Salem’s Lot (24 page)

3

Eva Miller and Weasel Craig were in the waiting room when she went back to get her coat. Eva was wearing an old fall coat with a rusty fur collar, obviously kept for best, and Weasel was floating in an outsized motorcycle jacket. Susan warmed at the sight of both of them.

‘How is he?’ Eva asked.

‘Going to be all right, I think.’ She repeated the doctor’s diagnosis, and Eva’s face relaxed.

‘I’m so glad. Mr Mears seems like a very nice man. Nothing like this has ever happened at my place. And Parkins Gillespie had to lock Floyd up in the drunk tank. He didn’t act drunk, though. Just sort of dopey and confused.’

Susan shook her head. ‘It doesn’t sound like Floyd at all.’

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.

‘Ben’s a lovely fella,’ Weasel said, and patted Susan’s hand. ‘He’ll be up and about in no time. You wait and see.’

‘I’m sure he will be,’ Susan said, and squeezed his hand in both of hers. ‘Eva, isn’t Father Callahan the priest at St Andrew’s?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘Oh… curious. Listen, thank you both for coming. If you could come back tomorrow-’

‘We’ll do that,’ Weasel said. ‘Sure we will, won’t we, Eva?’ He slipped an arm about her waist. It was a long reach, but he got there eventually.

‘Yes, we will.’

Susan walked out to the parking lot with them and then drove back to Jerusalem’s Lot.

4

Matt did not answer at her knock or yell
Come in!
as he usually did. Instead, a very careful voice which she hardly recognized said, ‘Who is it?’ very quietly from the other side.

‘Susie Norton, Mr Burke.’

He opened the door and she felt real shock at the change in him. He looked old and haggard. A moment after that, she saw that he was wearing a heavy gold crucifix. There was something so strange and ludicrous about that ornate five-and-dime corpus lying against his checked flannel shirt that she almost laughed-but didn’t.

‘Come in. Where’s Ben?’

She told him and his face grew long. ‘So Floyd Tibbits of all people decides to play wronged lover, is that it? Well, it couldn’t have happened at a more inopportune time. Mike Ryerson was brought back from Portland late this afternoon for burial preparations at Foreman’s. And I suppose our trip up to the Marsten House will have to be put off-’

‘What trip? What’s this about Mike?’

‘Would you like coffee?’ he asked absently.

‘No. I want to find out what’s going on. Ben said you know.’

‘That,’ he said, ‘is a very tall order. Easy for Ben to say I’m to tell you everything. Harder to do. But I will try.’

‘What-’

He held up one hand. ‘One thing first, Susan. You and your mother went down to the new shop the other day.’ Susan’s brow furrowed. ‘Sure. Why?’

‘Can you give me your impressions of the place, and more specifically, of the man who runs it?’

‘Mr Straker?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he’s quite charming,’ she said. ‘Courtly might be an even better word. He complimented Glynis Mayberry on her dress and she blushed like a schoolgirl. And asked Mrs Boddin about the bandage on her arm she spilled some hot fat on it, you know. He gave her a recipe for a poultice. Wrote it right down. And when Mabel came in…’ She laughed a bit at the memory.

‘Yes?’

‘He got her a chair,’ Susan said. ‘Not a chair, actually, but a
chair
. More like a throne. A great carved mahogany thing. He brought it out of the back room all by himself, smiling and chatting with the other ladies all the time. But it must have weighed at least three hundred pounds. He plonked it down in the middle of the floor and escorted Mabel to it. Took her arm, you know. And she was
giggling
. If you’ve seen Mabel giggling, you’ve seen everything. And he served coffee. Very strong but very good.’

‘Did you like him?’ Matt asked, watching her closely.

‘This is all a part of it, isn’t it?’ she asked.

‘It might be, yes.’

‘All right, then. I’ll give you a woman’s reaction. I did and I didn’t. I was attracted to him in a mildly sexual way, I guess. Older man, very urbane, very charming, very courtly. You know looking at him that he could order from a French menu and know what wine would go with what, not just red or white but the year and even the vineyard. Very definitely not the run of fellow you see around here. But not effeminate in the least. Lithe, like a dancer. And of course there’s something attractive about a man who is so unabashedly bald.’ She smiled a little defensively, knowing there was color in her cheeks, wondering if she had said more than she intended.

‘But then you didn’t,’ Matt said.

She shrugged. ‘That’s harder to put my finger on. I think… I think I sensed a certain contempt under the surface. A cynicism. As if he were playing a certain part, and playing it well, but as if he knew he wouldn’t have to pull out all the stops to fool us. A touch of condescension.’ She looked at him uncertainly. ‘And there seemed to be something a little bit cruel about him. I don’t really know why.’

‘Did anyone buy anything?’

‘Not much, but he didn’t seem to mind. Mom bought a little knickknack shelf from Yugoslavia ‘ and that Mrs Petrie bought a lovely little drop-leaf table, but that was all I saw. He didn’t seem to mind. Just urged people to tell their friends he was open, to come back by and not be strangers. Very Old World charming.’

‘And do you think people were charmed?’

‘By and large, yes,’ Susan said, mentally comparing her mother’s enthusiastic impression of R. T. Straker to her immediate dislike of Ben.

‘You didn’t see his partner?’

‘Mr Barlow? No, he’s in New York, on a buying trip.’

‘Is he?’ Matt said, speaking to himself. ‘I wonder. The elusive Mr Barlow.’

‘Mr Burke, don’t you think you better tell me what all this is about?’

He sighed heavily.

‘I suppose I must try. What you’ve just told me is disturbing. Very disturbing. It all fits so well… ’

‘What? What does?’

‘I have to start,’ he began, ‘with meeting Mike Ryerson in Dell’s tavern last night… which already seems a century ago.’

5

It was twenty after eight by the time he had finished, and they had both drunk two cups of coffee.

‘I believe that’s everything,’ Matt said. ‘And now shall I do my Napoleon imitation? Tell you about my astral conversations with Toulouse-Lautrec?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘There’s something going on, but not what you think. You must
know
that.’

‘I did until last night.’

‘If no one has it in for you, as Ben suggested, then maybe Mike did it himself. In a delirium or something. That sounded thin, but she pushed ahead anyway. ‘Or maybe you fell asleep without knowing and dreamed the whole thing. I’ve dozed off without knowing it before and lost a whole fifteen or twenty minutes.’

He shrugged tiredly. ‘How does a person defend testimony no rational mind will accept at face value? I heard what I heard. I was not asleep. And something has me worried… rather badly worried. According to the old literature, a vampire cannot simply walk into a man’s house and suck his blood. No. He has to be invited. But Mike Ryerson invited Danny Glick in last night.
And I invited Mike myself!
’

‘Matt, has Ben told you about his new book?’

He fiddled with his pipe but didn’t light it. ‘Very little. Only that it’s somehow connected with the Marsten House.’

‘Has he told you he had a very traumatic experience in the Marsten House as a boy?’

He looked up sharply. ‘
In
it? No.’

‘He went in on a dare. He wanted to join a club, and the initiation was for him to go into the Marsten House and bring something out. He did, as a matter of fact - but before he left, he went up to the second-floor bedroom where Hubie Marsten hung himself. When he opened the door, he saw Hubie hanging there. He opened his eyes. Ben ran. That’s festered in him for twenty-four years. He came back to the Lot to try to write it out of his system.’

‘Christ,’ Matt said.

‘He has… a certain theory about the Marsten House. It springs partly from his own experience and partly from some rather amazing research he’s done on Hubert Marsten-’

‘His penchant for devil worship?’

She started. ‘How did you know that.’

He smiled a trifle grimly. ‘Not all the gossip in a small town is open gossip. There are secrets. Some of the secret gossip in ‘salem’s Lot has to do with Hubie Marsten. It’s shared among perhaps only a dozen or so of the older people now-Mabel Werts is one of them. It was a long time ago, Susan. But even so, there is no statute of limitations on some stories. It’s strange, you know. Even Mabel won’t talk about Hubert Marsten with anyone but her own circle. They’ll talk about his death, of course. About the murder. But if you ask about the ten years he and his wife spent up there in their house, doing God knows what, a sort of governor comes into play-perhaps the closest thing to a taboo our Western civilization knows. There have even been whispers that Hubert Marsten kidnapped and sacrificed small children to his infernal gods. I’m surprised Ben found out as much as he did. The secrecy concerning that aspect of Hubie and his wife and his house is almost tribal.’

‘He didn’t come by it in the Lot.’

‘That explains it, then. I suspect his theory is a rather old parapsychological wheeze-that humans manufacture evil just as they manufacture snot or excrement or fingernail parings. That it doesn’t go away. Specifically, that the Marsten House may have become a kind of evil dry-cell; a malign storage battery.’

‘Yes. He expressed it in exactly those terms.’ She looked at him wonderingly.

He gave a dry chuckle. ‘We’ve read the same books. And what do you think, Susan? Is there more than heaven and earth in your philosophy?’

‘No,’ she said with quiet firmness. ‘Houses are only houses. Evil dies with the perpetration of evil acts.’

‘You’re suggesting that Ben’s instability may enable me to lead him down the path to insanity that I am already traversing?’

‘No, of course not. I don’t think you’re insane. But Mr Burke, you must realize-’

‘Be quiet.’

He had cocked his head forward. She stopped talking and listened. Nothing… except perhaps a creaky board. She looked at him questioningly, and he shook his head. ‘You were saying?’

‘Only that coincidence has made this a poor time for him to exorcise the demons of his youth. There’s been a lot of cheap talk going around town since the Marsten House reoccupied and that store was opened… there’s been talk about Ben himself, for that matter. Rites of exorcism have been known to get out of hand and turn on the exorcist. I think Ben needs to get out of this town and I think maybe you could use a vacation from it, Mr Burke.’

Exorcism made her think of Ben’s request to mention the Catholic priest to Matt. On impulse, she decided not to. The reason he had asked was now clear enough, but it would only be adding fuel to a fire that was, in her opinion, already dangerously high. When Ben asked her-if he ever did-she would say she had forgotten.

‘I know how mad it must sound,’ Matt said. ‘Even to me, who heard the window go up, and that laugh, and saw the screen lying beside the driveway this morning. But if it will allay your fears any, I must say that Ben’s reaction to the whole thing was very sensible. He suggested we put the thing on the basis of a theory to be proved or disproved, and begin by-’ He ceased again, listening.

This time the silence spun out, and when he spoke again, the soft certainty in his voice frightened her. ‘There’s someone upstairs.’

She listened. Nothing.

‘You’re imagining things.’

‘I know my house,’ he said softly. ‘Someone is in the guest bedroom… there, you hear?’

And this time she did hear. The audible creak of a board, creaking the way boards in old houses do, for no good reason at all. But to Susan’s ears there seemed to be something more-something unutterably sly-in that sound.

‘I’m going upstairs,’ he said.

‘No!’

The word came out with no thought. She told herself:
Now who’s sitting in the chimney corner, believing the wind in the eaves is a banshee?

‘I was frightened last night and did nothing and things grew worse. Now I am going upstairs.’

‘Mr Burke-’

They had both begun to speak in undertones. Tension into her veins, making her muscles stiff. Maybe there
was
someone upstairs. A prowler.

‘Talk,’ he said. ‘After I go, continue speaking. On any subject.’

And before she could argue, he was out of his seat and moving toward the hall, moving with a grace that was nearly astounding. He looked back once, but she couldn’t read his eyes. He began to go up the stairs.

Her mind felt dazed into unreality by the swift turnaround things had taken. Less than two minutes ago they had been discussing this business calmly, under the rational light of electric bulbs. And now she was afraid. Question: If you put a psychologist in a room with a man who thinks he’s Napoleon and leave them there for a year (or ten or twenty), will you end up with two Skinner men or two guys with their hands in their shirts? Answer: Insufficient data.

She opened her mouth and said, ‘Ben and I were going to drive up Route 1 to Camden on Sunday-you know, the town where they filmed
Peyton Place
-but now I guess we’ll have to wait. They have the most darling little church… ’

She found herself droning along with great facility, even though her hands were clenched together in her lap tightly enough to whiten the knuckles. Her mind was clear, still unimpressed with this talk of bloodsuckers and the undead. It was from her spinal cord, a much older network of nerves and ganglia, that the black dread emanated in waves.