Salem’s Lot (38 page)

7

At quarter past ten, Eva Miller went down cellar to get two jars of corn to take to Mrs Norton who, according to Mabel Werts, was in bed. Eva had spent most of September in a steamy kitchen, toiling over her canning operations, blanching vegetables and putting them up, putting paraffin plugs in the tops of Ball jars to cover homemade jelly. There were well over two hundred glass jars neatly shelved in her spick-and-span dirt-floored basement-canning was one of her great joys. Later in the year, as fall drifted into winter and the holidays neared, she would add mincemeat.

The smell struck her as soon as she opened the cellar door. ‘Gosh’n fishes,’ she muttered under her breath, and went down gingerly, as if wading into a polluted pool. Her husband had built the cellar himself, rock-walling it for coolness. Every now and then a muskrat or woodchuck or mink would crawl into one of the wide chinks and die there. That was what must have happened, although she could never recall a stink this strong.

She reached the lower floor and went along the walls, squinting in the faint overhead glow of the two fifty-watt bulbs. Those should be replaced with seventy-fives, she thought. She got her preserves, neatly labeled CORN in her own careful blue script (a slice of red pepper on the top of every one), and continued her inspection, even squeezing into the space behind the huge, multi-duct furnace. Nothing.

She arrived back at the steps leading up to her kitchen and stared around, frowning, hands on hips. The large cellar was much neater since she had hired two of Larry Crockett’s boys to build a tool shed behind her house two years ago. There was the furnace, looking like an Impressionist sculpture of the goddess Kali with its score of pipes twisting off in all directions; the storm windows that she would have to get on soon now that October had come and heating was so dear; the tarpaulin-covered pool table that had been Ralph’s. She had the felt carefully vacuumed each May, although no one had played on it since Ralph had died in 1959. Nothing much else down here now. A box of paperbacks she had collected for the Cumberland Hospital, a snow shovel with a broken handle, a pegboard with some of Ralph’s old tools hanging from it, a trunk containing drapes that were probably all mildewed by now.

Still, the stink persisted.

Her eyes fixed on the small half-door that led down to the root cellar, but she wasn’t going down there, not today. Besides, the walls of the root cellar were solid concrete. Unlikely that an animal could have gotten in there. Still -

‘Ed?’ she called suddenly, for no reason at all. The flat sound of her voice scared her.

The word died in the dimly lit cellar. Now, why had she done that? What in God’s name would Ed Craig be doing down here, even if there
was
a place to hide? Drinking? Offhand, she couldn’t think of a more depressing place in town to drink than here in her cellar. More likely he was off in the woods with that good-for-nothing friend of his, Virge Rathbun, guzzling someone’s dividend.

Yet she lingered a moment longer, sweeping her gaze around. The rotten stink was awful, just awful. She hoped she wouldn’t have to have the place fumigated.

With a last glance at the root cellar door, she went back upstairs.

8

Father Callahan heard them out, all three, and by the time he was brought up to date, it was a little after eleven-thirty.

They were sitting in the cool and spacious sitting room of the rectory, and the sun flooded in the large front windows in bars that looked thick enough to slice. Watching the dust motes that danced dreamily in the sun shafts, Callahan was reminded of an old cartoon he had seen somewhere. Cleaning woman with a broom is staring in surprise down at the floor; she has swept away part of her shadow. He felt a little like that now. For the second time in twenty-four hours he had been confronted with a stark impossibility-only now the impossibility had corroboration from a writer, a seemingly levelheaded little boy, and a doctor whom the town respected. Still, an impossibility was an impossibility. You couldn’t sweep away your own shadow. Except that it seemed to have happened.

‘This would be much easier to accept if you could have arranged for a thunderstorm and a power failure,’ he said.

‘It’s quite true,’ Jimmy said. ‘I assure you.’ His hand went to his neck.

Father Callahan got up and pulled something out of Jimmy’s black bag-two truncated baseball bats with sharpened points. He turned one of them over in his hands and said, ‘Just a moment, Mrs Smith. This won’t hurt a bit.’

No one laughed.

Callahan put the stakes back, went to the window, and looked out at Jointner Avenue. ‘You are all very persuasive,’ he said. ‘And I suppose I must add one little piece which you now do not have in your possession.’ He turned back to them.

‘There is a sign in the window of the Barlow and Straker Furniture Shop,’ he said. ‘It says, "Closed Until Further Notice." I went down this morning myself promptly at nine o’clock to discuss Mr Burke’s allegations with your mysterious Mr Straker. The shop is locked, front and back.’

‘You have to admit that jibes with what Mark says,’ Ben remarked.

‘Perhaps. And perhaps it’s only chance. Let me ask you again: Are you sure you must have the Catholic Church in this?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘But we’ll proceed without you if we have to. If it comes to that, I’ll go alone.’

‘No need of that,’ Father Callahan said, rising. ‘Follow me across to the church, gentlemen, and I will hear your confessions.’

9

Ben knelt awkwardly in the darkness of the confessional, his mind whirling, his thoughts inchoate. Flicking through them was a succession of surreal images: Susan in the park; Mrs Glick backing away from the makeshift tongue-depressor cross, her mouth an open, writhing wound; Floyd Tibbits coming out of his car in a lurch, dressed like a scarecrow, charging him; Mark Petrie leaning in the window of Susan’s car. For the first and only time, the possibility that all of this might be a dream occurred to him, and his tired mind clutched at it eagerly.

His eye fell on something in the corner of the confessional, and he picked it up curiously. It was an empty Junior Mints box, fallen from the pocket of some little boy, perhaps. A touch of reality that was undeniable. The cardboard was real and tangible under his fingers. This nightmare was real.

The little sliding door opened. He looked at it but could see nothing beyond. There was a heavy screen in the opening.

‘What should I do?’ He asked the screen.

‘Say, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned."‘

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ Ben said his voice sounding strange and heavy in the enclosed space.

‘Now tell me your sins.’

‘All of them?’ Ben asked, appalled.

‘Try to be representative,’ Callahan said, his voice dry. ‘I know we have something to do before dark.’

Thinking hard and trying to keep the Ten Commandments before him as a kind of sorting screen, Ben began. It didn’t become easier as he went along. There was no sense of catharsis-only the dull embarrassment that went with telling a stranger the mean secrets of his life. Yet he could see how this ritual could become compulsive: as bitterly compelling as strained rubbing alcohol for the chronic drinker or the pictures behind the loose board in the bathroom for an adolescent boy. There was something medieval about it, something accursed-a ritual act of regurgitation. He found himself remembering a scene from the Bergman picture
The Seventh Seal
, where a crowd of ragged penitents proceeds through a town stricken with the black plague. The penitents were scourging themselves with birch branches, making themselves bleed. The hatefulness of baring himself this way (and perversely, he would not allow himself to lie, although he could have done so quite convincingly) made the day’s purpose real in the final sense, and he could almost see the word ‘vampire’ printed on the black screen of his mind, not in scare movie-poster print, but in small, economical letters that were made to be a woodcut or scratched on a scroll. He felt helpless in the grip of this alien ritual, out of joint with his time. The confessional might have been a direct pipeline to the days when werewolves and incubi and witches were an accepted part of the outer darkness and the church the only beacon of light. For the first time in his life he felt the slow, terrible beat and swell of the ages and saw his life as a dim and glimmering spark in an edifice which, if seen clearly, might drive all men mad. Matt had not told them of Father Callaban’s conception of his church as a Force, but Ben would have understood that now. He could feel the Force in this fetid little box, beating in on him, leaving him naked and contemptible. He felt it as no Catholic, raised to confession since earliest childhood, could have.

When he stepped out, the fresh air from the open doors struck him thankfully. He wiped at his neck with the palm of his hand and it came away sweaty.

Callahan stepped out. ‘You’re not done yet,’ he said.

Wordlessly, Ben stepped back inside, but did not kneel. Callahan gave him an act of contrition-ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.

‘I don’t know that one,’ Ben said.

‘I’ll give you a card with the prayer written on it,’ the voice on the other side of the screen said. ‘You can say them to yourself while we ride over to Cumberland.’

Ben hesitated a moment. ‘Matt was right, you know. When he said it was going to be harder than we thought. We’re going to sweat blood before this is over.’

‘Yes?’ Callahan said-polite or just dubious? Ben couldn’t tell. He looked down and saw he was still holding the Junior Mints box. He had crushed it to a shapeless pulp with the convulsive squeezing of his right hand.

10

It was nearing one o’clock when they all got in Jimmy Cody’s large Buick and set off. None of them spoke. Father Donald Callahan was wearing his full gown, a surplice, and a white stole bordered with purple. He had given them each a small tube of water from the Holy Font, and had blessed them each with the sign of the cross. He held a small silver pyx on his lap which contained several pieces of the Host.

They stopped at Jimmy’s Cumberland office first, and Jimmy left the motor idling while he went inside. When he came out, he was wearing a baggy sport coat that concealed the bulge of McCaslin’s revolver and carrying an ordinary Craftsman hammer in his right hand.

Ben looked at it with some fascination and saw from the tail of his eye that Mark and Callahan were also staring. The hammer had a blue steel head and a perforated rubber handgrip.

‘Ugly, isn’t it?’ Jimmy remarked.

Ben thought of using that hammer on Susan, using it to ram a stake between her breasts, and felt his stomach flip over slowly, like an airplane doing a slow roll.

‘Yes,’ he said, and moistened his lips. ‘It’s ugly, all right.’

They drove to the Cumberland Stop and Shop. Ben and Jimmy went into the supermarket and picked up all the garlic that was displayed along the vegetable counter-twelve boxes of the whitish-gray bulbs. The check-out girl raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Glad I ain’t going on a long ride with you boys t’night.’

Going out, Ben said idly, ‘I wonder what the basis of garlic’s effectiveness against them is? Something in the Bible, or an ancient curse, or-’

‘I suspect it’s an allergy,’ Jimmy said.

‘Allergy?’

Callahan caught the last of it and asked for a repetition as they drove toward the Northern Belle Flower Shop.

‘Oh yes, I agree with Dr Cody,’ he said. ‘Probably is an allergy… if it works as a deterrent at all. Remember, that’s not proved yet.’

‘That’s a funny idea for a priest,’ Mark said.

‘Why? If I must accept the existence of vampires (and; it seems I must, at least for the time being), must I also accept them as creatures beyond the bounds of all natural laws? Some, certainly. Folklore says they can’t be seen in mirrors, that they can transform themselves into bats or wolves or birds-the so-called psychopompos-that they can narrow their bodies and slip through the tiniest cracks. Yet we know they see, and hear, and speak… and they most certainly taste. Perhaps they also know discomfort, pain-’

‘And love?’ Ben asked, looking straight ahead.

‘No,’ Jimmy answered. ‘I suspect that love is beyond them.’ He pulled into a small parking lot beside an L-shaped flower shop with an attached greenhouse.

A small bell tinkled over the door when they went in, and the heavy aroma of flowers struck them. Ben felt sickened by the cloying heaviness of their mixed perfumes, and was reminded of funeral parlors.

‘Hi there.’ A tall man in a canvas apron came toward them, holding an earthen flowerpot in one hand.

Ben had only started to explain what they wanted when the man in the apron shook his head and interrupted.

‘You’re late, I’m afraid. A man came in last Friday and bought every rose I had in stock-red, white, and yellow. I’ll have no more until Wednesday at least. If you’d care to order-’

‘What did this man look like?’

‘Very striking,’ the proprietor said, putting his poi down. ‘Tall, totally bald. Piercing eyes. Smoked foreign cigarettes, by the smell. He had to take the flowers out in three armloads. He put them in the back of a very old car, a Dodge, I think-’

‘Packard,’ Ben said. ‘A black Packard.’

‘You know him, then.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘He paid cash. Very unusual, considering the size of the order. But perhaps if you get in touch with him, he would sell you- ‘

‘Perhaps,’ Ben said.

In the car again, they talked it over.

‘There’s a shop in Falmouth-’ Father Callahan began doubtfully.

‘No!’ Ben said. ‘No!’ And the raw edge of hysteria in his voice made them all look around. ‘And when we got to Falmouth and found that Straker had been there, too? What then? Portland? Kittery?
Boston?
Don’t you realize what’s happening? He’s foreseen us!
He’s leading us by the nose!
’

‘Ben, be reasonable,’ Jimmy said. ‘Don’t you think we ought to at least-’

‘Don’t you remember what Matt said? "You mustn’t go into this feeling that because he can’t rise in the daytime he can’t harm you." Look at your watch, Jimmy.’

Jimmy did. ‘Two-fifteen,’ he said slowly, and looked up at the sky as if doubting the truth on the dial. But it was true; now the shadows were going the other way.

‘He’s anticipated us,’ Ben said. ‘He’s been four jumps ahead every mile of the way. Did we-could we-actually think that
he
would be blissfully unaware of us? That
he
never took the possibility of discovery and opposition into account? We have to go
now
, before we waste the rest of the day arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.’

‘He’s right,’ Callahan said quietly. ‘I think we had better stop talking and get going.’

‘Then
drive
,’ Mark said urgently.

Jimmy pulled out of the flower-shop parking lot fast, screeching the tires on the pavement. The proprietor stared after them, three men, one of them a priest, and a little boy who sat in a car with MD plates and shouted at each other of total lunacies.