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“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…”
And he jumps on it. “Unless what, Susan?”
“Unless the body in the garbage bags isn’t the Engineer.”
She steps on the brake and the Expedition skids to a halt, the phone still clutched to her ear. Through it she thinks she can hear the voice laughing.
It doesn’t even feel like she’s walking anymore, or even running. It feels like she’sflying, skimming an inch above the ground, every neuron cranked to maximum performance. She swoops around to the back, yanks open the hatch of the Expedition, and stares inside at the thing wrapped up in garbage bags. For the first time since she dug it up, she pulls the bags open and looks at the face of the thing inside.
For a fathomless span of seconds she simply stares at it, her entire body petrified by raw disbelief.
The corpse wrapped in the garbage bags—the corpse that she lugged from a slimy hole underneath the bridge, ten hours ago, and dragged halfway across Massachusetts in the back of her SUV—isnot wearing blue-striped overalls with a red bandanna sticking out of the pocket.
It’s not the Engineer.
No, this corpse, this body, this dead human being, is dressed in a navy blue blazer and L.L. Bean khaki pants. It wears a white oxford shirt beneath the blazer, a red silk tie, with Bass loafers. It has a silver watch on its wrist and a silver wedding band on its finger.
The face and hands are pale and bruised in the places where blood has begun pooling up under the skin. It hasn’t been dead for long. The decay process has only just begun. Across its face the muscles have drawn back into a tight grin, the skin of the cheeks bunching together above the teeth. Crumbs of dirt stick in the creases. There’s dirt and mud in the hair as well.
And the eyes…the eyes are black and staring.
While she’s looking at them, a shiny black beetle scur
ries from the corner of his mouth, trundling busily across the curved expanse of skull and ducking up into the corpse’s hairline. And with that Sue vomits—no warning, no nausea, just jerks her mouth open and throws up into the snow beside the Expedition. She vomits and vomits, until there’s nothing left but a bitter taste in the back of her mouth and tears in her eyes, blurring her vision to a field of soggy prisms.
But of course Sue doesn’t need to see in order to recognize the man in the garbage bags. She has seen enough for a lifetime.
“Phillip,” she says, her voice stripped away to a hoarse and rasping gasp. “Oh my God.”
And that’s when the corpse lunges straight up at her, his swollen fingers locking around her throat.
7:07A.M.
“So you finally opened the garbage bags, you brainless little snatch.”
Coming through her husband’s mouth, Isaac Hamilton’s voice is grating, rippled with caked filth and swamp slime. At this moment Sue realizes that the grin wrinkling across its face is not, as she first thought, the result of rigor mortis or some other half-fathomed notion of what happens to your muscles after you die.The thing has been grinning up at her this whole time.
She tries to twist free, but the corpse’s grip is far tighter than Jeff’s. And this makes sense. He’s come farther along the route than Marilyn or Jeff. He’s almost fully resurrected. His fingers squeeze into the soft hollow of her throat until she feels something pop, shooting a bright spike of pain through her neck.
“It fucking took you long enough,” Hamilton’s voice says. Crawling forward, out of the trunk, shedding the last of the tattered garbage bags, her husband’s corpse jams her body up and out so that her feet are no longer touching the ground. Then he starts to shake her so hard that her legs flop and jitter, feet flying everywhere as she fights pointlessly to pry his hands off. The rotting, black-eyed face laughs at her. She fights the urge to black out, because she’s certain she’ll never wake up. He’s going to kill her, this thing that’s inside her husband, this parasite that lives in his guts.
She starts praying then, not the kind of prayer that startsDear God, but the kind that goes, “From Ocean Street in Old White’s Cove,” spitting the words with the blood that’s now pouring into her mouth. “Across the virgin land he drove—”
Phillip goes motionless, holding her upright, head tilted back. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“—to paint each town and hamlet red, with the dying and the—”
Whack!He slams his head into hers so hard that she bites her tongue, incandescent waves of green stars shimmering before her eyes, the pain itself not even a factor compared to the sheer shock of the attack. When Sue hoists up her head again he’s still holding her by the throat, his head angled back. “Don’t you try that shit with me, you brainless, lowbrow whore. It doesn’t work. It’s notgoing to w—”
“He walked through Wickham and Newbury,” Sue says, except her tongue is bleeding and swollen and the words spill out mushy and malformed. “In Ashford or Stoneview he might tarry—”
Whack!Another blow, the corpse’s skull clubbing hers like the back of a shovel, sending her reeling.Now the pain is here, big-time pain, an eye-popping Las Vegas of it and then in the muffled distance, very far off, Isaac Hamilton’s musty cackle.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” his voice is saying behind the pain, behind the funny-colored stars and constellations that flutter close to her head, blinding her. “I’mreally going to enjoy this, Susan.”
“To call…child…to…knee…” she’s mumbling, on total autopilot now, “where he slew it…one…two…”
WHAM!A massive blow, the worst yet, something cracking, and it pitches her whole upper body backward, the pain so intense that Sue can’t help it, she feels herself start crying again, he’s breaking her and she’s going to let him. She’s got no choice. Bright hot needles pierce her flesh from every possible angle as she feels her scalp beginning to swell with bleeding under the skin. Her mouth sags open, drooling. She can’t see. She can’t hear. She can only feel the pain. Unconsciousness beckons her forward as seductively as any controlled substance she can imagine and she feels herself sliding toward it gratefully, almost all the way there, when a single thought cuts through her like a bullet.
Veda.
If you black out now she’s dead.
If you black out now she’s dead.
If you black out now she’s fucking dead.
That centers her. Blind, numb, but somehow centered, she makes her lips and tongue move. It’s like a guttural foreign language that, to an uncomprehending ear, sounds more like snarling than diction, Arabic or German spoken through a mouthful of stiffening rubber cement. She pushes the words out anyway until they don’t sound like any language at all. They’re merely sounds. Animal noises.
“…un fum…In-sluh fuh…GuhHuhn… Whuh uhmuh… ” It’s such a completely debilitating effort expelling these noises and she’s dizzy, fading, losing whatever’s left of herself. “Whuh…uh…muh…”
Far beyond the darkness that fills her eyes, through Phillip’s lips, Isaac Hamilton is laughing, laughing. Coughing on dirt. Mimicking her feeble attempts, mocking, “Uh-fuh-uh-fuh-uh-fuh—” She can hear the stuffy noises getting more congested as his hilarity crescendos. “I didn’t know it was fucking barnyard night, Susan. Moo, moo, cock a doodle-doo!” As he says this, her vision clears slightly, perhaps for the sheer novelty of seeing her husband’s reanimated corpse—a thing with maggots in its sinuses and worm shit on its breath—making fun of her enunciation. Through swollen eye-slits she sees Phillip’s head tilting itself back again, preparing to drive forward for the blow that will no doubt turn out her lights forever, rendering whatever good intentions she might still have utterly irrelevant. She cringes away with the last of her strength, and waits for it.
Then nothing happens.
“Sue…?” It’s so tentative, that familiar voice. It doesn’t sound like Isaac Hamilton at all. “Honey?”
7:19A.M.
Sue raises her head, manages to peel back the lid on one eye. Phillip’s corpse has fallen absolutely still and is just facing her now, what’s left of his face tinged pinkish. She’s not sure if this coloration is due to the blood in her own eyes, or the Expedition’s taillights glowing behind his head. Whatever the cause, it makes the thing look slightly more human, less dead. He’s leaning over her, and that’s when she realizes she’s on the ground, sprawled in the snow at the side of the road, her legs tucked underneath her. When exactly did she fall down?
“Sue,” he says, “is that you?”
“Phillip.” His name flows from her battered windpipe in a watery whisper, zero inflection, zero strength. “Don’t hit me. Don’t hurt me anymore.”
“Sue, honey, what’s wrong, are you…?” Phillip stops, and her sight is good enough now that she can see the wave of realization washing across his face, a single foamy whitecap across a midnight sea. “Oh no. Oh, Sue. Oh, baby.” His legs buckle and he slumps down on the roadside next to her, the tailpipe of the Expedition pumping exhaust out in plumes behind his head. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.” He holds out one hand and then lets it fall. “He’s in me, Sue. I can feel him.”
She nods. It hurts. Everything does.
“That’s how he works.”
“I don’t—”
“Listen to me, Sue. Without a vessel he’s only a dismembered corpse in the ground. Regardless of what he wants you to think, he can’t read minds or hunt people down by himself. That’s what took him so long to find me.”
“Why?”
“He only has power over the corpses he commands. He had to send one of his vessels out to kill a private detective and bring him through the route just so he could get someone with the skills to locate me. I had to keep hiding. That’s why I sent Tatum to warn you.”
Sue’s mind darts back to the farm truck following her on and off over the past few months, how it had known where to find h
er. “Yousent Jeff Tatum?”
“Met him…at his brother Daniel’s funeral in Gray Haven three years ago. Kept in touch with him after I went to California. When Hamilton started tracking me down in August, after I called the radio station, I contacted Jeff. Asked him to keep an eye on you.”
“They got Tatum too,” Sue says.
“I know.”
“Phillip—”
“The worst part is, he never stops.” Phillip’s corpse nods shakily. “Hamilton’s spirit, Sue…it’s like having a fever that won’t break—you can’t…push through it. Always there. Always building.”
