Authors: User
“Vicky, what do you think about what our pal Jeff said about the Engineer?”
“I think the guy’s on to something.”
“So you think the Engineer’s still out there?”
“Absolutely. I think I dated him.”
Damien laughs. “All right, thanks a lot.” He goes to the next call. “Hey, the X, who’s this?”
“This is Randall.”
“Where you calling from, Randall?”
“Dorchester.”
“Randall, what’s your take on the Engineer, dead or alive?”
“It’s irrelevant.”
Damien makes a yawning sound. “Fascinating answer, Randall. Thanks for weighing in.”
“I’m totally serious. To understand the Engineer you have to know about Isaac Hamilton. That’s the real story.”
“Never heard of him.”
“That’s because no one pays attention to the tabloids,” Randall says. “Hamilton’s the guy whose statue is up in all seven towns that the Engineer went through, from White’s Cove right to Gray Haven. Whoever the Engineer was, you can’t tell me he wasn’t influenced by Hamilton.”
“All I said was, I never heard of the guy. Suppose you enlighten us.”
“Well…” Randall holds back a second, considering his reply. “Let’s just say that what Isaac Hamilton did back in the late eighteenth century makes the Engineer look like a Boy Scout by comparison. Depending on what account you read, he put away something like twenty, twenty-five kids in his day.”
“How intriguing,” DJ Damien says, though Sue doesn’t think he sounds intrigued. He sounds like he wishes he never started this conversation. “Okay, I’m going to take a couple more calls on this, children, and then we’re going to move on to a more wholesome topic like, oh, I don’t know, famous celebrity suicides. Hello, you’re on the air, who’s this?”
“This is Terry from Chelmsford.”
“Terry, I hope you’ve got something down to earth to say on this topic that can help put the rest of these paranoid freaks at ease.”
Terry gives a high-pitched little giggle, the giggle of a man, Sue thinks, wired to the eyeballs on an all-night binge of coffee, cigarettes, and nothing to do. “As a matter of fact, I read a history book about Isaac Hamilton,” he says. “As far as the connection between the Engineer and Hamilton goes, I don’t see how you can ignore it.”
“Is that so. I guess the police managed to overlook all this when they were hunting the Engineer?”
“No, they know about it, they just don’t have the imagination to put it in context.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m serious. This book talked about how Hamilton was, like, this sea captain in the days of whaling and how he ended up in Haiti way back in the late 1700s.”
“Gripping stuff, Terry, but—”
“It said when he came back to Boston he was already going crazy from a wicked case of syphilis, but the voodoo priests taught him the so-called secrets of everlasting life.”
“I’m sorry, did you say
voodoo priests,
Terry?”
“It’s pretty obvious to anybody who does a little reading that wherever the Engineer is right now, Isaac Hamilton is with him, firing up the old barbecue grill. So if you live between White’s Cove and Gray Haven, watch your back!”
“Thanks a bunch, Terry. What are you people on tonight, anyway? Okay, one more call. Who is this?”
There’s a long pause on the other end.
“Hello, caller? You there?”
“Hello?”
“While we’re young, caller. Let’s start with your name.”
“You want to know my name?” The caller’s voice is formal, anxious. Sue recognizes it instantly. The realization sucks the breath from her lungs in one unpleasant tug, leaves her with nothing but a dry ache where her heart should be.
She stops the tape, hitsREWIND , and plays it back to make sure, but that’s not really necessary.
“You want to know my name?”
She knows it immediately. She would’ve recognized it from a single syllable, perhaps not even that.
The caller is Phillip.
5:37A.M.
“That’s right, what’s your name?” the DJ asks patiently.
Phillip clears his throat. “I’d rather not give it, if that’s all right with you.”
“Suit yourself, mystery man. Can you tell us where you’re calling from on this disgustingly hot August night, or is that classified top secret too?”
“Not that it matters, but I’m listening to a webcast of your show. I’m in California.”
“Fantastic. Just keep it short, huh?”
“I’m responding to the callers who seem to believe that the child-killer known as the Engineer might still be alive somewhere, possibly due to supernatural reasons, simply because he was never apprehended and his body was never found.”
“Okay…”
“Trust me, this is not the case. I was born and raised in Gray Haven, and I can assure you beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt that the Engineer is dead. He died—a long time ago.”
“You sound pretty sure of yourself there,” Damien says. “What, do you have proof or something?”
Sue can’t believe she’s hearing this. She resists the temptation to stop the tape again and rewind, to try listening from the beginning, because there’s no point. There’s no way the man talking on this call-in show from six months earlier is not her husband.
“Like I said,” Phillip says, “I grew up in Gray Haven. I was there when everything happened. For those who didn’t live through it, it’s almost impossible to convey the atmosphere of pure dread that existed during that summer. Thirteen children murdered, including one in our own town; police had zero leads, no identification, no physical description of the killer beyond the fact that he wore overalls and looked like a locomotive engineer.”
“Yeah, we all know the history, chief.”
Phillip just ignores him. “The mood those days was almost borderline hysteria. Curfews were established and parents refused to let their children out of the yard, even in broad daylight. Those of us who were old enough to follow what was happening speculated all the time about who might be next.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then on August 21 my friend and I were out on one of the back roads, hanging out at this old playground on the edge of town—a stupid idea considering everything that was going on. Anyway, we saw a car idling alongside the fence. It looked like a Plymouth, and it was burnt orange. We noticed that the man inside was wearing overalls and—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Damien cuts in, “hold on here. Are you actually going to tell me that you and this buddy of yours saw the Engineer in person?”
“That’s right.”
“Unbelievable. So what did you do?”
“We discussed for several minutes what should be done, whether we should alert the police about the man. I won’t go into the specifics of what happened next, except that it wasn’t long before we no longer had a choice.”
“What do you mean—you no longer had a choice?”
There’s a long silence hissing from the tape, long enough for Sue to think, Don’t say it, Phillip. Don’t you dare say what I think you’re about to.
“That afternoon,” Phillip says, “my friend and I killed the Engineer.”
“Excuse me?” Damien says. “You did
what
?”
“It was horrible and we never spoke of it to anyone, including the police. But the murders stopped after that, so we know it was him.”
“Hold on, go back—”
“First we got rid of the car. I was only eleven but I got up behind the wheel and drove it out to an empty field by the edge of a forest. We took everything out of the car and dumped it. Then we went back and buried the body where we knew it would never be found.” He stops as if to gather his thoughts and pull himself together. “To those who delight in such things I say only that the Engineer isn’t some supernatural ghoul or bogeyman under the bed. He was a sick man who liked to kill children, and he is now very, very dead.”
“Stop, hang on a damn second,” Damien says. “You honestly expect us to believe that you and your pal killed the Engineer and stashed the body and that’s why the killings stopped?
That’s
your story?” He waits. “Hello, caller? Are you there…?”
But Phillip is gone. Sue hears DJ Damien let out a long sigh, audibly shaken. “Well, children, I think I can safely say that this has been one of the strangest midnight shifts in recent memory. I’m going to throw on some tunes and pour myself a
big
cup of coffee. Not to belabor the obvious, here’s Rob Zombie with ‘Living Dead Girl.’ And for all of you insomniac freaks and geeks out there, the topic of the Engineer is officially closed.”
Sue hears grinding guitar cut in and, within a few seconds, the recording ends. She fast-forwards briefly but there’s nothing more on the tape.
“Phillip,” she says. “Why did you have to tell them? What were you
thinking
?”
Of course she knows the answer already. Phillip made his anonymous confession to DJ Damien and the insomniac listeners for the same reason he woke up bathed in sweat night after night, screaming or close to it. Because he needed to. Because the past is never done with us, not in any substantial way.
She can see it now. To her post-exhausted mind, it all clicks with a kind of chilling certainty, a puzzle whose pieces can’t possibly fit together in any other way. She knows that Phillip never got past what happened that afternoon between them and the Engineer. For him, calling in to this show would be a combination of relief and self-flagellation, touching on old scars that had never quite healed. She imagines him on the other side of the continent, hunkered over his phone, drinking black coffee and poring over the old photos and scanned news items from the past, reliving the terror that they both felt so acutely that summer.
For as long as possible he must have tried to cope with his fears that he was being followed, sublimating them into nightmares. And when he couldn’t stand it anymore he’d done the one thing he thought he must do—he’d left Sue and their baby girl with the simplest excuse imaginable, abandonment, gave up everything and tried to disappear, for their own protection. He went to California. Severed every tie save the most essential ones. Communicated with her only by phone and e-mail.
Until that night back in August when he called in to the radio show. It wasn’t long after that that Sue stopped hearing from him completely.
Almost without realizing it, she passes the sign on the right:
WICKHAM—ESTABLISHED1802
If not for the sign, she would have thought she took a wrong turn. Of all the stops along the route, Wickham is the most developed yet. It’s almost quaint. Down the main thoroughfare she can see a toy store, a real estate office, clothing boutiques, and a pizza parlor, all with hand-painted wooden signs hanging down that remind her of the storefronts of Concord Center. On the right is an ice cream place, and next to it a bookshop called Bound to Please.
It’s still dark, of course, and she doesn’t see any residents, but there’s a smattering of lights on in the windows of Main Street. Sue tries to think. Are the towns along the route also coming to life as she enters them?
Up ahead she can see a snow-dusted triangle of ground, slightly raised, with the main road bending around it. In the center, bracketed by park benches, is a pedestal with a figure on top of it. Isaac Hamilton, who else could it be? And from here she can see clearly that the figure has no arms or legs, just a slender body with head, held up at the same proud tilt. At least the angle of the head
used
to look proud to her; now it looks defiant. As she lowers her foot on the brake, the Expedition’s tires encounter an unexpected patch of black ice and the vehicle swerves a little. Sue instinctively steers in the direction of the skid, correcting it without thinking—ambulance driver reflexes coming into play again.
Then, halfway through Wickham, as she passes the statue, it starts snowing again, heavily. She sits forward, switches on her wipers, visibility compromised. The flakes are thick and seem to strike her windshield with real weight. It’s becoming distinctly more difficult to see.
Up ahead, at the next intersection, the gray van is pulling out of a side street, emerging from a snowfall so thick that it actually seems to materialize out of the air. It turns right, and now it’s driving in front of her, fifty feet up the road, heading out of town. The van is moving slower than she is and she taps the brake slightly to maintain her distance. At the same time the snow falls even harder, thicker. The wipers are at their fastest setting and they still can’t keep up. Sue slows down even more, hovering between twenty-five and thirty. The van’s taillights fade in the distance, and then they are gone. She feels pressure in her skull, building in her sinuses. It’s her headache coming back. Her foot goes down on the gas. She’s going thirty-five, forty.
Sue’s still picking up speed when the snow suddenly stops coming down again, the road clear in front of her. With complete clarity she sees the van is right there, less than twenty feet away.
It’s directly in her path.
And it’s not moving.
“Shit!” She grabs the wheel with both hands and smashes down on the brake. The Expedition goes into a skid, the back end swerving, coming around faster than she can control it, and Sue realizes there’s no choice—she’s going to hit the van, and she’s going to hit it hard. Everything slows down, the details of the moment laser-clear in her mind, and there’s a loud, complicated crash as the rear of the Expedition smacks violently into the van. The impact hurls her hard against the seat belt, which catches her between her breasts, the Expedition’s airbag deploying with a pop that she feels more than hears, the synthetic smell of fresh plastic whacking her in the face and driving her head back against the seat. Then it’s deflating, letting her sag forward, as she looks out her windshield at nothing. The engine has stalled. It’s dead quiet.
Sliding out of her seat, she jumps down and walks around the back of the Expedition. From here she can see that the rear door of the van has been knocked open and hangs crookedly from its hinges. There’s a faint light on inside. Sue takes two steps, hearing her feet scrape the snow off the road as she advances toward the van, then cranes her neck for a closer look.
All the seats have been removed, creating a featureless cave. Sprawled on the floor, not moving, are two corpses that by now she recognizes immediately—her nanny, Marilyn, and Jeff Tatum. Marilyn is on her side, her legs flopped at an angle, one arm across her face. Jeff Tatum is facedown.