Salem’s Lot (36 page)

2

When he had finished, Matt allowed a moment of silence and then said, ‘So. Am I crazy?’

‘You’re determined that people will think you so, anyway,’ Callahan said, ‘in spite of the fact that you seem to have convinced Mr Mears and your own doctor. No, I don’t think you’re crazy. After all, I am in the business of dealing with the supernatural. If I may be allowed a small pun, it is my bread and wine.’

‘But-’

‘Let me tell you a story. I won’t vouch for its truth, but I will vouch for my own belief that it is true. It concerns a good friend of mine, Father Raymond Bissonette, who has been ministering to a parish in Cornwall for some Years now-along the so-called Tin Coast. Do you know of it?’

‘Through reading, yes.’

‘Some five years ago he wrote me that he had been called to an out-of-the-way corner of his parish to conduct a funeral service for a girl who had just "pined away". The girl’s coffin was filled with wild roses, which struck Ray as unusual. What he found downright grotesque was the fact that her mouth had been propped open with a stick and then filled with garlic and wild thyme.’

‘But those are-’

‘Traditional protections against the rising of the Undead, yes. Folk remedies. When Ray inquired, he was told quite matter-of-factly by the girl’s father that she had been killed by an incubus. You know the meaning?’

‘A sexual vampire.’

‘The girl had been betrothed to a young man named Bannock, who had a large strawberry-colored birthmark on the side of his neck. He was struck and killed by a car on his way home from work two weeks before the wedding. Two years later, the girl became engaged to another man. She broke it off quite suddenly during the week before the banns were to be cried for the second time. She told her parents and friends that John Bannock had been coming to her in the night and she had been unfaithful with him. Her present lover, according to Ray, was more distressed by the thought that she might have become mentally unbalanced than by the possibility of demon visitation. Nonetheless, she wasted away, died, and was buried in the old ways of the church.

‘All of that did not occasion Ray’s letter. What did was an occurrence some two months after the girl’s burial. While he was on an early morning walk, Ray spied a young man standing by the girl’s grave - a young man with a strawberry-colored birthmark on his neck. Nor is that the end of the story. He had gotten a Polaroid camera from his parents the Christmas before and had amused himself by snapping various views of the Cornish countryside. I have some of them in a picture album at the rectory-they’re quite good. The camera was around his neck that morning, and he took several snaps of the young man. When he showed them around the village, the reaction was quite amazing. One old lady fell down in a faint, and the dead girl’s mother began to pray in the street.

‘But when Ray got up the next morning, the young man’s figure had completely faded out of the pictures, and all that was left were several views of the local churchyard.’

‘And you believe that?’ Matt asked.

‘Oh yes. And I suspect most people would. The ordinary fellow isn’t half so leery of the supernatural as the fiction writers like to make out. Most writers who deal in that particular subject, as a matter of fact, are more hardheaded about spirits and demons and boogies than your ordinary man in the street. Lovecraft was an atheist. Edgar Allen Poe was sort of a half-assed transcendentalist. And Hawthorne was only conventionally religious.’

‘You’re amazingly conversant on the subject,’ Matt said.

The priest shrugged. ‘I had a boy’s interest in the occult and the outré,’ he said, ‘and as I grew older, my calling to the priesthood enhanced rather than retarded it.’ He sighed deeply. ‘But lately I’ve begun to ask myself some rather hard questions about the nature of evil in the world.’ With a twisted smile he added, ‘It’s spoiled a lot of the fun.’

‘Then… would you investigate a few things for me? And would you be averse to taking along some holy water and a bit of the Host?’

‘You’re treading on uneasy theological ground now, Callahan said with genuine gravity.

‘Why?’

‘I’m not going to say no, not at this point,’ Callahan said. ‘And I ought to tell you that if you’d gotten a younger priest, he probably would have said yes almost at once, with few if any qualms at all.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘They view the trappings of the church as symbolic rather than practical-like a shaman’s headdress and medicine stick. This young priest might decide you were crazy, but if shaking a little holy water around would case your craziness, fine and dandy. I can’t do that. If I should proceed to make your investigations in a neat Harris tweed with nothing under my arm but a copy of Sybil Leek’s The
Sensuous Exorcist
or whatever, that would be between you and me. But if I go with the Host… then I go as an agent of the Holy Catholic Church, prepared to execute what I would consider the most spiritual rites of my office. Then I go as Christ’s representative on earth.’ He was now looking at Matt seriously, solemnly. ‘I may be a poor excuse for a priest - at times I’ve thought so - a bit jaded, a bit cynical, and just lately suffering a crisis of… what? faith? identity?… but I still believe enough in the awesome, mystical, and apotheotic power of the church which stands behind me to tremble a bit at the thought of accepting your request lightly. The church is more than a bundle of ideals, as these younger fellows seem to believe. It’s more than a spiritual Boy Scout troop. The church is a Force… and one does not set a Force in motion lightly.’ He frowned severely at Matt. ‘Do you understand that? Your understanding is vitally important.’

‘I understand.’

‘You see, the over-all concept of evil in the Catholic Church has undergone a radical change in this century. Do you know what caused it?’

‘I imagine it was Freud.’

‘Very good. The Catholic Church began to cope with a new concept as it marched into the twentieth century: evil with a small "e". With a devil that was not a red-horned monster complete with spiked tall and cloven hooves, or a serpent crawling through the garden-although that is a remarkably apt psychological image. The devil, according to the Gospel According to Freud, would be a gigantic composite id, the subconscious of all of us.’

‘Surely a more stupendous concept than red-tailed boogies or demons with such sensitive noses that they can be banished with one good fart from a constipated churchman,’ Matt said.

‘Stupendous, of course. But impersonal. Merciless. Untouchable. Banishing Freud’s devil is as impossible as Shylock’s bargain to extract a pound of flesh without spilling a drop of blood. The Catholic Church has been forced to reinterpret its whole approach to evil-bombers over Cambodia, the war in Ireland and the Middle East, cop-killings and ghetto riots, the billion smaller evils loosed on the world each day like a plague of gnats. It is in the process of shedding its old medicine-man skin and re-emerging as a socially active, socially conscious body. The inner city rap-center ascendant over the confessional. Communion playing second fiddle to the civil rights movement and urban renewal. The church has been in the process of planting both feet in this world.’

‘Where there are no witches or incubi or vampires,’ Matt said, ‘but only child-beating, incest, and the rape of the environment.’

‘Yes.’

Matt said deliberately, ‘And you hate it, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Callahan said quietly. ‘I think it’s an abomination. It’s the Catholic Church’s way of saying that God isn’t dead, only a little senile. And I guess that’s my answer, isn’t it? What do you want me to do?’

Matt told him.

Callahan thought it over and said, ‘You realize it flies in the face of everything I just told you?’

‘On the contrary, I think it’s your chance to put your church-
your
church-to the test.’

Callahan took a deep breath. ‘Very well, I agree. On one condition.’

‘What would that be?

‘That all of us who go on this little expedition first go to the shop this Mr Straker is managing. That Mr Mears, as spokesman, should speak to him frankly about all of this. That we all have a chance to observe his reactions. And finally, that he should have, his chance to laugh in our faces.’

Matt was frowning. ‘It would be warning him.’

Callahan shook his head. ‘I believe the warning would be of no avail if the three of us-Mr Mears, Dr Cody, and myself-still agreed that we should move ahead regardless.’

‘All right,’ Matt said. ‘I agree, contingent on the approval of Ben and Jimmy Cody.’

‘Fine.’ Callahan sighed. ‘Will it hurt you if I tell you that I hope this is all in your mind? That I hope this man Straker does laugh in our faces, and with good reason?’

‘Not in the slightest.’

‘I do hope it. I have agreed to more than you know. It frightens me.’

‘I am frightened, too,’ Matt said softly.

3

But walking back to St Andrew’s, he did not feel frightened at all. He felt exhilarated, renewed. For the first time in years he was sober and did not crave a drink.

He went into the rectory, picked up the telephone, and dialed Eva Miller’s boardinghouse. ‘Hello? Mrs Miller? May I speak with Mr Mears?… He’s not. Yes, I see… No, no message. I’ll call tomorrow. Yes, good-by.’ He hung up and went to the window.

Was Mears out there someplace, drinking beer on a country road, or could it be that everything the old schoolteacher had told him was true?

If so… if so…

He could not stay in the house. He went out on the back porch, breathing in the brisk, steely air of October, and looked into the moving darkness. Perhaps it wasn’t all Freud after all. Perhaps a large part of it had to do with the invention of the electric light, which had killed the shadows in men’s minds much more effectively than a stake through a vampire’s heart-and less messily, too.

The evil still went on, but now it went on in the hard, soulless glare of parking-lot fluorescents, of neon tubing, of hundred-watt bulbs by the billions. Generals planned strategic air strikes beneath the no-nonsense glow of alternating current, and it was all out of control, like a kid’s soapbox racer going downhill with no brakes:
I was following my orders
. Yes, that was true, patently true. We were all soldiers, simply following what was written on our walking papers. But where were the orders coming from, ultimately?
Take me to your leader
. But where is his office?
I was just following orders. The people elected me
. But who elected the people?

Something flapped overhead and Callahan looked up, startled out of his confused revery. A bird? A bat? Gone. Didn’t matter.

He listened for the town and heard nothing but the whine of telephone wires.

The night the kudzu gets your fields, you sleep like the dead.

Who wrote that? Dickey?

No sound; no light but the fluorescent in front of the church where Fred Astaire had never danced and the faint waxing and waning of the yellow warning light at the crossroads of Brock Street and Jointner Avenue. No baby cried.

The night the kudzu gets your fields, you sleep like-

The exultation had faded away like a bad echo of pride. Terror struck him around the heart like a blow. Not terror for his life or his honor or that his housekeeper might find out about his drinking. It was a terror he had never dreamed of, not even in the tortured days of his adolescence.

The terror he felt was for his immortal soul.

I heard a voice crying from the deep:
Come join me baby, in my endless sleep.

-Old rock ‘n’ roll song

And travelers now within that valley
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh-but smile no more.

-Edgar Allen Poe
The Haunted Palace

Tell you now that the whole town is empty.

-Bob Dylan

THE LOT (IV)

1

From the Old Farmer’s Almanac’:

Sunset on Sunday, October 5, 1975, at 7:02 P.M., sunrise on Monday, October 6, 1975, at 6:49 A.M. The period of darkness on Jerusalem’s Lot during that particular rotation of the Earth, thirteen days after the vernal equinox, lasted eleven hours and forty-seven minutes. The moon was new. The day’s verse from the Old Farmer was: ‘See less sun, harvest’s nigh done.’

From the Portland Weather Station:

High temperature for the period of darkness was 62°, reported at 7:05 P.M. Low temperature was 47°, reported at 4:06 A.M. Scattered clouds, precipitation zero. Winds from the northwest at five to ten miles per hour.

From the Cumberland County police blotter:

Nothing.

2

No one pronounced Jerusalem’s Lot dead on the morning of October 6; no one knew it was. Like the bodies of previous days, it retained every semblance of life.

Ruthie Crockett, who had lain pale and ill in bed all weekend, was gone on Monday morning. The disappearance went unreported. Her mother was down cellar, lying behind her shelves of preserves with a canvas tarpaulin pulled over her body, and Larry Crockett, who woke up very late indeed, simply assumed that his daughter had gotten herself off to school. He decided not to go into the office that day. He felt weak and washed out and lighthearted. Flu, or something. The light hurt his eyes. He got up and pulled down the shades, yelping once when the sunlight fell directly on his arm. He would have to replace that window some day when he felt better. Defective window glass was no joke. You could come home on a sunshiny day, find your house burning away six licks to the minute, and those insurance pricks in the home office called it spontaneous combustion and wouldn’t pay up. When he felt better was time enough. He thought about a cup of coffee and felt sick to his stomach. He wondered vaguely where his wife was, and then the subject slipped out of his mind. He went back to bed, fingering a funny little shaving nick just under his chin, pulled the sheet over his wan cheek, and went back to sleep.

His daughter, meanwhile, slept in enameled darkness within an abandoned freezer close to Dud Rogers-in the night world of her new existence, she found his advances among the heaped mounds of garbage very acceptable.

Loretta Starcher, the town librarian, had also disappeared, although there was no one in her disconnected spinster’s life to remark it. She now resided on the dark and musty third floor of the Jerusalem’s Lot Public Library. The third floor was always kept locked (she had the only key, always worn on a chain around her neck) except when some special supplicant could convince her that he was strong enough, intelligent enough, and
moral
enough to receive a special dispensation.

Now she rested there herself, a first edition of a different kind, as mint as when she had first entered the world. Her binding, so to speak, had never even been cracked.

The disappearance of Virgil Rathbun also went unnoticed. Franklin Boddin woke up at nine o’clock in their shack, noticed vaguely that Virgil’s pallet was empty, thought nothing of it, and started to get out of bed and see if there was a beer. He fell back, all rubber-legs and reeling head.

Christ
, he thought,
drifting into sleep again. What was we in to last night? Sterno?

And beneath the shack, in the cool of twenty seasons’ fallen leaves and among a galaxy of rusted beer cans popped down through the gaping floorboards in the front room, Virgil lay waiting for night. In the dark clay of his brain there were perhaps visions of a liquid more fiery than the finest scotch, more quenching than the finest wine.

Eva Miller missed Weasel Craig at breakfast but thought little of it. She was too busy directing the flow to and from the stove as her tenants rustled up their breakfasts and then stumbled forth to look another work week in the eye. Then she was too busy putting things to rights and washing the plates of that damned Grover Verrill and that no good Mickey Sylvester, both of whom had been consistently ignoring the ‘Please wash up your dishes’ sign taped over the sink for years.

But as the silence crept back into the day and the frantic bulge of breakfast work merged into the steady routine of things to be done, she missed him again. Monday was garbage-collection day on Railroad Street, and Weasel always took the big green bags of rubbish out to the curb for Royal Snow to pick up in his dilapidated old International Harvester truck. Today the green bags were still out on the back steps.

She went to his room and knocked gently. ‘Ed?’

There was no response. On another day she would have assumed his drunkenness and simply have put the bags out herself, her lips slightly more compressed than usual. But this morning a faint thread of disquiet wormed into her, and she turned the doorknob and poked her head in. ‘Ed?’ she called softly.

The room was empty. The window by the head of the bed was open, the curtains fluttering randomly in and out with the vagaries of the light breeze. The bed was wrinkled and she made it without thinking, her hands doing their own work. Stepping over to the other side, her right loafer crunched in something. She looked down and saw Weasel’s horn-backed mirror, shattered on the floor. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands, frowning. It had been his mother’s, and he had once turned down an antique dealer’s offer of ten dollars for it. And that had been after he started drinking.

She got the dustpan from the hall closet and brushed up the glass with slow, thoughtful gestures. She knew Weasel had been sober when he went to bed the night before, and there was no place he could buy beer after nine o’clock, unless he had hitched a ride out to Dell’s or into Cumberland.

She dumped the fragments of broken mirror into Weasel’s wastebasket, seeing herself reflected over and over for a brief second. She looked into the wastebasket but saw no empty bottle there. Secret drinking was really not Ed Craig’s style, anyway.

Well. He’ll turn up.

But going downstairs, the disquiet remained. Without consciously admitting it to herself she knew that her feelings for Weasel went a bit deeper than friendly concern.

‘Ma’am?’

She started from her thoughts and regarded the stranger in her kitchen. The stranger was a little boy, neatly dressed in corduroy pants and a clean blue T-shirt.
Looks like he fell off his bike
. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite pin him down. From one of the new families out on Jointner Avenue, most likely.

‘Does Mr Ben Mears live here?’

Eva began to ask why he wasn’t in school, then didn’t. His expression was very serious, even grave. There were blue hollows under his eyes.

‘He’s sleeping.’

‘May I wait?’

Homer McCaslin ad gone directly from Green’s Mortuary to the Norton home on Brock Street. It was eleven o’clock by the time he got there. Mrs Norton was in tears, and while Bill Norton seemed calm enough, he was chain smoking and his face looked drawn.

McCaslin agreed to put the girl’s description on the wire. Yes, he would call as soon as he heard something. Yes, he would check the hospitals in the area, it was part of the routine (so was the morgue). He privately thought the girl might have gone off in a tiff. The mother admitted they had quarreled and that the girl had been talking of moving out.

Nonetheless, he cruised some of the back roads, one ear comfortably cocked to the crackle of static coming from the radio slung under the dash. At a few minutes past midnight, coming up the Brooks Road toward town, the spotlight he had trained on the soft shoulder of the road glinted off metal-a car parked in the woods.

He stopped, backed up, got out. The car was parked partway up an old disused wood-road. Chevy Vega, light brown, two years old. He pulled his heavy chained notebook out of his back pocket, paged past the interview with Ben and Jimmy, and trained his light on the license number Mrs Norton had given him. It matched. The girl’s car, all right. That made things more serious. He laid his hand on the hood. Cool. It had been parked for a while.

‘Sheriff?’

A light, carefree voice, like tinkling bells. Why had his hand dropped to the butt of his gun?

He turned and saw the Norton girl, looking incredibly beautiful, walking toward him hand in hand with a stranger-a young man with black hair unfashionably combed straight back from his forehead. McCaslin shone the flashlight at his face and had the oddest impression that the light was shining right through it without illuminating it in the slightest. And although they were walking, they left no tracks in the soft dirt. He felt fear and warning kindle in his nerves, his hand tightened on his revolver… and then loosened. He clicked off his flashlight and waited passively.

‘Sheriff,’ she said, and now her voice was low, caressing.

‘How good of you to come,’ the stranger said.

They fell on him.

Now his patrol car was parked far out on the rutted and brambled dead end of the Deep Cut Road, with hardly a twinkle of chrome showing through the heavy strands of juniper, bracken, and Loily-come-see-me. McCaslin was curled up in the trunk. The radio called him at regular intervals unheeded.

Later that same morning Susan paid a short visit to her mother but did little damage; like a leech that had fed well on a slow swimmer, she was satisfied. Still, she had been invited in and now she could come and go as she pleased. There would be a new hunger tonight… every night.

Charles Griffen had wakened his wife at a little after five on that Monday morning, his face long and chiseled into sardonic lines by his anger. Outside, the cows were bawling unmilked with full udders. He summed up the work of the night in six words: ‘Those damned boys have run off.’

But they had not. Danny Glick had found and battened upon Jack Griffen and Jack had gone to his brother Hal’s room and had finally ended his worries of school and books and unyielding fathers forever. Now both of them lay in the center of a huge pile of loose hay in the upper mow, with chaff in their hair and sweet motes of pollen dancing in the dark and tideless channels of their noses. An occasional mouse scampered across their faces.

Now the light had spilled across the land, and all evil things slept. It was to be a beautiful autumn day, crisp and clear and filled with sunshine. By and large the town (not knowing it was dead) would go off to their jobs with no inkling of the night’s work. According to the Old Farmer, sunset Monday night would come at 7:00 P.M. sharp.

The days shortened, moving toward Halloween, and beyond that, winter.