Tommy Nightmare(66)

“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.”