Salem’s Lot (39 page)

11

Cody came at the Marsten House from the Brooks Road, on the village’s blind side, and Donald Callahan, looking at it from this new angle, thought: Why, it actually
looms
over the town. Strange I never saw it before. It must have perfect elevation there, perched on its hill high above the crossroads of Jointner Avenue and Brock Street. Perfect elevation and a very nearly 360° view of the township itself. It was a huge and rambling place, and with the shutters closed it took on an uncomfortable, overlarge configuration in the mind; it became a sarcophagus-like monolith, an evocation of doom.

And it was the site of both suicide and murder, which meant it stood on unhallowed ground.

He opened his mouth to say so, and then thought better of it.

Cody turned off onto the Brooks Road, and for a moment the house was blotted out by trees. Then they thinned, and Cody was turning into the driveway. The Packard was parked just outside the garage, and when Jimmy turned off the car, he drew McCaslin’s revolver.

Callahan felt the atmosphere of the place seize him at once. He took a crucifix-his mother’s-from his pocket and slipped it around his neck with his own. No bird sang in these fall-denuded trees. The long and ragged grass seemed even drier and more dehydrated than the end of the season warranted; the ground itself seemed gray and used up.

The steps leading up to the porch were warped crazily, and there was a brighter square of paint on one of the porch posts where a no-trespassing sign had recently been taken down. A new Yale lock glittered brassily below the old rusted bolt on the front door.

‘A window, maybe, like Mark-’ Jimmy began hesitantly.

‘No,’ Ben said. ‘Right through the front door. We’ll break it down if we have to.’

‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Callahan said, and his voice did not seem to be his own. When they got out, he led them without stopping to think about it. An eagerness-the old eagerness he was sure had gone forever seemed to seize him as he approached the door. The house seemed to lean around them, to almost ooze its evil from the cracked pores of its paint. Yet he did not hesitate. Any thought of temporizing was gone. In the last moments he did not lead them so much as he was impelled.

‘In the name of God the Father!’ he cried, and his voice took on a hoarse, commanding note that made them all draw closer to him. ‘I command the evil to be gone from this house! Spirits, depart!’ And without being aware he was going to do it, he smote the door with the crucifix in his hand.

There was a flash of light-afterward they all agreed there had been-a pungent whiff of ozone, and a crackling sound, as if the boards themselves had screamed. The curved fanlight above the door suddenly exploded outward, and the large bay window to the left that overlooked the lawn coughed its glass onto the grass at the same instant. Jimmy cried out. The new Yale lock lay on the boards at their feet, welded into an almost unrecognizable mass. Mark bent to poke it and then yelped.

‘Hot,’ he said.

Callahan withdrew from the door, trembling. He looked down at the cross in his hand. ‘This is, without a doubt, the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me in my life,’ he said. He glanced up at the sky, as if to see the very face of God, but the sky was indifferent.

Ben pushed at the door and it swung open easily. But he waited for Callahan to go in first. In the hall Callahan looked at Mark.

‘The cellar,’ he said. ‘You get to it through the kitchen. Straker’s upstairs. But-’ He paused, frowning. ‘Something’s different. I don’t know what. Something’s not the same as it was.’

They went upstairs first, and even though Ben was not in the lead, he felt a prickle of very old terror as they approached the door at the end of the hall. Here, almost a month to the day after he had come back to ‘salem’s Lot, he was to get his second look into that room. When Callahan pushed the door open, he glanced upward… and felt the scream well up in his throat and out of his mouth before he could stop it. It was high, womanish, hysterical.

But it was not Hubert Marsten hanging from the overhead beam, or his spirit.

It was Straker, and he had been hung upside down like a pig in a slaughtering pen, his throat ripped wide open. His glazed eyes stared at them, through them, past them.

He had been bled white.

12

‘Dear God,’ Father Callahan said. ‘Dear God.’

They advanced slowly into the room, Callahan and Cody a bit in the lead, Ben and Mark behind, pressed together.

Straker’s feet had been bound together; then he had been hauled up and tied there. It occurred to Ben in a distant part of his brain that it must have taken a man with enormous strength to haul Straker’s dead weight up to a point where his dangling hands did not quite touch the floor.

Jimmy touched the forehead with his inner wrist, then held one of the dead hands in his own. ‘He’s been dead for maybe eighteen hours,’ he said. He dropped the hand with a shudder. ‘My God, what an awful way to… I can’t figure this out. Why-who-’

‘Barlow did it,’ Mark said. He looked at Straker’s corpse with unflinching eyes.

‘And Straker screwed up,’ Jimmy said. ‘No eternal life for him. But why like this? Hung upside down?’

‘It’s as old as Macedonia,’ Father Callahan said. ‘Hanging the body of your enemy or betrayer upside down so his head faces earth instead of heaven. St Paul was crucified that way, on an X-shaped cross with his legs broken.’

Ben spoke, and his voice sounded old and dusty in his throat. ‘He’s still diverting us. He has a hundred tricks. Let’s go.’

They followed him back down the hall, back down the stairs, into the kitchen. Once there, he deferred to Father Callahan again. For a moment they just looked at each other, and then at the cellar door that led downward, just as twenty-five-odd years ago he had taken a set of stairs upward, to face an overwhelming question.

13

When the priest opened the door, Mark felt the rank, rotten odor assail his nostrils again-but that was also different. Not so strong. Less malevolent.

The priest started down the stairs. Still, it took all his will power to continue down after Father Callahan into that pit of the dead.

Jimmy had produced a flashlight from his bag and clicked it on. The beam illuminated the floor, crossed to one wall, and swung back. It paused for a moment on a long crate, and then the beam fell on a table.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Look.’

It was an envelope, clean and shining in all this dingy darkness, a rich yellow vellum.

‘It’s a trick,’ Father Callahan said. ‘Better not touch it.’

‘No,’ Mark spoke up. He felt both relief and disappointment. ‘He’s not here. He’s gone. That’s for us. Full of mean things, probably.’

Ben stepped forward and picked the envelope up. He turned it over in his hands twice-Mark could see in the glow of Jimmy’s flashlight that his fingers were trembling and then he tore it open.

There was one sheet inside, rich vellum like the envelope, and they crowded around. Jimmy focused his flashlight on the page, which was closely written in an elegant, spider-thin hand. They read it together, Mark a little more slowly than the others.

October 4

My Dear Young Friends,

How lovely of you to have stopped by!

I am never averse to company; it has been one of my great joys in a long and often lonely life. Had you come in the evening, I should have welcomed you in person with the greatest of pleasure. However, since I suspected you might choose to arrive during daylight hours, I thought it best to be out.

I have left you a small token of my appreciation; someone very near and dear to one of you is now in the place where I occupied my days until I decided that other quarters might be more congenial. She is very lovely, Mr Mears-very
toothsome
, if I may be permitted a small
bon mot
. I have no further need of her and so I have left her for you to-how is your idiom?-to warm up for the main event. To whet your appetites, if you like. Let us see how well you like the appetizer to the main course you contemplate, shall we?

Master Petrie, you have robbed me of the most faithful and resourceful servant I have ever known. You have caused me, in an indirect fashion, to take part in his ruination; have caused my own appetites to betray me. You sneaked up behind him, doubtless. I am going to enjoy dealing with you. Your parents first, I think. Tonight… or tomorrow night… or the next. And then you. But you shall enter my church as choirboy
castratum
.

And Father Callahan-have they persuaded you to come? I thought so. I have observed you at some length since I arrived in Jerusalem’s Lot… much as a good chess player will study the games of his opposition, am I correct? The Catholic Church is not the oldest of my opponents, though! I was old when it was young, when its members hid in the catacombs of Rome and painted fishes on their chests so they could tell one from another. I was strong when this simpering club of bread-eaters and wine-drinkers who venerate the sheep-savior was weak. My rites were old when the rites of your church were unconceived. Yet I do not underestimate. I am wise in the ways of goodness as well as those of evil. I am not jaded.

And I will best you.
How?
you say. Does not Callahan bear the symbol of White? Does not Callahan move in the day as well as the night? Are there not charms and potions, both Christian and pagan, which my so-good friend Matthew Burke has informed me and my compatriots of? Yes, yes, and yes. But I have lived longer than you. I am crafty. I am not the serpent, but the father of serpents.

Still, you say, this is not enough. And it is not. In the end, ‘Father’ Callahan, you will undo yourself. Your faith in the White is weak and soft. Your talk of love is presumption. Only when you speak of the bottle are you informed.

My good, good friends-Mr Mears; Mr Cody; Master Petrie; Father Callahan-enjoy your stay. The Médoc is excellent, procured for me especially by the late owner of this house, whose personal company I was never able to enjoy. Please be my guests if you still have a taste for wine after you have finished the work at hand. We will meet again, in person, and I shall convey my felicitations to each of you at that time in a more personal way.

Until then, adieu.

BARLOW.

Trembling, Ben let the letter fall to the table. He looked at the others. Mark stood with his hands clenched into fists, his mouth frozen in the twist of someone who has bitten something rotten; Jimmy, his oddly boyish face drawn and pale; Father Donald Callahan, his eyes alight, his mouth drawn down in a trembling bow.

And one by one, they looked up at him. ‘Come on,’ he said.

They went around the corner together.

14

Parkins Gillespie was standing on the front step of the brick Municipal Building, looking through his high-powered Zeiss binoculars when Nolly Gardener drove up in the town’s police car and got out, hitching up his belt and picking out his seat at the same time.

‘What’s up, Park?’ he asked, walking up the steps.

Parkins gave him the glasses wordlessly and flicked one callused thumb at the Marsten House.

Nolly looked. He saw that old Packard, and parked in front of it, a new tan Buick. The gain on the binoculars wasn’t quite high enough to pick off the plate number. He lowered his glasses. ‘That’s Doc Cody’s car, ain’t it?’

‘Yes, I believe it is.’ Parkins inserted a Pall Mall between his lips and scratched a kitchen match on the brick wall behind him.

‘I never seen a car up there except that Packard.’

‘Yes, that’s so,’ Parkins said meditatively.

‘Think we ought to go up there and have a look?’ Nolly spoke with a marked lack of his usual enthusiasm. He had been a lawman for five years and was still entranced with his own position.

‘No,’ Parkins said, ‘I believe we’ll just leave her alone.’ He took his watch out of his vest and clicked up the scrolled silver cover like a trainman checking an express. Just 3:41. He checked his watch against the clock on the town hall and then tucked it back into place.

‘How’d all that co-me out with Floyd Tibbits and the little McDougall baby?’ Nolly asked.

‘Dunno.’

‘Oh,’ Nolly said, momentarily nonplussed. Parkins was always taciturn but this was a new high for him. He looked through the glasses again: no change.

‘Town seems quiet today,’ Nolly volunteered.

‘Yes,’ Parkins said. He looked across Jointner Avenue and the park with his faded blue eyes. Both the avenue and the park were deserted. They had been deserted most of the day. There was a remarkable lack of mothers strolling babies or idlers around the War Memorial.

‘Funny things been happening,’ Nolly ventured.

‘Yes,’ Parkins said, considering.

As a last gasp, Nolly fell back on the one bit of conversational bait that Parkins had never failed to rise to: the weather. ‘Clouding up,’ he said. ‘Be rain by tonight.’

Parkins studied the sky. There were mackerel scales directly overhead and a building bar of clouds to the southwest. ‘Yes,’ he said, and threw the stub of his cigarette away.

‘Park, you feelin’ all right?’

Parkins Gillespie considered it.

‘Nope,’ he said.

‘Well, what in hell’s the matter.

‘I believe,’ Gillespie said, ‘that I’m scared shitless.’

‘What?’ Nolly floundered. ‘Of what?’

‘Dunno,’ Parkins said, and took his binoculars back. He began to scan the Marsten House again while Nolly stood speechless beside him.