Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

"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."