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“Who is he?”
But Jeff Tatum is looking out the windshield at the road ahead. “I don’t know what he told you about this route or these towns, or what you think you’re doing, but this is really a huge mistake.”
“Let me tell you what I know,” she says. “I know that somebody kidnapped my daughter tonight. Whoever it is killed her nanny and he’s given me orders to drive through these roads and these towns by tomorrow morning if I want to get her back. I don’t know why he wants me to do it, and I don’t care. All I know is that I’m driving his route.”
Of course she’s left out one small detail, the thing wrapped in garbage bags in the back of her car, the whole point of everything. And the kid seems to know it too. He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes watch her in the rearview mirror, reminding her of how they gleamed from the truck’s mirror earlier, only now they look softer, haunted by something deep inside.
“Why were you following me?” she asks.
“I already told you, to protect you.” He sounds like he means it. “To protect you and your daughter and other people from getting killed.”
“You’re protecting me by stopping me from doing what this guy is telling me to do?”
“Exactly.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“If you know your history it does.”
“History of what? People who do stupid things?”
“The history of murder in New England.”
“And you know about this, why?”
“I’ve done research. I know this route. I know what it can do. Just trust me, okay, this is not something you want to mess around with.”
That does it. Sue takes her foot off the gas, letting the Expedition roll to a gentle halt. Of course the kid notices this and pokes his head back up hopefully. “Wait, we’re stopping?”
“Get out.”
“Wait, you can’t just leave me here.”
“Believe me,” Sue says, “I’d like to.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
Sue opens her door and climbs out into the cold stillness of the long, empty road in front of them. “Come on, let’s go.”
“What are you doing?”
“Rearranging a few things. You’re sitting up front with me. And then you’re going to tell me what I need to know.” She looks him right in the eye. “I mean it.”
11:39P.M.
Their first job is hoisting Marilyn’s body from the front seat and transferring it to the back. The kid holds Marilyn’s legs and Sue takes her under the arms, with the nanny’s head propped against her chest so it doesn’t fall backward. For about two seconds Sue thinks this is going to be difficult for her emotionally, cradling the lifeless body of the woman who cared for her daughter, but she surprises herself with her own stoicism. Not that she doesn’t love Marilyn like a little sister, not that the horror at what happened has diminished one iota. But these feelings have become remote, as if her heart’s fallen asleep the way a leg or a foot might when circulation has been cut off.
The kid—well, the kid is a different story.
He tries to be a tough customer about it but when he gets back into the passenger seat next to Sue she can see how washed-out he looks, his face the color of the mushrooms that grow under the bridge in the summer, the slick nasty ones with spots on them. Mentally she’s readjusted his age to seventeen at the outside. He keeps wiping his hands on his jeans and that Adam’s apple of his just keeps bobbing and jerking like he’s trying to swallow something greasy that he can’t quite keep down.
“I shouldn’t be up here. He might see me.”
“You can crouch down if it makes you feel better,” Sue says.
He tries. He’s too tall. “Not all the way. There’s nothing to hide behind.”
“If the van comes you can jump into the backseat. But right now I want you up here. Now, fasten your seat belt.” She hits the gas.
The kid grabs the dashboard. “Hold on, where are we going? We’re not going to Winslow. I thought you were turning around.”
“Winslow is exactly where we’re going,” she says, “and after that, the next town on that map, all the way through, until we get to what is it, White’s Harbor?”
“White’s Cove,” the kid corrects her. “You have to remember that. From Ocean Street in old White’s Cove, across the virgin land he drove…”
Sue feels something curdling inside her. She knows this tune or at least it’s familiar to her from when she was young. “What is that?”
“It’s an old poem,” he says. “You have to remember it. It can help you.”
“Help me how?”
“He hates the poem. They made it up a long time ago as a kind of charm to keep him away. It’s like the only thing around that’s as old as he is, so it’s got some kind of power over him. Pushes him back inside so that whatever he’s infected has a chance to get out. Maybe not for very long, just a few seconds, but hell, sometimes that can make the difference, you know what I mean?”
Sue just looks at him. “No.”
“Just listen,” he says, and in a slightly more audible voice he begins to recite:
“From Ocean Street in old White’s Cove
Across the virgin land he drove
To paint each town and hamlet red
With the dying and the dead.
He walked through Wickham and Newbury
In Ashford or Stoneview he might tarry
To call a child to his knee
Where he slew it—One! Two! Three!
Then from Winslow to Gray Haven
Where he may begin again
Bedecked in his unholy shroud
To paint the Commonwealth with blood.”
“Who ishe ?” Sue asks.
“You don’t know?” The kid looks at her, his eyes as big as silver dollars. “Isaac Hamilton.” Then somewhat bizarrely he reaches for the radio dial and seems to remember it’s not his. “You mind if I turn this on?”
“The radio? Why?”
“There’s something I want to hear.” Without waiting for express permission he hits the power switch. Sue has it set for the Boston NPR affiliate, but the kid thumbs the scan button up to 102.8 and sits back as an obnoxious modern rock song, half-rap and half-screaming, plays through. Sue winces but doesn’t say anything. She regards this music with the kind of irritation she reserves for mosquitoes and coffee shop hipsters who wear desert camouflage ironically.
Finally, as the DJ comes on, Sue looks back at the kid. “You know, I’ve still got a lot of questions for you.”
“Shh.” The kid cocks his head to the speaker, listening to the DJ’s voice.
“You’re listening to Damien on the midnight shift, WBTX, 102.8,” the DJ says, “playing all your requests right on through till morning. Keep listening for more requests including one for that new War Pigs track and…” There’s the sound of paper being flipped over and the DJ laughs. “Oh, I like this, Elton John’s ‘Daniel,’ for my good buddy Jeff in Gray Haven.”
Sue sees the kid nodding to himself. “Jeff in Gray Haven,” she says. “Is he talking about you?”
“Yeah.”
“You requested an Elton John song?”
He nods. When the DJ comes back he says, “Okay, Damien here on the X midnight shift and like I said, I had a request here from Jeff to play Elton John’s ‘Daniel.’ Now, obviously this isn’t the sort of thing we normally play here on the X but Jeff’s what you might call a special case. Some of you might remember when he called in to the midnight shift last summer and told us how he lost his brother, who died a few years ago—the kid’s name was Daniel.” The DJ hesitates like he’s not sure he wants to go into this, then plunges right in anyway. “And as we’re on the air Jeff mentioned the Engineer.”
Just like that, Sue’s whole body goes cold. She looks at Jeff. “What is he—”
“Shh,” Jeff hisses, staring at the radio dial.
“Now,” the DJ continues, “I don’t know if any of you were
listening that night but if you were you know what I’m talking about, because we had some pretty messed-up people calling in to say some wild things. It turned into kind of a big deal, actually, the cops came by the station afterward and the whole thing was just totally out of control. Anyway, I’m just going to play the song, so here you go, Jeff.”
The song starts, Elton John hitting those first few notes, and Sue sees the kid tilt his head forward toward the glowing dial. Two tear tracks shine down either side of his face, the kid crying silently in the dashboard light.
And Sue says, “What’s the story with your brother?”
Jeff Tatum, monotone: “He died.”
“What does the Engineer have to do with it?”
The kid doesn’t say anything. He sniffles and wipes his eyes with the heels of his hands. Lets out a shaky breath. “The Engineer killed him.”
“What? When was this?”
Jeff Tatum looks at her. “Three years ago.”
11:49P.M.
“That’s crazy.” Sue feels herself go numb from the stomach outward. “That’s not possible.”
“That’s what you think,” he says, reaching into his pocket. “First, though, you better listen to this. I taped it last summer because I had a feeling he’d call in and I wanted to have proof.” Without further explanation he pulls out a cassette tape from his hip pocket and pops it into the Expedition’s tape deck. Static hisses and Sue hears the DJ’s voice come on again, Damien, cut back in mid-sentence, saying, “listening to 102.8, the midnight shift, all-request line…”
Then her phone starts beeping.
Sue stabs the power on the cassette deck off and gropes down to answer the phone. “Yes.”
“Hello, Susan,” the voice says. “How’s your passenger?”
She freezes. How would he know about Jeff? Had he seen Tatum come out of the truck? Was there some kind of bug in the Expedition?Say something, she commands herself.Anything is better than just staying silent. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I hope you don’t mind that I took out her eyes. Don’t worry. They’ll come back.”
“Her…” Then Sue realizes that he’s talking about Marilyn. “Her eyes.”
“Oh yes. They are the windows of the soul, after all.”
Sue doesn’t answer. Her mouth feels sealed shut. Up ahead on the right side of the road she sees a white sign coming up.WINSLOW—ESTABLISHED 1802. The same year as Gray Haven.
“Susan, are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“That’s good. So am I. I’m very close.”
She frowns, leaning forward, squinting through the glass. There’s a shape behind the sign. It’s not hiding—it’s much too big to hide behind such a small sign—but there is a sense of itcrouching there, a shadow tensed to spring. Then Sue realizes what it is.
It’s the van.
And there’s something else too. In front of the van, all but invisible in the falling snow, the outline of a man stands motionless at the side of the road. All Sue can tell is that he’s holding something in his hands. Then the headlights hit him and Sue sees a glimmer of something shiny. Teeth? Eyes? His face is blanched by the intensity of the lights. It’s actually like he has no face. Then he’s moving, taking five or six quick strides straight out until he’s standing in the middle of the road ahead of them. Sue hears the kid in the passenger seat groan with terror.
“What was that, Susan?” the voice on the phone asks immediately.
“What was what?”
“That sound. Is there someone else there with you?”
“No.” Sue has time to grab Jeff’s shoulder, pushing him toward the floor and mouthing the wordsget down.
But he’s not moving, his eyes locked on the figure in front of the van. Sue starts to turn the wheel. “Get down!” She feels the tires hiss and glide, losing their grip on the road. At last the kid seems to get it. He comes uncoiled all at once and starts to leap up between the passenger seat and the driver’s seat, heading for the back. But his right leg catches on the lever for the emergency brake, his ankle twisting as he flails, kicks, trying to get free.
“Who’s in the car with you, Susan?”
“Nobody, I told you, I’m alone.”
“You lied to me.”
“No, please.” At the same time Sue is able to see with a kind of dismal clarity the figure in front of them raising the object in his hands. From twenty feet away she can tell that it’s a rifle. The man in the road brings it up to shoulder level, tilts his head, and takes aim.
Sue’s foot goes down hard on the brakes. Time seems to take in a deep breath and hold it as the Expedition throws itself into a spin, Sue floating underneath her seat belt, light and darkness flickering past her windshield like a dreaming eye.
There’s the flat crack of a gunshot and a shout of light as the Expedition’s side window blows out with a crash. Next to her the kid howls. The car shoots through a crust of snow and grinds to a stop.
“Help me,” the kid is saying in a watery voice, somewhere behind her head. “Please help me.”
Sue sticks it in neutral, unfastens her seat belt, and starts to turn around. The kid’s leg is still twisted between the seats but she can’t see the rest of him down there in the dark. His breathing sounds like somebody blowing through a garden hose. On an unconscious level her brain is making assessments, ambulance driver assessments, and none of them are good. “Don’t try to move. Are you hit?”
The kid doesn’t say anything. He just makes that sound again.
She switches on the dome light and hears herself suck in a deep breath through her teeth. The kid is lying there looking up at her. The entire lower right side of his face has been obliterated, reduced to a lumpish mass of blood, muscle, and exposed bone. His right ear is gone and blood is pouring steadily down his neck from a hole in the side of his skull, the fresh blood steaming in the cold air that comes in through the shattered window. His eyes are dreamlike and moony, the lids fluttering.
He finally manages to speak, the words sounding like they’re coming from the bottom of a bowl of extra-thick oatmeal. “Is it bad?”
“You’re going to be all right. Just hold still.”
“Is it bad?” he asks again, though he doesn’t sound particularly alarmed. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” There’s a wet puttering sound and that’s when Sue sees the gash in his neck, blood bubbling up through it. “Oh man,” the kid says weakly. “This sucks.”
“Don’t try to talk.”
He mumbles something that she doesn’t understand. Then he grabs her hand and squeezes it, and his eyes go up to her, becoming intensely, almost preternaturally bright, making one last effort at communication. “I’ve been trying to contact you. I’m sorry. I waited too long.”
“Take it easy.”
“Kept backing off, when I thought I saw him.”
“It’s okay.”
“That time downtown, I almost caught up to you, but backed away at the last minute. He knows me. Thought I saw him in the crowd. Couldn’t take any chances. Afraid he might be using me to find you.”
“Jeff,” she says, with infinite tenderness, “the Engineer’s dead.”
“Not the Engineer.” He coughs, struggles to swallow, his throat making that same thick bubbling noise. “See, it’s not the Engineer, not really. It’s Isaac Hamilton. He’s…”
The bubbling noise stops. The kid’s eyes glaze. It’s not a dramatic thing but Sue has seen it enough times to know what it means. She doesn’t have to check his pulse but she picks up his wrist anyway and waits a long moment before laying it down again. There are now three dead bodies in the car with her and two of them were people she’s spoken to within the last few hours. For all she knows her daughter is already dead as well. There is no reasonable explanation for this except that she is caught in a nightmare. But it is not the kind of nightmare she will awaken from unless her definition ofawakening islosing her mind.
On the othe
r side of the windshield, something hits the hood of the Expedition with a thump. Sue’s skeleton jerks inside her and she turns around to look. Beyond the windshield, standing on her hood, she sees a pair of leather boots.
She looks up, but can’t see above his knees. The roof is blocking the rest of his body. The only other part of him she can see is the bottom of his long coat flapping at his legs. He’s so close to her that she can see the color of the coat, dark green with a red flannel lining. Sitting here mesmerized she can literally count the buttons holding the lining into place.