Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

"Susan, are you beginning to understand what's happening here?"

"What?"

"The changes. Do you feel the changes?"

"What changes?"

The voice sighs. "That's what I was afraid of. You need to be punished again, Susan. It will open your eyes."

"No, wait."No more punishment, she wants to cry. "What do you want? Just tell me."

"I want to see you."

"What?"

"I want to look at you, Susan. I want you to look at yourself."

"How…?" she starts.

"When you get to Stoneview, there's a place called Babe's. You'll find it."

"Please, don't-" she stops herself, realizing that he is still listening and probably enjoying hearing her beg, maybe that's the whole point to begin with. So instead she says, "Who was Isaac Hamilton?"

"Ah." He sounds pleased. "Youare beginning to understand. Just when I was ready to throw you to the wolves."

"Is his statue in all the towns along the route?"

"Do you want to see your little girl in the morning, Susan?"

"Yes."

"Babe's, Susan. I'll see you there."

He hangs up before she can say anything else.

She puts the phone down, still cruising along at seventy, seventy-five. She doesn't know what else to do except follow the map. She thinks about Isaac Hamilton. The name has an enchantment on it. It has a kind of power, like a key dangling from a chain, a key that might open a box-or a cage.

Sure enough, six miles later, she sees the sign coming up:

The town is a husk.

Empty buildings with no glass in the windows, a dead gas station, vacant houses, and great dinosaur spines of snow drifted up in the streets. It's like a hurricane came through, or a virus, and took everyone with it. She wouldn't have thought such towns even existed in Massachusetts. And apparently they don't, at least on any map but this one.

Sue drives through it, her sinuses expanding, the enormous, cabbage-size pain at the base of her skull beginning to pound again. She feels a twinge of nausea, and her skin is moist to the touch. Her ribs squeeze her chest like a pair of skeletal hands. The lines and edges of the Expedition are running together-the bloodstains and bodies that she shouldn't be able to see are trickling into her peripheral vision, occluding her eyes.

Up ahead the road bends to the right, around an island of snow-buried land that she assumes was once Stoneview's town common. There is a bench, two or three bare trees, and in the middle, there is another statue. She says his name aloud.

"Isaac Hamilton."

As her headlights reach out to touch it Sue can see the statue plainly. And it's different again. This time it's just a head, body, and legs. Both arms are missing.

Now she slows down, magnetized. There's a small amount of snow on it but she can still tell right away, the arms were never there. It's not like a bunch of kids came along and cut them off as a prank or ran their car into it and knocked the arms off. The sculptor deliberately left them off, fashioning smooth stumps at either shoulder. Beneath the statue, the pedestal has the same plaque as the others, and Sue thinks of the lines inscribed upon it, lines that she never bothered to read though, somehow, she'd always thought they were poetry, by virtue of the way they were laid out.

She thinks of the poem that Jeff quoted. She squints at the old copperplate type-difficult enough to read already, abraded further by the passing decades. Though it's impossible to tell without getting out of her car (she's not getting out of her car, not here, not now, no sir), she thinks it looks long enough to be the poem.

So what? So they wrote some poem about Hamilton, so what is that supposed to mean?

Her eyes shift away. Behind the statue the road rises and falls again. Instead of a cemetery, the hill behind the statue gives way to an unexpected surge of red neon, a glowing cigarette tip aimed at the flat, windowless structure cowering beneath it like a blind dog.

Babe's is a roadhouse surrounded with crookedly parked vehicles. Travelers like herself, Sue thinks, caught in the storm. She pulls in and cuts the engine. Already she can hear the music playing inside, a machinelike thud of pure distortion, skinned of all melody. Bending forward to climb out triggers something in her stomach and she almost gets sick, managing to hold it back at the last second.

The cell rings.

"I'm here," she says.

"I see that."

Sue stops and turns around, her eyes searching the lot until she sees what she's looking for. The van sits shivering in a handicapped spot with a rag of exhaust dangling from its tailpipe. She can see nothing inside.

"What am I doing here?"

"I'll let you know when the time comes," the voice says. "Go around to the back. Go through the kitchen. Inside you'll find another door, marked Employees Only. Go through it. And keep that phone handy."

She starts walking. There's a freshly shoveled pathway leading around the side of the building and Sue follows it until she hears voices murmuring quietly in Spanish or perhaps Portuguese, she can't tell. There's a light mounted on the roof, aimed down, and a giant fan blasts the smell of fried onions mixed with garbage and cooking grease. Two men in aprons and bandannas are passing a joint back and forth behind the Dumpster. They flick their eyes up at her for the briefest of appraisals and then resume their conversation.

Sue passes them on the way to the door, a featureless steel plate propped open by a plastic yellow mop bucket. She slips inside without touching it and finds herself in a filthy kitchen. The music that she heard outside is louder back here, bouncing off the dirty tiles and pans dangling over the stove, and she can hear men's voices shouting and whistling on the far side of a pair of swinging doors. A roach scuttles across the sink and disappears under a bag of frozen chicken wings.

She puts her shoulder to the doors but they won't budge. There is another door off to her left, markedEMPLOYEES ONLY, a strange sign to post inside the kitchen. Sue turns the handle and steps into a dark dressing room that smells like perfume and sweat. It's shaped like a railroad car with a long counter covered in Kleenex wads and jars of cotton balls and makeup kits. There's just one light, a dim lamp without a shade burning in the corner, the wattage so low that it hardly casts a shadow.

On the far side of the room a red curtain hangs and the roar coming from the other side is somehow bestial and benign at the same time, like a crowd at a ballgame. Suddenly she understands that the place isn't called Babe's but Babes, and what the voice on the phone expects her to do here at one in the morning.

"Where are you now?" the voice asks.

"I'm in the room."

"Take off your clothes."

"What?"

"You heard me."

I want to look at you. I want you to look at yourself.

Sue doesn't move.

"Take off your clothes and I'll let you see Veda. She's right on the other side of that curtain." It's not clear whether the voice is teasing her or not. "You do believe me, don't you, Susan?"

In the end it doesn't really matter. Laying the cell phone faceup on the counter next to a jar of nail polish, Sue takes off her bloody coat and drops it on the back of a chair. Then she unbuttons her blouse. There's a lot of blood on it too and more on her skirt, making the fabric stiff and tacky as it slithers off her hips-funny how she only notices that as she's taking it off. She unhooks her bra and peels off her underwear, letting it drop to the dirty floor where it lies like a dead jellyfish among the footprints and cigarette butts.

Naked, she's neither hot nor cold, the thermostat in the room being perfectly adjusted for nakedness, but that's not the first thing she thinks. The first thing she thinks is how infrequently she's taken off her clothes without a mirror, as if for some reason she needs one to get undressed, the way you need a mirror to put on makeup or fix your hair. She's always watched herself undress, she realizes. Whether it's in the bedroom or bathroom or a dressing room at Bloomingdale's, her stare has always inevitably found its way to the glassy rectangle reflecting the white cave-drawing of scars that crisscrosses her stomach and slashes over her breast to puncture and divide her right nipple.