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“What’s he going to do, jump out of the car and grab me?” Phillip asked, not slowing his pace. “In broad daylight?”
“We’re pretty far from town.”
“Come on,” he said, and if he was less sure of himself, he didn’t let on.
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to walk by, like I’m headed to the field, and as I pass him, just kind of take a look inside, see what he looks like. Maybe he’s wearing the bib overalls with the blue stripes on them like that kid back in Wickham said.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly what he’s wearing,” Sue said, not exactly sure why she was so reluctant to let Phillip get close to the Plymouth, only that the feeling of apprehension was building in her chest and abdomen, the way her head felt when she dove all the way to the bottom of the deep end of a pool. “Come on, let’s just go—okay?”
For the first time he stopped and stared back at her. His dark eyes were serious, as grown-up as she’d ever seen them, and all at once she knew exactly what he was going to look like as a grown man—it might’ve even been the first time that she realized she loved him, a little.
“What if it happens tonight?” he asked. “And in the morning everybody’s talking about some kid that got killed by the Engineer, and we both know we could’ve done something about it but we didn’t. Do you want that on your conscience?”
She took a breath, considered any number of possible replies:That’s not going to happen orMy conscience has nothing to do with this or simply the ever-popularOh please, but in the end she didn’t say anything. They were a dozen steps from the edge of the bare, tire-packed earth, putting them twenty or thirty good strides from the orange Plymouth, and it was clear now that she wasn’t going to stop him.
She glanced back over her shoulder to where the toddlers and their mothers had been playing, but the dingy little playground was empty. The blue Chevy and the rusty Ford were gone, must have left while she and Phillip were talking. The only car left in the lot was the Plymouth.
Sue nodded. “If we see anything that looks funny, we run straight to the police. I mean it, Phillip.”
“No duh, genius,” he smirked. “I’m not Magnum, PI.”
“Yeah, you’re more like Higgins.” The banter, however lame, made her feel a little better, and the next thought was even more comforting.Of course it’s not going to be the Engineer in there. Phillip could go up to the guy, climb in the backseat and ask him what he thought about the Red Sox’s chances for the playoffs, it wouldn’t matter because there’s no way the man that killed a dozen kids is sitting right there, twenty feet away from us.
No, of course not. It wasn’t the Engineer, it was just some worker bee from the paper mill, some lunchbox-toting working stiff like her own father who came down here to eat his onion sandwich and maybe sneak a warm Bud before going back to the factory floor. And when they got up to the orange Plymouth, Phillip would see that for himself.
Sue was still reassuring herself with these thoughts when the driver’s side door opened and the man in blue-striped bib overalls looked out at them, and smiled.
6:38A.M.
Sue sits up fast, eyes wide open, panic dousing her like an ice-cold jet of water, shooting down both arms and fusing her spinal column into a steel rod. The road is jumping at her crookedly—so crookedly that it’s not the road at all, it’s a thick row of trees plowing in her headlights, and she jerks the wheel hard around, the Expedition’s back tires skidding but finding something to pull against under the ice. And she’s back on course, breathing fast, trying not to have a heart attack.
She checks the dashboard clock. How long has she been out?
A few seconds, she thinks. Certainly no longer. It wasn’t like she was dozing, though. It was more like beinggone, transported, spirited away back to that summer day in ’83. She can practically smell the metallic rust from the swing’s chains on her palms and the high, acrid stench of the mill hanging in the air, the swamp below the bridge not far away. And despite the fact that it’s got to be at least ten below outside with the wind chill, and the Expedition’s broken side window is letting in all kinds of cold air, Sue realizes that underneath these strange, ill-fitting clothes she’s filmed from scalp to ankles in a clinging layer of sweat. Not perspiration—kids didn’t perspire, not even girls. They sweated.
The phone rings. She grabs it.
“Wake up, Susan.”
“I’m awake,” she croaks.
“You were drifting a little there,” the voice chides. “Can’t have that. Not with Veda relying on you to keep her alive.”
“Why can’t you tell me where she is?” Sue blurts, just defenseless enough from her vision of August 1983 that the question comes out sounding helpless. It sounds, actually, like a child’s question, in a child’s voice. “I just want to know she’s all right.”
“She’s all right, Susan. As long as you stay on the road and don’t crash into any trees, she’ll be just dandy.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Always keep my promises, Susan,” the voice says. “The only thing that matters is you. Getting you and your cargo where you need to be. At the other end of this route.”
“Why is that so important to you?”
“Why?” She anticipates scorn, maybe even laughter, but his earnestness sounds genuine. “You ought to know that by now. I’ve been in this business for a long, long time. I’m an old hand at it, nearly as old as the country itself. Haven’t you realized that yet?”
Sue lowers her hand from her mouth, looking for the first time at the cell phone she’s been holding against her face. It’s a small, sleek device, chrome-colored, made by the good people at AT&T Wireless. She peers at the three little holes where the voice has come out, imagines being able to somehow shimmy through those invisible cell frequencies to wherever the voice is crouched, with her daughter at its side and a blade to Veda’s throat.
“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,” Su
e 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.”