Salem’s Lot (43 page)

22

The gun went flying.

The woman in the ragged yellow dressing gown did not scream but began to make a high whining noise in her throat, almost keening. She scrambled after it like a crab, and the man who was behind her, looking bewildered and frightened, also darted after it. When he saw that she would get to it first, he kicked it across the lobby rug.

‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘Hey, help!’

Ann Norton looked over her shoulder and hissed at him, her faced pulled into a cheated scrawl of hate, and then scrambled after the gun again. The orderly had come back, on the run. He looked at the scene with blank amazement for a moment, and then picked up the gun that lay almost at his feet.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘This thing is load-’

She attacked him. Her hands, hooked into claws, pin-wheeled across his face, dragging red stripes across the surprised orderly’s forehead and right cheek. He held the gun up out of her reach. Still keening, she clawed for it.

The bewildered man came up from behind and grabbed her. He would say later that it was like grabbing a bag of snakes. The body beneath the dressing gown was hot and repulsive, every muscle twitching and writhing.

As she struggled to get free, the orderly popped her one flush on the jaw. Her eyes rolled up to the whites and she collapsed.

The orderly and the bewildered man looked at each other.

The nurse at the reception desk was screaming. Her hands were clapped to her mouth, giving the screams a unique foghorn effect.

‘What kind of a hospital do you people run here, anyhow?’ the bewildered man asked.

‘Christ if I know,’ the orderly said. ‘What the hell happened?’

‘I was just coming in to visit my sister. She had a baby. And this kid walks up to me and says a woman just went in with a gun. And-’

‘What kid?’

The bewildered man who had come to visit his sister looked around. The lobby was filling with people, but all of them were above drinking age.

‘I don’t see him now. But he was here. That gun loaded?’

‘It sure is,’ the orderly said.

‘What kind of a hospital do you people run here, anyhow?’ the bewildered man asked again.

23

They had seen two nurses run past the door toward the elevators and heard a vague shout down the stairwell. Ben glanced at Jimmy and Jimmy shrugged imperceptibly. Matt was dozing with his mouth open.

Ben closed the door and turned off the lights. Jimmy crouched by the foot of Matt’s bed, and when they heard footsteps hesitate outside the door, Ben stood beside it, ready. When it opened and a head poked through, he grabbed it in a half nelson and jammed the cross he held in the other hand into the face.

‘Let me
go!
’

A hand reached up and beat futilely at his chest. A moment later the overhead light went on. Matt was sitting up in bed, blinking at Mark Petrie, who was struggling in Ben’s arms.

Jimmy came out of his crouch and ran across the room. He seemed almost ready to embrace the boy when he hesitated. ‘Lift your chin.’

Mark did, showing all three of them his unmarked neck.

Jimmy relaxed. ‘Boy, I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life. Where’s the Father?’

‘Don’t know,’ Mark said somberly. ‘Barlow caught me… killed my folks. They’re dead. My folks are dead. He beat their heads together. He killed my folks. Then he had me and he said to Father Callahan that he would let me go if Father Callahan would promise to throw away his cross. He promised. I ran. But before I ran, I spit on him. I spit on him and I’m going to kill him.’

He swayed in the doorway. There were bramble marks on his forehead and cheeks. He had run through the forest along the path where Danny Glick and his brother had come to grief so long before. His pants were wet to the knees from his flight through Taggart Stream. He had hitched a ride, but couldn’t remember who he had hitched it with. The radio had been playing, he remembered that.

Ben’s tongue was frozen. He did not know what to say.

‘You poor boy,’ Matt said softly. ‘You poor, brave boy.’

Mark’s face began to break up. His eyes closed and his mouth twisted and strained. ‘My muh-muh-
mother
-’ He staggered blindly and Ben caught him in his arms, enfolded him, rocked him as the tears came and raged against his shirt.

24

Father Donald Callahan had no idea how long he walked in the dark. He stumbled back toward the downtown area along Jointner Avenue, never heeding his car, which he had left parked in the Petries’ driveway. Sometimes he wandered in the middle of the road, and sometimes he staggered along the sidewalk. Once a car bore down on him, its headlights great shining circles; its horn began to blare and it swerved at the last instant, tires screaming on the pavement. Once he fell in the ditch. As he approached the yellow blinking light, it began to rain.

There was no one on the streets to mark his passage; salem’s Lot had battened down for the night, even tighter than usual. The diner was empty, and in Spencer’s Miss Coogan was sitting by her cash register and reading a confession magazine off the rack in the frosty glow of the overhead fluorescents. Outside, under the lighted sign showing the blue dog in mid-flight, a red neon sign said:

BUS

They were afraid, he supposed. They had every reason to be. Some inner part of themselves had absorbed the danger, and tonight doors were locked in the Lot that had not been locked in years… if ever.

He was on the streets alone. And he alone had nothing to fear. It was funny. He laughed aloud, and the sound of it was like wild, lunatic sobbing. No vampire would touch him. Others, perhaps, by not him. The Master had marked him, and he would walk free until the Master claimed his own.

St Andrew’s loomed above him.

He hesitated, then walked up the path. He would pray. Pray all night, if necessary. Not to the new God, the God of ghettos and social conscience and free lunches, but the old God, who had proclaimed through Moses not to suffer a witch to live and who had given it unto his own son to raise from the dead. A second chance, God. All my life for penance. Only… a second chance.

He stumbled up the wide steps, his gown muddy and bedraggled, his mouth smeared with Barlow’s blood.

At the top he paused a moment, and then reached for the handle of the middle door.

As he touched it, there was a blue flash of light and he was thrown backward. Pain lanced his back, then his head, then his chest and stomach and shins as he fell head over heels down the granite steps to the walk.

He lay trembling in the rain, his hand afire.

He lifted it before his eyes. It was burned.

‘Unclean,’ he muttered. ‘Unclean, unclean, O God, so unclean.’

He began to shiver. He slid his arms around his shoulders and shivered in the rain and the church loomed behind him, its doors shut against him.

25

Mark Petrie sat on Matt’s bed, in exactly the spot Ben had occupied when Ben and Jimmy had come in. Mark had dried his tears with his shirt sleeve, and although his eyes were puffy and bloodshot, he seemed to have himself in control.

‘You know, don’t you,’ Matt asked him, ‘that ‘salem’s Lot is in a desperate situation?’

Mark nodded.

‘Even now,
his
Undead are crawling over it,’ Matt said somberly. ‘Taking others to themselves. They won’t get them all-not tonight-but there is dreadful work ahead of you tomorrow.’

‘Matt, I want you to get some sleep,’ Jimmy said. ‘We’ll be here don’t worry. You don’t look good. This has been a horrible strain on you-’

‘My town is disintegrating almost before my eyes and you want me to sleep?’ His eyes, seemingly tireless, flashed out of his haggard face.

Jimmy said stubbornly, ‘If you want to be around for the finish, you better save something back. I’m telling you that as your physician, goddammit.’

‘All right. In a minute.’ He looked at all of them. ‘Tomorrow the three of you must go back to Mark’s house. You’re going to make stakes. A great many of them.’ The meaning sank home to them.

‘How many?’ Ben asked softly.

‘I would say you’ll need three hundred at least. I advise you to make five hundred.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Jimmy said flatly. ‘There can’t be that many of them.’

‘The Undead are thirsty,’ Matt said simply. ‘It’s best to be prepared. You will go together. You dare not split up, even in the daytime. It will be like a scavenger hunt. You must start at one end of town and work toward the other.’

‘We’ll never be able to find them all,’ Ben objected. ‘Not even if we could start at first light and work through until dark.’

‘You’ve got to do your best, Ben. People may begin to believe you. Some will help, if you show them the truth of what you say. And when dark comes again, much of
his
work will be undone.’ He sighed. ‘We have to assume that Father Callahan is lost to us. That’s bad. But you must press on, regardless. You’ll have to be careful, all of you. Be ready to lie. If you’re locked up, that will serve
his
purpose well. And if you haven’t considered it, you might do well to consider it now: There is every possibility that some of us or all of us may live and triumph only to stand trial for murder.’

He looked each of them in the face. What he saw there must have satisfied him, because he turned his attention wholly to Mark again.

‘You know what the most important job is, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Mark said. ‘Barlow has to be killed.

Matt smiled a trifle thinly. ‘That’s putting the cart before the horse, I’m afraid. First we have to find him.’ He looked closely at Mark. ‘Did you see anything tonight, hear anything, smell anything, touch anything, that might help us locate him? Think carefully before you answer! You know better than any of us how important it is!’

Mark thought. Ben had never seen anyone take a command quite so literally. He lowered his chin into the palm of his hand and shut his eyes. He seemed to be quite deliberately going over every nuance of the night’s encounter.

At last he opened his eyes, looked around at them briefly, and shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

Matt’s face fell, but he did not give up. ‘A leaf clinging to his coat, maybe? A cattail in his pants cuff? Dirt on his shoes? Any loose thread that he has allowed to dangle?’ He smote the bed helplessly. ‘Jesus Christ Almighty, is he seamless like an egg?’

Mark’s eyes suddenly widened.

‘What?’ Matt said. He grasped the boy’s elbow. ‘What is it? What have you thought of?’

‘Blue chalk,’ Mark said. ‘He had one arm hooked around my neck, like this, and I could see his hand. He had long white fingers and there were smears of blue chalk on two of them. Just little ones.’

‘Blue chalk,’ Matt said thoughtfully.

‘A school,’ Ben said. ‘It must be.’

‘Not the high school,’ Matt said. ‘All our supplies come from Dennison and Company in Portland. They supply only white and yellow. I’ve had it under my fingernails and on my coats for years.’

‘Art classes?’ Ben asked.

‘No, only graphic arts at the high school. They use inks, not chalk. Mark, are you sure it was-’

‘Chalk,’ he said, nodding.

‘I believe some of the science teachers use colored chalk, but where is there to hide at the high school? You saw it all on one level, all enclosed in glass. People are in and out of the supply closets all day. That is also true of the furnace room.’

‘Backstage?’

Matt shrugged. ‘It’s dark enough. But if Mrs Rodin takes over the class play for me-the students call her Mrs Rodan after a quaint Japanese science fiction film-that area would be used a great deal. It would be a horrible risk for him.’

‘What about the grammar schools?’ Jimmy asked. ‘They must teach drawing in the lower grades. And I’d bet a hundred dollars that colored chalk is one of the things they keep on hand.’

Matt said, ‘The Stanley Street Elementary School was built with the same bond money as the high school. It is also modernistic, filled to capacity, and built on one level. Many glass windows to let in the sun. Not the kind of building our target would want to frequent at all. They like old buildings, full of tradition, dark, dingy, like-’

‘Like the Brock Street School,’ Mark said.

‘Yes.’ Matt looked at Ben. ‘The Brock Street School is a wooden frame building, three stories and a basement, built at about the same time as the Marsten House. There was much talk in the town when the school bond issue was up for a vote that the school was a fire hazard. It was one reason our bond issue passed. There had been a schoolhouse fire in New Hampshire two or three years before-’

‘I remember,’ Jimmy murmured. ‘In Cobbs’ Ferry, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. Three children were burned to death

‘Is the Brock Street School still used?’ Ben asked.

‘Only the first floor. Grades one through four. The entire building is due to be phased out in two years, when they put the addition on the Stanley Street School.’

‘Is there a place for Barlow to hide?’

‘I suppose so,’ Matt said, but he sounded reluctant. ‘The second and third floors are full of empty classrooms. The windows have been boarded over because so many children threw stones through them.’

‘That’s it, then,’ Ben said. ‘It must be.’

‘It sounds good,’ Matt admitted, and he looked very tired indeed now. ‘But it seems too simple. Too transparent.’

‘Blue chalk,’ Jimmy murmured. His eyes were far away.

‘I don’t know,’ Matt said, sounding distracted. ‘I just don’t know.’

Jimmy opened his black bag and brought out a small bottle of pills. ‘Two of these with water,’ he said. ‘Right now.’

‘No. There’s too much to go over. There’s too much-’

‘Too much for us to risk losing you,’ Ben said firmly. ‘If Father Callahan
is
gone, you’re the most important of all of us now. Do as he says.’

Mark brought a glass of water from the bathroom, and Matt gave in with some bad grace.

It was quarter after ten.

Silence fell in the room. Ben thought that Matt looked fearfully old, fearfully used. His white hair seemed thinner, drier, and a lifetime of care seemed to have stamped itself on his face in a matter of days. In a way, Ben thought, it was fitting that when trouble finally came to him-great trouble-it should come in this dreamlike, darkly fantastical form. A lifetime’s existence had prepared him to deal in symbolic evils that sprang to light under the reading lamp and disappeared at dawn.

‘I’m worried about him,’ Jimmy said softly.

‘I thought the attack was mild,’ Ben said. ‘Not really a heart attack at all.’

‘It was a mild occlusion. But the next one won’t be mild. It’ll be major. This business is going to kill him if it doesn’t end quickly.’ He took Matt’s hand and fingered the pulse gently, with love. ‘That,’ he said, ‘would be a tragedy.’

They waited around his bedside, sleeping and watching by turns. He slept the night away, and Barlow did not put in an appearance. He had business elsewhere.