Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

"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…"