Tommy Nightmare(65)

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.”