Salem’s Lot (41 page)

17

Matt was dozing lightly when Jimmy and Ben came in, and he snapped awake almost immediately, his hand tightening on the cross he held in his right hand.

His eyes touched Jimmy’s, moved to Ben’s… and lingered. ‘What happened?’

Jimmy told him briefly. Ben said nothing.

‘Her body?’

‘Callahan and I put it face down in a crate that was down cellar, maybe the same crate Barlow came to town in. We threw it into the Royal River not an hour ago. Filled the box with stones. We used Straker’s car. If anyone noticed it by the bridge, they’ll think of him.’

‘You did well. Where’s Callahan? And the boy?’

‘Gone to Mark’s house. His parents have to be told everything. Barlow threatened them specifically.’

‘Will they believe?’

‘If they don’t, Mark will have his father call you.’ Matt nodded. He looked very tired.

‘And Ben,’ he said. ‘Come here. Sit on my bed.’

Ben came obediently, his face blank and dazed. He sat down and folded his hands neatly in his lap. His eyes were burned cigarette holes.

‘There’s no comfort for you,’ Matt said. He took one of Ben’s hands in his own. Ben let him, unprotesting. ‘It doesn’t matter. Time will comfort you. She is at rest.’

‘He played us for fools,’ Ben said hollowly. ‘He mocked us, each in turn. Jimmy, give him the letter.’

Jimmy gave Matt the envelope. He stripped the heavy sheet of stationery from the envelope and read it carefully, holding the paper only inches from his nose. His lips moved slightly. He put it down and said, ‘Yes. It is him. His ego is larger than even I imagined. It makes me want to shiver.’

‘He left her for a joke,’ Ben said hollowly. ‘
He
was gone, long before. Fighting him is like fighting the wind. We must seem like bugs to him. Little bugs scurrying around for his amusement.’

Jimmy opened his mouth to speak, but Matt shook his head slightly.

‘That is far from the truth,’ he said. ‘If he could have taken Susan with him, he would have. He wouldn’t give up his Undead just for jokes when there are so few of them! Step back a minute, Ben, and consider what you’ve done to him. Killed his familiar, Straker. By his own admission, even forced him to participate in the murder by reason of his insatiable appetite! How it must have terrified him to wake from his dreamless sleep and find that a young boy, unarmed, had slain such a fearsome creature.’

He sat up in bed with some difficulty. Ben had turned his head and was looking at him with the first interest he had shown since the others had come out of the house to find him in the back yard.

‘Maybe that’s not the greatest victory,’ Matt mused. ‘You’ve driven him from his house, his chosen home. Jimmy said that Father Callahan sterilized the cellar with holy water and has sealed all the doors with the Host. If he goes there again, he’ll die…
and he knows it
.’

‘But he got away,’ Ben said. ‘What does it matter?’

‘He got away,’ Matt echoed softly. ‘And where did he sleep today? In the trunk of a car? In the cellar of one of his victims? Perhaps in the basement of the old Methodist Church in the Marshes which burned down in the fire of ‘51? Wherever it was, do you think he liked it, or felt safe there?’

Ben didn’t answer.

‘Tomorrow, you’ll begin to hunt,’ Matt said, and his hands tightened over Ben’s. ‘Not just for Barlow, but for all the little fish-and there will be a great many little fish after tonight.
Their
hunger is never satisfied. They’ll eat until they’re glutted. The nights are his, but in the daytime you will hound him and hound him until he takes fright and flees or until you drag him, staked and screaming, into the sunlight!’

Ben’s head had come up at this speech. His face had taken on an animation that was close to ghastly. Now a small smile touched his mouth. ‘Yes, that’s good,’ he whispered. ‘Only tonight instead of tomorrow. Right now-’

Matt’s hand shot out and clutched Ben’s shoulder with surprising, sinewy strength. ‘Not tonight. Tonight we’re going to spend together-you and I and Jimmy and Father Callahan and Mark and Mark’s parents.
He
knows now… he’s afraid. Only a madman or a saint would dare to approach Barlow when he is awake in his mother-night. And none of us are either.’ He closed his eyes and said softly, ‘I’m beginning to know him, I think. I lie in this hospital bed and play Mycroft Holmes, trying to outguess him by putting myself in his place. He has lived for centuries, and he is brilliant. But he is also an egocentric, as his letter shows. Why not? His ego has grown the way a pearl does, layer by layer, until it is huge and poisonous. He’s filled with pride. It must be vaunting indeed. And his thirst for revenge must be overmastering, a thing to be trembled at, but perhaps also a thing to be used.’

He opened his eyes and looked solemnly at them both. He raised the cross before him. ‘This will stop
him
, but it may not stop someone he can use, the way he used Floyd Tibbits. I think he may try to eliminate some of us tonight… some of us or all of us.’

He looked at Jimmy.

‘I think bad judgment was used in sending Mark and Father Callahan to the house of Mark’s parents. They could have been called from here and summoned, knowing nothing. Now we are split… and I am especially worried for the boy. Jimmy, you had better call them… call them now.’

‘All right.’ He got up.

Matt looked at Ben. ‘And you will stay with us? Fight with us?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said hoarsely. ‘Yes.’

Jimmy left the room, went down the hall to the nurse’s station, and found the Petries’ number in the book. He dialed it rapidly and listened with sick horror as the sirening sound of a line out of service came through the earpiece instead of a ringing tone.

‘He’s got them,’ he said.

The head nurse glanced up at the sound of his voice and was frightened by the look on his face.

18

Henry Petrie was an educated man. He had a BS from Northeastern, a master’s from Massachusetts Tech, and a PhD in economics. He had left a perfectly good junior college teaching position to take an administration post with the Prudential Insurance Company, as much out of curiosity as from any hope of monetary gain. He had wanted to see if certain of his economic ideas worked out as well in practice as they did in theory. They did. By the following summer, he hoped to be able to take the CPA test, and two years after that, the bar examination. His current goal was to begin the 1980s in a high federal government economics post. His son’s fey streak had not come from Henry Petrie; his father’s logic was complete and seamless, and his world was machined to a point of almost total precision. He was a registered Democrat who bad voted for Nixon in the 1972 elections not because he believed Nixon was honest-he had told his wife many times that he considered Richard Nixon to be an unimaginative little crook with all the finesse of a shoplifter in Woolworth’s - but because the opposition was a crackbrained sky pilot who would bring down economic ruin on the country. He had viewed the counterculture of the late sixties with calm tolerance born of the belief that it would collapse harmlessly because it had no monetary base upon which to stand. His love for his wife and son was not beautiful-no one would ever write a poem to the passion of a man who balled his socks before his wife-but it was sturdy and unswerving. He was a straight arrow’ confident in himself and in the natural laws of physics, mathematics, economics, and (to a slightly lesser degree) sociology.

He listened to the story told by his son and the village abbé sipping a cup of coffee and prompting them with lucid questions at points where the thread of narration became tangled or unclear. His calmness increased, it seemed, in direct ratio to the story’s grotesqueries and to his wife June’s growing agitation. When they had finished it was almost five minutes of seven. Henry Petrie spoke his verdict in four calm, considered syllables.

‘Impossible.’

Mark sighed and looked at Callahan and said, ‘I told you.’ He
had
told him, as they drove over from the rectory in Callahan’s old car.

‘Henry, don’t you think we-’

‘Wait.’

That and his hand held up (almost casually) stilled her at once. She sat down and put her arm around Mark, pulling him slightly away from Callahan’s side. The boy submitted.

Henry Petrie looked at Father Callahan pleasantly. ‘Let’s see if we can’t work this delusion or whatever it is out like two reasonable men.’

‘That may be impossible,’ Callahan said with equal pleasantness, ‘but we’ll certainly try. We are here, Mr Petrie, specifically because Barlow has threatened you and your wife.’

‘Did you actually pound a stake through that girl’s body this afternoon?’

‘I did not. Mr Mears did.’

‘Is the corpse still there?’

‘They threw it in the river.’

‘If that much is true,’ Petrie said, ‘you have involved my son in a crime. Are you aware of that?’

‘I am. It was necessary. Mr Petrie, if you’ll simply call Matt -Burke’s hospital room-’

‘Oh, I’m sure your witnesses will back you up,’ Petrie said, still smiling that faint, maddening smile. ‘That’s one of the fascinating things about this lunacy. May I see the letter this Barlow left you?’

Callahan cursed mentally. ‘Dr Cody has it.’ He added as an afterthought: ‘We really ought to ride over to the Cumberland Hospital. If you talk to-’

Petrie was shaking his head.

‘Let’s talk a little more first. I’m sure your witnesses are reliable, as I’ve indicated. Dr Cody is our family physician, and we all like him very much. I’ve also been given to understand that Matthew Burke is above reproach… as a teacher, at least.’

‘But in spite of that?’ Callahan asked.

‘Father Callahan, let me put it to you. If a dozen reliable witnesses told you that a giant ladybug had lumbered through the town park at high noon singing "Sweet Adeline’ and waving a Confederate flag, would you believe it?’

‘If I was sure the witnesses were reliable, and if I was sure they weren’t joking, I would be far down the road to belief, yes.’

Still with the faint smile, Petrie said, ‘That is where we differ.’

‘Your mind is closed,’ Callahan said.

‘No-simply made up.’

‘It amounts to the same thing. Tell me, in the company you work for do they approve of executives making decisions on the basis of internal beliefs rather than external facts? That’s not logic, Petrie; that’s cant.’

Petrie stopped smiling and stood up. ‘Your story is disturbing, I’ll grant you that. You’ve involved my son in something deranged, possibly dangerous. You’ll all be lucky if you don’t stand in court for it. I’m going to call your people and talk to them. Then I think we had all better go to Mr Burke’s hospital room and discuss the matter further.’

‘How good of you to bend a principle,’ Callahan said dryly.

Petrie went into the living room and picked up the telephone. There was no answering open hum; the line was bare and silent. Frowning slightly, he jiggled the cut-off buttons. No response. He set the phone in its cradle and went back to the kitchen.

‘The phone seems to be out of order,’ he said.

He saw the instant look of fearful understanding that passed between Callahan and his son, and was irritated by it.

‘I can assure you,’ he said a little more sharply than he had intended, ‘that the Jerusalem’s Lot telephone service needs no vampires to disrupt it.’

The lights went out.

19

Jimmy ran back to Matt’s room.

‘The line’s out at the Petrie house. I think he’s there. Goddamn, we were so
stupid
-’

Ben got off the bed. Matt’s face seemed to squeeze and crumple. ‘You see how he works?’ he muttered. ‘How smoothly? If only we had another hour of daylight, we could… but we don’t. It’s done.’

‘We have to go out there,’ Jimmy said.

‘No! You must not! For fear of your lives and mine, you must not.’

‘But they-’

‘
They are on their own!
What is happening-or has happened-will be done by the time you get out there!’

They stood near the door, indecisive.

Matt struggled, gathered his strength, and spoke to them quietly but with force.

‘His ego is great, and his pride is great. These might be flaws we can put to our use. But his mind is also great, and we must respect it and allow for it. You showed me his letter - he speaks of chess. I’ve no doubt he’s a superb player. Don’t you realize that he could have done his work at that house without cutting the telephone line? He did it because he wants you to know one of white’s pieces is in check! He understands forces, and he understands that it becomes easier to conquer if the forces are split and in confusion. You gave him the first move by default because you forgot that-the original group was split in two. If you go haring off to the Petries’ house, the group is split in three. I’m alone and bedridden; easy game in spite of crosses and books and incantations. All he needs to do is send one of his almost-Undead here to kill me with a gun or a knife. And that leaves only you and Ben, rushing pell-mell through the night to your own doom. Then ‘salem’s Lot is his. Don’t you see it?’

Ben spoke first. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Matt slumped back. ‘I’m not speaking out of fear for my life, Ben. You have to believe that. Not even for fear of your lives. I’m afraid for the town. No matter what else happens, someone must be left to stop him tomorrow.’

‘Yes. And he’s not going to have me until I’ve had revenge for Susan.’

A silence fell among them.

Jimmy Cody broke it. ‘They may get away anyway,’ he said meditatively. ‘I think he’s underestimated Callahan, and I know damned well he’s underestimated the boy. That kid is one cool customer.’

‘We’ll hope,’ Matt said, and closed his eyes. They settled down to wait.