Joe Schreiber - Chasing the dead

The closest I ever had to a son.

"If youdon't need Phillip's body," she says, "I'll turn around. Right now." She is mindful that she's walking an extremely perilous line here, gambling with lives, her own, her daughter's. But that's the only way to play it-right to the edge.

The corpse sits up and leers at her from the other side of the glass. Its legs have stopped struggling. "You wouldn't dare."

"Why not? You already told me that you're going to kill Veda. What's stopping me from sending the police into White's Cove and hauling you back to Gray Haven?" Without even waiting for an answer, she walks around to the front of the Expedition and gets behind the wheel. She puts it in drive and turns the vehicle around, arcing across both lanes so that she's facing the other way, and puts the pedal down, nose to the west, spitting snow to the east.

And that's when she hears the voice in the back say: "Wait."

"Yes?"

"All right."

She looks back at it. "What was that?"

"I said,all right. Bring…" The corpse glowers down at its own limbs, sprawled out around it. "Bring this body to Ocean Street."

"You said I had to have it there by seven thirty. There's no time."

"Never mind that. Just do it. Your daughter will be there. In exchange for bringing this body, you will get her back unharmed."

Why should I trust you now? Sue thinks, but doesn't say anything. Of course she cannot trust Isaac Hamilton any more than she ever could. But if there's a chance, however remote, that Veda is still in White's Cove then she has to go. And if things work out, if fate is kind, if she actually catches a breakShe might be able to get both of them out of there alive.

She reaches down to retrieve the map from the pile of crumpled faxes on the floor. She digs through the trash, checks under the seats, even looks in the back where her husband's body lies glowering at her.

But the map is gone.

She finds her way east by dead reckoning.

Twice she gets completely turned around, finding herself heading down a long, open road without any landmarks, sure that she's headed in the wrong direction. At one point it gets bad enough that she starts trembling, every part of her body, and she's convinced she'll never be able to stop.

Eventually she realizes that she can smell the ocean, the first foggy tendrils of wet sand, fish, and salt that never go away no matter what season it is. Up ahead the eastern skyline has begun to lighten beneath its veil of snow, gray dawn dragging itself into the faint encrustation of starlight like old age crawling up to smother something that was once bright and beautiful. In fact, the whole landscape has a lifeless pallor to it. It feels insubstantial, weightless, monochromatic, as if the road and trees and the sloping, snow-covered hills had been sucked dry of all life during the night, leaving only their outlines, ash sculptures that might crumble and spill if she bumped into them.

In the back of the Expedition, the thing inhabiting her husband's body doesn't speak. She can only hear it rustling around every minute or so, a sibilant restlessness of flesh and fabric that's barely loud enough to be distinguished from the hum of the tires on the road.

Out of nowhere a seagull dips across the sky, then kites upward, and her eyes follow it as the road curves to the right. Directly in front of her the gull banks sharply, rising into a part of the sky where dawn has not yet penetrated, and vanishes among what's left of the stars. Sue thinks of the sea, whose proximity is somehow more reassuring to her than the coming of daybreak. Maybe it's the way that the ocean brings the land to an end, a sense that whatever happens, there can be no more route beyond it.

There's a sign coming up and as she gets closer, Sue realizes it doesn't look like the other towns' signs. This one is bigger, the block letters carved into a slab of light, unfinished wood, pine or cedar, and mounted on massive, bare logs by the side of the road:

As she passes the sign Sue realizes, with mild surprise, that shehas heard of White's Cove before, the name itself so shamelessly bland that until she actually laid eyes on it, it didn't click. It's one of those communities like Plimoth Plantation or Colonial Williamsburg where the employees show up for work dressed in rigorously detailed period costumes, bonnets and buckles and waistcoats, the wooden buttons all stitched on by hand. They churn their own butter and call their children "rapscallion" and none of them are allowed to wear a digital watch on duty. The realization that this is where she's been headed all along-literally into the past-reverberates for a moment from her brain to her heart and back again like a cry in an empty street.

Off to the right, a sign with an arrow saysPARKING and points to a large, empty lot surrounded by drifts of snow. Sue drives past it, realizing only afterward that the road ends here, at least the paved portion of it. The Expedition thumps onto a dirt road packed with a layer of ice, skids a bit, and then finds its way without a problem.

And without any further warning she's driving straight down Main Street, circa 1802, past barns and old mansard-roofed houses, tiny dwellings with squinty little windows and doors that seem far too small for anyone to get in or out of. The narrow street presses in on either side of the Expedition, making it feel darker than it did before she stumbled into the village. It feels colder here too, as if somebody sealed the whole thing off in a bubble and pumped in dry-ice vapor. None of the gas lamps are lit, none of the storefronts open, and Sue isn't sure if they're closed for the season or it's just too early in the morning. The dirt road in front of her is clear, though, with great mountains of plowed snow heaped up shoulder-high on either side. She cruises along looking for some kind of street sign, but maybe they didn't have them back then, though apparently they had snowplows.

The road is headed steadily downhill and she looks ahead to what's in store. Spread out below her in the beads of sea gray dawn she can see the business part of the village leading into the square, and the wharf beyond it. This is no doubt the home of the requisite smithy and baker and butter churn and the wooden stockade where the kids can get their pictures taken with head and hands through the restraints.

To the right and left she can see several other roads coming down to converge at the low point like spokes on a wheel, and at the axis of the wheel-scarcely visible from here-is a dark statue standing atop a stone pillar.

Three guesses what that is.

Seeing it, she knows it doesn't matter whether she finds Ocean Street or not, because this is where she's going to be meeting the Engineer, where Isaac Hamilton will-or won't-trade Veda for the body of Phillip. This really is the end of the line.

Because this is where he killsyou,so he can take yourbody back to Gray Haven. This is where he gets what he's really after.

Behind her back, the thing wearing Phillip's skin starts laughing.

It is a revolting sound, chunky and clotted, like someone choking on thick chowder. The laugh keeps escalating in volume and intensity. Sue is about ready to put the Expedition in park and just get out,anything is better than listening to that laugh, when straight ahead of her in the middle of the road, she sees something half-buried in a pile of snow.

There's a shovel sticking out of the pile, as if someone was in the middle of burying it when she happened to come by. Then the wind picks up, a sharp gust that blasts the top layer of snow away, and Sue sees what it is.