Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (23 page)

“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.”

Ashleigh made a dozen scrambled eggs and six
pieces of French toast, which she dusted generously with powdered
sugar, then drizzled with some raw honey. She made coffee and
filled a silver pitcher with cream. She poured tall cups of orange
juice.

She played Jason Aldean on the stereo, and
she gradually turned up the volume with short blasts of the remote
while she set the kitchen table. She opened the big kitchen windows
to let in the sunlight and the warm spring air. Then she turned up
her stereo a bit louder.

Soon, Tommy wandered down the stairs, in his
boxer shorts.

“Want some breakfast?” Ashleigh asked.

“Hell yeah!” Tommy sat down at one of the
place settings and slurped up a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
“Nice!”

“I know,” Ashleigh said. “There’s love in
every bite.”

He smiled and forked a whole piece of French
toast into his mouth, then slurped down a glass of orange
juice.

“Help yourself,” Ashleigh said.

Esmeralda came down a few minutes later, but
she’d gone to the trouble of getting dressed and applying a little
makeup. She looked uneasy and a little scared when she first saw
Ashleigh, but then she noticed the elaborate meal on the table and
relaxed a little.

“Esmeralda!” Ashleigh squealed. She threw her
arms around the girl and hugged her tight. She even kissed her on
the cheek. Esmeralda melted like hot taffy in her arms.

“You look so happy,” Esmeralda said.

“I am!” Ashleigh released her and stepped
back. “Everything is just going perfectly, isn’t it?”

“Hell yeah,” Tommy said. “Are you gonna eat
that piece of French toast?”

“No, go ahead,” Ashleigh said.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” Esmeralda said.
She sat at the table and poured cream into her coffee. “You took a
big risk going to Jenny’s house.”

“I really did,” Ashleigh said. “She could
have killed me again. But you guys would have brought me back
again, right?”

They both hurried to agree that they
would.

“But anyway, I gathered some good
intelligence, and I figured out how we’re going to destroy
Jenny.”

“Why don’t we just shoot her?” Tommy asked.
“Bury the body, done.”

“Duh, tons of reasons,” Ashleigh said.
“First, Seth could bring her back.”

“Kill them both,” Tommy said. “Make it look
like they ran off together.”

“That, Tommy, is actually not a bad idea,”
Ashleigh said. “I actually respect you a lot more now that you came
up with that.”

“Thanks!” Tommy said.

“Hold on,” Esmeralda said. “You two are
kidding, right? We’re not actually going to kill these people.”

“The mass murderer girl, with the disease
touch,” Tommy said. He raised his hands, which were pockmarked with
little scars from his Jenny pox infection. “She has to die. She’s
too dangerous to live. Especially if she might come after us.”

“Why would she come after us?” Esmeralda
asked.

“Because she hates me,” Ashleigh said. “If
she knows I’m back, she’ll come and kill me, and she’ll kill anyone
who gets in her way. That’s exactly what happened last time.”

“That’s scary,” Esmeralda said.

“Very,” Ashleigh agreed.

“But this French toast, it’s amazing,”
Esmeralda said.

“Thank you! So, Tommy, killing her is more
complicated than it seems. Then her soul gets free, she gets
incarnated again. Then she’s a newborn baby somewhere on the Earth,
and I have no idea where.”

“So we do reincarnate,” Tommy said. “All of
us. Right?”

“All of us,” Ashleigh said.

“I don’t believe in that,” Esmeralda
said.

“Well, I wouldn’t either,” Ashleigh said.
“Except I just recently died, and now I remember the past
lives.”

“Do you remember me in any of them?” Tommy
asked.

“Bunches!” Ashleigh said. “All three of us.
We’ve been friends for thousands and thousands of years. We always
help each other. But some of our kind are evil, like Jenny and
Seth, and we end up fighting wars against them. That’s why it’s
important we stop them now, while we’re all young, before they can
get too powerful and kill a whole lot of people. Like millions of
people.”

“What do you mean by ‘our kind’?” Esmeralda
asked.

“We’re old,” Ashleigh said. “Older than any
human soul. But we were cast out from where we originated, and we
found our way to Earth, and we learned to incarnate as human
beings.”

“Like fallen angels?” Esmeralda asked.

“I don’t know,” Ashleigh said. “It’s hard to
even remember things clearly. That’s the bad thing about being
human, we have to focus so hard to incarnate that we forget
everything that came before. The good part of being human, of
course, is we get to use our powers. Plus, all the other pleasures
available in the flesh. But you two know all about that, don’t
you?” Ashleigh winked at Esmeralda, who blushed and looked down at
her plate.

“So.” Ashleigh slapped the table, as if
calling a meeting to order. “It’s time we get on with the old game.
What I want to do is have Jenny Mittens kept alive, but in deep
captivity. For the rest of what will hopefully be a very long, very
boring life. We need her out of the way before we can hope to do
anything else of significance.”

“What do you want to do?” Tommy asked. “Keep
her in the basement?”

“No,” Ashleigh said. “And I have to say, my
respect-o-meter did just drop a notch. I will not ‘keep her in the
basement’ so that she can kill me in my sleep. I want her locked
away, underground, maximum security, fed through a slit in a door.
That is my dream for Jenny’s future.”

“Sounds expensive,” Esmeralda said.

“I’m not going to
pay
for it,”
Ashleigh said. “I’m going to
arrange
it.”

“How?” Tommy said.

“I need your special power for the first
thing, Tommy. You’ll have to drive down to Charleston, though. You
can just take your bike.”

“What am I doing there?” he asked.

“You can go down there tonight,” Ashleigh
said. “Talk to somebody for me. Then grab a hotel room. I have a
list of errands for you.”

“We’re going tonight?” he asked.

“No,” Ashleigh said. “
You’re
going
tonight. Esmeralda and I are staying here.”

“She’s staying with you?” Tommy asked.

“It’s okay with me,” Esmeralda said. She gave
Ashleigh a big smile. “I’m really starting to like it here.”

“I like having you!” Ashleigh said. She took
Esmeralda’s hand and held onto it. “Anyway, I’ll keep on Jenny with
the whole poor-Darcy-needs-a-friend act. And I need Esmeralda to
help me with a few things.”

“You really have it all planned out,” Tommy
said.

“Of course,” Ashleigh said. “That’s what I
do. I’ve made you into powerful men before, Tommy. Kings. Emperors.
Think of how much fun we’re going to have in this crazy modern
world.”

Tommy grinned.

“I’m so glad we all found each other again!”
Ashleigh said.

“Me, too,” Esmeralda sighed, beaming at
Ashleigh and holding her hand.

Seth was in the library again late Saturday
night, trying very hard to focus on Beowulf for his English final.
He was relieved when his cell phone rang, because he thought it
would be Jenny. He needed a break.