'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.'
'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,
