He wandered out onto his sprawling back porch, looking up at the high brick wall of the necropolis he’d built for his family, a monumental place to bury himself and his descendants. He would rot and die here, watching his wife retreat into opiate addiction until the day he buried her, watching his son cringe and tremble, never emerging from his shadow.
His son would manage to marry, though, and have another son of his own, named Jonathan Seth Barrett III, as Barrett would insist. In that direction, at least, lay some hope for his legacy.
Chapter Fifty
JONATHAN SETH BARRETT XVI, read the inscription on the monument. Seth’s great-grandfather, the egomaniac he knew more recently by the name Alexander, had planned for at least sixteen generations to be named after him, one more than the Ptolemy dynasty that had ruled over the final centuries of ancient Egypt’s decline.
Seth pulled the goggles down over his eyes, fitted the sharp end of the chisel into the letter J, and swung the hammer. The chisel bit the stone, rendering the letter illegible. He only had to chisel out every single letter of his name from the hard, dark granite, and he only had to do that sixteen times. It was a hot, humid summer afternoon in Fallen Oak, the sunlight bleach-white all around him, and he was already sweating.
He struck out the next letter, and the next. It sometimes took a few swings of the hammer to fully scratch out a single letter.
His great-grandfather had built this necropolis in his backyard out of an obsession with legacy. It was an obsession that had led him, five thousand years earlier, to order the construction of the first large pyramid in Egypt to serve as his tomb, when he had ruled as the pharaoh Djoser and used his undead minions to conquer the Sinai Peninsula and mine its minerals.
Seth finished chiseling out the name from the sixteenth row of monuments, then moved up a row to chisel out JONATHAN SETH BARRETT XV. It was going to be a long day.
The dead-raiser had transformed the Barrett family into a pharaoh-style death cult, using threats to make them uphold the memory of their malignant ancestor. He had terrified his son and grandson—Seth’s grandfather and father, respectively—by demonstrating his power to raise the dead, then threatening to haunt them from beyond the grave if his wishes were not obeyed.
Wish number one: the firstborn son of each generation had to be named after him. Seth was the fourth, and he was going to be the last. If Seth ever had a son, he would name him anything but “Jonathan Seth.”
Seth chiseled out row after row of names, his muscles starting to ache and his shirt plastered to him with sweat. He didn’t know what he would say if the police came to investigate the hours of banging and chiseling, but he wasn’t entirely sure whether Fallen Oak even had a police department anymore. The little downtown was overgrown already, the town square thick with weeds and wildflowers. Between the still-unexplained disappearance and rumored death of so many people, and the closing of Mayor Winder’s timber plant, the town was drying up fast.
He smirked as he remembered Barrett’s grandiose plans for his model town, proudly explaining the importance of Fallen Oak’s position on the local roadways and the rail and telegraph lines, clueless that the interstates, telephone, and eventually the internet would make every advantage obsolete. It was sad to see the empty shells that remained, but he’d fulfilled his promise to Barrett. The man’s vast, dark Charleston-style mansion was reduced to a charred stump. His most recent incarnation, Alexander, had been killed by Seth’s power. Seth himself had pretty well ruined the Barrett name in town, to the point that they’d tried to lynch him along with Jenny. Seth himself would eventually inherit Barrett’s entire fortune.
Today, he struck the final blows, punishing the dead-raiser in a way that would matter to him, erasing his name from history, the same method used by ancient priests to destroy the ghost of a horrible king.
Seth reached his own name, smiling as he chiseled it away. He paused to touch his brother’s name. CARTER MAYFIELD BARRETT. He left that one in place.
He moved back a row and chiseled away his father’s name, and his mother’s for good measure. There was no reason for them to be buried here in Fallen Oak, he thought. They should be buried in Florida, where they’d lived happily with their boat and their sunlight and rum.
He chiseled out his grandfather’s name, feeling satisfied. He knew that his grandfather had suffered from mental problems, from severe paranoia, especially late in life, obsessed with the idea that Barrett’s ghost was hounding him. He’d even built a very modest house on the grounds, far from the main house, and lived there much of his life. It had fallen into disrepair since his death.