echoes, and there's something almost soothing about the ease with which his voice dovetails with hers. "Oh Susan, if only you knew how close you were. You know, I actually think you might make it."

  Up ahead the road dips and rises and she can see the white sign forEAST NEWBURY-ESTABLISHED 1802, and she's not sure whether he's talking about making it through the route or-something else. Something deeper, reaching upward from the depths of her mind and heart simultaneously, two hands groping for a light switch in the dark. She knows the switch is there and when she hits it everything will leap into absolute clarity, despite the fact that she hasn't found it yet. But now, unexpectedly, irrationally, the urge to find out the truth overwhelms her, rivaling-even momentarily eclipsing-the urge to save her daughter's life.

  "These towns on the route, they were all founded the same year, 1802," she says, passing the sign as she sees the first houses of town. "The year that…" Her mind flashes back to what one of the callers from the radio show said:the late eighteenth century. "The year they finally stopped you."

  "The year theykilled me, Susan."

  "Who?"

  "The idiots, the Puritans, the vultures, that pious, mindless, shrieking mob," he says. "They interrupted my work because they couldn't appreciate the holiness, the sanctity of what I was doing. And in the end they killed me for it. But I showed them, Susan, didn't I? Didn't I just?"

  Sue waits, not saying anything. Outside her windows the haphazardly spliced landscape of East Newbury is tripping past in a series of flat, stacked row houses and narrow streets with cars piled in snow, but she couldn't be less aware of it. She can't even be slowed down. Her mind is warping ahead, switched on and powered up, and she's making connections more quickly than she's even consciously aware of. "The parents of the children," she says. "The children that you murdered."

  "I deal in souls, Susan, always have. I harvest them the way a farmer harvests fruit, at the peak of its ripeness. The ripeness of childhood. I tried to explain that to them but the Philistines didn't understand my work. Theynever understood. It was like reciting sonnets to an orangutan or playing Bach cantatas for a chunk of granite. That's why I had to keep coming back, to make them understand the holiness of it."

  "Coming back," she says.

  "Three times the jackals came after me. The first time they caught me was in the winter of 1793, four years after the holy men from Haiti had begun the painful process of awakening me to my mission on earth."

  "Wait," Sue says, "go back," and she's zooming again to the tape of the call-in show, the mention of the voodoo priests. "What happened in Haiti?"

  "In 1789 I was seventeen years old, and I signed on as a cook's apprentice on a whaler out of New Bedford. I was looking for adventure and I found it, certainly, but not the kind that I'd imagined. The cook turned out to be a leering pederast, a flabby, sadistic wolf with a taste for boys." The voice reels all this off with a keening, singsong inflection, as if the words themselves were some traditional ballad that he's been rehearsing over and over throughout the centuries. "On the first week of the voyage the perverted son of a bitch locked me in the galley with three of the mates, having charged each one a good bit of coin for the privilege, and they did what men do to the youngest boy on the vessel. I contracted a case of raging syphilis from one or perhaps all of them, I don't know-in any case I became very sick and by the sixth week of the voyage the crew abandoned me at a port in Haiti. I wandered inland and met the natives who lived there. They took pity on me."

  "What did they do?"

  "They made me well again."

  "What did they do?" Sue repeats.

  This time he ignores the question. "It wasn't long before I was able to arrange passage on another ship returning to my homeland. Upon finally arriving back I was a bit confused. But clarity returned to me in time, and I began to see my place in the greater warp and weft of creation."

  "A harvester of souls," Sue hears herself say emptily.

  "Oh yes," the voice replies. "And those were heady days, Susan, I wish you could've seen me then. My very first kill was a man named Gideon Winter, a perfect stranger. Killing him was merely a test, a means by which I could measure my own abilities and fortitude. After that I began to visit the families of the men who'd abandoned me. Many of my fellow sailors had gone back out to sea in the meantime, leaving their wives at home with many, many children-oh, I fattened myself upon their souls for months!"

  "Their souls…" Sue begins. She can hear her own voice quavering uncontrollably. "They make you stronger?"

  "Not just stronger, Susan. I absorb every soul that passes through me. I learn things from them. Languages, technologies-"

  "Wait a minute," she says. "So this is how you found me? By murdering tech geeks?"

  But again Hamilton ignores her, all but turning his back on the question. "After those first families in the Boston area, I ventured west through the young country, taking from it as I pleased, until one winter evening when a merchant found me in his barn, where I'd taken the eyes of his three young sons. I had them laid out in the most tantalizing tableau-really, you ought to have seen them, Susan. In any case, the merchant gathered a group from town and they nailed the door shut and set fire to the barn, burned it to the ground with me inside."

  "What happened?" Sue asks.

  "Well, I died, Susan, obviously."

  She waits.

  "But my work would not let me rest. And so I came back five years later, on the twenty-second of December, to pick up where I left off. The restorative properties of my body had regenerated the dead, blackened skin that the fire had enshrouded me in, and I was ready to get back to business."

  "Business," she says.

  "Again, children, that ripest of fruit. This time I gathered seventeen more souls before the brutes tracked me down in a Boston wharf. A veritable army of longshoremen stabbed me dozens of times with gaffs and spears and various whaling implements until every drop of blood had drained from my body. They strung my mangled corpse from a ship's mast until the gulls plucked out my eyes and the flesh puckered and peeled from my bones. When they finally cut me down, they cast me into the sea with my legs weighted down in anchor chains, and I sank swiftly to the bottom. Food for the fishes, alas."

  "And you came back again," Sue says.

  The voice offers a quick grunt of assent. "What you must understand about me, Susan-what has eluded your fellow lower life-forms over the past two centuries-is that while I was in Haiti, I not only suffered from syphilis,I died from it. The holy men of the village resurrected me; they brought me back to life."

  "How?"

  "Rituals," he says, "ancient rites, older than Christianity. Throughout the process, the very tissues of my body were inculcated with the ability to regenerate themselves beyond death, so that I could eventually recover from any injury, no matter how horrific. And the madness that I experienced on the voyage home was the madness of death, the death of the soul, while the body endured. Can you fathom such torment?"

  "Yes."

  "Hmm," he says, "I believe you could at that. In any case-"

  "What happened the third time?" she cuts in.

  The voice chuckles, not seeming to mind the interruption; sounding perhaps amused by its impertinence. "Yes, I forget, time is growing short for you, isn't it? Well, by this point, as you may imagine, back here in America, even the most thickheaded of the yokels and hyenas who'd been hunting me down had finally gotten it through their skulls that they were dealing with something marginally more profound than a routine child slayer. Rumors had begun to circulate that I was immortal, undead, beyond death. They realized that I would persist in coming back. A kind of advocacy group formed from the parents of the children I'd taken, a vigilante army that made the previous mobs seem trivial by comparison. Counsel was sought
both from the church in Boston, and up in Salem, among those practitioners of certain…darker faiths. One of the Salem women was Gideon Winter's older sister Sarah, whose involvement in my demise would later prove to be critical. And in time a consensus was arrived at-perhaps the first and only time in recorded history that witches and Christians have been able to agree on anything-regarding my destruction. And what do you think they decided to do?"

  Sue stares through her windshield, the wind dying down, dropping the snow to offer her an absolutely clear view of the Isaac Hamilton statue coming up in front of her, the statue which no longer has arms or legs-or a head. It is simply a torso held aloft by a post, with some markings on its base.

  "In 1802 they caught you and they killed you again."

  "Yes…"

  "And this time…"

  "Yes?"

  "They cut you up."

  "Yesssss."The voice sounds as if it's leaning toward her through the phone. There is a sickening ecstasy in it, a kind of obscene release that reminds her yet again of phone sex. "And…?"

  "And scattered the pieces throughout the state." She thinks of the different statues along the way, each one less than the one before it. "Your right arm, your left arm, your right and left legs, your head-" She's counting as she's saying them, mentally traveling through the towns. "Wait a minute, what about Gray Haven, with the whole statue? What's there?"

  "It's just a monument of sorts. A statement of what they feared the most."

  "And the last town, after your arms and legs and head?" Then she figures it out. "Your heart. The last town was where they buried your heart."

  The voice on the other end says nothing. It doesn't have to.

  "They cut it from your chest," Sue says, "and buried it in White's Cove. They marked each place with a monument, and they probably assigned someone to stay and watch the spot just to make sure the pieces didn't try to come back together again. And they came up with that rhyme, as a kind of charm, for extra protection. That's right, isn't it?"

  The voice makes a soft, satisfied sound, smacks its lips. "Oh yes."

  "But…" she says, and stops.

  "Keep going. You're almost there."

  "But it still wasn't over," Sue says, sensing the ground beneath her growing more alarmingly fragile but knowing she has to push on, because there is no more time for hesitation. The light switch is very close at hand now, intoxicatingly near, and she almost feels the tips of her fingers brushing against it. "They'd planted seeds wherever they'd buried you. Towns sprung up from each place, seven towns, founded by the statues' original guardians, and a line formed between them, connecting them. A route."

  "A route," he repeats, savoring it. "Yes."

  "And the curse that held your body together after you died, the spell, the magic, whatever it was…it spread itself out along the route, among the seven towns. That ability to resurrect dead things, dead people-it lived between the towns, along these back roads. By bringing a corpse through the towns you could restore life to it."

  As she's saying this, Sue's thinking so fast that she doesn't even realize how much her head has begun to hurt. It's like the worst hangover of her life multiplied by twelve and stacked on top of a neutron bomb of a sinus headache. She thinks of Jeff Tatum and Marilyn, and how they are only hollow shells, clumsy pawns before the resurrecting power of the route. How Jeff spoke to her in the same tone, the same voice as the one on the cell phone, his human attributes swallowed and digested by the relentless black onslaught of the force that drove him: Isaac Hamilton.

  "But the bodies always take on your personality. They speak with your voice. They're like empty shells. They come back not knowing they're dead until they feel you within them. Even then they might not know it-until you take over."

  "That's exactly right."

  Of course it is, she thinks. Dear God, how do I know all this?

  Her prescience doesn't seem to bother the voice on the other end. If anything he sounds delighted that she has finally arrived at the true significance of the route and her role in it. "Very impressive, Susan. You've come a long way tonight, both literally and figuratively. Daylight is almost in view. There's just one more thing we need to talk about."

  She knows. "The Engineer."

  "Yes."

  "What about him?"

  The voice purrs. "You tell me."

  "Who was he," she asks, "really?"

  "I believe I've already answered that question."

  She doesn't say anything.

  "Think, Susan. What I just told you."

  She casts her mind back, reviewing everything he said up till now, and comes up with nothing.

  Let your mind go blank. Try not to think.

  She draws away, allowing her thoughts to come unfocused. Given her current psychological exhaustion, this isn't difficult. Abruptly, out of nowhere, she finds herself thinking about Gideon Winter, about the Engineer. Then she sees it.

  "He was your first."

  "Good, Susan."

  "The very first man you killed when you came back to the States," she says, "what was his name, Gideon Winter? He was a railway engineer."

  "A private joke of mine. There were no railroads then. The ironic thing is that Gideon Winter was never an 'engineer'-that was merely one of the many personas that I created for my vessel over these past two centuries."

  She wants to ask him more, but senses they've reached the point in their conversation where he will tell her what he wants. And he does.

  "As I said, his older sister Sarah was one of the women from Salem," the voice says. "The one who suggested cutting my body apart and scattering it through the seven villages." Hamilton's smile is evident in his tone of voice, a thin meanness in which there is no spark of humanity. "But she couldn't let it be. She was obsessed. When she saw how the towns were sprouting up where I'd been buried, she thought about her brother, poor Gideon, lying in the cold ground. And she was seized by an idea-the notion that whatever force had animated her brother's murderer might be used to return Gideon from death itself."

  "Whoever gave her that idea?" Sue says.

  "Ah." He laughs. "I wish I could take credit for that, Susan. But as you no doubt have come to realize by now, I have no particular power over the living, only the dead."

  "Then why did she…?"

  "Human nature," he says. "Unholy obsession at work in the grief-stricken mind, the same sort of morbid compulsion that drives desperate people to extreme acts every day. In that sense you might say that Sarah Winter was the true mother of the route-inadvertently, of course. And I am grateful."

  Sue feels a long, cold finger trace a line down the back of her neck, between her shoulder blades. "Dear God."

  "One night in midwinter of 1810, on the longest night of the year, under cover of darkness, Sarah went back to her brother's grave, dug up his coffin, and loaded it into a carriage. She drove his body from Gray Haven, heading east down dirt roads and lumber trails to White's Cove. She wasn't quite there when she began to hear the scratching sounds coming from inside his coffin." Hamilton chuckles again, and it is the dry sound of something stirring at the bottom of a pile of dead leaves. "The last thing Sarah Winter ever saw was her brother coming out of that pine box, fully resurrected, and reaching for her throat, his eyes as black as anthracite." He pauses, letting it sink in. "But she'd already completed the trip, thus providing me with my first portal back into the world, the Engineer. He would be my emissary, my first new flesh and blood, the closest I ever had to a son. After that, there would be many, many more."

  "But if that's true, the Engineer would already have to be dead in the summer of 1983, when he killed all those children."

  "Of course." The voice sounds perfunctory. Not so much impatient as eager for her to get to the next step, to make the final connection. "And if we follow that line of reasoning, where does that lead us, Susan?"

  "If he was already dead in 1983, and you were already controlling him, then we couldn't have really killed him
in the first place."

  "Of course not. You can't kill a corpse. But you did set him back in his work."

  "But-"

  "Youattacked him, Susan. That's what incensed me. You attacked the one I'd come to think of as my only begotten son, brought back into the world to continue my work. I needed someone to take him through the route again, just to recover from his wounds."

  "Then what's the purpose of me bringing his corpse through the route again tonight? It doesn't make sense." She's blinking, her head pounding, so close, so fuckingclose to figuring out where he's been leading her, and then it hits her all at once. "Unless…"

  And he jumps on it. "Unless what, Susan?"

  "Unless the body in the garbage bags isn't the Engineer."

  She steps on the brake and the Expedition skids to a halt, the phone still clutched to her ear. Through it she thinks she can hear the voice laughing.

  It doesn't even feel like she's walking anymore, or even running. It feels like she'sflying, skimming an inch above the ground, every neuron cranked to maximum performance. She swoops around to the back, yanks open the hatch of the Expedition, and stares inside at the thing wrapped up in garbage bags. For the first time since she dug it up, she pulls the bags open and looks at the face of the thing inside.

  For a fathomless span of seconds she simply stares at it, her entire body petrified by raw disbelief.

  The corpse wrapped in the garbage bags-the corpse that she lugged from a slimy hole underneath the bridge, ten hours ago, and dragged halfway across Massachusetts in the back of her SUV-isnot wearing blue-striped overalls with a red bandanna sticking out of the pocket.

  It's not the Engineer.

  No, this corpse, this body, this dead human being, is dressed in a navy blue blazer and L.L. Bean khaki pants. It wears a white oxford shirt beneath the blazer, a red silk tie, with Bass loafers. It has a silver watch on its wrist and a silver wedding band on its finger.

  The face and hands are pale and bruised in the places where blood has begun pooling up under the skin. It hasn't been dead for long. The decay process has only just begun. Across its face the muscles have drawn back into a tight grin, the skin of the cheeks bunching together above the teeth. Crumbs of dirt stick in the creases. There's dirt and mud in the hair as well.