“Why’d it take so long?”
For a moment there was no sound in the car but the hum of tires on pavement and somewhere far away a siren railing against the night. The agent rolled down his window and spat emphatically into the slipstream. “City the size of Boston,” he said, “it has a lot of fucking cemeteries.”
The cemetery in question turned out to be everything I could have hoped for: remote and unkempt, with weathered gothic tombstones right off a Hollywood back lot. And wouldn’t it be comforting to think so, I remember thinking as I got out of the car—the ring of lights atop the hill nothing more than stage dressing, the old world as it had been always. But it wasn’t, of course, and the ragged figures digging at the grave weren’t actors, either. You could smell them for one, the stomach-wrenching stench of decay. A light rain had begun to fall, too, and it had the feel of a genuine Boston drizzle, cold and steady toward the bleak fag end of December.
Andy, the director, turned when he heard me.
“Any trouble?” I asked.
“No. They don’t care much what we’re about, long as we don’t interfere.”
“Good.”
Andy pointed. “There she is, see?”
“Yeah, I see her.”
She was on her knees in the grass, still wearing the dress she had been buried in. She dug with single-minded intensity, her arms caked with mud to the elbow, her face empty of anything remotely human. I stood and stared at her for a while, trying to decide what it was I was feeling.
“You all right?” Andy said.
“What?”
“I said, are you all right? For a second there, I thought you were crying.”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine. It’s the rain, that’s all.”
“Right.”
So I stood there and half-listened while he filled me in. He had several cameras running, multiple filters and angles, he was playing with the lights. He told me all this and none of it meant anything at all to me. None of it mattered as long as I got the footage I wanted. Until then, there was nothing for me here.
He must have been thinking along the same lines, for when I turned to go, he called after me: “Say, Rob, you needn’t have come out tonight, you know.”
I looked back at him, the rain pasting my hair against my forehead and running down into my eyes. I shivered. “I know,” I said. A moment later, I added: “I just—I wanted to see her somehow.”
But Andy had already turned away.
I still remember the campaign ad, my own private nightmare dressed up in cinematic finery. Andy and I cobbled it together on Christmas Eve, and just after midnight in a darkened Boston studio, we cracked open a bottle of bourbon in celebration and sat back to view the final cut. I felt a wave of nausea roll over me as the first images flickered across the monitor. Andy had shot the whole thing from distorted angles in grainy black and white, the film just a hair overexposed to sharpen the contrast. Sixty seconds of derivative expressionism, some media critic dismissed it, but even he conceded it possessed a certain power.
You’ve seen it, too, I suppose. Who hasn’t?
She will rise from her grave to haunt you, the opening title card reads, and the image holds in utter silence for maybe half a second too long. Long enough to be unsettling, Andy said, and you could imagine distracted viewers all across the heartland perking up, wondering what the hell was wrong with the sound.
The words dissolve into an image of hands, bloodless and pale, gouging at moist black earth. The hands of a child, battered and raw and smeared with the filth and corruption of the grave, digging, digging. There’s something remorseless about them, something relentless and terrible. They could dig forever, and they might, you can see that. And now, gradually, you awaken to sound: rain hissing from a midnight sky, the steady slither of wet earth underhand, and something else, a sound so perfectly lacking that it’s almost palpable in its absence, the unearthly silence of the dead. Freeze frame on a tableau out of Goya or Bosch: seven or eight zombies, half-dressed and rotting, laboring tirelessly over a fresh grave.
Fade to black, another slug line, another slow dissolve.
Dana Maguire came back.
The words melt into a long shot of the child, on her knees in the poison muck of the grave. Her dress clings to her thighs, and it’s a dress someone has taken some care about—white and lacy, the kind of dress you’d bury your little girl in if you had to do it—and it’s ruined. All the care and heartache that went into that dress, utterly ruined. Torn and fouled and sopping. Rain slicks her blonde hair black against her skull. And as the camera glides in upon Dana Maguire’s face, half-shadowed and filling three-quarters of the screen, you can glimpse the wound at her throat, flushed clean and pale. Dark roses of rot bloom along the high ridge of her cheekbone. Her eyes burn with the cold hard light of vistas you never want to see, not even in your dreams.
The image holds for an instant, a mute imperative, and then, mercifully, fades. Words appear and deliquesce on an ebon screen, three phrases, one by one:
The dead have spoken.
Now it’s your turn.
Burton for president.
Andy touched a button. A reel caught and reversed itself. The screen went gray, and I realized I had forgotten to breathe. I sipped at my drink.
The whiskey burned in my throat, it made me feel alive.
“What do you think?” Andy said.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.”
Grinning, he ejected the tape and tossed it in my lap. “Merry Christmas,” he said, raising his glass. “To our savior born.”
And so we drank again.
Dizzy with exhaustion, I made my way back to my hotel and slept for eleven hours straight. I woke around noon on Christmas day. An hour later, I was on a plane.
By the time I caught up to the campaign in Richmond, Lewis was in a rage, pale and apoplectic, his acne scars flaring an angry red. “You seen these?” he said, thrusting a sheaf of papers at me.
I glanced through them quickly—more bad news from Angela Dey, Burton slipping further in the polls—and then I set them aside. “Maybe this’ll help,” I said, holding up the tape Andy and I had cobbled together.
We watched it together, all of us, Lewis and I, the entire senior staff, Burton himself, his face grim as the first images flickered across the screen. Even now, viewing it for the second time, I could feel its impact. And I could see it in the faces of the others as well—Dey’s jaw dropping open, Lewis snorting in disbelief. As the screen froze on the penultimate image—Dana Maguire’s decay-ravaged face—Libby Dixon turned away.
“There’s no way we can run that,” she said.
“We’ve got—” I began, but Dey interrupted me.
“She’s right, Rob. It’s not a campaign ad, it’s a horror movie.” She turned to Burton, drumming his fingers quietly at the head of the table. “You put this out there, you’ll drop ten points, I guarantee it.”
“Lewis?” Burton asked.
Lewis pondered the issue for a moment, rubbing his pitted cheek with one crooked finger. “I agree,” he said finally. “The ad’s a frigging nightmare. It’s not the answer.”
“The ad’s revolting,” Libby said. “The media will eat us alive for politicizing the kid’s death.”
“We ought to be politicizing it,” I said. “We ought to make it mean something.”
“You run that ad, Rob,” Lewis said, “every redneck in America is going to remember you threatening to take away their guns. You want to make that mistake twice?”
“Is it a mistake? For Christ’s sake, the dead are walking, Lewis. The old rules don’t apply.” I turned to Libby. “What’s Stoddard say, Libby, can you tell me that?”