Chapter Twenty-Nine

The same Saturday, Seth sat in a leather armchair in the library at his house, studying for his chemistry final. This basically meant trying to memorize some formulas and getting a reasonably good idea of where to plug them in, once you puzzled out the word problems. Hopefully, the information would stick for at least the next forty-eight hours.

He heard his dad approach and he looked up. Seth thought his dad looked unusually old today, a little more stooped, a little more gray in his hair.

“Seth,” he said. He raised his whiskey glass, and the single large ice cube clinked against the side as he drank.

“What’s up, Dad? How’s it going with the dye factory thing?”

“Not bad, really. The government paid the bank a ridiculous compensation for use of the old factory. They said we didn’t have to worry about EPA or anybody. Our insurers wanted to investigate the dye factory themselves, and the government even paid them to shut up and go away.”

“Well, that’s great!” Seth said. It meant Jenny was in the clear, he thought, if the government was burying the incident.

His dad looked at him, maybe a bit surprised by the excitement in Seth’s voice.

“I mean, right?” Seth asked. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Hell of a lot better than I expected,” he said. “Almost scary how well it’s going now. Although they’re full of horseshit. That dye factory’s been emptier than a politician’s heart as long as I can remember.”

“Well, if they want it to go away, and we want it go away…” Seth said.

“No, no, I’m satisfied. I could go for a walk. You want to go for a walk?”

“I have finals tomorrow.”

“Just take a minute.”

Seth didn’t like the sound of it. His dad was clearly in one of his melancholy, semi-drunken moods.

He followed his dad across the back lawn, through the blooming peach orchard where bees hummed their way from one sweet nectar snack to the next.

Seth’s dad kept walking, on and up the far slope. He was heading right for the family cemetery, up the staircase of big granite slabs, toward the wrought-iron gate in the old brick wall.

Seth trailed behind. The family cemetery was mostly the sign of his great-grandfather’s insanity, his master plan for his descendants. Like how the third floor of his house was a sign of Seth’s grandfather’s insanity. There was plenty of crazy to go around in this family.

Seth’s dad took out a key ring and unlocked the iron gate.

“Ted Burris at the bank says he’s seen you driving around town.” He pushed open the gate. “Says you have Jenny Morton in your car.”

Seth sighed.

“You still dating her?” Seth’s dad stepped inside the high brick walls of the cemetery. Inside, rows of identical monuments marked the burial sites of Barretts past and future. His dad walked past the blank monuments of generations to come, back to where his grave and Seth’s had already been carved—Jonathan Seth Barretts III and IV, their birthdays already inscribed, years of death to be added as needed.

“This isn’t going to be that conversation about Jenny again, is it?” Seth asked. “And how much you hate her?”

“I don’t hate her. And this is not that conversation. I only have one thing to say about her: Use protection. Get her pregnant and you’ll never really shake her loose.”

“Dad!”

“I’m not kidding. You have your fun with the town girls if you want, just be careful. You’ll grow out of her once you meet some decent girls at school.”

“Whatever,” Seth said. “I really care about her. I don’t want to meet anyone else.”

“You’re young,” his dad said, in a dismissive tone.

They walked all the way to the back of the cemetery, to the megalith commemorating the first Jonathan S. Barrett. Seth’s great-grandfather had made the family extremely wealthy, but he’d been obsessed with death. He’d built this miniature necropolis and even disinterred his own ancestors to move their bodies here.

“I never told you the most important thing about your great-grandfather,” Seth’s dad said. “I never talked about it at all, even with my own father. He knew it, though, you can bet on that.”

“Knew what?” Seth asked.

“There’s a reason your grandfather believed that your great-grandfather’s ghost would haunt the family.”

“Didn’t Great-Grandpa threaten to do that?”

“That’s true. J.S. Barrett the First lived to be almost ninety, and he got meaner and crueler every year. He died before I was ten years old, but I can remember his screaming and his horrible laugh, and how he would threaten my father with every kind of thing. The monster on the third floor, that’s how I thought of him. He was shriveled and half-senile by then, or at least he acted that way. He had the coldest, darkest eyes, and you could feel him studying you….” Seth’s dad shuddered. “Those eyes were as dark as hell.”

“I know,” Seth said. “I kind of got he was terrible.”

“He was more than that,” Seth’s dad said. “He was terrifying. When I was six years old, he insisted on taking me out to one of his farms, even though my father tried to stop him. We had a huge amount of land back then, I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of acres. But a lot of it was a good distance from town, a good distance from anybody.

“He took me out there in his big black Cadillac. He must have been more than eighty years old, but nobody would even think about saying he was too old to drive. Nobody forbid Grandfather anything he wanted. We were all scared of him. And I’m about to tell you why.

“He drove down one dirt road after another, far away from any town. And he drove out into a field, where there must have been thousands of rows of tobacco, and he told me, ‘Look, boy. That’s how you keep your margins high on a plantation.’”

Seth’s dad eased down onto granite bench and finished his drink.

“What was he showing you?” Seth asked.

“The workers. I saw them out there, slowly harvesting the tobacco leaves into baskets.” He shook his head. “It’s the most goddamned horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Were they slaves?” Seth asked.

His dad sighed. “No, Seth, we didn’t have slaves in 1966.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”

“They were…” He shook his head. “They were dead, Seth.”

Seth looked at him, expecting more.

“They were dead,” his dad repeated.

“Who was dead?”

“The workers in the fields. I mean they were corpses. Rotting. Missing skin. Some of them, you could see through to their skulls, bones, the daylight on the other side. Pieces of them were falling off while they picked that tobacco.”

“How much have you had to drink, Dad?”

“I’m not making this up.” He scowled at Seth. “He could animate dead bodies. Make them do simple, repetitive tasks. They were sluggish and they fell apart after a while, but they were free. And you can always find more dead people.”

“Okay,” Seth said. “It sounds like you’re seriously telling me Great-Grandpa was a…what? A zombie master? Like Evil Dead zombies?”

“My father thought he sold his soul to the Devil, to get rich,” Seth’s dad said. “Because that’s how he made his money first, farming all that land with free labor. Then he started investing in Charleston, and then New York…”

“The devil,” Seth said.

“Look.” His dad sighed again, looking down at the dirt. “This thing happened. It happened for decades, and they kept working right up until he died. Then they all fell over and stopped working. My father had to fill pits with lime to get rid of all the bodies.”

Seth just looked at his dad. He had no idea what to say, or even what to think.

“So that’s where the Barretts come from,” his dad said. “Black magic and pacts with Satan. So when I say your great-grandfather told us his ghost would watch over and rule this family from the other side…”

“Kind of sounds more believable now,” Seth said.

“I tried not to believe it,” his dad said. “But I just can’t forget how it looked, all those poor bastards out there working day and night until they fell to pieces. When the wind blew through them, they would make this sound…this awful groaning sound, like they were in agony, and just wanted to be dead again—”

“Okay! I get it.”

“And then there was your brother.” He nodded to the marker inscribed CARTER MAYFIELD BARRETT, 1986-2000. Seth’s brother had died when Seth was ten, and Carter was fourteen. “Your great-grandfather insisted that the firstborn son in every generation continue his name. But he’d been dead for more than fifteen years. And your other grandfather, Carter Mayfield, we needed his influence right about then to pull some strings in Washington, protect a major overseas investment of ours.”

“What do you mean?”

“Better you don’t know. Old Carter was adamant that our boy be named after him. So I ignored what your great-grandfather said. And Carter paid for it.”

“You don’t really think Great-Grandpa’s ghost killed Carter?”

“In his will, he threatened horrors against the living if he wasn’t obeyed. You can read it yourself.”

“That’s crazy,” Seth said. “But Carter…that could have been a regular accident. People die in car accidents every day.”

“We were being punished.”

“How can you believe that?”

“Seth, you’ve never seen a hundred and fifty corpses working a tobacco field. Death was nothing to him. He had powers over death.”

Seth thought about how Ashleigh had blasted him through the heart with a shotgun. He’d managed to heal his own body, but he couldn’t remember much about how. He could only remember a powerful determination to get back to Jenny.

“So do I,” Seth muttered.

“What?” His dad looked up at him sharply.

“Nothing.”

“So that’s why your grandfather wasn’t crazy when he turned the third floor into a maze to confuse your great-grandfather’s ghost. Your great-grandfather really was supernatural. And that is why we must maintain things as he wishes. Because he’s watching. And he’s ruthless.”

Seth looked at Jonathan Seth Barrett’s granite monolith. “Wow. Thanks a lot, Great-Grandpa.”

“Don’t mock him.”

“He doesn’t have a sense of humor?”

“No.”

Though it was a hot day, almost June, Seth felt very cold. He didn’t want to believe anything his dad had said. But he couldn’t deny there were supernatural things in the world. Seth was one of them. So was Jenny.

For a moment, he thought about telling his dad everything—about his own healing abilities, and Jenny’s deadly touch. But he didn’t know whether that would encourage his dad to approve of the relationship, or if his dad would solidly forbid him to ever see Jenny again.

So he kept his mouth shut.

“Can we go back now?” Seth asked.

“We can try.”