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He is described as wearing steel-rimmed glasses. He is as tall as [[Richie Boddin]], so he toward over most of his classmates. He was slender and his face looked defenceless and bookish.
 
He is described as wearing steel-rimmed glasses. He is as tall as [[Richie Boddin]], so he toward over most of his classmates. He was slender and his face looked defenceless and bookish.
 
{{DEFAULTSORT:Petrie, Mark}}
 
{{DEFAULTSORT:Petrie, Mark}}
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<ref>
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10:00 A.M.
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It was recess time at Stanley Street Elementary School, which was the Lot's newest and proudest school building. It was a low, glassine four-classroom building that the school district was still paying for, as new and bright and modern as the Brock Street Elementary School was old and dark.
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Richie Boddin, who was the school bully and proud of it, stepped out onto the playground grandly, eyes searching for that smart-ass new kid 'who knew all the answers in math. No new kid came waltzing into his school without knowing who was boss. Especially some four-eyes queer?boy teacher's pet like this one.
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Richie was eleven years old and weighed 140 pounds. All his life his mother had been calling on people to see what a huge young man her son was. And so he knew he was big. Sometimes he fancied that he could feel the? ground tremble underneath his feet when he walked. And when he grew up he was going to smoke Camels, just like his old man,
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The fourth- and fifth-graders were terrified of him, and the smaller kids regarded him as a schoolyard totem. When he, moved on to the seventh grade at Brock Street School, their pantheon would be empty of its devil. All this pleased him immensely.
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And there was the Petrie kid, waiting to be chosen up for the recess touch football game.
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'Hey!' Richie yelled.
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Everyone looked around except Petrie. Every eye had a glassy sheen on it, and every pair of eyes showed relief when they saw that Richie's rested elsewhere.
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'Hey you! Four-eyes!'
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Mark Petrie turned and looked at Richie. His steel-rimmed glasses flashed in the morning sun. He was as tall as Richie, which meant he towered over most of his classmates, but he was slender and his face looked defenseless and bookish.
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'Are you speaking to me?'
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"'Are you speaking to me?" Richie mimicked, his voice a high falsetto. 'You sound like a queer, four-eyes. You know that?'
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'No, I didn't know that,' Mark Petrie said.
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Richie took a step forward. 'I bet you suck, you know that, four-eyes? I bet you suck the old hairy root.'
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'Really?' His polite tone was infuriating.
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'Yeah, I heard you really suck it. Not just Thursdays for you. You can't wait. Every day for you.'
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Kids began to drift over to watch Richie stomp the new boy. Miss Holcomb, who was playground monitor this week, was out front watching the little kids on the swings and seesaws.
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'What's your racket?' Mark Petrie asked. He was looking at Richie as if he had discovered an interesting new beetle.
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"'What's your racket?" Richie mimicked falsetto. 'I ain't got no racket. I just heard you were a big fat queer, that's all.'
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'Is that right?' Mark asked, still polite. 'I heard that you were a big clumsy stupid turd, that's what I heard.' Utter silence. The other boys gaped (but it was an interested gape; none of them had ever seen a fellow sign his own death warrant before). Richie was caught entirely by surprise and gaped with the rest.
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Mark took off his glasses and handed them to the boy next to him. 'Hold these, would you?' The boy took them and goggled at Mark silently.
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Richie charged. It was a slow, lumbering charge, with not a bit of grace or finesse in it. The ground trembled under his feet. He was filled with confidence and the clear, joyous urge to stomp and break. He swung his haymaker right, which would catch ole four-eyes queer-boy right in the mouth and send his teeth flying like piano keys. Get ready for the dentist, queer-boy. Here I come.
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Mark Petrie ducked and sidestepped at the same instant. The haymaker went over his head. Richie was pulled halfway around by the force of his own blow, and Mark had only to stick out a foot. Richie Boddin thumped to the ground. He grunted. The crowd of watching children went 'Aaaah.'
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Mark knew perfectly well that if the big, clumsy boy on the ground regained the advantage, he would be beaten up badly. Mark was agile, but agility could not stand up for long in a schoolyard brawl. In a street situation this would have been the time to run, to outdistance his slower pursuer, then turn and thumb his nose. But this wasn't the street or the city, and he knew perfectly well that if he didn't whip this big ugly turd now the harassment would never stop.
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These thoughts went through his mind in a fifth of a second.
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He jumped on Richie Boddin's back.
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Richie grunted. The crowd went 'Aaaah' again. Mark grabbed Richie's arm, careful to get it above the shirt cuff so he couldn't sweat out of his grip, and twisted it behind Richie's back. Richie screamed in pain.
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'Say uncle,' Mark told him.
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Richie's reply would have pleased a twenty-year Navy man.
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Mark yanked Richie's arm no to his shoulder blades, and Richie screamed again. He was filled with indignation, fright, and puzzlement. This had never happened to him before. It couldn't be happening now. Surely no four-eyes queer-boy could be sitting on his back and twisting his arm and making him scream before his subjects.
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'Say uncle,' Mark repeated.
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Richie heaved himself to his knees; Mark squeezed his own knees into Richie's sides, like a man riding a horse bareback, and stayed on. They were both covered with dust, but Richie was much the worse for wear. His face was red and straining, his eyes bulged, and there was a scratch on his cheek.
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He tried to dump Mark over his shoulders, and Mark yanked upward on the arm again. This time Richie didn't scream. He wailed.
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'Say uncle, or so help me God I'll break it.'
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Richie's shirt had pulled out of his pants. His belly felt hot and scratched. He began to sob and wrench his shoulders from side to side. Yet the hateful four-eyes queer-boy stayed on. His forearm was ice, his shoulder fire.
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'Get off me, you son of a whore! You don't fight fair!' An explosion of pain.
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'Say uncle.'
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'No!'
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He overbalanced on his knees and went face-down in the dust. The pain in his arm was paralyzing. He was eating dirt. There was dirt in his eyes. He thrashed his legs helplessly. He had forgotten about being huge. He had forgotten about how the ground trembled under his feet when he walked. He had forgotten that he was going to smoke Camels, just like his old man, when he grew up.
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'Uncle! Uncle! Uncle!' Richie screamed. He felt that he could go on screaming uncle for hours, for days, if it would get his arm back.
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'Say: "I'm a big ugly turd."'
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'I'm a big ugly turd!' Richie screamed into the dirt.
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'Good enough.'
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Mark Petrie got off him and stepped back warily out of reach as Richie got up. His thighs hurt from squeezing them together. He hoped that all the fight was out of Richie. If not, he was going to get creamed.
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Richie got up. He looked around. No one met his eyes. They turned away and went back to whatever they had been doing. That stinking Glick kid was standing next to the queer-boy and looking at him as though he were some kind of God.
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Richie stood by himself, hardly able to believe how quickly his ruination had come. His face was dusty except where it had been streaked clean with his tears of rage and shame. He considered launching himself at Mark Petrie.
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Yet his shame and fear, new and shining and huge, would not allow it. Not yet. His arm ached like a rotted tooth. Son of a whoring dirty fighter. If I ever land on you and get you down -
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But not today. He turned away and walked off and the ground didn't tremble a bit. He looked at the ground so he wouldn't have to look anyone in the face.
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Someone on the girl's side laughed - a high, mocking sound that carried with cruel clarity on the morning air.
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He didn't took up to see who was laughing at him.
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------
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'You be home early,' Marjorie Glick said to her eldest son, Danny. 'School tomorrow. I want your brother in bed by quarter past nine.'
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Danny shuffled his feet. 'I don't see why I have to take him at all.'
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'You don't,' Marjorie said with dangerous pleasantness. 'You can always stay home.'
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She turned back to the counter, where she was freshening fish, and Ralphie stuck out his tongue. Danny made a fist and shook it, but his putrid little brother only smiled.
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'We'll be back,' he muttered and turned to leave the kitchen, Ralphie in tow.
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'By nine.'
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'Okay, okay.'
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In the living room Tony Glick was sitting in front of the TV with his feet up, watching the Red Sox and the Yankees. 'Where are you going, boys?'
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'Over to see that new kid,' Danny said. 'Mark Petrie.' 'Yeah,' Ralphie said. 'We're gonna look at his electric trains.'
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Danny cast a baleful eye on his brother, but their father noticed neither the pause nor the emphasis. Doug Griffen had just struck out. 'Be home early,' he said absently.
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Outside, afterlight still lingered in the sky, although sunset had passed. As they crossed the back yard Danny said, 'I ought to beat the stuff out of you, punko.'
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'I'll tell,' Ralphie said smugly. 'I'll tell why you really wanted to go.'
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'You creep,' Danny said hopelessly.
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At the back of the mowed yard, a beaten path led down the slope to the woods. The Glick house was on Brock Street, Mark Petrie's on South Jointner Avenue. The path was a short cut that saved considerable time if you were twelve and nine years old and willing to pick your way across the Crockett Brook stepping stones. Pine needles and twigs crackled under their feet. Somewhere in the woods, a whippoorwill sang, and crickets chirred all around them.
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Danny had made the mistake of telling his brother that Mark Petrie had the entire set of Aurora plastic monsters - wolfman, mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, the mad doc?tor, and even the Chamber of Horrors. Their mother thought all that stuff was bad news, rotted your brains or something, and Danny's brother had immediately turned blackmailer. He was putrid, all right.
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---
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Danny and Ralphie Glick had gone out to see Mark Petrie with orders to be in by nine, and when they hadn't come home by ten past, Marjorie Glick called the Petrie house. No, Mrs Petrie said, the boys weren't there. Hadn't been there. Maybe your husband had better talk to Henry. Mrs Glick handed the phone to her husband, feeling the lightness of fear in her belly.
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---
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They came up Burns Road in a long line, twisting up and out of sight over the next hill. All the cars had their lights turned on in spite of the day's brilliance. First came Carl Foreman's hearse, its rear windows filled with flowers, then Tony Glick's 1965 Mercury, its deteriorating muffler bellowing and farting. Behind that, in the next four cars, came relatives on both sides of the family, one bunch from as far away as Tulsa, Oklahoma. Others in that long, lights-on parade included: Mark Petrie (the boy Ralphie and Danny had been on their way to see the night Ralphie disappeared) and his mother and father; Richie Boddin and family; Mabel Werts in a car containing Mr and Mrs William Norton (sitting in the back seat with her cane planted between her swelled legs, she talked with unceas?ing constancy about other funerals she had attended all the way back to 1930); Lester Durham and his wife, Harriet; Paul Mayberry and his wife, Glynis; Pat Middler, Joe Crane, Vinnie Upshaw, and Clyde Corliss, all riding in a car driven by Milt Crossen (Milt had opened the beer cooler before they left, and they had all shared out a solemn six-pack in front of the stove); Eva Miller in a car which also contained her close friends Loretta Starcher and Rhoda Curless, who were both maiden ladies; Parkins Gillespie and his deputy, Nolly Gardener, riding in the Jerusalem's Lot police car (Parkins's Ford with a stick-on dashboard bubble); Lawrence Crockett and his sallow wife; Charles Rhodes, the sour bus driver, who went to all funerals on general principles; the Charles Griffen family, including wife and two sons, Hat and Jack, the only off?spring still living at home.
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---
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Mark Petrie was working on a model of Frankenstein's monster in his room and listening to his parents down in the living room. His room was on the second floor of the farmhouse they had bought on South Jointner Avenue, and although the house was heated by a modern oil furnace now, the old second-floor grates were still there. Orig?inally, when the house had been heated by a central kitchen stove, the warm-air grates had kept the second floor from becoming too cold - although the woman who had orig?inally lived in this house with her dour Baptist husband from 1873 to 1896 had still taken a hot brick wrapped in flannel to bed with her - but now the grates served another purpose. They conducted sound excellently.
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Although his parents were down in the living room, they might as well have been discussing him right outside the door.
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Once, when his father had caught him listening at the door in their old house - Mark had only been six then ?his father had told him an old English proverb: Never listen at a knothole lest you be vexed. That meant, his father said, that you may hear something about yourself that you don't like.
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Well, there was another one, too. Forewarned is fore?armed.
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At age twelve, Mark Petrie was a little smaller than the average and slightly delicate-looking. Yet he moved with a grace and litheness that is not the common lot of boys his age, who seem mostly made up of knees and elbows and scabs. His complexion was fair, almost milky, and his features, which would be considered aquiline later in life, now seemed a trifle feminine. It had caused him some trouble even before the Richie Boddin incident in the schoolyard, and he had determined to handle it himself. He had made an analysis of the problem. Most bullies, he had decided, were big and ugly and clumsy. They scared people by being able to hurt them. They fought dirty. Therefore, if you were not afraid of being hurt a little, and if you were willing to fight dirty, a bully might be bested. Richie Boddin had been the first full vindication of his theory. He and the bully at the Kittery Elementary School had come off even (which had been a victory of a kind; the Kittery bully, bloody but unbowed, had proclaimed to the schoolyard community at large that he and Mark Petrie were pals. Mark, who thought the Kittery bully was a dumb piece of shit, did not contradict him. He understood discretion.). Talk did no good with bullies. Hurting was the only language that the Richie Boddins of the world seemed to understand, and Mark supposed that was why the world always had such a hard time getting along. He had been sent from school that day, and his father had been very angry until Mark, resigned to his ritual whipping with a rolled - up magazine, told him that Hitler had just been a Richie Boddin at heart. That had made his father laugh like hell, and even his mother snickered. The whip?ping had been averted.
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Now June Petrie was saying: 'Do you think it's affected him, Henry?'
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'Hard . . . to tell.' And Mark knew by the pause that his father was lighting his pipe. 'He's got a hell of a poker face.'
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'Still waters run deep, though.' She paused. His mother was always saying things like still waters run deep or it's a long, long road that has no turning. He loved them both dearly, but sometimes they seemed just as ponderous as the books in the folio section of the library . . . and just as dusty.
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'They were on their way to see Mark,' she resumed. 'To play with his train set . . . now one dead and one missing! Don't fool yourself, Henry. The boy feels something.'
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'He's got his feet pretty solidly planted on the ground,' Mr Petrie said. 'Whatever his feelings are, I'm sure he's got them in hand.'
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Mark glued the Frankenstein m6nster's left arm into the shoulder socket. It was a specially treated Aurora model that glowed green in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus he had gotten for memorizing all of the 119th Psalm in Sunday school class in Kittery.
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'I've sometimes thought we should have had another,' his father was saying. 'Among other things, it would have been good for Mark.'
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And his mother, in an arch tone: 'Not for lack of trying, dear.'
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His father grunted.
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There was a long pause in the conversation. His father, he knew, would be rattling through The Wall Street Journal. His mother would be holding a novel by Jane Austen on her lap, or perhaps Henry James. She read them over and over again, and Mark was darned if he could see the sense in reading a book more than once. You knew how it was going to end.
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'D'you think it's safe to let him go in the woods behind the house?' his mother asked presently. 'They say there's quicksand somewhere in town - '
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'Miles from here.'
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Mark relaxed a little and glued the monster's other arm on. He had a whole table of Aurora horror monsters, arranged in a scene that he changed each time a new element was added. It was a pretty good set. Danny and Ralphie had really been coming to see that the night when . . . whatever.
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'I think it's okay,' his father said. 'Not after dark, of course.'
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'Well, I hope that awful funeral won't give him nightmares.'
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Mark could almost see his father shrug. 'Tony Glick . . . unfortunate. But death and grief are part of living. Time he got used to the idea.'
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'Maybe.' Another long pause. What was coming now? he wondered. The child is the father of the man, maybe. Or as the twig is bent the tree is shaped. Mark glued the monster onto his base, which was a grave mound with a leaning headstone in the background. 'In the midst of life we're in death. But I may have nightmares.'
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'Oh?'
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'That Mr Foreman must be quite an artist, grisly as it sounds. He really looked as if he was just asleep. That any second he might open his eyes and yawn and . . . I don't know why these people insist on torturing themselves with open-coffin services. It's . . . heathenish.'
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'Well, it's over.'
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'Yes, I suppose. He's a good boy, isn't he, Henry?'
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'Mark? The best.'
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Mark smiled.
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'Is there anything on TV?'
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'I'll look.'
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Mark turned the rest off; the serious discussion was done. He set his model on the window sill to dry and harden. In another fifteen minutes his mother would be calling up for him to get ready for bed. He took his pajamas out of the top dresser drawer and began to undress.
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In point of fact, his mother was worrying needlessly about his psyche, which was not tender at all. There was no particular reason why it should have been; he was a typical boy in most ways, despite his economy and his gracefulness. His family was upper middle class and still upwardly mobile, and the marriage of his parents was sound. They loved each other firmly, if a little stodgily. There had never been any great trauma in Mark's life. The few school fights had not scarred him. He got along with his peers and in general wanted the same things they wanted.
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If there was anything that set him apart, it was a reservoir of remoteness, of cool self-control. No one had inculcated it in him; he seemed to have been born with it. When his pet dog, Chopper, had been hit by a car, he had insisted on going with his mother to the vet's. And when the vet had said, The dog has got to be put to sleep, my boy. Do you understand why? Mark said, You're not going to put him to sleep. You're going to gas him to death, aren't you? The vet said yes. Mark told him to go ahead, but he had kissed Chopper first. He had felt sorry but he hadn't cried and tears had never been close to the surface. His mother had cried but three days later Chopper was in the dim past to her, and he would never be in the dim past for Mark. That was the value in not crying. Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.
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He had been shocked by the disappearance of Ralphie Glick, and shocked again by Danny's death, but he had not been frightened. He had heard one of the men in the store say that probably a sex pervert had gotten Ralphie. Mark knew what perverts were. They did something to you that got their rocks off and when they were done they strangled you (in the comic books, the guy getting strangled always said Arrrgggh) and buried you in a gravel pit or under the boards of a deserted shed. If a sex pervert ever offered him candy, he would kick him in the balls and then run like a split streak.
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'Mark?' His mother's voice, drifting up the stairs. 'I am,' he said, and smiled again.
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'Don't forget your ears when you wash.'
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'I won't.'
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He went downstairs to kiss them good night, moving lithely and gracefully, sparing one glance backward to the table where his monsters rested in tableau: Dracula with his mouth open, showing his fangs, was menacing a girl lying on the ground while the Mad Doctor was torturing a lady on the rack and Mr Hyde was creeping up on an old guy walking home.
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Understand death? Sure. That was when the monsters got you.
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---
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Something had awakened him.
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He lay still in the ticking dark, looking at the ceiling.
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A noise. Some noise. But the house was silent.
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There it was again. Scratching.
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Mark Petrie turned over in bed and looked through the window and Danny Glick was staring in at him through the glass, his skin grave-pale, his eyes reddish and feral.
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Some dark substance was smeared about his lips and chin, and when he saw Mark looking at him, he smiled and showed teeth grown hideously long and sharp.
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'Let me in,' the voice whispered, and Mark was not sure if the words had crossed dark air or were only in his mind.
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He became aware that he was frightened - his body had known before his mind. He had never been so frightened, not even when he got tired swimming back from the float at Popham Beach and thought he was going to drown. His mind, still that of a child in a thousand ways, made an accurate judgment of his position in seconds. He was in peril of more than his life.
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'Let me in, Mark. I want to play with you.'
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There was nothing for that hideous entity outside the window to hold onto; his room was on the second floor and there was no ledge. Yet somehow it hung suspended in space . . . or perhaps it was clinging to the outside shingles like some dark insect.
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'Mark . . . I finally came, Mark. Please . . . '
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Of course. You have to invite them inside. He knew that from his monster magazines, the ones his mother was afraid might damage or warp him in some way.
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He got out of bed and almost fell down. It was only then that he realized fright was too mild a word for this. Even terror did not express what he felt. The pallid face outside the window tried to smile, but it had lain in darkness too long to remember precisely how. What Mark saw was a twitching grimace - a bloody mask tragedy.
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Yet if you looked in the eyes, it wasn't so bad. If you looked in the eyes, you weren't so afraid anymore and you saw that all you had to do was open the window and say, 'C'mon in, Danny,' and then you wouldn't be afraid at all because you'd be at one with Danny and all of them and at one with him. You'd be -
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No! That's how they get you!
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He dragged his eyes away, and it took all of his will power to do it.
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'Mark, let me in! I command it! He commands it!'
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Mark began to walk toward the window again. There was no help for it. There was no possible way to deny that voice. As he drew closer to the glass, the evil little boy's face on the other side began to twitch and grimace with eagerness. Fingernails, black with earth, scratched across the windowpane.
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Think of something. Quick! Quick!
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'The rain,' he whispered hoarsely. 'The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In vain he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.'
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Danny Glick hissed at him.
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'Mark! Open the window!'
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'Betty Bitter bought some butter - '
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'The window, Mark, he commands it!'
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' - but, says Betty, this butter's bitter.'
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He was weakening. That whispering voice was seeing through his barricade, and the command was imperative. Mark's eyes fell on his desk, littered with his model mon?sters, now so bland and foolish -
  +
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His eyes fixed abruptly on part of the display and widened slightly.
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The plastic ghoul was walking through a plastic grave?yard and one of the monuments was in the shape of a cross.
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With no pause for thought or consideration (both would have come to an adult - his father, for instance - and both would have undone him), Mark swept up the cross, curled it into a tight fist, and said loudly: 'Come on in, then.'
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The face became suffused with an expression of vulpine triumph. The window slid up and Danny stepped in and took two paces forward. The exhalation from that opening mouth was fetid, beyond description: a smell of charnel pits. Cold, fish-white hands descended on Mark's shoulders. The head cocked, doglike, the upper lip curled away from those shining canines.
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Mark brought the plastic cross around in a vicious swipe and laid it against Danny Glick's cheek.
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His scream was horrible, unearthly . . . and silent. It echoed only in the corridors of his brain and the chambers of his soul. The smile of triumph on the Glick-thing's mouth became a yawning grimace of agony. Smoke spurted from the pallid flesh, and for just a moment, before the creature twisted away and half dived, half fell out the window, Mark felt the flesh yield like smoke.
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And then it was over, as if it had never happened.
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But for a moment the cross shone with a fierce light, as if an inner wire had been ignited. Then it dwindled away, leaving only a blue after-image in front of his eyes.
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Through the grating in the floor, he heard the distinctive Click of the lamp in his parents' bedroom and his father's voice: 'What in hell was that?'
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13
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His bedroom door opened two minutes later, but that was' still time enough to set things to rights.
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'Son?' Henry Petrie asked softly. 'Are you awake?'
  +
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'I guess so,' Mark answered sleepily.
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'Did you have a bad dream?'
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'I . . . think so. I don't remember.
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'You called out in your sleep - '
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'Sorry.'
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'No, don't be sorry.' He hesitated and then earlier memories of his son, a small child in a blue blanket?suit that had been much more trouble but infinitely more explicable: 'Do you want a drink of water?'
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'No thanks, Dad.'
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Henry Petrie surveyed the room briefly, unable to under?stand the trembling feeling of dread he had wakened with, and which lingered still - a feeling of disaster averted by cold inches. Yes, everything seemed all right. The window was shut. Nothing was knocked over.
  +
  +
'Mark, is anything wrong?'
  +
  +
'No, Dad.'
  +
  +
'Well . . . g'night, then.'
  +
  +
'Night.' The door shut softly and his father's slippered feet descended the stairs. Mark let himself go limp with relief and delayed reaction. An adult might have had hysterics at this point, and a slightly younger or older child might also have done. But Mark felt the terror slip from him in almost imperceptible degrees, and the sensation reminded him of letting the wind dry you after you had been swimming on a cool day. And as the terror left, drowsiness began to come in its place.
  +
  +
Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting - not for the first time - on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job I the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.
  +
  +
In some shorter, simpler mental shorthand, these thoughts passed through his brain. The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child's rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys.
  +
  +
  +
  +
  +
---
  +
  +
  +
When he first heard the distant snapping of twigs, he crept behind the trunk of a large spruce and stood there, waiting to see who would show up. They couldn't come out in the daytime, but that didn't mean they couldn't get people who could; giving them money was one way, but it wasn't that guy Straker in town, the only way. Mark had seen of a toad sunning itself on and his eyes were like the eyes a rock. He looked like he could break a baby's arm and smile while he did it.
  +
  +
He touched the heavy shape of his father's target pistol in his jacket pocket. Bullets were no good against them ?except maybe silver ones - but a shot between the eyes would punch that Straker's ticket, all right.
  +
  +
His eyes shifted downward momentarily to the roughly cylindrical shape propped against the tree, wrapped in an old piece of toweling. There was a woodpile behind his house, half a cord of yellow ash stove lengths which he and his father had cut with the McCulloch chain saw in July and August. Henry Petrie was methodical, and each length, Mark knew, would be within an inch of three feet, one way or the other. His father knew the proper length just as he knew that winter followed fall and that yellow ash would burn longer and cleaner in the living room fireplace.
  +
  +
His son, who knew other things, knew that ash was for men - things - like him. This morning, while his mother and father were out on their Sunday bird walk, he had taken one of the lengths and whacked one end into a rough point with his Boy Scout hatchet. It was rough, but it would serve.
  +
  +
He saw a flash of color and shrank back against the tree, peering around the rough bark with one eye. A moment later he got his first clear glimpse of the person climbing the hill. It was a girl. He felt a sense of relief mingled with disappointment. No henchman of the devil there; that was Mr Norton's daughter.
  +
  +
His gaze sharpened again. She was carrying a stake of her own! As she drew closer, he felt an urge to laugh bitterly - a piece of snow fence, that's what she had. Two swings with an ordinary tool box hammer would split it right in two.
  +
  +
She was going to pass his tree on the right. As she drew closer, he began to slide carefully around his tree to the left, avoiding any small twigs that might pop and give him away. At last the synchronized little movement was done; her back was to him as she went on up the hill toward the break in the trees. She was going very carefully, he noted with approval. That was good. In spite of the silly snow fence stake, she apparently had some idea of what she was getting into. Still, if she went much further, she was going to be in trouble. Straker was at home. Mark had been here since twelve-thirty, and he had seen Straker go out to the driveway and look down the road and then go back into the house. Mark had been trying to make up his mind on what to do himself when this girl had entered things, upsetting the equation.
  +
  +
Perhaps she was going to be all right. She had stopped behind a screen of bushes and was crouching there, just looking at the house. Mark turned it over in his mind. Obviously she knew. How didn't matter, but she would not have had even that pitiful stake with her if she didn't know. He supposed he would have to go up and warn her that Straker was still around, and on guard. She probably didn't have a gun, not even a little one like his.
  +
  +
He was pondering how to make his presence known to her without having her scream her head off when the motor of Straker's car roared into life. She jumped visibly, and at first he was afraid she was going to break and run, crashing through the woods and advertising her presence for a hundred miles. But then she hunkered down again, holding on to the ground like she was afraid it would fly away from her. She's got guts even if she is stupid, he thought, approvingly.
  +
  +
Straker's car backed down the driveway - she would have a much better view from where she was; he could only see the Packard's black roof - hesitated for a moment, and then went off down the road toward town.
  +
  +
He decided they had to team up. Anything would be better than going up to that house alone. He had already sampled the poison atmosphere that enveloped it. He had felt it from a half a mile away, and it thickened as you got closer.
  +
  +
Now he ran lightly up the carpeted incline and put his hand on her shoulder. He felt her body tense, knew she was going to scream, and said, 'Don't yell. It's all right. It's me.'
  +
  +
She didn't scream. What escaped was a terrified exha?lation of air. She turned around and looked at him, her face white. 'W-Who's me?'
  +
  +
He sat down beside her. 'My name is Mark Petrie. I know you; you're Sue Norton. My dad knows your dad.'
  +
  +
'Petrie . . . ? Henry Petrie?'
  +
  +
'Yes, that's my father.'
  +
  +
'What are you doing here?' Her eyes were moving continually over him, as if she hadn't been able to take in his actuality yet.
  +
  +
'The same thing you are. Only that stake won't work. It's too . . . He groped for a word that had checked into his vocabulary through sight and definition but not by use. 'It's too flimsy.'
  +
  +
She looked down at her piece of snow fence and actu?ally blushed. 'Oh, that. Well, I found that in the woods and . . . and thought someone might fall over it, so I just - '
  +
  +
He cut her adult temporizing short impatiently: 'You came to kill the vampire, didn't you?'
  +
  +
'Wherever did you get that idea? Vampires and things like that?'
  +
  +
He said somberly, 'A vampire tried to get me last night. It almost did, too.'
  +
  +
'That's absurd. A big boy like you should know better than to make up - '
  +
  +
'It was Danny Glick.'
  +
  +
She recoiled, her eyes wincing as if he had thrown a mock punch instead of words. She groped out, found his arm, and held it. Their eyes locked. 'Are you making this up, Mark?'
  +
  +
'No,' he said, and told his story in a few simple sentences.
  +
  +
'And you came here alone?' she asked when he had finished. 'You believed it and came up here alone?'
  +
  +
'Believed it?' He looked at her, honestly puzzled. 'Sure I believed it. I saw it, didn't I?'
  +
  +
There was no response to that, and suddenly she was ashamed of her instant doubt (no, doubt was too kind a word) of Matt's story and of Ben's tentative acceptance.
  +
  +
'How come you're here?'
  +
  +
She hesitated a moment and then said, 'There are some men in town who suspect that there is a man in that house whom no one has seen. That he might be a . . . a . . .' Still she could not say the word, but he nodded his understand?ing. Even on short acquaintance, he seemed quite an extraordinary little boy.
  +
  +
Abridging all that she might have added, she said simply, 'So I came to look and find out.'
  +
  +
He nodded at the stake. 'And brought that to pound through him?'
  +
  +
'I don't know if I could do that.'
  +
  +
'I could,' he said calmly. 'After what I saw last night. Danny was outside my window, holding on like a great big fly. And his teeth . . .' He shook his head, dismissing the nightmare as a businessman might dismiss a bankrupt client.
  +
  +
'Do your parents know you're here?' she asked, knowing they must not.
  +
  +
'No,' he said matter-of-factly. 'Sunday is their nature day. They go on bird walks in the mornings and do other things in the afternoon. Sometimes I go and sometimes I don't. Today they went for a ride up the coast.'
  +
  +
'You're quite a boy,' she said.
  +
  +
'No, I'm not,' he said, his composure unruffled by the praise. 'But I'm going to get rid of him.' He looked up at the house.
  +
  +
'Are you sure - '
  +
  +
'Sure I am. So're you. Can't you feel how bad he is? Doesn't that house make you afraid, just looking at it?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' she said simply, giving in to him. His logic was the logic of nerve endings, and unlike Ben's or Matt's, it was resistless.
  +
  +
'How are we going to do it?' she asked, automatically giving over the leadership of the venture to him.
  +
  +
'Just go up there and break in,' he said. 'Find him, pound the stake - my stake - through his heart, and get out again. He's probably down cellar. They like dark places. Did you bring a flashlight?'
  +
  +
'No.'
  +
  +
'Damn it, neither did I.' He shuffled his sneakered feet aimlessly in the leaves for a moment. 'Probably didn't bring a cross either, did you?'
  +
  +
'Yes, I did,' Susan said. She pulled the link chain out of her blouse and showed him. He nodded and then pulled a chain out of his own shirt.
  +
  +
'I hope I can get this back before my folks come home,' he said gloomily. 'I crooked it from my mother's jewelry box. I'll catch hell if she finds out.' He looked around. The shadows had lengthened even as they talked, and they both felt an impulse to delay and delay.
  +
  +
'When we find him, don't look in his eyes,' Mark told her. 'He can't move out of his coffin, not until dark, but he can still book you with his eyes. Do you know anything religious by heart?'
  +
  +
They had started through the bushes between the woods and the unkempt lawn of the Marsten House.
  +
  +
'Well, the Lord's Prayer - '
  +
  +
'Sure, that's good. I know that one, too. We'll both say it while I pound the stake in.'
  +
  +
He saw her expression, revolted and half flagging, and he took her hand and squeezed it. His self-possession was disconcerting. 'Listen, we have to. I bet he's got half the town after last night. If we wait any longer, he'll have it all. It will go fast, now.'
  +
  +
'After last night?'
  +
  +
'I dreamed it,' Mark said. His voice was still calm, but his eyes were dark. 'I dreamed of them going to houses and calling on phones and begging to be let in. Some people knew, way down deep they knew, but they let them in just the same. Because it was easier to do that than to think something so bad might be real.'
  +
  +
'Just a dream,' she said uneasily.
  +
  +
'I bet there's a lot of people lying around in bed today with the curtains closed or the shades drawn, wondering if they've got a cold or the flu or something. They feel all weak and fuzzy-headed. They don't want to eat. The idea of eating makes them want to puke.'
  +
  +
'How do you know so much?'
  +
  +
'I read the monster magazines,' he said, 'and go to see the movies when I can. Usually I have to tell my mom I'm going to see Walt Disney. And you can't trust all of it. Sometimes they just make stuff up so the story will be bloodier.'
  +
  +
They were at the side of the house. Say, we're quite a crew, we believers, Susan thought. An old teacher half-?cracked with books, a writer obsessed with his childhood nightmares, a little boy who has taken a postgraduate course in vampire lore from the films and the modern penny-dreadfuls. And me? Do I really believe? Are para?noid fantasies catching?
  +
  +
She believed.
  +
  +
As Mark had said, this close to the house it was just not possible to scoff. All the thought processes, the act of conversation itself, were overshadowed by a more funda?mental voice that was screaming danger! danger! in words that were not words at all. Her heart-beat and respiration were up, yet her skin was cold with the capillary-dilating effect of adrenaline, which keeps the blood hiding deep in the body's wells during moments of stress. Her kidneys were tight and heavy. Her eyes seemed preternaturally sharp, taking in every splinter and paint flake on the side of the house. And all of this had been triggered by no external stimuli at all: no men with guns, no large and snarling dogs, no smell of fire. A deeper watchman than her five senses had been wakened after a long season of sleep. And there was no ignoring it.
  +
  +
She peered through a break in the lower shutters. 'Why, they haven't done a thing to it,' she said almost angrily. 'It's a mess.'
  +
  +
'Let me see. Boost me up.'
  +
  +
She laced her fingers together so he could look through the broken slats and into the crumbling living room of the Marsten House. He saw a deserted, boxy parlor with a thick patina of dust on the floor (many footprints had been tracked through it), peeling wallpaper, two or three old easy chairs, a scarred table. There were cobwebs festooned in the room's upper corners, near the ceiling.
  +
  +
Before she could protest, he had rapped the hook-and?-eye combination that held the shutter closed with the blunt end of his stake. The lock fell to the ground in two rusty pieces, and the shutters creaked outward an inch or two.
  +
  +
'Hey!' she protested. 'You shouldn't - '
  +
  +
'What do you want to do? Ring the doorbell?'
  +
  +
He accordioned back the right-hand shutter and rapped one of the dusty, wavy panes of glass. It tinkled inward. The fear leaped up in her, hot and strong, making a coppery taste in her mouth.
  +
  +
'We can still run,' she said, almost to herself.
  +
  +
He looked down at her and there was no contempt in his glance - only an honesty and a fear that was as great as her own. 'You go if you have to,' he said.
  +
  +
'No. I don't have to.' She tried to swallow away the obstruction in her throat and succeeded not at all. 'Hurry it up. You're getting heavy.'
  +
  +
He knocked the protruding shards of glass out of the pane he had broken, switched the stake to his other hand, then reached through and unlatched the window. It moaned slightly as he pushed it up, and then the way was open.
  +
  +
She let him down and they looked wordlessly at the window for a moment. Then Susan stepped forward, pushed the right-hand shutter open all the way, and put her hands on the splintery windowsill preparatory to boosting herself up. The fear in her was sickening with its greatness, settled in her belly like a horrid pregnancy. At last, she understood how Matt Burke had felt as he had gone up the stairs to whatever waited in his guest room.
  +
  +
She had always consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fears = unknown. And to solve the equation, one simply reduced the problem to simple algebraic terms, thus: unknown = creaky board (or whatever), creaky board = nothing to be afraid of. In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of equality. Some fears were justified, of course (you don't drive when you're too plowed to see, don't extend the hand of friendship to snarling dogs, don't go parking with boys you don't know - how did the old joke go? Screw or walk?), but until now she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insol?uble. The act of moving forward at all became heroism.
  +
  +
She boosted herself with a smooth flex of muscles, swung one leg over the sill, and then dropped to the dusty parlor floor and looked around. There was a smell. It oozed out of the walls in an almost visible miasma. She tried to tell herself it was only plaster rot, or the accumulated damp guano of all the animals that had nested behind those broken lathings - woodchucks, rats, perhaps even a rac?coon or two. But it was more. The smell was deeper than animal-stink, more entrenched. It made her think of tears and vomit and blackness.
  +
  +
'Hey,' Mark called softly. His hands waved above the windowsill. 'A little help.'
  +
  +
She leaned out, caught him under the armpits, and dragged him up until he had caught a grip on the window?sill. Then he jackknifed himself in neatly. His sneakered feet thumped the carpet, and then the house was still again.
  +
  +
They found themselves listening to the silence, fasci?nated by it. There did not even seem to be the faint, high hum that comes in utter stillness, the sound of nerve endings idling in neutral. There was only a great dead soundlessness and the beat of blood in their own ears.
  +
  +
And yet they both knew, of course. They were not alone.
  +
  +
2
  +
  +
'Come on,' he said. 'Let's took around.' He clutched the stake very tightly and for just a moment looked longingly back at the window.
  +
  +
She moved slowly toward the hall and he came after her. Just outside the door there was a small end table with a book on it. Mark picked it up.
  +
  +
'Hey,' he said. 'Do you know Latin?'
  +
  +
'A little, from high school.'
  +
  +
'What's this mean?' He showed her the binding.
  +
  +
She sounded the words out, a frown creasing her fore?head. Then she shook her head. 'Don't know.'
  +
  +
He opened the book at random, and flinched. There was a picture of a naked man holding a child's gutted body toward something you couldn't see. He put the book down, glad to let go of it - the stretched binding felt uncomfortably familiar under his hand - and they went down the hallway toward the kitchen together. The shadows were more prominent here. The sun had gotten around to the other side of the house.
  +
  +
'Do you smell it?' he asked.
  +
  +
'Yes.'
  +
  +
'It's worse back here, isn't it?'
  +
  +
'Yes.'
  +
  +
He was remembering the cold-pantry his mother had kept in the other house, and how one year three bushel baskets of tomatoes had gone bad down there in the dark. This smell was like that, like the smell of tomatoes decaying into putrescence.
  +
  +
Susan whispered: 'God, I'm so scared.'
  +
  +
His hand groped out, found hers, and they locked tightly.
  +
  +
The kitchen linoleum was old and gritty and pocked, worn black in front of the old porcelain-tub sink. A large, scarred table stood in the middle of the floor, and on it was a yellow plate, a knife and fork, and a scrap of raw hamburger.
  +
  +
The cellar door was standing ajar.
  +
  +
'That's where we have to go,' he said.
  +
  +
'Oh,' she said weakly.
  +
  +
The door was open just a crack and the light did not penetrate at all. The tongue of darkness seemed to lick hungrily at the kitchen, waiting for night to come so it could swallow it whole. That quarter inch of darkness was hideous, unspeakable in its possibilities. She stood beside Mark, helpless and moveless.
  +
  +
Then he stepped forward and pulled the door open and stood for a moment, looking down. She saw a muscle jump beneath his jaw.
  +
  +
'I think - ' he began, and she heard something behind her and turned, suddenly feeling slow, feeling too late. It was Straker. He was grinning.
  +
  +
Mark turned, saw, and tried to dive around him. Straker's fist crashed into his chin and he knew no more.
  +
  +
3
  +
  +
When Mark came to, he was being carried up a flight of stairs - not the cellar stairs, though. There was not that feeling of stone enclosure, and the air was not so fetid. He allowed his eyelids to unclose themselves a tiny fraction, letting his head still loll limply on his neck. A stair landing coming up . . . the second floor. He could see quite clearly. The sun was not down yet. Thin hope, then.
  +
  +
They gained the landing, and suddenly the arms holding him were gone. He thumped heavily onto the floor, hitting his head.
  +
  +
'Do you not think I know when someone is playing the possum, young master?' Straker asked him. From the floor he seemed easily ten feet tall. His bald head glistened with a subdued elegance in the gathering gloom. Mark saw with growing terror that there was a coil of rope around his shoulder.
  +
  +
He grabbed for the pocket where the pistol had been.
  +
  +
Straker threw back his head and laughed. 'I have taken the liberty of removing the gun, young master. Boys should I not be allowed weapons they do not understand . . . any more than they should lead young ladies to houses where their commerce has not been invited.'
  +
  +
'What did you do with Susan Norton?'
  +
  +
Straker smiled. 'I have taken her where she wished to go, my boy. Into the cellar. Later, when the sun goes down, she will meet the man she came here to meet. You will meet him yourself, perhaps later tonight, perhaps tomorrow night. He may give you to the girl, of course . . . but I rather think he'll want to deal with you himself. The girl will have friends of her own, some of them perhaps meddlers like yourself.'
  +
  +
Mark lashed out with both feet at Straker's crotch, and Straker side-stepped liquidly, like a dancer. At the same moment he kicked his own foot out, connecting squarely with Mark's kidneys.
  +
  +
Mark bit his lips and writhed on the floor.
  +
  +
Straker chuckled. 'Come, young master. To your feet.'
  +
  +
'I . . . I can't.'
  +
  +
'Then crawl,' Straker said contemptuously. He kicked again, this time striking the large muscle of the thigh. The pain was dreadful, but Mark clenched his teeth together. He got to his knees, and then to his feet.
  +
  +
They progressed down the hall toward the door at the far end. The pain in his kidneys was subsiding to a dull ache. 'What are you going to do with me?'
  +
  +
'Truss you like a spring turkey, young master. Later, after my Master holds intercourse with you, you will be set free.'
  +
  +
'Like the others?'
  +
  +
Straker smiled.
  +
  +
As Mark pushed open -the door and stepped into the room where Hubert Marsten had committed suicide, some?thing odd seemed to happen in his mind. The fear did not fall away from it, but it seemed to stop acting as a brake on his thoughts, jamming all productive signals. His thoughts began to flicker past with amazing speed, not in words or precisely images, but in a kind of symbolic shorthand. He felt like a light bulb that has suddenly received a surge of power from no known source.
  +
  +
The room itself was utterly prosaic. The wallpaper hung in strips, showing the white plaster and sheet rock beneath. The floor was heavily dusted with time and plaster, but there was only one set of footprints in it, suggesting some?one had come up once, looked around, and left again. There were two stacks of magazines, a cast-iron cot with no spring or mattress, and a small tin plate with a faded Currier & Ives design that had once blocked the stove hole in the chimney. The window was shuttered, but enough light filtered dustily through the broken slats to make Mark think there might be an hour of daylight left. There was an aura of old nastiness about the room.
  +
  +
It took perhaps five seconds to open the door, see these things, and cross to the center of the room where Straker told him to stop. In that short period, his mind raced along three tracks and saw three possible outcomes to the situation he found himself in.
  +
  +
On one, he suddenly sprinted across the room toward the shuttered window and tried to crash through both glass and shutter like a Western movie hero, taking the drop to whatever lay below with blind hope. In one mental eye he saw himself crashing through only to fall onto a rusty pile of junked farm machinery, twitching away the last seconds of his life impaled on blunt harrow blades like a bug on a pin. In the other eye he saw himself crashing through the glass and into the shutter which trembled but did not break. He saw Straker pulling him back, his clothes torn, his body lacerated and bleeding in a dozen places.
  +
  +
On the second track, he saw Straker tie him up and leave. He saw himself trussed on the floor, saw the light fading, saw his struggles become more frenzied (but just as useless), and heard, finally, the steady tread on the stairs of one who was a million times worse than Straker.
  +
  +
On the third track, he saw himself using a trick he had read about last summer in a book on Houdini. Houdini had been a famous magician who had escaped jail cells, chained boxes, bank vaults, steamer trunks thrown into rivers. He could get out of ropes, police handcuffs, and Chinese finger-pullers. And one of the things the book said he did was hold his breath and tighten his hands into fists when a volunteer from the audience was tying him up. You bulged your thighs and forearms and neck muscles, too. If your muscles were big, you had a little slack when you relaxed them. The trick then was to relax completely, and go at your escape slowly and surely, never letting panic hurry you up. Little by little, your body would give you sweat for grease, and that helped, too. The book made it sound very easy.
  +
  +
'Turn around,' Straker said. 'I am going to tie you up. While I tie you up, you will not move. If you move, I take this' - he cocked his thumb before Mark like a hitchhiker - 'and pop your right eye out. Do you understand?'
  +
  +
Mark nodded. He took a deep breath, held it, and bunched all his muscles.
  +
  +
Straker threw his coil of rope over one of the beams.
  +
  +
'Lie down,' he said.
  +
  +
Mark did.
  +
  +
He crossed Mark's hands behind his back and bound them tightly with the rope. He made a loop, slipped it around Mark's neck, and tied it in a hangman's knot. 'You're made fast to the very beam my Master's friend and sponsor in this country hung himself from, young master. Are you flattered?'
  +
  +
Mark grunted, and Straker laughed. He passed the rope through Mark's crotch, and he groaned as Straker took up the slack with a brutal jerk.
  +
  +
He chuckled with monstrous good nature. 'So your jewels hurt? They will not for long. You are going to lead an ascetic's life, my boy - a long, long life.'
  +
  +
He banded the rope over Mark's taut thighs, made the knot tight, banded it again over his knees, and again over his ankles. Mark needed to breathe very badly now, but he held on stubbornly.
  +
  +
'You're trembling, young master,' Straker said mock?ingly. 'Your body is all in hard little knots. Your flesh is white - but it, will be whiter! Yet you need not be so afraid. My Master has the capacity for kindness. He is much loved, right here in your own town. There is only a little sting, like the doctor's needle, and then sweetness. And later on you will be let free. You will go see your mother and father, yes? You will see them after they sleep.'
  +
  +
He stood up and looked down at Mark benignly. 'I will say good-by for a bit now, young master. Your lovely consort is to be made comfortable. When we meet again, you will like me better.'
  +
  +
He left, slamming the door behind him. A key rattled in the lock. And as his feet descended the stairs, Mark Jet out his breath and relaxed his muscles with a great, whooping sigh.
  +
  +
The ropes holding him loosened - a little.
  +
  +
He lay moveless, collecting himself. His mind was still flying with that same unnatural, exhilarating speed. From his position, he looked across the swelled, uneven floor to the iron cot frame. He could see the wall beyond it. The wallpaper was peeled away from that section and lay beneath the cot frame like a discarded snake-skin. He focused on a small section of the wall and examined it closely. He flushed everything else from his mind. The book on Houdini said that concentration was all? important. No fear or taint of panic must be allowed in the mind. The body must be completely relaxed. And the escape must take place in the mind before a single finger did so much as twitch. Every step must exist concretely in the mind.
  +
  +
He looked at the wall, and minutes passed.
  +
  +
The wall was white and bumpy, like an old drive-i n movie screen. Eventually, as his body relaxed to its greatest degree, he began to see himself projected there, a small boy wearing a blue T-shirt and Levi's jeans. The boy was on his side, arms pulled behind him, wrists nestling the small of the back above the buttocks. A noose looped around his neck, and any hard struggling would tighten that running slipknot inexorably until enough air was cut off to black out the brain.
  +
  +
He looked at the wall.
  +
  +
The figure there had begun to move cautiously, although he himself lay perfectly still. He watched all the movements of the simulacrum raptly. He had achieved a level of concentration necessary to the Indian fakirs and yogis, who are able to contemplate their toes or the tips of their noses for days, the state of certain mediums who levitate tables in a state of unconsciousness or extrude long tendrils of teleplasm from the nose, the mouth, the fingertips. His state was close to sublime. He did not think of Straker or the fading daylight. He no longer saw the gritty floor, the cot frame, or even the wall. He only saw the boy, a perfect figure which went through a tiny dance of carefully controlled muscles.
  +
  +
He looked at the wall.
  +
  +
And at last he began to move his wrists in half circles toward each other. At the limit of each half circle, the thumb sides of his palms touched. No muscles moved but those in his lower forearms. He did not hurry. He looked at the wall.
  +
  +
As sweat rose through his pores, his wrists began to turn more freely. The half circles became three-quarters. At the limit of each, the backs of his hands pressed together. The loops holding them had loosened a tiny bit more.
  +
  +
He stopped.
  +
  +
After a moment had passed, he began to flex his thumbs against his palms and press his fingers together in a wrig?gling motion. His face was utterly expressionless, the plas?ter face of a department store dummy.
  +
  +
Five minutes passed. His hands were sweating freely now. The extreme level of his concentration had put him in partial control of his own sympathetic nervous system, another device of yogis and fakirs, and he had, unknow?ingly, gained some control over his body's involuntary functions. More sweat trickled from his pores than his careful movements could account for. His hands had be?come oily. Droplets fell from his forehead, darkening the white dust on the floor.
  +
  +
He began to move his arms in an up-and-down piston motion, using his biceps and back muscles now. The noose tightened a little, but he could feel one of the loops holding his hands beginning to drag lower on his right palm. It was sticking against the pad of the thumb now, and that was all. Excitement shot through him and he stopped at once until the emotion had passed away completely. When it had, he began again. Up-down. Up-down. Up-down. He gained an eighth of an inch at a time. And suddenly, shockingly, his right hand was free.
  +
  +
He left it where it was, flexing it. When he was sure it was limber, he eased the fingers under the loop holding the left wrist and tented them. The left hand slid free.
  +
  +
He brought both hands around and put them on the floor. He closed his eyes for a moment. The trick now was to not think he had it made. The trick was to move with great deliberation.
  +
  +
Supporting himself with his left hand, he let his right roam over the bumps and valleys of the knot which secured the noose at his neck. He saw immediately that he would have to nearly choke himself to free it - and he was going to tighten the pressure on his testicles, which already throbbed dully.
  +
  +
He took a deep breath and began to work on the knot. The rope tightened by steady degrees, pressing into his neck and crotch. Prickles of coarse hemp dug into his throat like miniature tattoo needles. The knot defied him for what seemed an endless time. His vision began to fade under the onslaught of large black flowers that burst into soundless bloom before his eyes. He refused to hurry. He wiggled the knot steadily, and at last felt new slack in it. For a moment the pressure on his groin tightened unbearably, and then with a convulsive jerk, he threw the noose over his head and the pain lessened.
  +
  +
He sat up and hung his head over, breathing raggedly, cradling his wounded testicles in both hands. The sharp pain became a dull, pervading ache that made him feel nauseated.
  +
  +
When it began to abate a little, he looked over at the shuttered window. The light coming through the broken slats had faded to a dull ocher - it was almost sundown. And the door was locked.
  +
  +
He pulled the loose loop of rope over the beam, and set to work on the knots that held his legs. They were maddeningly tight, and his concentration had begun to slip away from him as reaction set in.
  +
  +
He freed his thighs, the knees, and after a seemingly endless struggle, his ankles. He stood up weakly among the harmless loops of rope and staggered. He began to rub his thighs.
  +
  +
There was a noise from below: footsteps.
  +
  +
He looked up, panicky, nostrils dilating. He hobbled over to the window and tried to lift it. Nailed shut, with rusted tenpennies bent over the cheap wood of the half sill like staples.
  +
  +
The feet were coming up the stairs.
  +
  +
He wiped his mouth with his hand and stared wildly around the room. Two bundles of magazines. A small tin plate with a picture of an 1890s summer picnic on the back. The iron cot frame.
  +
  +
He went to it despairingly and pulled up one end. And some distant gods, perhaps seeing how much luck he had manufactured by himself, doled out a little of their own.
  +
  +
The steps had begun down the hall toward the door when he unscrewed the steel cot leg to its final thread and pulled it free.
  +
  +
4
  +
  +
When the door opened, Mark was standing behind it with the bed leg upraised, like a wooden Indian with a tomahawk.
  +
  +
'Young master, I've come to - '
  +
  +
He saw the empty coils of rope and froze for perhaps one full second in utter surprise. He was halfway through the door.
  +
  +
To Mark, things seemed to have slowed to the speed of a football maneuver seen in instant replay. He seemed to have minutes rather than bare seconds to aim at the one-quarter skull circumference visible beyond the edge of the door.
  +
  +
He brought the leg down with both hands, not as hard as he could - he sacrificed some force for better aim. It struck Straker just above the temple, as he started to turn to look behind the door. His eyes, open wide, squeezed shut in pain. Blood flew from the scalp in an amazing spray.
  +
  +
Straker's body recoiled and he stumbled backward into the room. His face was twisted into a terrifying grimace. He reached out and Mark hit him again. This time the pipe struck his bald skull just above the bulge of the forehead, and there was another gout of blood. ?He went down bonelessly, his eyes rolling up in his head. Mark skirted the body, looking at it with eyes that were bulging and wide. The end of the bed leg was painted with blood. It was darker than Technicolor movie blood. Looking at it made him feet sick, but looking at Straker made him feel nothing.
  +
  +
I killed him, he thought. And on the heels of that: Good. Good.
  +
  +
Straker's hand closed around his ankle.
  +
  +
Mark gasped and tried to pull his foot away. The hand held fast like a steel trap and now Straker was looking up at him, his eyes cold and bright through a dripping mask of blood. His lips were moving, but no sound came out. Mark pulled harder, to no avail. With a half groan, he began to hammer at Straker's clutching hand with the bed leg. Once, twice, three times, four. There was the awful pencil sound of snapping fingers. The hand loosened, and he pulled free with a yank that sent him stumbling out through the doorway and into the hall.
  +
  +
Straker's head had dropped to the floor again, but his mangled hand opened and closed on the air with tenebrous vitality, like the jerking of a dog's paws in dreams of cat-chasing.
  +
  +
The bed leg fell from his nerveless fingers and he backed away, trembling. Then panic took him and he turned and fled down the stairs, leaping two or three at a time on his numb legs, his hand skimming the splintered banister.
  +
  +
The front hall was shadow-struck, horribly dark.
  +
  +
He went into the kitchen, casting lunatic, shying glances at the open cellar door. The sun was going down in a blazing mullion of reds and yellows and purples. In a funeral parlor sixteen miles distant, Ben Mears was watching the clock as the hands hesitated between 7:01 and 7:02.
  +
  +
Mark knew nothing of that, but he knew the vampire's time was imminent. To stay longer meant confrontation on top of confrontation; to go back down into that cellar and try to save Susan meant induction into the ranks of the Undead.
  +
  +
Yet he went to the cellar door and actually walked down the first three steps before his fear wrapped him in almost physical bonds and would allow him to go no further. He was weeping, and his body was trembling wildly, as if with ague.
  +
  +
'Susan!' he screamed. 'Run!'
  +
  +
'M - Mark?' Her voice, sounding weak and dazed. 'I can't see. It's dark - '
  +
  +
There was a sudden booming noise, like a hollow gun?shot, followed by a profound and soulless chuckle.
  +
  +
Susan screamed . . . a sound that trailed away to a moan and then to silence.
  +
  +
Still he paused, on feather-feet that trembled to blow him away.
  +
  +
And from below came a friendly voice, amazingly like his father's: 'Come down, my boy. I admire you' '
  +
  +
The power in the voice alone was so great that he felt the fear ebbing from him, the feathers in his feet turning to lead. He actually began to grope down another step before he caught hold of himself - and the catching hold took all the ragged discipline he had left.
  +
  +
'Come down,' the voice said, closer now. It held, be?neath the friendly fatherliness, the smooth steel of com?mand.
  +
  +
Mark shouted down: 'I know your name! It's Barlow!'
  +
  +
And fled.
  +
  +
By the time he reached the front hall the fear had come on him full again, and if the door had not been unlocked he might have burst straight through the center of it, leaving a cartoon cutout of himself behind.
  +
  +
He fled down the driveway (much like that long-ago boy Benjaman Mears) and then straight down the center of the Brooks Road toward town and dubious safety. Yet might not the king vampire come after him, even now?
  +
  +
He swerved off the road and made his way blunderingly through the woods, splashi ' ng through Taggart Stream and failing in a tangle of burdocks on the other side, and finally out into his own back yard.
  +
  +
He walked through the kitchen door and looked through the arch into the living room to where his mother, with worry written across her face in large letters, was talking into the telephone with the directory open on her lap.
  +
  +
She looked up and saw him, and relief spread across her face in a physical wave.
  +
  +
' - here he is - '
  +
  +
She set the phone into its cradle without waiting for a response and walked toward him. He saw with greater sorrow than she would have believed that she had been crying.
  +
  +
'Oh, Mark . . . where have you been?'
  +
  +
'He's home?' His father called from the den. His face, unseen, was filling with thunder.
  +
  +
'Where have you been?' She caught his shoulders and shook them.
  +
  +
'Out,' he said wanly. 'I fell down running home.'
  +
  +
There was nothing else to say. The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.
  +
  +
He added: 'The time got away from me. It - '
  +
  +
Then his father, descending upon him.
  +
  +
5
  +
  +
Some time in the darkness before Monday's dawn.
  +
  +
Scratching at the window.
  +
  +
He came up from sleep with no pause, no intervening period of drowsiness or orientation. The insanities of sleep and waking had become remarkably similar.
  +
  +
The white face in the darkness outside the glass was Susan's.
  +
  +
'Mark . . . let me in.'
  +
  +
He got out of bed. The floor was cold under his bare feet. He was shivering.
  +
  +
'Go away,' he said tonelessly. He could see that she was still wearing the same blouse, the same slacks. I wonder if her folks are worried, he thought. If they've called the police.
  +
  +
'It's not so bad, Mark,' she said, and her eyes were flat and obsidian. She smiled, showing her teeth, which shone in sharp relief below her pale gums. 'It's ever so nice. Let me in, I'll show you. I'll kiss you, Mark. I'll kiss you all over like your mother never did.'
  +
  +
'Go away,' he repeated.
  +
  +
'One of us will get you sooner or later,' she said. 'There are lots more of us now. Let it be me, Mark. I'm . . . I'm hungry.' She tried to smile, but it turned into a nightshade grimace that made his bones cold.
  +
  +
He held up his cross and pressed it against the window.
  +
  +
She hissed, as if scalded, and let go of the window frame. For a moment she hung suspended in air, her body becoming misty and indistinct. Then, gone. But not before he saw (or thought he saw) a look of desperate unhappiness on her face.
  +
  +
The night was still and silent again.
  +
  +
There are lots more of us now.
  +
  +
His thoughts turned to his parents, sleeping in thought?less peril below him, and dread gripped his bowels.
  +
  +
Some men knew, she had said, or suspected.
  +
  +
Who?
  +
  +
The writer, of course. The one she dated. Mears, his name was. He lived at Eva's boardinghouse. Writers knew a lot. It would be him. And he would have to get to Mears before she did -
  +
  +
He stopped on his way back to bed.
  +
  +
If she hadn't already.
  +
  +
---
  +
  +
When Ben came downstairs at quarter to nine, Eva Miller said from the sink, 'There's someone waiting to see you on the porch.'
  +
  +
He nodded and went out the back door, still in his slippers, expecting to see either Susan or Sheriff McCaslin. But the visitor was a small, economical boy sitting on the top step of the porch and looking out over the town, which was coming slowly to its Monday morning vitality.
  +
  +
'Hello?' Ben said, and the boy turned around quickly-
  +
  +
They looked at each other for no great space of time, but for Ben the moment seemed to undergo a queer stretching, and a feeling of unreality swept him. The boy reminded him physically of the boy he himself had been, but it was more than that. He seemed to feel a weight settle onto his neck, as if in a curious way he sensed the more-than-chance coming together of their lives. It made him think of the day he had met Susan in the park, and how their light, get-acquainted conversation had seemed queerly heavy and fraught with intimations of the future.
  +
  +
Perhaps the boy felt something similar, for his eyes widened slightly and his hand found the porch railing, as if for support.
  +
  +
'You're Mr Mears,' the boy said, not questioning.
  +
  +
'Yes. You have the advantage, I'm afraid.'
  +
  +
'My name is Mark Petrie,' the boy said. 'I have some bad news for you.'
  +
  +
And I bet he does, too, Ben thought dismally, and tried to tighten his mind against whatever it might be - but when it came, it was a total, shocking surprise.
  +
  +
'Susan Norton is one of them,' the boy said. 'Barlow got her at the house. But I killed Straker. At least, I think I did.'
  +
  +
Ben tried to speak and couldn't. His throat was locked.
  +
  +
The boy nodded, taking charge effortlessly. 'Maybe we could go for a ride in your car and talk. I don't want anyone to see me around. I'm playing hooky and I'm already in dutch with my folks.'
  +
  +
Ben said something - he didn't know what. After the motorcycle accident that had killed Miranda, he had picked himself up off the pavement shaken but unhurt (except for a small scratch across the back of his left hand, mustn't forget that, Purple Hearts had been awarded for less) and the truck driver had walked over to him, casting two shadows in the glow of the streetlight and the head lamps of the truck - he was a big, balding man with a pen in the breast pocket of his white shirt, and stamped in gold letters on the barrel of the pen he could read 'Frank's Mobil Sta' and the rest was hidden by the pocket, but Ben had guessed shrewdly that the final letters were 'tion', elementary, my dear Watson, elementary. The truck driver had said something to Ben, he didn't remember what, and then he took Ben's arm gently, trying to lead him away. He saw one of Miranda's flat-heeled shoes lying near the large rear wheels of the moving van and had shaken the trucker off and started toward it and the trucker had taken two steps after him and said, I wouldn't do that, buddy. And Ben had looked up at him dumbly, unhurt except for the small scratch across the back of his left hand, wanting to tell the trucker that five minutes ago this hadn't happened, wanting to tell the trucker that in some parallel world he and Miranda had taken a left at the corner one block back and were riding into an entirely different future. A crowd was gathering, coming out of a liquor store on one comer and a small milk-and-sandwich bar on the other. And he had begun to feel then what he was feeling now: the complex and awful mental and physical interaction that is the begin?ning of acceptance, and the only counterpart to that feeling is rape. The stomach seems to drop. The lips become numb. A thin foam forms on the roof of the mouth. There is a ringing noise in the ears. The skin on the testicles seems to crawl and tighten. The mind goes through a turning away, a hiding of its face, as from a light too brilliant to bear. He had shaken off the well-meaning truck driver's hands a second time and had walked over to the shoe. He picked it up. He turned it over. He placed his hand inside it, and the insole was still warm from her foot. Carrying it, he had gone two steps further and had seen her sprawled legs under the truck's front wheels, clad in the yellow Wranglers she had pulled on with such careless and laughing ease back at the apartment. It was impossible to believe that the girl who had pulled on those slacks was dead, yet the acceptance was there, in his belly, his mouth, his balls. He had groaned aloud, and that was when the tabloid photographer had snapped his picture for Mabel's paper. One shoe off, one shoe on. People looking at her bare foot as if they had never seen one before. He had taken two steps away and leaned over and -
  +
  +
?'I'm going to be sick,' he said.
  +
  +
'That's all right.'
  +
  +
Ben stepped behind his Citro?n and doubled over, hold?ing on to the door handle. He closed his eyes, feeling dark?ness wash over him, and in the darkness Susan's face appeared, smiling at him and looking at him with those lovely deep eyes. He opened his eyes again. It occurred to him that the kid might be lying, or mixed up, or an out-and?-out psycho. Yet the thought brought him no hope. The kid was not set up like that. He turned back and looked into the kid's face and read concern there - nothing else.
  +
  +
'Come on,' he said.
  +
  +
The boy got in the car and they drove off. Eva Miller watched them go from the kitchen window, her brow creased. Something bad was happening. She felt it, was filled with it, the same way she had been filled with an obscure and cloudy dread on the day her husband died.
  +
  +
She got up and dialed Loretta Starcher. The phone rang over and over without answer until she put it back in the cradle. Where could she be? Certainly not at the library. It was closed Mondays.
  +
  +
She sat, looking pensively at the telephone. She felt that some great disaster was in the wind - perhaps something as terrible as the fire of '51.
  +
  +
At last she picked up the phone again and called Mabel Werts, who was filled with the gossip of the hour and eager for more. The town hadn't known such a weekend in years.
  +
  +
4
  +
  +
Ben drove aimlessly and without direction as Mark told his story. He told it well, beginning with the night Danny Glick had come to his window and ending with his noctur?nal visitor early this morning.
  +
  +
'Are you sure it was Susan?' he asked. Mark Petrie nodded.
  +
  +
Ben pulled an abrupt U-turn and accelerated back up Jointner Avenue.
  +
  +
'Where are you going? To the - '
  +
  +
'Not there. Not yet.
  +
  +
5
  +
  +
'Wait. Stop.'
  +
  +
Ben pulled over and they got-out together. They had been driving slowly down the Brooks Road, at the bottom of Marsten's Hill. The wood-road where Homer McCaslin had spotted Susan's Vega. They had both caught the glint of sun on metal. They walked up the disused road together, not speaking. There were deep and dusty wheel ruts, and the grass grew high between them. A bird twitted somewhere.
  +
  +
They found the car shortly.
  +
  +
Ben hesitated, then halted. He felt sick to his stomach again. The sweat on his arms was old.
  +
  +
'Go look,' he said.
  +
  +
Mark went down to the car and leaned in the driver's side window. 'Keys are in it,' he called back.
  +
  +
Ben began to walk toward the car and his foot kicked something. He looked down and saw a .38 revolver lying in the dust. He kicked it up and turned it over in his hands. It looked very much like a police issue revolver.
  +
  +
'Whose gun?' Mark asked, walking toward him. He had Susan's keys in his hand.
  +
  +
'I don't know.' He checked the safety to be sure it was on, and then put the gun in his pocket.
  +
  +
Mark offered him the keys and Ben took them and walked toward the Vega, feeling like a man in a dream. His hands were shaking and he had to poke twice before he could get the right key into the trunk slot. He twisted it and pulled the back deck up without allowing himself to think.
  +
  +
They looked in together. The trunk held a spare tire, a jack, and nothing else. Ben felt his breath come out in a rush.
  +
  +
'Now?' Mark asked.
  +
  +
Ben didn't answer for a moment. When he felt that his voice would be under control, he said, 'We're going to see a friend of mine named Matt Burke, who is in the hospital. He's been researching vampires.'
  +
  +
The urgency in the boy's gaze remained. 'Do you believe me?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Ben said, and hearing the word on the air seemed to confirm it and give it weight. It was beyond recall. 'Yes, I believe you.'
  +
  +
'Mr Burke is from the high school, isn't he? Does he know about this?'
  +
  +
'Yes. So does his doctor.'
  +
  +
'Dr Cody?'
  +
  +
'Yes.'
  +
  +
They were both looking at the car as they spoke, as if it were a relic of some dark, lost race which they had dis?covered in these sunny woods to the west of town. The trunk gaped open like a mouth, and as Ben slammed it shut, the dull thud of its latching echoed in his heart.
  +
  +
'And after we talk,' he said, 'we're going up to the Marsten House and get the son of a bitch who did this.' Mark looked at him without moving. 'It may not be as easy as you think. She will be there, too. She's his now.'
  +
  +
'He is going to wish he never saw 'salem's Lot,' he said softly. 'Come on.'
  +
  +
6
  +
  +
They arrived at the hospital at nine-thirty, and Jimmy Cody was in Matt's room. He looked at Ben, unsmiling, and then his eyes flicked to Mark Petrie with curiosity.
  +
  +
'I've got some bad news for you, Ben. Sue Norton has disappeared.'
  +
  +
'She's a vampire,' Ben said flatly, and Matt grunted from his bed.
  +
  +
'Are you sure of that?' Jimmy asked sharply.
  +
  +
Ben cocked his thumb at Mark Petrie and introduced him. 'Mark here had a little visit from Danny Glick on Saturday night. He can tell you the rest.'
  +
  +
Mark told it from beginning to end, just as he had told Ben earlier.
  +
  +
Matt spoke first when he had finished. 'Ben, there are no words to say how sorry I am.'
  +
  +
'I can give you something if you need it,' Jimmy said.
  +
  +
'I know what medicine I need, Jimmy. I want to move against this Barlow today. Now. Before dark.'
  +
  +
'All right,' Jimmy said. 'I've canceled all my calls. And I phoned the county sheriff s office. McCaslin is gone, too.'
  +
  +
'Maybe that explains this,' Ben said, and took the pistol out of his pocket and dropped it onto Matt's bedside table. It looked strange and out of place in the hospital room.
  +
  +
'Where did you get this?' Jimmy asked, picking it up.
  +
  +
'Out by Susan's car.'
  +
  +
'Then I can guess. McCaslin went to the Norton house sometime after he left us. He got the story on Susan, including the make, model, and license number of her car. Went out cruising some of the back roads, just on the off-chance. And - '
  +
  +
Broken silence in the room. None of them needed it filled.
  +
  +
'Foreman's is still closed,' Jimmy said. 'And a lot of the old men who hang around Crossen's have been complain?ing about the dump. No one has seen Dud Rogers for a week.'
  +
  +
They looked at each other bleakly.
  +
  +
'I spoke with Father Callahan last night,' Matt said. 'He has agreed to go along, providing you two - plus Mark, of course - will stop at this new shop and talk to Straker first.'
  +
  +
'I don't think he'll be talking to anyone today,' Mark said quietly.
  +
  +
'What did you find out about them?' Jimmy asked Matt.
  +
  +
'Anything useful?'
  +
  +
'Well, I think I've put some of the pieces together. Straker must be this thing's human watchdog and body?guard . . . a kind of human familiar. He must have been in town long before Barlow appeared. There were certain rites to be performed, in propitiation of the Dark Father. Even Barlow has his Master, you see.' He looked at them somberly. 'I rather suspect no one will ever find a trace of Ralphie Glick. I think he was Barlow's ticket of admission. Straker took him and sacrificed him.'
  +
  +
'Bastard,' Jimmy said distantly.
  +
  +
'And Danny Glick?' Ben asked.
  +
  +
'Straker bled him first,' Matt said. 'His Master's gift. First blood for the faithful servant. Later, Barlow would have taken over that job himself. But Straker performed another service for his Master before Barlow ever arrived. Do any of you know what?'
  +
  +
For a moment there was silence, and then Mark said quite distinctly, 'The dog that man found on the cemetery gate.'
  +
  +
'What?' Jimmy said. 'Why? Why would he do that?'
  +
  +
'The white eyes,' Mark said, and then looked questioningly at Matt, who was nodding with some surprise.
  +
  +
'All last night I nodded over these books, not knowing we had a scholar in our midst.' The boy blushed a little. 'What Mark says is exactly right. According to several of the standard references on folklore and the supernatural, one way to frighten a vampire away is to paint white 'angel eyes' over the real eyes of a black dog. Win's Doc was all black except for two white patches. Win used to call them his headlights - they were directly over his eyes. He let the dog run at night. Straker must have spotted it, killed it, and then hung it on the cemetery gate.'
  +
  +
'And how about this Barlow?' Jimmy asked. 'How did he get to town?'
  +
  +
Matt shrugged. 'I have no way of telling. I think that we must assume, in line with the legends, that he is old . . . very old. He may have changed his name a dozen times, or a thousand. He may have been a native of almost every country in the world at one time or another, although I suspect his origins may have been Romanian or Magyar or Hungarian. It doesn't really matter how he got to town anyway . . . although I wouldn't be surprised to find out Larry Crockett had a hand in it. He's here. That's the important thing.
  +
  +
'Now, here is what you must do: Take a stake when you go. And a gun, in case Straker is still alive. Sheriff McCaslin's revolver will serve the purpose. The stake must pierce the heart or the vampire may rise again. Jimmy, you can check that. When you have staked him you must cut off his head, stuff the mouth with garlic, and turn it face down in the coffin. In most vampire fiction, Hollywood and otherwise, the staked vampire mortifies almost in?stantly into dust. This may not happen in real life. If it doesn't, you must weight the coffin and throw it into ?running water. I would suggest the Royal River. Do you have questions?'
  +
  +
There were none.
  +
  +
'Good. You must each carry a vial of holy water and a bit of the Host. And you must each have Father Callahan hear your confession before you go.'
  +
  +
'I don't think any of us are Catholic,' Ben said.
  +
  +
'I am,' Jimmy said. 'Nonpracticing.'
  +
  +
'Nonetheless, you will make a confession and an act of contrition. Then you go pure, washed in Christ's blood . . . clean blood, not tainted.'
  +
  +
'All right,' Ben said.
  +
  +
'Ben, had you slept with Susan? Forgive me, but - '
  +
  +
'Yes,' he said.
  +
  +
'Then you must pound the stake - first into Barlow, then into her. You are the only person in this little party who has been hurt personally. You will act as her husband. And you mustn't falter. You'll be releasing her.'
  +
  +
'All right,' he said again.
  +
  +
'Above all' - his glance swept all of them - 'you must not look in his eyes! If you do, he'll catch you and turn you against the others, even at the expense of your own life.
  +
  +
Remember Floyd Tibbits! That makes it dangerous to carry a gun, even if it's necessary. Jimmy, you take it, and hang back a little. If you have to examine either Barlow or Susan, give it to Mark.'
  +
  +
'Understood,' Jimmy said.
  +
  +
'Remember to buy garlic. And roses, if you can. Is that little flower shop in Cumberland still open, Jimmy?'
  +
  +
'The Northern Belle? I think so. '
  +
  +
'A white rose for each of you. Tie them in your hair or around your neck. And I'll repeat myself - don't look in his eyes! I could keep you here and tell you a hundred other things, but you better go along. It's ten o'clock already, and Father Callahan may be having second thoughts. My best wishes and my prayers go with you. Praying is quite a trick for an old agnostic like me, too. But I don't think I'm as agnostic as I once was. Was it Carlyle who said that if a man dethrones God in his heart, then Satan must ascend to His position?'
  +
  +
No one answered, and Matt sighed. 'Jimmy, I want a closer look at your neck.'
  +
  +
Jimmy stepped to the bedside and lifted his chin. The wounds were obviously punctures, but they had both scabbed over and seemed to be healing nicely.
  +
  +
'Any pain? Itching?' Matt asked.
  +
  +
'No.'
  +
  +
'You were very lucky,' he said, looking at Jimmy soberly.
  +
  +
'I'm starting to think I was luckier than I'II ever know.' Matt leaned back in his bed. His face looked drawn, the eyes deeply socketed. 'I will take the pill Ben refused, if you please.'
  +
  +
'I'll tell one of the nurses.'
  +
  +
'I'll sleep while you go about your work,' Matt said. 'Later there is another matter . . . well, enough of that.' His eyes shifted to Mark. 'You did a remarkable thing yesterday, boy. Foolish and reckless, but remarkable.'
  +
  +
'She paid for it,' Mark said quietly, and clasped his hands together in front of him. They were trembling.
  +
  +
'Yes, and you may have to pay again. Any of you, or all of you. Don't underestimate him' And now, if you don't mind, I'm very tired. I was reading most of the night. Call me the very minute the work is done.'
  +
  +
They left. In the hall Ben looked at Jimmy and said, 'Did be remind you of anyone?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Jimmy said. 'Van Helsing.'
  +
  +
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 mil?dewed 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 con?fessional, 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 Command?ments 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 hate?fulness 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 con?fession 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 ciga?rettes, 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.
  +
  +
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 configur?ation 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 mo?ment 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 hesi?tantly.
  +
  +
'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 out?ward, 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. 'Some?thing'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 over?head 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. 'Hang?ing 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 envel?ope, and they crowded around. Jimmy focused his flash?light 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 com?patriots 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 M��doc 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 conver?sational 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 ciga?rette 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.
  +
  +
15
  +
  +
Beyond the table where the letter had been propped the cellar made an L-turn, and they were now in what once had been a wine cellar. Hubert Marsten must have been a bootlegger indeed, Ben thought. There were small and medium casks covered with dust and cobwebs. One wall was covered with a crisscrossed wine rack, and ancient magnums still peered forth from some of the diamond?-shaped pigeonholes. Some of them had exploded, and where sparkling burgundy had once waited for some dis?cerning palate, the spider now made his home. Others had undoubtedly turned to vinegar; that sharp odor drifted in the air, mingled with that of slow corruption.
  +
  +
'No,' Ben said, speaking quietly, as a man speaks a fact. 'I can't.'
  +
  +
'You must,' Father Callahan said. 'I'm not telling you it will be easy, or for the best. Only that you must.'
  +
  +
'I can't!' Ben cried, and this time the words echoed in the cellar.
  +
  +
In the center, on a raised dais and spotlighted by Jimmy's flashlight, Susan Norton lay still. She was covered from shoulders to feet in a drift of simple white linen, and when they reached her, none of them had been able to speak. Wonder had swallowed words.
  +
  +
In life she had been a cheerfully pretty girl who had missed the turn to beauty somewhere (perhaps by inches), not through any lack in her features but - just possibly ?because her life had been so calm and unremarkable. But now she had achieved beauty. Dark beauty.
  +
  +
Death had not put its mark on her. Her face was blushed with color, and her lips, innocent of make-up, were a deep and glowing red. Her forehead was pale but flawless, the skin like cream. Her eyes were closed, and the dark lashes lay sootily against her cheeks. One hand was curled at her side, and the other was thrown lightly across her waist. Yet the total impression was not of angelic loveliness but a cold, disconnected beauty. Something in her face - not stated but hinted at - made Jimmy think of the young Saigon girls, some not yet thirteen, who would kneel before soldiers in the alleys behind the bars, not for the first time or the hundredth. Yet with those girls, the corruption hadn't been evil but only a knowledge of the world that had come too soon. The change in Susan's face was quite different - but he could not have said just how.
  +
  +
Now Callahan stepped forward and pressed his fingers against the springiness of her left breast. 'Here,' he said. 'The heart.'
  +
  +
'No,' Ben repeated. 'I can't.'
  +
  +
'Be her lover,' Father Callahan said softly. 'Better, be her husband. You won't hurt her, Ben. You'll free her. The only one hurt will be you.'
  +
  +
Ben looked at him dumbly. Mark had taken the stake from Jimmy's black bag and held it out wordlessly. Ben took it in a hand that seemed to stretch out for miles.
  +
  +
If I don't think about it when I do it, then maybe -
  +
  +
?But it would be impossible not to think about it. And suddenly a line came to him from Dracula, that amusing bit of fiction that no longer amused him in the slightest. It was Van Heising's speech to Arthur Holmwood when Arthur had been faced with this same dreadful task: We must go through bitter waters before we reach the sweet.
  +
  +
Could there be sweetness for any of them, ever again?
  +
  +
'Take it away!' he groaned. 'Don't make me do this - '
  +
  +
No answer.
  +
  +
He felt a cold, sick sweat spring out on his brow, his cheeks, his forearms. The stake that had been a simple baseball bat four hours before seemed infused with eerie heaviness, as if invisible yet titanic lines of force had converged on it.
  +
  +
He lifted the stake and pressed it against her left breast, just above the last fastened button of her blouse. The point made a dimple in her flesh, and he felt the side of his mouth begin to twitch in an uncontrollable tic.
  +
  +
'She's not dead,' he said. His voice was hoarse and thick. It was his last line of defense.
  +
  +
'No,' Jimmy said implacably. 'She's Undead, Ben.' He had shown them; had wrapped the blood-pressure cuff around her still arm and pumped it. The reading had been 00/00. He had put his stethoscope on her chest, and each of them had listened to the silence inside her.
  +
  +
Something was put into Ben s other hand - years later he still did not remember which of them had put it there. The hammer. The Craftsman hammer with the rubber perforate grip. The head glimmered in the flashlight's glow.
  +
  +
'Do it quickly,' Callahan said, land go out into the daylight. We'll do the rest.'
  +
  +
We must go through bitter waters before we reach the sweet.
  +
  +
'God forgive me,' Ben whispered.
  +
  +
He raised the hammer and brought it down.
  +
  +
The hammer struck the top of the stake squarely, and the gelatinous tremor that vibrated up the length of ash would haunt him forever in his dreams. Her eyes flew open, wide and blue, as if from the very force of the blow. Blood gushed upward from the stake's point of entry in a bright and astonishing flood, splashing his hands, his shirt, his cheeks. In an instant the cellar was filled with its hot, coppery odor.
  +
  +
She writhed on the table. Her hands came up and beat madly at the air like birds. Her feet thumped an aimless, rattling tattoo on the wood of the platform. Her mouth yawned open, revealing shocking, wolflike fangs, and she began to peal forth shriek after shriek, like hell's clarion. Blood gushed from the corners of her mouth in freshets.
  +
  +
The hammer rose and fell: again . . . again . again.
  +
  +
Ben's brain was filled with the shrieks of large black crows. It whirled with awful, unremembered images. His hands were scarlet, the stake was scarlet, the remorselessly rising and failing hammer was scarlet. In Jimmy's trembling hands the flashlight became stroboscopic, illuminating Susan's crazed, lashing face in spurts and flashes. Her teeth sheared through the flesh of her lips, tearing them to ribbons. Blood splattered across the fresh linen sheet which Jimmy had so neatly turned back, making patterns like Chinese ideograms.
  +
  +
And then, suddenly, her back arched like a bow, and her mouth stretched open until it seemed her jaws must break. A huge explosion of darker blood issued forth from the wound the stake had made - almost black in this chancy, lunatic light: heart's blood. The scream that welled from the sounding chamber of that gaping mouth came from all the subcellars of deepest race memory and beyond that, to the moist darknesses of the human soul. Blood suddenly boiled from her mouth and nose in a tide . . . and something else. In the faint light it was only a suggestion, a shadow, of something leaping up and out, cheated and ruined. It merged with the darkness and was gone.
  +
  +
She settled back, her mouth relaxing, closing. The mangled lips parted in a last, susurating pulse of air. For a moment the eyelids fluttered and Ben saw, or fancied he saw, the Susan he had met in the park, reading his book.
  +
  +
It was done.
  +
  +
He backed away, dropping the hammer, holding his hands out before him, a terrified conductor whose sym?phony has run riot.
  +
  +
Callahan put a hand on his shoulder. 'Ben - '
  +
  +
He fled.
  +
  +
He stumbled going up the stairs, fell, and crawled toward the light at the top. Childhood horror and adult horror had merged. If he looked over his shoulder, he would see Hubie Marsten (or perhaps Straker) only a hand's breadth behind, grinning out of his puffed and greenish face, the rope embedded deep into his neck - the grin revealing fangs instead of teeth. He screamed once, miserably.
  +
  +
Dimly, he heard Callahan cry out, 'No, let him go - '
  +
  +
He burst through the kitchen and out the back door. The back porch steps were gone under his feet and he pitched headlong into the dirt. He got to his knees, crawled, got to his feet, and cast a glance behind him.
  +
  +
Nothing.
  +
  +
The house loomed without purpose, the last of its evil stolen away. It was just a house again.
  +
  +
Ben Mears stood in the great silence of the weed-choked back yard, his head thrown back, breathing in great white snuffles of air.
  +
  +
16
  +
  +
In the fall, night comes like this in the Lot:
  +
  +
The sun loses its thin grip on the air first, turning it cold, making it remember that winter is coming and winter will be long. Thin clouds form, and the shadows lengthen out. They have no breadth, as summer shadows have; there are no leaves on the trees or fat clouds in the sky to make them thick. They are gaunt, mean shadows that bite the ground like teeth.
  +
  +
As the sun nears the horizon, its benevolent yellow begins to deepen, to become infected, until it glares an angry inflamed orange. It throws a variegated glow over the horizon - a cloud-congested caul that is alternately red, orange, vermilion, purple. Sometimes the clouds break apart in great, slow rafts, letting through beams of innocent yellow sunlight that are bitterly nostalgic for the summer that has gone by.
  +
  +
This is six o'clock, the supper hour (in the Lot, dinner is eaten at noon and the lunch buckets that men grab from counters before going out the door are known as dinner pails). Mabel Werts, the unhealthy fat of old age hanging doughily on her bones, is sitting down to a broiled breast of chicken and a cup of Lipton tea, the phone by her elbow. In Eva's the men are getting together whatever they have to get together: TV dinners, canned corned beef, canned beans which are woefully unlike the beans their mothers used to bake all Saturday morning and afternoon years ago, spaghetti dinners, or reheated hamburgers picked up at the Falmouth McDonald's on the way home from work. Eva sits at the table in the front room, irritably playing gin rummy with Grover Verrill, and snapping at the others to wipe up their grease and to stop that damn slopping around. They cannot remember ever having seen her this way, cat-nervous and feisty. But they know what the matter is, even if she does not.
  +
  +
Mr and Mrs Petrie eat sandwiches in their kitchen, trying to puzzle out the call they have just received, a call from the local Catholic priest, Father Callahan: Your son is with me. He's fine. I will have him home shortly. Good-by. They have debated calling the local lawman, Parkins Gillespie, and have decided to wait a bit longer. They have sensed some sort of change in their son, who has always been what his mother likes to call A Deep One. Yet the specters of Ralphie and Danny Glick hang over them, unacknowl?edged.
  +
  +
Milt Crossen is having bread and milk in the back of his store. He has had damned little appetite since his wife died back in '68. Delbert Markey, proprietor of Dell's, is working his way methodically through the five hamburgers which he has fried himself on the grill. He eats them with mustard and heaps of raw onions, an wi comp am most of the night to anyone who will listen that his goddamn acid indigestion is killing him. Father Callahan's housekeeper, Rhoda Curless, eats nothing. She is worried about the Father, who is out someplace ramming the roads. Harriet Durham and her family are eating pork chops. Carl Smith, a widower since 1957, has one boiled potato and a bottle of Moxie. The Derek Boddins are having an Armour Star ham and brussels sprouts. Yechhh, says Richie Boddin, the deposed bully. Brussels sprouts. You eat 'em or I'll clout your ass backward, Derek says. He hates them himself.
  +
  +
Reggie and Bonnie Sawyer are having a rib roast of beef, frozen corn, french-fried potatoes, and for dessert a chocolate bread pudding with hard sauce. These are all Reggie's favorites. Bonnie, her bruises just beginning to fade, serves silently with downcast eyes. Reggie eats with steady, serious attention, killing three cans of Bud with the meal. Bonnie eats standing up. She is still too sore to sit down. She hasn't much appetite, but she eats anyway, so Reggie won't notice and say something. After he beat her up on that night, he flushed all her pills down the toilet and raped her. And has raped her every night since then.
  +
  +
By quarter of seven, most meals have been eaten, most after-dinner cigarettes and cigars and pipes smoked, most tables cleared. Dishes are being washed, rinsed, and stacked in drainers. Young children are being packed into Dr Dentons and sent into the other room to watch game shows on TV until bedtime.
  +
  +
Roy McDougall, who has burned the shit out of a fry pan full of veal steaks, curses and throws them - fry pan and all - into the swill. He puts on his denim jacket and sets out for Dell's, leaving his goddamn good-for-nothing pig of a wife to sleep in the bedroom. Kid's dead, wife's slacking off, supper's burned to hell. Time to get drunk. And maybe time to haul stakes and roll out of this two-bit town.
  +
  +
In a small upstairs flat on Taggart Street, which runs a short distance from Jointner Avenue to a dead end behind the Municipal Building, Joe Crane is given a left-handed gift from the gods. He has finished a small bowl of Shred?ded Wheat and is sitting down to watch the TV when he feels a large and sudden pain paralyze the left side of his chest and his left arm. He thinks: What's this? Ticker? As it happens, this is exactly right. He gets up and makes it halfway to the telephone before the pain suddenly swells and drops him in his tracks like a steer hit with a hammer. His small color TV babbles on and on, and it will be twenty-four hours before anyone finds him. His death, which occurs at 6:51 P.M., is the only natural death to occur in Jerusalem's Lot on October 6.
  +
  +
By 7:00 the panoply of colors on the horizon has shrunk to a bitter orange line on the western horizon, as if furnace fires had been banked beyond the edge of the world. In the east the stars are already out. They gleam steadily, like fierce diamonds. There is no mercy in them at this time of year, no comfort for lovers. They gleam in beautiful indifference.
  +
  +
For the small children, bedtime is come. Time for the babies to be packed into their beds and cribs by parents who smile at their cries to be let up a little longer, to leave the light on. They indulgently open closet doors to show there is nothing in there.
  +
  +
And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire's time has come.
  +
  +
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 centur?ies, 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 Ph.D 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 unimagin?ative little crook with all the finesse of a shoplifter in Woolworth's - but because the opposition was a crack?brained 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 abb�� 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 Ad?eline' 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 de?cisions 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 'sa?lem'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.
  +
  +
20
  +
  +
Father Donald Callahan stood on one side of the spacious Petrie kitchen, holding his mother's cross high above his head, and it spilled its ghostly effulgence across the room. Barlow stood on the other side, near the sink, one hand pinning Mark's hands behind his back, the other slung around his neck. Between them, Henry and June Petrie lay sprawled on the floor in the shattered glass of Barlow's entry.
  +
  +
Callahan was dazed. It had all happened with such swiftness that he could not take it in. At one moment he had been discussing the matter rationally (if maddeningly) with Petrie, under the brisk, no-nonsense glow of the kitchen lights. At the next, he had been plunged into the insanity that Mark's father had denied with such calm and understanding firmness.
  +
  +
His mind tried to reconstruct what had happened.
  +
  +
Petrie had come back and told them the phone was out. Moments later they had lost the lights. June Petrie screamed. A chair fell over. For several moments all of them had stumbled around in the new dark, calling out to each other. Then the window over the sink had crashed inward, spraying glass across the kitchen counter and onto the linoleum floor. All this had happened in a space of thirty seconds.
  +
  +
Then a shadow had moved in the kitchen, and Callahan had broken the spell that held him. He clutched at the cross that hung around his neck, and even as his flesh touched it, the room was lit with its unearthly light.
  +
  +
He saw Mark, trying to drag his mother toward the arch which led into the living room. Henry Petrie stood beside them, his head turned, his calm face suddenly slack-jawed with amazement at this totally illogical invasion. And be?hind him, looming over them, a white, grinning face like something out of a Frazetta painting, which split to reveal long, sharp fangs - and red, lurid eyes like furnace doors to hell. Barlow's hands flew out (Callahan had just time to see how long and sensitive those livid fingers were, like a concert pianist's) and then he had seized Henry Petrie's head in one hand, June's in the other, and had brought them together with a grinding, sickening crack. They had both dropped down like stones, and Barlow's first threat had been carried out.
  +
  +
Mark had uttered a high, keening scream and threw himself at Barlow without thought.
  +
  +
'And here you are!' Barlow had boomed good-naturedly in his rich, powerful voice. Mark attacked without thought and was captured instantly.
  +
  +
Callahan moved forward, holding his cross up.
  +
  +
Barlow's grin of triumph was instantly transformed into a rictus of agony. He fell back toward the sink, dragging the boy in front of him. Their feet crunched in the broken glass.
  +
  +
'In Gods' name - 'Callahan began.
  +
  +
At the name of the Deity, Barlow screamed aloud as if he had been struck by a whip, his mouth open in a downward grimace, the needle fangs glimmering within, The cords of muscle on his neck stood out in stark, etched relief. 'No closer!' he said. 'No closer, shaman! Or I sever the boy's jugular and carotid before you can draw a breath!' As he spoke, his upper lip lifted from those long, needlelike teeth, and as he finished, his head made a predatory downward pass with adder's speed, missing Mark's flesh by a quarter-inch.
  +
  +
Callahan stopped.
  +
  +
'Back up,' Barlow commanded, now grinning again. 'You on your side of the board and I on mine, eh?'
  +
  +
Callahan backed up slowly, still holding the cross before him at eye level, so that he looked over its arms. The cross seemed to thrum with chained fire, and its power coursed up his forearm until the muscles bunched and trembled.
  +
  +
They faced each other.
  +
  +
'Together at last!' Barlow said, smiling. His face was strong and intelligent and handsome in a sharp, forbidding sort of way - yet, as the light shifted, it seemed almost effeminate. Where had he seen a face like that before? And it came to him, in this moment of the most extreme terror he had ever known. It was the face of Mr Flip, his own personal bogeyman, the thing that hid in the closet during the days and came out after his mother closed the bedroom door. He was not allowed a night light - both his mother and his father had agreed that the way to conquer these childish fears was to face them, not toady to them ?and every night, when the door snicked shut and his mother's footsteps padded off down the hall, the closet door slid open a crack and he could sense (or actually see?) the thin white face and burning eyes of Mr Flip. And here he was again, out of the closet, staring over Mark's shoulder with his clown-white face and glowing eyes and red, sensual lips.
  +
  +
'What now?' Callahan said, and his voice was not his own at all. He was looking at Barlow's fingers, those long, sensitive fingers, which lay against the boy's throat. There were small blue blotches on them.
  +
  +
'That depends. What will you give for this miserable wretch?' He suddenly jerked Mark's wrists high behind his back, obviously hoping to punctuate his question with a scream, but Mark would not oblige. Except for the sudden whistle of air between his set teeth, he was silent.
  +
  +
'You'll scream,' Barlow whispered, and his lips had twisted into a grimace of animal hate. 'You'll scream until your throat bursts!'
  +
  +
'Stop that!' Callahan cried.
  +
  +
---
  +
  +
  +
'And should I?' The hate was wiped from his face. A darkly charming smile shone forth in its place. 'Should I reprieve the boy, save him for another night?'
  +
  +
'Yes!'
  +
  +
Softly, almost purring, Barlow said, 'Then will you throw away your cross and face me on even terms - black against white? Your faith against my own?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Callahan said, but a trifle less firmly.
  +
  +
'Then do it!' Those full lips became pursed, anticipatory. The high forehead gleamed in the weird fairy light that filled the room.
  +
  +
'And trust you to let him go? I would be wiser to put a rattlesnake in my shirt and trust it not to bite me.'
  +
  +
'But I trust you . . . look!'
  +
  +
He let Mark go and stood back, both hands in the air, empty.
  +
  +
Mark stood still, unbelieving for a moment, and then ran to his parents without a backward look at Barlow.
  +
  +
'Run, Mark!' Callahan cried. 'Run!'
  +
  +
Mark looked up at him, his eyes huge and dark. 'I think they're dead - '
  +
  +
'R UN!'
  +
  +
Mark got slowly to his feet. He turned around and looked at Barlow.
  +
  +
'Soon, little brother,' Barlow said, almost benignly. 'Very soon now you and I will - '
  +
  +
Mark spit in his face.
  +
  +
Barlow's breath stopped. His brow darkened with a depth of fury that made his previous expressions seem like what they might well have been: mere play-acting. For a moment Callahan saw a madness in his eyes blacker than the soul of murder.
  +
  +
'You spit on me,' Barlow whispered. His body was trembling, nearly rocking with his rage. He took a shudder?ing step forward like some awful blind man.
  +
  +
'Get back!' Callahan screamed, and thrust the cross forward. Barlow cried out and threw his hands in front of his face. The cross flared with preternatural, dazzling brilliance, and it was at that moment that Callahan might have banished him if he had dared to press forward.
  +
  +
'I'm going to kill you,' Mark said.
  +
  +
He was gone, like a dark eddy of water.
  +
  +
Barlow seemed to grow taller. His hair, swept back from his brow in the European manner, seemed to float around his skull. He was wearing a dark suit and a wine-colored tie, impeccably knotted, and to Callahan he seemed part and parcel of the darkness that surrounded him. His eyes glared out of their sockets like sly and sullen embers.
  +
  +
'Then fulfill your part of the bargain, shaman.'
  +
  +
'I'm a priest!' Callahan flung at him.
  +
  +
Barlow made a small, mocking bow. 'Priest,' he said, and the word sounded like a dead haddock in his mouth.
  +
  +
Callahan stood indecisive. Why throw it down? Drive him off, settle for a draw tonight, and tomorrow -
  +
  +
But a deeper part of his mind warned. To deny the vampire's challenge was to risk possibilities far graver than any he had considered. If he dared not throw the cross aside, it would be as much as admitting . . . admitting . . . what? If only things weren't going so fast, if one only had time to think, to reason it out -
  +
  +
The cross's glow was dying.
  +
  +
He looked at it, eyes widening. Fear leaped into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. His head jerked up and he stared at Barlow. He was walking toward him across the kitchen and his smile was wide, almost voluptuous.
  +
  +
'Stay back,' Callahan said hoarsely, retreating a step. 'I command it, in the name of God.'
  +
  +
Barlow laughed at him.
  +
  +
The glow in the cross was only a thin and guttering light in a cruciform shape. The shadows had crept across the vampire's face again, masking his features in strangely barbaric lines and triangles under the sharp cheekbones.
  +
  +
Callahan took another step backward, and his buttocks bumped the kitchen table, which was set against the wall.
  +
  +
'Nowhere left to go,' Barlow murmured sadly. His dark eyes bubbled with infernal mirth. 'Sad to see a man's faith fail. Ah, well . . .'
  +
  +
The cross trembled in Callahan's hand and suddenly the last of its light vanished. It was only a piece of plaster that his mother had bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper's price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough power to smash down walls and shatter stone, was gone. The muscles remembered the thrumming but could not duplicate it.
  +
  +
Barlow reached from the darkness and plucked the cross from his fingers. Callahan cried out miserably, the cry that had vibrated in the soul - but never the throat - of that long-ago child who had been left alone each night with Mr Flip peering out of the closet at him from between the shutters of sleep. And the next sound would haunt him for the rest of his life: two dry snaps as Barlow broke the arms of the cross, and a meaningless thump as he threw it on the floor.
  +
  +
'God damn you!' he cried out.
  +
  +
'It's too late for such melodrama,' Barlow said from the darkness. His voice was almost sorrowful. 'There is no need of it. You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross . . . the bread and wine . . . the confessional . . . only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night. In a way, I hoped it might be so. It has been long since I have met an opponent of any real worth. The boy makes ten of you, false priest.'
  +
  +
Suddenly, out of the darkness, hands of amazing strength gripped Callahan's shoulders.
  +
  +
'You would welcome the oblivion of my death now, I think. There is no memory for the Undead; only the hunger and the need to serve the Master. I could make use of you. I could send you among your friends. Yet is there need of that? Without you to lead them, I think they are little. And the boy will tell them. One moves against them at this time. There is, perhaps, a more fitting punishment for you, false priest.'
  +
  +
He remembered Matt saying: Some things are worse than death.
  +
  +
He tried to struggle away, but the hands held him in a viselike grip. Then one hand left him. There was the sound of cloth moving across bare skin, and then a scraping sound.
  +
  +
The hands moved to his neck.
  +
  +
'Come, false priest. Learn of a true religion. Take my communion.'
  +
  +
Understanding washed over Callahan in a ghastly flood.
  +
  +
'No! Don't . . . don't - '
  +
  +
But the hands were implacable. His head was drawn forward, forward, forward.
  +
  +
'Now, priest,' Barlow whispered
  +
  +
And Callahan's mouth was pressed-against the reeking flesh of the vampire's cold throat, where an open vein pulsed. He held his breath for what seemed like aeons, twisting his head wildly and to no avail, smearing the blood across his cheeks and forehead and chin like war paint.
  +
  +
Yet at last, he drank.
  +
  +
---
  +
  +
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 took 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 com?mand 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 encoun?ter.
  +
  +
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 Is 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 trans?parent.'
  +
  +
'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 fantasti?cal 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.
  +
  +
26
  +
  +
Miss Coogan was reading a story called 'I Tried to Strangle Our Baby' in Real Life Confessions when the door opened and her first customer of the evening came in.
  +
  +
She had never seen things so slow. Ruthie Crockett and her friends hadn't even been in for a soda at the fountain - not that she missed that crowd - and Loretta Starcher hadn't stopped in for The New York Times. It was still under the counter, neatly folded. Loretta was the only person in Jerusalem's Lot who bought the Times (she pronounced it that way, in italics) regularly. And the next day she would put it out in the reading room.
  +
  +
Mr Labree hadn't come back from his supper, either, although there was nothing unusual about that. Mr Labree was a widower with a big house out on Schoolyard Hill near the Griffens, and Miss Coogan knew perfectly well that he didn't go home for his supper. He went out to Dell's and ate hamburgers and drank beer. If he wasn't back by eleven (and it was quarter of now), she would get the key out of the cash drawer and lock up herself. Wouldn't be the first time, either. But they would-all be in a pretty pickle if someone came in needing medicine badly.
  +
  +
She sometimes missed the after-movie rush that had always come about this time before they had demolished the old Nordica across the street - people wanting ice?cream sodas and frapp��s and malteds, dates holding hands and talking about homework assignments. It had been hard, but it had been wholesome, too. Those children hadn't been like Ruthie Crockett and her crowd, sniggering and flaunting their busts and wearing jeans tight enough to show the line of their panties - if they were wearing any. The reality of her feelings for those bygone patrons (who, although she had forgotten it, had irritated her just as much) was fogged by nostalgia, and she looked up eagerly when the door opened, as if it might be a member of the class of '64 and his girl, ready for a chocolate fudge sundae with extra nuts.
  +
  +
But it was a man, a grown-up man, someone she knew but could not place. As he carried his suitcase down to the counter, something in his walk or the motion of his head identified him for her.
  +
  +
'Father Callahan!' she said, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice. She had never seen him without his priest suit on. He was wearing plain dark slacks and a blue chambray shirt, like a common millworker.
  +
  +
She was suddenly frightened. The clothes he wore were clean and his hair was neatly combed, but there was something in his face, something -
  +
  +
She suddenly remembered the day, twenty years ago, when she had come from the hospital where her mother had died of a sudden stroke - what the old-timers called a shock. When she had told her brother, he had looked something like Father Callahan did now. His face had a haggard, doomed took, and his eyes were blank and stunned. There was a burned-out look in them that made her uncomfortable. And the skin around his mouth looked red and irritated, as if he had overshaved or rubbed it for a long period of time with a washcloth, trying to get rid of a bad stain.
  +
  +
'I want to buy a bus ticket,' he said.
  +
  +
That's it, she thought. Poor man, someone's died and he just got the call down at the directory, or whatever they call it.
  +
  +
'Certainly,' she said. 'Where - '
  +
  +
'What's the first bus?'
  +
  +
'To where?'
  +
  +
'Anywhere,' he said, throwing her theory into shambles.
  +
  +
'Well . . . I don't . . . let me see . . .' She fumbled out the schedule and looked at it, flustered. 'There's a bus at eleven-ten that connects with Portland, Boston, Hartford, and New Y - '
  +
  +
'That one,' he said. 'How much?'
  +
  +
'For how long - I mean, how far?' She was thoroughly flustered now.
  +
  +
'All the way,' he said hollowly, and smiled. She had never seen such a dreadful smile on a human face, and she flinched from it. If he touches me, she thought, I'll scream. Scream blue murder.
  +
  +
'T-th-that would be to New York City,' she said. 'Twenty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents.'
  +
  +
He dug his wallet out of his back pocket with some difficulty, and she saw that his right hand was bandaged. He put a twenty and two ones before her, and she knocked a whole pile of blank tickets onto the floor taking one off the top of the stack. When she finished picking them up, he had added five more ones and a pile of change.
  +
  +
She wrote the ticket as fast as she could, but nothing would have been fast enough. She could feel his dead gaze on her. She stamped it and pushed it across the counter so she wouldn't have to touch his hand.
  +
  +
'Y-you'll have to wait outside, Father C-Callahan. I've got to close in about five minutes.' She scraped the bills and change into the cash drawer blindly, making no attempt to count it.
  +
  +
'That's fine,' he said. He stuffed the ticket into his breast pocket. Without looking at her he said, 'And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, that whosoever found him should not kill him. And Cain went out from the face of the Lord, and dwelt as a fugitive on the earth, at the east side of Eden. That's Scripture, Miss Coogan. The hardest scripture in the Bible.'
  +
  +
'Is that so?' she said. 'I'm afraid you'll have to go out?side, Father Callahan. I . . . Mr Labree is just in back a minute and he doesn't like doesn't like me to . . . to . . .'
  +
  +
'Of course,' he said, and turned to go. He stopped and looked around at her. She flinched before those wooden eyes. 'You live in Falmouth, don't you, Miss Coogan?'
  +
  +
'Yes - '
  +
  +
'Have your own car?'
  +
  +
'Yes, of course. I really have to ask you to wait for the bus outside - '
  +
  +
'Drive home quickly tonight, Miss Coogan. Lock all your car doors and don't stop for anybody. Anybody. Don't even stop if it's someone you know.'
  +
  +
'I never pick up hitchhikers,' Miss Coogan said righteously.
  +
  +
'And when you get home, stay away from Jerusalem's Lot,' Callahan went on. He was looking at her fixedly. 'Things have gone bad in the Lot now.'
  +
  +
She said faintly, 'I don't know what you're talking about, but you'll have to wait for the bus outside.'
  +
  +
'Yes. All right.'
  +
  +
He went out.
  +
  +
She became suddenly aware of how quiet the drugstore was ' how utterly quiet. Could it be that no one - no one - had come in since it got dark except Father Callahan? It was. No one at all.
  +
  +
Things have gone bad in the Lot now.
  +
  +
She began to go around and turn off the lights.
  +
  +
27
  +
  +
In the Lot the dark held hard.
  +
  +
At ten minutes to twelve, Charlie Rhodes was awakened by a long, steady honking. He came awake in his bed and sat bolt upright.
  +
  +
His bus!
  +
  +
And on the heels of that:
  +
  +
The little bastards! The children had tried things like this before. He knew them, the miserable little sneaks. They had let the air out of his tires with matchsticks once. He hadn't seen who did it, but he had a damned good idea. He had gone to that damned wet-ass principal and reported Mike Philbrook and Audie James. He had known it was them - who had to see?
  +
  +
Are you sure it was them, Rhodes?
  +
  +
I told you, didn't I?
  +
  +
And there was nothing that fucking Mollycoddle could do; he had to suspend them. Then the bastard had called him to the office a week later.
  +
  +
Rhodes, we suspended Andy Garvey today.
  +
  +
Yeah? Not surprised. What was he up to?
  +
  +
Bob Thomas caught him letting the air out of his bus tires. And he had given Charlie Rhodes a long, cold, measuring look.
  +
  +
Well, so what if it had been Garvey instead of Philbrook and James? They all hung around together, they were all creeps, they all deserved to have their nuts in the grinder.
  +
  +
Now, from outside, the maddening sound of his horn, running down the battery, really laying on it:
  +
  +
WHONK, WHONNK, WHOONNNNNNNNK -
  +
  +
'You sons of whores,' he whispered, and slid out of bed. He dragged his pants on without using the light. The light would scare the little scumbags away, and he didn't want that.
  +
  +
Another time, someone had left a cow pie on his driver's seat, and he had a pretty good idea of who had done that, too. You could read it in their eyes. He had learned that standing guard at the repple depple in the war. He had taken care of the cow-pie business in his own way. Kicked the little son of a whore off the bus three days' running, four miles from home. The kid finally came to him crying.
  +
  +
I ain't done nothin', Mr Rhodes. Why you keep kickin' me off.?
  +
  +
You call puttin' a cow flop on my seat nothin'?
  +
  +
No, that wasn't me. Honest to God it wasn't.
  +
  +
Well, you had to hand it to them. They could lie to their own mothers with a clear and smiling face, and they probably did it, too. He had kicked the kid off two more nights and then he had confessed, by the Jesus. Charlie kicked him off once more - one to grow on, you might say - and then Dave Felsen down at the motor pool told him he better cool it for a while.
  +
  +
WHONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNK-
  +
  +
He grabbed his shirt and then got the old tennis racket standing in the corner. By Christ, he was going to whip some ass tonight!
  +
  +
He went out the back door and around the house to where he kept the big yellow bus parked. He felt tough and coldly competent. This was infiltration, just like the Army.
  +
  +
He paused behind the oleander bush and looked at the bus. Yes, he could see them, a whole bunch of them, darker shapes behind the night-darkened glass. He felt the old red rage, the hate of them like hot ice, and his grip on the tennis racket tightened until it trembled in his hand like a tuning fork. They had busted out - six, seven, eight - eight windows on his bus!
  +
  +
He slipped behind it and then crept up the long yellow side to the passenger door. It was folded open. He tensed, and suddenly sprang up the steps.
  +
  +
'All right! Stay where you are! Kid, lay off that goddamn horn or I'll - '
  +
  +
The kid sitting in the driver's seat with both hands plastered on the horn ring turned to him and smiled crazily. Charlie felt a sickening drop in his gut. It was Richie Boddin. He was white - just as white as a sheet - except for the black chips of coal that were his eyes, and his lips, which were ruby red.
  +
  +
And his teeth -
  +
  +
Charlie Rhodes looked down the aisle.
  +
  +
Was that Mike Philbrook? Audie James? God Almighty, the Griffen boys were down there! Hal and Jack, sitting near the back with hay in their hair. But they don't ride on my bus! Mary Kate Greigson and Brent Tenney, sitting side by side. She was in a nightgown, he in blue jeans and a flannel shirt that was on backward and inside out, as if he had forgotten how to dress himself.
  +
  +
And Danny Glick. But - oh, Christ - he was dead; dead for weeks!
  +
  +
'You,' he said through numb lips. 'You kids - '
  +
  +
The tennis racket slid from his hand. There was a wheeze and a thump as Richie Boddin, still smiling that crazy smile, worked the chrome lever that shut the folding door. They were getting out of their seats now, all of them.
  +
  +
'No,' he said, trying to smile. 'You kids . . . you don't understand. It's me. It's Charlie Rhodes. You . . . you . . .' He grinned at them without meaning, shook his head, held out his hands to show them they were just ole Charlie Rhodes's hands, blameless, and backed up until his back was jammed against the wide tinted glass of the windshield.
  +
  +
'Don't,' he whispered.
  +
  +
They came on, grinning. 'Please don't.'
  +
  +
And fell on him.
  +
  +
28
  +
  +
Ann Norton died on the short elevator trip from the first floor of the hospital to the second. She shivered once, and a small trickle of blood ran from the comer of her mouth.
  +
  +
---
  +
  +
  +
  +
Ben felt a hand on his arm and swam upward to wakeful?ness. Mark, near his right ear, said, 'Morning.'
  +
  +
He opened his eyes, blinked twice to clear the gum out of them, and looked out the window at the world. Dawn had come stealing through a steady autumn rain that was neither heavy nor light. The trees which ringed the grassy pavilion on the hospital's north side were half denuded now, and the black branches were limned against the gray sky like giant letters in an unknown alphabet. Route 30, which curved out of town to the east, was as shiny as sealskin - a car passing with its taillights still on left baleful red reflections on the macadam.
  +
  +
Ben stood up and looked around. Matt was sleeping, his chest rising and falling in regular but shallow respiration. Jimmy was also asleep, stretched out in the room's one lounge chair. There was an undoctorlike stubble on the planes of his cheeks, and Ben ran a palm across his own face. It rasped.
  +
  +
'Time to get going, isn't it?' Mark asked.
  +
  +
Ben nodded. He thought of the day ahead of them and all its potential hideousness, and shied away from it. The only way to get through it would be without thinking more than ten minutes ahead. He looked into the boy's face, and the stony eagerness he saw there made him feel queasy. He went over and shook Jimmy.
  +
  +
'Huh!' Jimmy said. He thrashed in his chair like a swim?mer coming up from deep water. His face twitched, his eyes fluttered open, and for a moment they showed blank terror. He looked at them both unreasoningly, without recognition.
  +
  +
Then recognition came, and his body relaxed. 'Oh. Dream.'
  +
  +
Mark nodded in perfect understanding.
  +
  +
Jimmy looked out the window and said 'Daylight' the way a miser might say money. He got up and went over to Matt, took his wrist and held it.
  +
  +
'Is he all right?' Mark asked.
  +
  +
'I think he's better than he was last night,' Jimmy said. 'Ben, I want the three of us to leave by way of the service elevator in case someone noticed Mark last night. The less risk, the better.'
  +
  +
'Will Mr Burke be okay alone?' Mark asked.
  +
  +
'I think so,' Ben said. 'We'll have to trust to his ingenuity, I guess. Barlow would like nothing better than to have us tied up another day.'
  +
  +
They tiptoed down the corridor and used the service elevator. The kitchen was just cranking up at this hour ?almost quarter past seven. One of the cooks looked up, waved a hand, and said, 'Hi, Doc.' No one else spoke to them.
  +
  +
'Where first?' Jimmy asked. 'The Brock Street School?'
  +
  +
'No,' Ben said. 'Too many people until this afternoon. Do the little ones get out early, Mark?'
  +
  +
'They go until two o'clock.'
  +
  +
'That leaves plenty of daylight,' Ben said. 'Mark's house first. Stakes.'
  +
  +
34
  +
  +
As they drew closer to the Lot, an almost palpable cloud of dread formed in Jimmy's Buick, and conversation lagged. When Jimmy pulled off the turnpike at the large green reflectorized sign that read ROUTE 12 JERUSALEM 'S LOT CUMBERLAND CUMBERLAND CTR, Ben thought that this was the way he and Susan had come home after their first date - she had wanted to see something with a car chase in it.
  +
  +
'It's gone bad,' Jimmy said. His boyish face looked pale and frightened and angry. 'Christ, you can almost smell it.'
  +
  +
And you could, Ben thought, although the smell was mental rather than physical: a psychic whiff of tombs.
  +
  +
Route 12 was nearly deserted. On the way in they passed Win Purinton's milk truck, parked off the road and deserted. The motor was idling, and Ben turned it off after looking in the back. Jimmy glanced at him inquiringly as he got back in. Ben shook his head. 'He's not there. The engine light was on, and it was almost out of gas. Been idling there for hours.' Jimmy pounded his leg with a closed fist.
  +
  +
But as they entered town, Jimmy said in an almost absurdly relieved tone, 'Look there. Crossen's is open.'
  +
  +
It was. Milt was out front, fussing a plastic drop cover over his rack of newspapers, and Lester Silvius was stand?ing next to him, dressed in a yellow slicker.
  +
  +
'Don't see the rest of the crew, though,' Ben said.
  +
  +
Milt glanced up at them and waved, and Ben thought be saw lines of strain on both men's faces. The 'Closed' sign was still posted inside the door of Foreman's Mortu?ary. The hardware store was also closed, and Spencer's was locked and dark. The diner was open, and after they had passed it, Jimmy pulled his Buick up to the curb in front of the new shop. Above the show window, simple goldfaced letters spelled out the name: 'Barlow and Straker - Fine Furnishings.' And taped to the door, as Callahan had said, a sign which had been hand-lettered in a fine script which they all recognized from the note they had seen the day before: 'Closed until further notice.'
  +
  +
'Why are you stopping here?' Mark asked.
  +
  +
'Just on the off-chance that he might be holing up inside,' Jimmy said. 'It's so obvious he might figure we'd overlook it. And I think that sometimes customs men put an okay on boxes they've checked through. They write it on with chalk.'
  +
  +
They went around to the back, and while Ben and Mark hunched their shoulders against the rain, Jimmy poked one overcoated elbow through the glass in the back door until they could all climb inside.
  +
  +
The air was noxious and stale, the air of a room shut up for centuries rather than days. Ben poked his head out into the showroom, but there was no place to hide out there. Sparsely furnished, there was no sign that Straker had been replenishing his stock.
  +
  +
'Come here!' Jimmy called hoarsely, and Ben's heart leaped into his throat.
  +
  +
Jimmy and Mark were standing by a long crate which Jimmy had partly pried open with the claw end of his hammer. Looking in, they could see one pale hand and a darksleeve.
  +
  +
Without thinking, Ben attacked the crate. Jimmy was fumbling at the far end with the hammer.
  +
  +
'Ben,' Jimmy said, 'you're going to cut your hands. You - '
  +
  +
He hadn't heard. He snapped boards off the crate, regardless of nails and splinters. They had him, they had the slimy night-thing, and he would pound the stake into him as he had pounded it into Susan, he would - He snapped back another piece of the cheap wooden crating and looked into the dead, moon-pallid face of Mike Ryer?son.
  +
  +
For a moment there was utter silence, and then they all let out their breath . . . it was as if a soft wind had coursed through the room.
  +
  +
'What do we do now?' Jimmy asked.
  +
  +
'We better get out to Mark's house first,' Ben said. His voice was dull with disappointment. 'We know where he is. We don't even have a finished stake yet.'
  +
  +
They put the splintered strips of wood back helter?skelter.
  +
  +
'Better let me look at those hands, Jimmy said. 'They're bleeding.'
  +
  +
'Later,' Ben said. 'Come on.'
  +
  +
They went back around the building, all of them word?lessly glad to be back in the open air, and Jimmy drove the Buick up Jointner Avenue and into the residential part of town, just outside the skimpy business district. They arrived at Mark's house perhaps sooner than any of them would have liked.
  +
  +
Father Callahan's old sedan was parked behind Henry Petrie's sensible Pinto runabout in the circular Petrie drive?way. At the sight of it, Mark sucked in his breath and looked away. All color had drained out of his face.
  +
  +
'I can't go in there,' he muttered. 'I'm sorry. I'll wait in the car.'
  +
  +
'Nothing to be sorry for, Mark,' Jimmy said.
  +
  +
He parked, turned off the ignition, and got out. Ben hesitated a minute, then put a hand on Mark's shoulder. 'Are you going to be all right?'
  +
  +
'Sure.' But he did not look all right. His chin was trembling and his eyes looked hollow. He suddenly turned to Ben and the hollowness was gone from the eyes and they were filled with simple pain, swimming with tears. 'Cover them up, will you? If they're dead, cover them up.'
  +
  +
'Sure I will,' Ben said.
  +
  +
'It's better this way,' Mark said. 'My father . . . he would have made a very successful vampire. Maybe as good as Barlow, in time. He . . . he was good at everything he tried. Maybe too good.'
  +
  +
'Try not to think too much,' Ben said, hating the lame sound of the words as they left his mouth. Mark looked up at him and smiled wanly.
  +
  +
'The woodpile's around in the back,' Mark said. 'You can go faster if you use my father's lathe down in the basement.'
  +
  +
'All right,' Ben said. 'Be easy, Mark. As easy as you can.'
  +
  +
But the boy was looking away now, swiping at his eyes with his arm.
  +
  +
He and Jimmy went up the back steps and inside.
  +
  +
35
  +
  +
'Callahan's not here,' Jimmy said flatly. They had gone through the entire house.
  +
  +
Ben forced himself to say it. 'Barlow must have gotten him.'
  +
  +
He looked at the broken cross in his hand. It had been around Callahan's neck yesterday. It was the only trace of him they had found. It had been lying next to the bodies of the Petries, who were very dead indeed. Their heads had been crushed together with force enough to literally shatter the skulls. Ben remembered the unnatural strength Mrs Glick had displayed and felt sick.
  +
  +
'Come on,' he said to Jimmy. 'We've got to cover them up. I promised.'
  +
  +
36
  +
  +
They took the dust cover from the couch in the living room and covered them with that. Ben tried not to look at or think about what they were doing, but it was impossible. When the job was done, one hand - the cultivated, lac?quered nails revealed it to be June Petrie's - protruded from under the gaily patterned dust cover, and he poked it underneath with his toe, grimacing in an effort to keep his stomach under control. The shapes of the bodies under the cover were undeniable and unmistakable, making him think of news photos from Vietnam - battlefield dead and soldiers carrying dreadful burdens in black rubber sacks that looked absurdly like golf bags.
  +
  +
They went downstairs, each with an armload of yellow ash stove lengths.
  +
  +
The cellar had been Henry Petrie's domain, and it re?flected his personality perfectly: Three high-intensity lights had been hung in a straight line over the work area, each shaded with a wide metal shell that allowed the light to fall with strong brilliance on the planer, the jigsaw, the bench saw, the lathe, the electric sander. Ben saw that he had been building a bird hotel, probably to place in the back yard next spring, and the blueprint he had been working from was neatly laid out and held at each corner with machined metal paperweights. He had been doing a competent but uninspired job, and now it would never be finished. The floor was neatly swept, but a pleasantly nostalgic odor of sawdust hung in the air.
  +
  +
'This isn't going to work at all,' Jimmy said.
  +
  +
'I know that,' Ben said.
  +
  +
'The woodpile,' Jimmy snorted, and let the wood fall from his arms in a lumbering crash. The stove lengths rolled wildly on the floor like jackstraws. He uttered a high, hysterical laugh.
  +
  +
'Jimmy - '
  +
  +
But his laugh cut across Ben's attempt to speak like jags of piano wire. 'We're going to go out and end the scourge with a pile of wood from Henry Petrie's back lot. How about some chair legs or baseball bats?'
  +
  +
'Jimmy, what else can we do?'
  +
  +
Jimmy looked at him and got himself under control with a visible effort. 'Some treasure hunt,' he said. 'Go forty paces into Charles Griffen's north pasture and look under the large rock. Ha. Jesus. We can get out of town. We can do that.'
  +
  +
'Do you want to quit? Is that what you want?'
  +
  +
'No. But it isn't going to be just today, Ben. It's going to be weeks before we get them all, if we ever do. Can you stand that? Can you stand doing . . . doing what you did to Susan a thousand times? Pulling them out of their closets and their stinking little bolt holes screaming and struggling, only to pound a stake into their chest cavities and smash their hearts? Can you keep that up until November without going nuts?'
  +
  +
Ben thought about it and met a blank wall: utter incom?prehension.
  +
  +
'I don't know,' he said.
  +
  +
'Well, what about the kid? Do you think he can take it? He'll be ready for the fucking nut hatch. And Matt will be dead. I'll guarantee you that. And what do we do when the state cops start nosing around to find out what in hell happened to 'salem's Lot? What do we tell them? "Pardon me while I stake this bloodsucker"? What about that, Ben?'
  +
  +
'How the hell should I know? Who's had a chance to stop and think this thing out?'
  +
  +
They realized simultaneously that they were standing nose to nose, yelling at each other. 'Hey,' Jimmy said. 'Hey.'
  +
  +
Ben dropped his eyes. 'I'm sorry-'
  +
  +
'No, my fault. We're under pressure . . . what Barlow would undoubtedly call an end game.' He ran a hand through his carroty hair and looked around aimlessly. His eye suddenly lit on something beside Petrie's blueprint and he picked it up. It was a black grease pencil.
  +
  +
'Maybe this is the best way,' he said.
  +
  +
'What?'
  +
  +
'You stay here, Ben. Start turning out stakes. If we're going to do this, it's got to be scientific. You're the pro?duction department. Mark and I will be research. We'll go through the town, looking for them. We'll find them, too, just the way we found Mike. I can mark the locations with this grease pencil. Then, tomorrow, the stakes.'
  +
  +
'Won't they see the marks and move?'
  +
  +
'I don't think so. Mrs Glick didn't look as though she was connecting too well. I think they move more on instinct than real thought. They might wise up after a while, start hiding better, but I think at first it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.'
  +
  +
'Why don't I go?'
  +
  +
'Because I know the town, and the town knows me - like they knew my father. The live ones in the Lot are hiding in their houses today. If you come knocking, they won't answer. If I come, most of them will. I know some of the hiding places. I know where the winos shack up out in the Marshes and where the pulp roads go. You don't. Can you run that lathe?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Ben said.
  +
  +
Jimmy was right, of course. Yet the relief he felt at not having to go out and face them made him feel guilty.
  +
  +
'Okay. Get going. It's after noon now.'
  +
  +
Ben turned to the lathe, then paused. 'If you want to wait a half hour, I can give you maybe half a dozen stakes to take with you.'
  +
  +
Jimmy paused a moment, then dropped his eyes. 'Uh, I think tomorrow . . . tomorrow would be . . .'
  +
  +
'Okay,' Ben said. 'Go on. Listen, why don't you come back around three? Things ought to be quiet enough around that school by then so we can check it out.'
  +
  +
'Good.'
  +
  +
Jimmy stepped away from Petrie's shop area and started for the stairs. Something - a half thought or perhaps inspiration - made him turn. He saw Ben across the base?ment, working under the bright glare of those three lights, hung neatly in a row.
  +
  +
Something . . . and it was gone.
  +
  +
He walked back.
  +
  +
Ben shut off the lathe and looked at him. 'Something else?'
  +
  +
'Yeah,' Jimmy said. 'On the tip of my tongue. But it's stuck there.'
  +
  +
Ben raised his eyebrows.
  +
  +
'When I looked back from the stairs and saw you, something clicked. It's gone now.'
  +
  +
'Important?'
  +
  +
'I don't know.' He shuffled his feet purposelessly, want?ing it to come back. Something about the image Ben had made, standing under those work lights, bent over the lathe. No good. Thinking about it only made it seem more distant.
  +
  +
He went up the stairs, but paused once more to look back. The image was hauntingly familiar, but it wouldn't come. He went through the kitchen and out to the car. The rain had faded to drizzle.
  +
  +
37
  +
  +
Roy McDougall's car was standing in the driveway of the trailer lot on the Bend Road, and seeing it there on a weekday made Jimmy suspect the worst.
  +
  +
He and Mark got out, Jimmy carrying his black bag. They mounted the steps and Jimmy tried the bell. It didn't work and so he knocked instead. The pounding roused no one in the McDougall trailer or in the neighboring one twenty yards down the road. There was a car in that driveway, too.
  +
  +
Jimmy tried the storm door and it was locked. 'There's a hammer in the back seat of the car,' he said.
  +
  +
Mark got it, and Jimmy smashed the glass of the storm door beside the knob. He reached through and unsnapped the catch. The inside door was unlocked. They went in.
  +
  +
The smell was definable instantly, and Jimmy felt his nostrils cringe against it and try to shut it out. The smell was not as strong as it had been in the basement of the Marsten House, but it was just as basically offensive - the smell of rot and deadness. A wet, putrified stink. Jimmy found himself remembering when, as boys, he and his buddies had gone out on their bikes during spring vacation to pick up the returnable beer and soft-drink bottles the retreating snows had uncovered. In one of those (an Orange Crush bottle) he saw a small, decayed field mouse which had been attracted by the sweetness and had then been unable to get out. He had gotten a whiff of it and had immediately turned away and thrown up. This smell was plangently like that - sickish sweet and decayed sour, mixed together and fermenting wildly. He felt his gorge rise.
  +
  +
'They're here,' Mark said. 'Somewhere.'
  +
  +
They went through the place methodically - kitchen, dining nook, living room, the two bedrooms. They opened closets as they went. Jimmy thought they had found some?thing in the master bedroom closet, but it was only a heap of dirty clothes.
  +
  +
'No cellar?' Mark asked.
  +
  +
'No, but there might be a crawl space.
  +
  +
They went around to the back and saw a small door that swung inward, set into the trailer's cheap concrete foundation. It was fastened with an old padlock. Jimmy knocked it off with five hard blows of the hammer, and when he pushed the half-trap open, the smell hit them in a ripe wave.
  +
  +
'There they are,' Mark said.
  +
  +
Peering in, Jimmy could see three sets of feet, like corpses lined up on a battlefield. One set wore work boots, one wore knitted bedroom slippers, and the third set - tiny feet indeed - were bare.
  +
  +
Family scene, Jimmy thought crazily. Reader's Digest, where are you when we need you? Unreality washed over him. The baby, he thought. How are we supposed to do that to a little baby?
  +
  +
He made a mark with the black grease pencil on the trap and picked up the broken padlock. 'Let's go next door,' he said.
  +
  +
'Wait,' Mark said. 'Let me pull one of them out.'
  +
  +
'Pull . . . ? Why?'
  +
  +
'Maybe the daylight will kill them,' Mark said. 'Maybe we won't have to do that with the stakes.'
  +
  +
Jimmy felt hope. 'Yeah, okay. Which one?'
  +
  +
'Not the baby,' Mark said instantly. 'The man. You catch one foot.'
  +
  +
'All right,' Jimmy said. His mouth had gone cotton-dry, and when he swallowed there was a click in his throat.
  +
  +
Mark wriggled in on his stomach, the dead leaves that had drifted in crackling under his weight. He seized one of Roy McDougall's workboots and pulled. Jimmy squirmed in beside him, scraping his back on the low overhang, fighting claustrophobia. He got hold of the other boot and together they pulled him out into the lessening drizzle and white light.
  +
  +
What followed was almost unbearable. Roy McDougall began to writhe as soon as the light struck him full, like a man who has been disturbed in sleep. Steam and moisture came from his pores, and the skin underwent a slight sagging and yellowing. Eyeballs rolled behind the thin skin of his closed lids. His feet kicked slowly and dreamily in the wet leaves. His upper lip curled back, showing upper incisors like those of a large dog - a German shepherd or a collie. His arms thrashed slowly, the hands clenching and unclenching, and when one of them brushed Mark's shirt, he jerked back with a disgusted cry.
  +
  +
Roy turned over and began to hunch slowly back into the crawl space, arms and knees and face digging grooves in the rain-softened humus. Jimmy noted that a hitching, Cheyne-Stokes type of respiration had begun as soon as the light struck the body; it stopped as soon as McDougall was wholly in shadow again. So did the moisture extrusion.
  +
  +
When he had reached his previous resting place, McDougall turned over and lay still.
  +
  +
'Shut it,' Mark said in a strangled voice. 'Please shut it.' Jimmy closed the trap and replaced the hammered lock as well as he could. The image of McDougall's body, struggling in the wet, rotted leaves like a dazed snake, remained in his mind. He did not think there would ever be a time when it was not within hand's reach of his memory - even if he lived to be a hundred.
  +
  +
38
  +
  +
They stood in the rain, I trembling, looking at each other. 'Next door?' Mark asked.
  +
  +
'Yes. They'd be the logical ones for the McDougalls to attack first.'
  +
  +
They went across, and this time their nostrils picked up the telltale odor of rot in the dooryard. The name below the doorbell was Evans. Jimmy nodded. David Evans and family. He worked as a mechanic in the auto department of Sears in Gates Falls. He had treated him a couple of years ago, for a cyst or something.
  +
  +
This time the bell worked, but there was no response. They found Mrs Evans in bed. The two children were in a bunk bed in a single bedroom, dressed in identical pajamas that featured characters from the Pooh stories. It took longer to find Dave Evans. He had hidden himself away in the unfinished storage space over the small garage.
  +
  +
Jimmy marked a check inside a circle on the front door and the garage door. 'We're doing good,' he said. 'Two for two.'
  +
  +
Mark said diffidently, 'Could you hold on a minute or two? I'd like to wash my hands.'
  +
  +
'Sure,' Jimmy said. 'I'd like that, too. The Evanses won't mind if we use their bathroom.'
  +
  +
They went inside, and Jimmy sat down in one of the living room chairs and closed his eyes. Soon he heard Mark running water in the bathroom.
  +
  +
On the darkened screen of his eyes he saw the mor?tician's table, saw the sheet covering Marjorie Glick's body start to tremble, saw her hand fall out and begin its delicate toe dance on the air - He opened his eyes.
  +
  +
This trailer was in nicer condition than the McDougalls', neater, taken care of. He had never met Mrs Evans, but it seemed she must have taken pride in her home. There was a neat pile of the dead children's toys in a small storage room, a room that had probably been called the laundry room in the mobile home dealer's original brochure. Poor kids, he hoped they'd enjoyed the toys while there had still been bright days and sunshine to enjoy them in. There was a tricycle, several large plastic trucks and a play gas station, one of those caterpillars on wheels (there must have been some dandy fights over that), a toy pool table.
  +
  +
He started to look away and then looked back, startled.
  +
  +
Blue chalk.
  +
  +
Three shaded lights in a row.
  +
  +
Men walking around the green table under the bright lights, cueing up, brushing the grains of blue chalk off their fingertips -
  +
  +
'Mark!' he shouted, sitting bolt upright in the chair. 'Mark!' And Mark came running with his shirt off, to see what the matter was.
  +
  +
39
  +
  +
An old student of Matt's (class of '64, A's in literature, C's in composition) had dropped by to see him around two-thirty, had commented on the stacks of arcane litera?ture, and had asked Matt if he was studying for a degree in the occult. Matt couldn't remember if his name was Herbert or Harold.
  +
  +
Matt, who had been reading a book called Strange Disappearances when Herbert-or-Harold walked in, wel?comed the interruption. He was waiting for the phone to ring even now, although he knew the others could not safely enter the Brock Street School until after three o'clock. He was desperate to know what had happened to Father Callahan. And the day seemed to be passing with alarming rapidity - he had always heard that time passed slowly in the hospital. He felt slow and foggy, an old man at last.
  +
  +
He began telling Herbert-or-Harold about the town of Momson, Vermont, whose history he had just been read?ing. He bad found it particularly interesting because he thought the story, if true, might be a precursor of the Lot's fate.
  +
  +
'Everyone disappeared,' he told Herbert-or-Harold, who was listening with polite but not very well masked boredom. 'Just a small town in the upcountry of northern Vermont, accessible by Interstate Route 2 and Vermont Route 19. Population of 312 in the census of 1920. In August of 1923 a woman in New York got worried because her sister hadn't written her for two months. She and her husband took a ride out there, and they were the first to break the story to the newspapers, although I don't doubt that the locals in the surrounding area had known about the disappearance for some time. The sister and her hus?band were gone, all right, and so was everyone else in Momson. The houses and the barns were all standing, and in one place supper had been put on the table. The case was rather sensational at the time. I don't believe that I would care to stay there overnight. The author of this book claims the people in the neighboring townships tell some odd stories . . . ha'ants and goblins and all that. Several of the outlying barns have hex signs and large crosses painted on them, even to this day. Look, here's a photo?graph of the general store and ethyl station and feed-and?-grain store - what served in Momson as downtown. What do you suppose ever happened there?'
  +
  +
Herbert-or-Harold looked at the picture politely. Just a little town with a few stores and a few houses. Some of them were falling down, probably from the weight of snow in the winter. Could be any town in the country. Driving through most of them, you wouldn't know if anyone was alive after eight o'clock when they rolled up the sidewalks. The old man had certainly gone dotty in his old age. Herbert-or-Harold thought about an old aunt of his who had become convinced in the last two years of her life that her daughter had killed her pet parakeet and was feeding it to her in the meat loaf. Old people got funny ideas.
  +
  +
'Very interesting,' he said, looking up. 'But I don't think. . . Mr Burke? Mr Burke, is something wrong? Are you. . . nurse! Hey, nurse!'
  +
  +
Matt's eyes had grown very fixed. One hand gripped the top sheet of the bed. The other was pressed against his chest. His face had gone pallid, and a pulse beat in the center of his forehead.
  +
  +
Too soon, he thought. No, too soon -
  +
  +
Pain, smashing into him in waves, driving him down into darkness. Dimly he thought: Watch that last step, it's a killer.
  +
  +
Then, falling.
  +
  +
Herbert-or-Harold ran out of the room, knocking over his chair and spilling a pile of books. The nurse was already coming, nearly running herself.
  +
  +
'It's Mr Burke,' Herbert-or-Harold told her. He was still holding the book, with his index finger inserted at the picture of Momson, Vermont.
  +
  +
The nurse nodded curtly and entered the room. Matt was lying with his head half off the bed, his eyes closed.
  +
  +
'Is he - ?' Herbert-or-Harold asked timidly. It was a complete question.
  +
  +
'Yes, I think so,' the nurse answered, at the same time pushing the button that would summon the ECV unit. 'You'll have to leave now.'
  +
  +
She was calm again now that all was known, and had time to regret her lunch, left half-eaten.
  +
  +
40
  +
  +
'But there's no pool hall in the Lot,' Mark said. 'The closest one is over in Gates Falls. Would he go there?'
  +
  +
'No,' Jimmy said. 'I'm sure he wouldn't. But some people have pool tables or billiard tables in their houses.'
  +
  +
'Yes, I know that.'
  +
  +
'There's something else,' Jimmy said. 'I can almost get it.'
  +
  +
  +
---
  +
  +
  +
  +
He leaned back, closed his eyes, and put his hands over them. There was something else, and in his mind he associated it with plastic. Why plastic? There were plastic toys and plastic utensils for picnics and plastic drop covers to put over your boat when winter came -
  +
  +
And suddenly a picture of a pool table draped in a large plastic dust cover formed in his mind, complete with sound track, a voiceover that was saying, I really ought to sell it before the felt gets mildew or something - Ed Craig says it might mildew - but it was Ralph's . . .
  +
  +
He opened his eyes. 'I know where he is,' he said. 'I know where Barlow is. He's in the basement of Eva Miller's boardinghouse.' And it was true; he knew it was. It felt incontrovertibly right in his mind.
  +
  +
Mark's eyes flashed brilliantly. 'Let's go get him.'
  +
  +
'Wait.'
  +
  +
He went to the phone, found Eva's number in the book, and dialed it swiftly. It rang with no answer. Ten rings, eleven, a dozen. He put it back in its cradle, frightened. There had been at least ten roomers at Eva's, many of them old men, retired. There was always someone around. Always before this.
  +
  +
He looked at his watch. It was quarter after three and time was racing, racing.
  +
  +
'Let's go,' he said.
  +
  +
'What about Ben?'
  +
  +
Jimmy said grimly, 'We can't call. The line's out at your house. If we go straight to Eva's, there'll be plenty of daylight left if we're wrong. If we're right, we'll come back and get Ben and stop his fucking clock.'
  +
  +
'Let me put my shirt on again,' Mark said, and ran down the hall to the bathroom.
  +
  +
41
  +
  +
Ben's Citro?n was still sitting in Eva's parking lot, now plastered with wet leaves from the elms that shaded the square of gravel. The wind had picked up but the rain had stopped. The sign that said 'Eva's Rooms' swung and squeaked in the gray afternoon. The house had an eerie silence about it, a waiting quality, and Jimmy made a mental connection and was chilled by it. It was just like the Marsten House. He wondered if anyone had ever committed suicide here. Eva would know, but he didn't think Eva would be talking . . . not anymore.
  +
  +
'It would be perfect,' he said aloud. 'Take up residence in the local boardinghouse and then surround yourself with your children,'
  +
  +
'Are you sure we shouldn't get Ben?'
  +
  +
'Later. Come on.'
  +
  +
They got out of the car and walked toward the porch.
  +
  +
The wind pulled at their clothes, riffled their hair. All the shades were drawn, and the house seemed to brood over them.
  +
  +
'Can you smell it?' Jimmy asked.
  +
  +
'Yes. Thicker than ever.'
  +
  +
'Are you up to this?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Mark said firmly. 'Are you.
  +
  +
'I hope to Christ I am,' Jimmy said.
  +
  +
They went up the porch steps and Jimmy tried the door. It was unlocked. When they stepped into Eva Miller's compulsively neat big kitchen, the odor smote them both, like an open garbage pit - yet dry, as with the smoke of years.
  +
  +
Jimmy remembered his conversation with Eva - it had been almost four years ago, just after he had begun practic?ing. Eva had come in for a check-up. His father had had her for a patient for years, and when Jimmy took his place, even running things out of the same Cumberland office, she had come to him without embarrassment. They had spoken of Ralph, dead twelve years even then, and she had told him that Ralph's ghost was still in the house ?every now and then she would turn up something new and temporarily forgotten in the attic or a bureau drawer. And of course there was the pool table in the basement. She said that she really ought to get rid of it; it was just taking up space she could use for something else. But it had been Ralph's and she just couldn't bring herself to take out an ad in the paper or call up the local radio 'Yankee Trader' program.
  +
  +
Now they walked across the kitchen to the cellar door and Jimmy opened it. The stench was thick, powering. He thumbed the light switch but got no response. He would have broken that, of course.
  +
  +
'Look around,' he told Mark. 'She's got to have a flashlight, or candles.'
  +
  +
Mark began nosing around, pulling open drawers and looking into them. He noticed that the knife rack over the sink was empty, but thought nothing of it at the time. His heart was thudding with painful slowness, like a muffled drum. He recognized the fact that he was now on the far, ragged edges of his endurance, at the outer limits. His mind did not seem to be thinking, but only reacting. He kept seeing movement at the corners of his eyes and jerking his head around to look, seeing nothing. A war veteran might have recognized the symptoms which signaled the onset of battle fatigue.
  +
  +
He went out into the hall and looked through the dresser there. In the third drawer he found a long four?cell flashlight. He took it back to the kitchen. 'Here it is, J - '
  +
  +
There was a rattling noise, followed by a heavy thump. The cellar door stood open.
  +
  +
And the screams began.
  +
  +
42
  +
  +
When Mark stepped back into the kitchen of Eva's Rooms, it was twenty minutes of five. His eyes were hollow, and his T-shirt was smeared with blood. His eyes were stunned and slow.
  +
  +
Suddenly he shrieked.
  +
  +
The sound came roaring out of his belly, up the dark passage of his throat, and through his distended jaws. He shrieked until he felt some of the madness begin to leave his brain. He shrieked until his throat cracked and an awful pain lodged in his vocal cords like a sliver of bone. And even when he had externalized all the fear, the horror, the rage, the disappointment that he could, that awful pressure remained, coming up out of the cellar in waves - the knowledge of Barlow's presence somewhere down there - ?and now it was close to dark.
  +
  +
He went outside onto the porch and breathed great gasps of the windy air. Ben. He had to get Ben. But an odd sort of lethargy seemed to have wrapped his legs in lead. What was the use? Barlow was going to win. They had been crazy to go against him. And now Jimmy had paid the full price, as well as Susan and the Father.
  +
  +
The steel in him came up. No. No. No.
  +
  +
He went down the porch steps on trembling legs and got into Jimmy's Buick. The keys hung in the ignition.
  +
  +
Get Ben. Try once more.
  +
  +
His legs were too short to reach the pedals. He pulled the seat up and twisted the key. The engine roared. He put the gearshift lever in drive and put his foot on the gas. The car leaped forward. He slammed his foot down on the power brake and was thrown painfully into the steering wheel. The horn honked.
  +
  +
I can't drive it!
  +
  +
And he seemed to hear his father saying in his logical, pedantic voice: You must be careful when you learn to drive, Mark. Driving is the only means of transportation that is not fully regulated by federal law. As a result, all the operators are amateurs. Many of these amateurs are suicidal. Therefore, you must be extremely careful. You use the gas pedal like there was an egg between it and your foot. When you're driving a car with an automatic transmission, like ours, the left foot is not used at all. Only the right is used; first brake and then gas.
  +
  +
He let his foot off the brake and the car crawled forward down the driveway. It bumped over the curb and he brought it to a jerky stop. The windshield had fogged up. He rubbed it with his arm and only smeared it more.
  +
  +
'Screw it,' he muttered.
  +
  +
He started up jerkily and performed a wide, drunken U-turn, driving over the far curb in the process, and set off for his house. He had to crane his neck to see over the steering wheel. He fumbled out with his right hand and turned on the radio and played it loud. He was crying.
  +
  +
43
  +
  +
Ben was walking down Jointner Avenue toward town when Jimmy's tan Buick came up the road, moving in jerks and spasms, weaving drunkenly. He waved at it and it pulled over, bounced the left front wheel over the curb, and came to a stop.
  +
  +
He had lost track of time making the stakes, and when he looked at his watch, he had been startled to see that it was nearly ten minutes past four. He had shut down the lathe, taken a couple of the stakes, put them in his belt, and gone upstairs to use the telephone. He had only put his hand on it when he remembered it was out.
  +
  +
Badly worried now, he ran outside and looked in both cars, Callahan's and Petrie's. No keys in either. He could have gone back and searched Henry Petrie's pockets, but the thought was too much. He had set off for town at a fast walk, keeping an eye peeled for Jimmy's Buick. He had been intending to go straight to the Brock Street School when Jimmy's car came into sight.
  +
  +
He ran around to the driver's seat and Mark Petrie was sitting behind the wheel . . . alone. He looked at Ben numbly. His lips worked but no sound came out.
  +
  +
'What's the matter? Where's Jimmy?'
  +
  +
'Jimmy's dead,' Mark said woodenly. 'Barlow thought ahead of us again. He's in the basement of Mrs Miller's boardinghouse somewhere. Jimmy's there, too. I went down to help him and I couldn't get back out. Finally I got a board that I could crawl up, but at first I thought I was going to be trapped down there . . . until s-s-sunset. . . . '
  +
  +
'What happened? What are you talking about?'
  +
  +
'Jimmy figured out the blue chalk, you see? While we were at a house in the Bend. Blue chalk. Pool tables. There's a pool table in the cellar at Mrs Miller's, it belonged to her husband. Jimmy called the boardinghouse and there was no answer so we drove over.'
  +
  +
He lifted his tearless face to Ben's.
  +
  +
'He told me to look around for a flashlight because the cellar light switch was broken, just like at the Marsten House. So I started to look around. I . . . I noticed that all the knives in the rack over the sink were gone, but I didn't think anything of it. So in a way I killed him. I did it. It's my fault, all my fault, all my - '
  +
  +
Ben shook him: two brisk snaps. 'Stop it, Mark. Stop it!
  +
  +
Mark put his hands to his mouth, as if to catch the hysterical babble before it could flow out. His eyes stared hugely at Ben over his hands.
  +
  +
At last he went on: 'I found a flashlight in the hall dresser, see. And that was when Jimmy fell, and he started to scream. He - I would have fallen, too, but he warned me. The last thing he said was Look out, Mark.'
  +
  +
'What was it?' Ben demanded.
  +
  +
'Barlow and the others just took the stairs away,' Mark said in a dead, listless voice. 'Sawed the stairs off after the second one going down. They left a little more of the railing so it looked like . . . looked like . . .' He shook his head. 'In the dark, Jimmy just thought they were there. You see?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Ben said. He saw. It made him feel sick. 'And the knives?'
  +
  +
'Set all around on the floor underneath,' Mark whis?pered. 'They pounded the blades through these thin ply?wood squares and then knocked off the handles so they would sit flat with the blades pointing . . . pointing.'
  +
  +
'Oh,' Ben said helplessly. 'Oh, Christ.' He reached down and took Mark by the shoulders. 'Are you sure he's dead, Mark?'
  +
  +
'Yes. He . . . he was stuck in half a dozen places. The blood . . . '
  +
  +
Ben looked at his watch. It was ten minutes of five. Again he had that feeling of being crowded, of running out of time.
  +
  +
'What are we going to do now?' Mark asked remotely.
  +
  +
'Go into town. Talk to Matt on the phone and then talk to Parkins Gillespie. We'll finish Barlow before dark. We've got to.'
  +
  +
Mark smiled a small, morbid smile. 'Jimmy said that, too. He said we were going to stop his clock. But he keeps beating us. Better guys than us must have tried, too.'
  +
  +
Ben looked down at the boy and got ready to do some?thing nasty.
  +
  +
'You sound scared,' he said.
  +
  +
'I am scared,' Mark said, not rising to it. 'Aren't you?'
  +
  +
'I'm scared,' Ben said, 'but I'm mad, too. I lost a girl I liked one hell of a lot. I loved her, I guess. We both lost Jimmy. You lost your mother and father. They're lying in your living room under a dust cover from your sofa.' He pushed himself to a final brutality. 'Want to go back and look?'
  +
  +
Mark winced away from him, his face horrified and hurting.
  +
  +
'I want you with me,' Ben said more softly He felt a germ of self-disgust in his stomach. He sounded like a football coach before the big game. 'I don't care who's tried to stop him before. I don't care if Attila the Run played him and lost. I'm going to have my shot. I want you with me. I need you.' And that was the truth, pure and naked.
  +
  +
'Okay,' Mark said. He looked down into his lap, and his hands found each other and entwined in distraught pantomime.
  +
  +
'Dig your feet in,' Ben said.
  +
  +
Mark looked at him hopelessly. I'm trying,' he said.
  +
  +
44
  +
  +
Sonny's Exxon station on outer Jointner Avenue was open and Sonny James (who exploited his country-music name?sake with a huge color poster in the window beside a pyramid of oil cans) came out to wait on them himself. He was a small, gnome-like man whose receding hair was lawn-mowered into a perpetual crew cut that showed his pink scalp.
  +
  +
'Hey there, Mr Mears, howya doin'? Where your Citrowan?'
  +
  +
'Laid up, Sonny. Where's Pete?' Pete Cook was Sonny's part-time help, and lived in town. Sonny did not.
  +
  +
'Never showed up today. Don't matter. Things been slow, anyway. Town seems downright dead.'
  +
  +
Ben felt dark, hysterical laughter in his belly. It threatened to boil out of his mouth in a great and rancid wave.
  +
  +
'Want to fill it up?' he managed. 'Want to use your phone.'
  +
  +
'Sure. Hi, kid. No school today?'
  +
  +
I'm on a field trip with Mr Mears,' Mark said. 'I had a bloody nose.'
  +
  +
'I guess to God you did. My brother used to get 'em. They're a sign of high blood pressure, boy. You want to watch out.' He strolled to the back of Jimmy's car and took off the gas cap
  +
  +
Ben went inside and dialed the pay phone beside the rack of New England road maps.
  +
  +
'Cumberland Hospital, which department?'
  +
  +
'I'd like to speak with Mr Burke, please. Room 402.
  +
  +
There was an uncharacteristic hesitation, and Ben was about to ask if the room had been changed when the voice said: 'Who is this, please?'
  +
  +
'Benjaman Mears.' The possibility of Matt's death sud?denly loomed up in his mind like a long shadow. Could that be? Surely not - that would be too much. 'Is he all right?'
  +
  +
'Are you a relative?'
  +
  +
'No, a close friend. He isn't - '
  +
  +
'Mr Burke died at 3:07 this afternoon, Mr Mears. If you'd like to hold for just a minute, I'll see if Dr Cody has come in yet. Perhaps he could . . . '
  +
  +
The voice went on but Ben had ceased hearing it, although the receiver was still glued to his ear. The realiz?ation of how much he had been depending on Matt to get them through the rest of this nightmare afternoon crashed home with sickening weight. Matt was dead. Congestive heart failure. Natural causes. It was as if God Himself had turned His face away from them.
  +
  +
Just Mark and I now.
  +
  +
Susan, Jimmy, Father Callahan, Matt. All gone.
  +
  +
Panic seized him and he grappled with it silently. He put the receiver back into its cradle without thinking about it, guillotining a question half-asked.
  +
  +
He walked back outside. It was ten after five. In the west the clouds were breaking up.
  +
  +
'Comes to just three dollars even,' Sonny told him brightly. 'That's Doc Cody's car, ain't it? I see them MD plates and it always makes me think of this movie I seen, this story about a bunch of crooks and one of them would always steal cars with MD plates because - '
  +
  +
Ben gave him three one-dollar bills. 'I've got to split, Sonny. Sorry. I've got trouble.'
  +
  +
Sonny's face crinkled up. 'Gee, I'm sorry to hear that, Mr Mears. Bad news from your editor?'
  +
  +
'I guess you could say that.' He got behind the wheel, shut the door, pulled out, and left Sonny looking after him in his yellow foulweather slicker.
  +
  +
'Matt's dead, isn't he?' Mark asked, watching him.
  +
  +
'Yes. Heart attack. How did you know?'
  +
  +
'Your face. I saw your face.'
  +
  +
It was 5:15.
  +
  +
45
  +
  +
Parkins Gillespie was standing on the small covered porch of the Municipal Building, smoking a Pall Mall and looking out at the western sky. He turned his attention to Ben Mears and Mark Petrie reluctantly. His face looked sad and old, like the glasses of water they bring you in cheap diners.
  +
  +
'How are You, Constable?' Ben asked.
  +
  +
'Tolerable,' Parkins allowed. He considered a hangnail on the leathery arc of skin that bordered his thumbnail, 'Seen you truckin' back and forth. Looked like the kid was drivin' up from Railroad Street by hisself this last time. That so?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Mark said.
  +
  +
'Almost got clipped, Fella goin' the other way missed you by a whore's hair.'
  +
  +
'Constable,' Ben said, 'we want to tell you what's been happening around here.'
  +
  +
Parkins Gillespie spat out the stub of his cigarette with?out raising his hands from the rail of the small covered porch. Without looking at either of them, he said calmly, 'I don't want to hear it.'
  +
  +
They looked at him dumbfounded.
  +
  +
'Nolly didn't show up today,' Parkins said, still in that calm, conversational voice. 'Somehow don't think he will. He called in late last night and said he'd seen Homer McCaslin's car out on the Deep Cut Road - I think it was the Deep Cut he said. He never called back in.' Slowly, sadly, like a man under water, he dipped into his shirt pocket and reached another Pall Mall out of it. He rolled it reflectively between his thumb and finger. 'These fucking things are going to be the death of me,' he said.
  +
  +
Ben tried again. 'The man who took the Marsten House, Gillespie. His name is Barlow. He's in the basement of Eva Miller's boardinghouse right now.'
  +
  +
'That so?' Parkins said with no particular surprise, 'Vam?pire, ain't he? Just like in all the comic books they used to put out twenty years ago.'
  +
  +
Ben said nothing. He felt more and more like a man lost in a great and grinding nightmare where clockwork ran on and on endlessly, unseen, but just below the surface of things.
  +
  +
'I'm leavin' town,' Parkins said. 'Got my stuff all packed up in the back of the car. I left my gun and the bubble and my badge in on the shelf. I'm done with lawin'. Goin' t'see my sister in Kittery, I am. Figure that's far enough to be safe.'
  +
  +
Ben heard himself say remotely, 'You gutless creep. You cowardly piece of shit. This town is still alive and you're running out on it.'
  +
  +
'It ain't alive,' Parkins said, lighting his smoke with a wooden kitchen match. 'That's why he came here. It's dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. Whole country's goin' the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin's in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin' popcorn and cheerin 'em on.' He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the broken rays of the westering sun, like a dream village. 'They prob'ly like bein' vampires. But not me; Nolly'd be in after me tonight. I'm goin'.'
  +
  +
Ben looked at him helplessly.
  +
  +
'You two fellas want to get in that car and hit it out of here,' Parkins said. 'This town will go on without us . . . for a while. Then it won't matter.'
  +
  +
Yes, Ben thought. Why don't we do that? Mark spoke the reason for both of them. 'Because he's bad, mister. He's really bad. That's all.'
  +
  +
'Is that so?' Parkins said. He nodded and puffed his Pall Mall. 'Well, okay.' He looked up toward the Consolidated High School. 'Piss-poor attendance today, from the Lot, anyway. Buses runnin' late, kids out sick, office phonin' houses and not gettin' any answer. The attendance officer called me, and I soothed him some. He's a funny little bald-headed fella who thinks he knows what he's doing. Well, the teachers are there, anyway. They come from out of town, mostly. They can teach each other.'
  +
  +
Thinking of Matt, Ben said, 'Not all of them are from out of town.'
  +
  +
'It don't matter,' Parkins said. His eyes dropped to the stakes in Ben's belt. 'You going to try to do that fella up with one of those?'
  +
  +
'Yes.'
  +
  +
'You can have my riot gun if you want it. That gun, it was Nolly's idear. Nolly liked to go armed, he did. Not even a bank in town so's he could hope someone would rob it. He'll make a good vampire though, once he gets the hang of it.'
  +
  +
Mark was looking at him with rising horror, and Ben knew he had to get him away. This was the worst of all.
  +
  +
'Come on,' he said to Mark. 'He's done.'
  +
  +
'I guess that's it,' Parkins said. His pale, crinkle-caught eyes surveyed the town. 'Surely is quiet. I seen Mabel Werts, peekin' out with her glasses, but I don't guess there's much to peek at, today. There'll be more tonight, likely.'
  +
  +
They went back to the car. It was almost 5:30.
  +
  +
46
  +
  +
They pulled up in front of St Andrew's at quarter of six. Lengthening shadows fell from the church across the street to the rectory, covering it like a prophecy. Ben pulled Jimmy's bag out of the back seat and dumped it out. He found several small ampoules, and dumped their contents out the window, saving the bottles.
  +
  +
'What are you doing?'
  +
  +
'We're going to put holy water in these,' Ben said. 'Come on.'
  +
  +
They went up the walk to the church and climbed the steps. Mark, about to open the middle door, paused and pointed. 'Look at that.'
  +
  +
The handle was blackened and pulled slightly out of shape, as if a heavy electric charge had been pushed through it.
  +
  +
'Does that mean anything to you?' Ben asked.
  +
  +
'No. No, but . . . ' Mark shook his head, pushing an unformed thought away. He opened the door and they went in. The church was cool and gray and filled with the endless pregnant pause that all empty altars of faith, white and black, have in common.
  +
  +
The two ranks of pews were split by a wide central aisle, and flanking this, two plaster angels stood cradling bowls of holy water, their calm and sweetly knowing faces bent, as if to catch their own reflections in the still water.
  +
  +
Ben put the ampoules in his pocket. 'Bathe your face and hands,' he said.
  +
  +
Mark looked at him, troubled. 'That's sac - sacri - '
  +
  +
'Sacrilege? Not this time. Go ahead.'
  +
  +
They dunked their hands in the still water and then splashed it over their faces, the way a man who has just wakened will splash cold water into his eyes to shock the world back into them.
  +
  +
Ben took the first ampoule out of his pocket and was filling it when a shrill voice cried, 'Here! Here now! What are you doing?'
  +
  +
Ben turned around. It was Rhoda Curless, Father Calla?han's housekeeper, who had been sitting in the first pew and twisting a rosary helplessly between her fingers. She was wearing a black dress, and her slip hung below the hem. Her hair was in disarray; she had been pulling her fingers through it.
  +
  +
'Where's the Father? What are you doing?' Her voice was reedy and thin, close to hysteria.
  +
  +
'Who are you?' Ben asked.
  +
  +
'Mrs Curless. I'm Father Callahan's housekeeper. Where's the Father? What are you doing?' Her hands came together and began to war with each other.
  +
  +
'Father Callahan is gone,' Ben said, as gently as he could.
  +
  +
'Oh.' She closed her eyes. 'Was he getting after whatever ails this town?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Ben said.
  +
  +
'I knew it,' she said. 'I didn't have to ask. He's a strong, good man of the cloth. There were always those who said he'd never be man enough to fill Father Bergeron's shoes, but he filled 'em. They were too small for him, as it turned out.'
  +
  +
She opened her eyes wide and looked at them. A tear spilled from her left, and ran down her cheek. 'He won't be back, will he?'
  +
  +
'I don't know,' Ben said.
  +
  +
'They talked about his drinkin',' she said, as though she hadn't heard. 'Was there ever an Irish priest worth his keep who didn't tip the bottle? None of that mollycoddlin' wet-nursin' church-bingo-prayer-basket for him. He was more'n that!' Her voice rose toward the vaulted ceiling in a hoarse, almost challenging cry. 'He was a priest, not some holy alderman!'
  +
  +
Ben and Mark listened without speech or surprise. There was no surprise left on this dream-struck day; there was not even the capacity for it. They no longer saw themselves as doers or avengers or saviors; the day had absorbed them. Helplessly, they were only living.
  +
  +
'Was he strong when last you saw him?' she demanded, peering at them. The tears magnified the gimlet lack of compromise in her eyes.
  +
  +
'Yes,' Mark said, remembering Callahan in his mother's kitchen, holding his cross aloft.
  +
  +
'And are you about his work now?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Mark said again.
  +
  +
'Then be about it,' she snapped at them. 'What are you waiting for?' And she left them, walking down the center aisle in her black dress, the solitary mourner at a funeral that hadn't been held here.
  +
  +
47
  +
  +
Eva's again - and at the last. It was ten minutes after six. The sun hung over the western pines, peering out of the broken clouds like blood.
  +
  +
Ben drove into the parking lot and looked curiously up at his room. The shade was not drawn and he could see his typewriter standing sentinel, and beside it, his pile of manuscript and the glass globe paperweight on top of it. It seemed amazing that he could see all those things from here, see them clearly, as if everything in the world was sane and normal and ordered.
  +
  +
He let his eyes drop to the back porch. The rocking chairs where he and Susan had shared their first kiss stood side by side, unchanged. The door which gave ingress to the kitchen stood open, as Mark had left it.
  +
  +
'I can't,' Mark muttered. 'I just can't.' His eyes were wide and white. He had drawn up his knees and was now crouched on the seat.
  +
  +
'It's got to be both of us,' Ben said. He held out two of the ampoules filled with holy water. Mark twitched away from them in horror, as if touching them would admit poison through his skin. 'Come on,' Ben said. He had no arguments left. 'Come on, come on.'
  +
  +
'No.'
  +
  +
'Mark?'
  +
  +
'No!'
  +
  +
'Mark, I need you. You and me, that's all that's left.'
  +
  +
'I've done enough!' Mark cried. 'I can't do any more! 'Can't you understand I can't look at him?'
  +
  +
'Mark, it has to be the two of us. Don't you know that?'
  +
  +
Mark took the ampoules and curled them slowly against his chest. 'Oh boy,' he whispered. 'Oh boy, oh boy.' He looked at Ben and nodded. The movement of his head was jerky and agonized. 'Okay,' he said.
  +
  +
'Where's the hammer?' he asked as they got out.
  +
  +
'Jimmy had it.'
  +
  +
'Okay.'
  +
  +
They walked up the porch steps in the strengthening wind. The sun glared red through the clouds, dyeing every?thing. Inside, in the kitchen, the stink of death was palpable and wet, pressing against them like granite. The cellar door stood open.
  +
  +
'I'm so scared,' Mark said, shuddering.
  +
  +
'You better be. Where's that flashlight?'
  +
  +
'In the cellar. I left it when . . . '
  +
  +
'Okay.' They stood at the mouth of the cellar. As Mark had said, the stairs looked intact in the sunset light. 'Follow me,' Ben said.
  +
  +
48
  +
  +
Ben thought quite easily: I'm going to my death.
  +
  +
The thought came naturally, and there was no fear or regret in it. Inward-turning emotions were lost under the overwhelming atmosphere of evil that hung over this place. As he slipped and scraped his way down the board Mark had set up to get out of the cellar, all he felt was an unnatural glacial calm. He saw that his hands were glowing, as if wreathed in ghost gloves. It did not surprise him.
  +
  +
Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. Who had said that? Matt? Matt was dead. Susan was dead. Miranda was dead. Wallace Stevens was dead, too. I wouldn't look at that, if I were you. But he had looked. That's what you looked like when it was over. Like something smashed and broken that had been filled with different-colored fluids. It wasn't so bad. Not so bad as his death. Jimmy had been carrying McCaslin's pistol; it would still be in his coat pocket. He would take it, and if sunset came before they could get to Barlow . . . first the boy, and then himself. Not good, but better than his death.
  +
  +
He dropped to the cellar floor and then helped Mark down. The boy's eyes flashed to the dark, curled thing on the floor and then skipped away.
  +
  +
'I can't look at that,' he said huskily.
  +
  +
'That's all right.'
  +
  +
Mark turned away and Ben knelt down. He swept away a number of the lethal plywood squares, the knife blades thrust through them glittering like dragon's teeth. Gently, then, he turned Jimmy over.
  +
  +
I wouldn't look at that, if I were you.
  +
  +
'Oh, Jimmy,' he tried to say, and the words broke open and bled in his throat. He cradled Jimmy in the curve of his left arm and pulled Barlow's blades out of him with his right hand. There were six of them, and Jimmy had bled a great deal.
  +
  +
There was a neatly folded stack of living room drapes on a corner shelf. He took them over to Jimmy and spread them over his body after he had the gun and the flashlight and the hammer.
  +
  +
He stood up and tried the flashlight. The plastic lens cover had cracked, but the bulb still worked. He flashed it around. Nothing. He shone it under the pool table. Bare. Nothing behind the furnace. Racks of preserves, and a pegboard hung with tools. The amputated stairs, pushed over in the far corner so they would be out of sight from the kitchen. They looked like a scaffold leading nowhere.
  +
  +
'Where is he?' Ben muttered. He glanced at his watch, and the hands stood at 6:23. When was sunset? He couldn't remember. Surely no later than 6:55. That gave them a bare half hour.
  +
  +
'Where is he?' he cried out. 'I can feel him, but where is he?'
  +
  +
"There!' Mark cried, pointing with one glowing hand. 'What's that?'
  +
  +
Ben centered the light on it. A Welsh dresser. 'It's not big enough,' he said to Mark. 'And it's flush against the wall.'
  +
  +
'Let's look behind it.'
  +
  +
Ben shrugged. They crossed the room to the Welsh dresser and each took a side. He felt a trickle of building excitement. Surely the odor or aura or atmosphere or whatever you wanted to call it was thicker here, more offensive?
  +
  +
Ben glanced up at the open kitchen door. The light was dimmer now. The gold was fading out of it.
  +
  +
'It's too heavy for me,' Mark panted.
  +
  +
'Never mind,' Ben said. 'We're going to tip it over. Get your best hold.'
  +
  +
Mark bent over it, his shoulder against the wood. His eyes looked fiercely out of his glowing face. 'Okay.'
  +
  +
They threw their combined weight against it and the Welsh dresser went over with a bonelike crash as Eva Miller's long-ago wedding china shattered inside.
  +
  +
'I knew it!' Mark cried triumphantly.
  +
  +
There was a small door, chest-high, set into the wall where the Welsh dresser had been. A new Yale padlock secured the hasp.
  +
  +
Two hard swings of the hammer convinced him that the lock wasn't going to give. 'Jesus Christ,' he muttered softly. Frustration welled up bitterly in his throat. To be balked like this at the end, balked by a five-dollar padlock -
  +
  +
No. He would bite through the wood with his teeth if he had to.
  +
  +
He shone the flashlight around, and its beam fell on the neatly hung too] board to the right of the stairs. Hung on two of its steel pegs was an ax with a rubber cover masking its blade.
  +
  +
He ran across, snatched it off the pegboard, and pulled the rubber cover from the blade. He took one of the ampoules from his pocket and dropped it. The holy water ran out on the floor, beginning to glow immediately. He got another one, twisted the small cap off, and doused the blade of the ax. It began to glimmer with eldritch fairy?light. And when he set his hands on the wooden haft, the grip felt incredibly good, incredibly right. Power seemed to have welded his flesh into its present grip. He stood holding it for a moment, looking at the shining blade, and some curious impulse made him touch it to his forehead. A hard sense of sureness clasped him, a feeling of inevitable rightness, of whiteness. For the first time in weeks he felt he was no longer groping through fogs of belief and unbelief, sparring with a partner whose body was too insubstantial to sustain blows.
  +
  +
Power, humming up his arms like volts.
  +
  +
The blade glowed brighter.
  +
  +
'Do it!' Mark pleaded. 'Quick! Please!'
  +
  +
Ben Mears spread his feet, slung the ax back, and brought it down in a gleaming arc that left an after-image on the eye. The blade bit wood with a booming, portentous sound and sunk to the haft. Splinters flew.
  +
  +
He pulled it out, the wood screaming against the steel. He brought it down again . . . again . . . again. He could feel the muscles of his back and arms flexing and meshing, moving with a sureness and a studied heat that they had never known before. Each blow sent chips and splinters flying like shrapnel. On the fifth blow the blade crashed through to emptiness and he began hacking the hole wider with a speed that approached frenzy.
  +
  +
Mark stared at him, amazed. The cold blue fire had crept down the ax handle and spread up his arms until he seemed to be working in a column of fire. His head was twisted to one side, the muscles of his neck corded with strain, one eye open and glaring, the other squeezed shut. The back of his shirt had split between the straining wings of his shoulder blades, and the muscles writhed beneath the skin like ropes. He was a man taken over, possessed, and Mark saw without knowing (or having to know) that the possession was not in the least Christian; the good was more elemental, less refined. It was ore, like something coughed up out of the ground in naked chunks. There was nothing finished about it. It was Force; it was Power, it was whatever moved the greatest wheels of the universe.
  +
  +
The door to Eva Miller's root cellar could not stand before it. The ax began to move at a nearly blinding speed; it became a ripple, a descending arc, a rainbow from over Ben's shoulder to the splintered wood of the final door.
  +
  +
He dealt it a final blow and slung the ax away. He held his hands up before his eyes. They blazed.
  +
  +
He held them out to Mark, and the boy flinched. 'I love you,' Ben said.
  +
  +
They clasped hands.
  +
  +
49
  +
  +
The root cellar was small and cell-like, empty except for a few dusty bottles, some crates, and a dusty bushel basket of very old potatoes that were sprouting eyes in every direction - and the bodies. Barlow's coffin stood at the far end, propped up against the wall like a mummy's sarcophagus, and the crest on it blazed coldly in the light they carried with them like St Elmo's fire.
  +
  +
In front of the coffin, leading up to it like railroad ties, were the bodies of the people Ben had lived with and broken bread with: Eva Miller, and Weasel Craig beside her; Mabe Mullican from the room at the end of the second-floor hall; John Snow, who had been on the county and could barely walk down to the breakfast table with his arthritis; Vinnie Upshaw; Grover Verrill.
  +
  +
They stepped over them and stood by the coffin. Ben glanced down at his watch; it was 6:40.
  +
  +
'We're going to take it out there,' he said. 'By Jimmy.'
  +
  +
'It must weigh a ton,' Mark said.
  +
  +
'We can do it.' He reached out, almost tentatively, and then grasped the upper right corner of the coffin. The crest glittered like an impassioned eye. The wood was crawlingly unpleasant to the touch, smooth and stone-like with years. There seemed to be no pores in the wood, no small imperfections for the fingers to recognize and mold to. Yet it rocked easily. One hand did it.
  +
  +
He tipped it forward with a small push, feeling the great weight held in check as if by invisible counterweights. Something thumped inside. Ben took the weight of the coffin on one hand.
  +
  +
'Now,' he said. 'Your end.'
  +
  +
Mark lifted and the end of the coffin came up easily. The boy's face filled with pleased amazement. 'I think I could do it with one finger.'
  +
  +
'You probably could. Things are finally running our way. But we have to be quick.'
  +
  +
They carried the coffin through the shattered door. It threatened to stick at its widest point, and Mark lowered his head and shoved. It went through with a wooden scream.
  +
  +
They carried it across to where Jimmy lay, covered with Eva Miller's drapes.
  +
  +
'Here he is, Jimmy,' Ben said. 'Here the bastard is. Set it down, Mark.'
  +
  +
He glanced at his watch again. 6:45. Now the light coming through the kitchen door above them was an ashy gray.
  +
  +
'Now?' Mark asked.
  +
  +
They looked at each other over the coffin.
  +
  +
'Yes,' Ben said.
  +
  +
Mark came around and they stood together in front of the coffin's locks and seals. They bent together, and the locks split as they touched them, making a sound like thin, snapping clapboards. They lifted.
  +
  +
Barlow lay before them, his eyes glaring upward.
  +
  +
He was a young man now, his black hair vibrant and lustrous, flowing over the satin pillow at the head of his narrow apartment. His skin glowed with life. The cheeks were as ruddy as wine. His teeth curved out over his full lips, white with strong streaks of yellow, like ivory.
  +
  +
'He - ' Mark began, and never finished.
  +
  +
  +
---
  +
  +
  +
  +
Barlow's red eyes rolled in their sockets, filling with a hideous life and mocking triumph. They locked with Mark's eyes and Mark gaped down into them, his own eyes growing blank and far away.
  +
  +
'Don't look at him!' Ben cried, but it was too late.
  +
  +
He knocked Mark away. The boy whined deep in his throat and suddenly attacked Ben. Taken by surprise, Ben staggered backward. A moment later the boy's hands were in his coat pocket, digging for Homer McCaslin's pistol.
  +
  +
'Mark! Don't - '
  +
  +
But the boy didn't hear. His face was as blank as a washed blackboard. The whining went on and on in his throat, the sound of a very small trapped animal. He had I! both hands around the pistol. They struggled for it, Ben trying to rip it from the boy's grasp and keep it pointed away from both of them.
  +
  +
'Mark!' he bellowed. 'Mark, wake up! For Christ's sake - '
  +
  +
The muzzle jerked down toward his head and the gun went off. He felt the slug pass by his temple. He wrapped his hands around Mark's and kicked out with one foot. Mark staggered backward, and the gun clattered on the floor between them. The boy leaped at it, whining, and Ben punched him in the mouth with all the stren2th he had. He felt the boy's lips mash back against his teeth and cried out as if he himself had been hit. Mark slipped to his knees, and Ben kicked the gun away. Mark tried to go after it crawling, and Ben hit him again.
  +
  +
With a tired sigh, the boy collapsed.
  +
  +
The strength had left him now, and the sureness. He was only Ben Mears again, and he was afraid.
  +
  +
The square of light in the kitchen doorway had faded to thin purple; his watch said 6:51.
  +
  +
A huge force seemed to be dragging at his head, com?manding him to look at the rosy, gorged parasite in the coffin beside him.
  +
  +
Look and see me, puny man. Look upon Barlow, who has passed the centuries as you have passed hours before a fireplace with a book. Look and see the great creature of the night whom you would slay with your miserable little stick. Look upon me, scribbler. I have written in human lives, and blood has been my ink. Look upon me and despair!
  +
  +
Jimmy, I can't do it. It's too late, he's too strong for me -
  +
  +
?LOOK AT ME!
  +
  +
It was 6:53.
  +
  +
Mark groaned on the floor. 'Mom? Momma, where are you? My head hurts . . . it's dark . . .'
  +
  +
He shall enter my service castratum . . .
  +
  +
Ben fumbled one of the stakes from his belt and dropped it. He cried out miserably, in utter despair. Outside, the sun had deserted Jerusalem's Lot. Its last rays lingered on the roof of the Marsten House.
  +
  +
He snatched the stake up. But where was the hammer? Where was the fucking hammer?
  +
  +
By the root cellar door. He had swung at the padlock with it.
  +
  +
He scrambled across the cellar and picked it up where it lay.
  +
  +
Mark was half sitting, his mouth a bloody gash. He wiped a hand across it and looked dazedly at the blood. 'Momma!' he cried. 'Where's my mother?'
  +
  +
6:55 now. Light and darkness hung perfectly balanced.
  +
  +
Ben ran back across the darkening cellar, the stake clutched in his left hand, the hammer in his right.
  +
  +
There was a booming, triumphant laugh. Barlow was sitting up in his coffin, those red eyes flashing with hellish triumph. They locked with Ben's, and he felt the will draining away from him.
  +
  +
With a mad, convulsive yell, he raised the stake over his head and brought it down in a whistling arc. Its razored point sheared through Barlow's shirt, and he felt it strike into the flesh beneath.
  +
  +
Barlow screamed. It was an eerie, hurt sound, like the howl of a wolf. The force of the stake slamming home drove him back into the coffin on his back. His hands rose out of it, hooked into claws, waving crazily.
  +
  +
Ben brought the hammer down on the top of the stake, and Barlow screamed again. One of his hands, as cold as the grave, seized Ben's left hand, which was locked around the stake.
  +
  +
Ben wriggled into the coffin, his knees planted on Barlow's knees. He stared down into the hate and pain?-driven face.
  +
  +
'Let me GO!' Barlow cried.
  +
  +
'Here it comes, you bastard,' Ben sobbed. 'Here it is, leech. Here it is for you.'
  +
  +
He brought the hammer down again. Blood splashed upward in a cold gush, blinding him momentarily. Barlow's head lashed from side to side on the satin pillow.
  +
  +
'Let me go, you dare not, you dare not, you dare not do this - '
  +
  +
He brought the hammer down again and again. Blood burst from Barlow's nostrils. His body began to jerk in the coffin like a stabbed fish. The hands clawed at Ben's cheeks, pulling long gouges in his skin.
  +
  +
'LET ME GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO - '
  +
  +
He brought the hammer down on the stake once more, and the blood that pulsed from Barlow's chest turned black.
  +
  +
Then, dissolution.
  +
  +
It came in the space of two seconds, too fast to ever be believed in the daylight of later years, yet slow enough to recur again and again in nightmares, with awful stop?motion slowness.
  +
  +
The skin yellowed, coarsened, blistered like old sheets of canvas. The eyes faded, filmed white, fell in. The hair went white and fell like a drift of feathers. The body inside the dark suit shriveled and retreated. The mouth widened gapingly as the lips drew back and drew back, meeting the nose and disappearing in an oral ring of jutting teeth. The fingernails went black and peeled off, and then there were only bones, still dressed with rings, clicking and clenching like castanets. Dust puffed through the fibers of the linen shirt. The bald and wrinkled head became a skull. The pants, with nothing to fill them out, fell away to broom?sticks clad in black silk. For a moment a hideously ani?mated scarecrow writhed beneath him, and Ben lunged out of the coffin with a strangled cry of horror. But it was impossible to tear the gaze away from Barlow's last metamorphosis; it hypnotized. The fleshless skull whipped from side to side on the satin pillow. The nude jawbone opened in a soundless scream that had no vocal cords to power it. The skeletal fingers danced and clicked on the dark air like marionettes.
  +
  +
Smells struck his nose and then vanished, each in a light little puff: gas; putrescence, horrid and fleshy; a moldy library smell; acrid dust; then nothing. The twisting, pro?testing finger bones shredded and flaked away like pencils. The nasal cavity of the skull widened and met the oral cavity. The empty eye sockets widened in a fleshless ex?pression of surprise and horror, met, and were no more. The skull caved in like an ancient Ming vase. The clothes settled flat and became as neutral as dirty laundry.
  +
  +
And still there was no end to its tenacious hold on the world - even the dust billowed and writhed in tiny dust devils within the coffin. And then, suddenly, he felt the passage of something which buffeted past him like a strong wind, making him shudder. At the same instant, every window of Eva Miller's boardinghouse blew out?ward.
  +
  +
'Look out, Ben!' Mark screamed. 'Look out!'
  +
  +
He whirled over on his back and saw them coming out of the root cellar - Eva, Weasel, Mabe, Grover, and the others. Their time was on the world.
  +
  +
Mark's screams echoed in his ears like great fire bells, and he grabbed the boy by the shoulders.
  +
  +
'The holy water!' he yelled into Mark's tormented face. 'They can't touch us!'
  +
  +
Mark's cries turned to whimpers.
  +
  +
'Go up the board,' Ben said. 'Go on.' He had to turn the boy to face it, and then slap his bottom to make him climb. When he was sure the boy was going up, he turned back and looked at them, the Undead.
  +
  +
They were standing passively some fifteen feet away, looking at him with a flat hate that was not human.
  +
  +
'You killed the Master,' Eva said, and he could almost believe there was grief in her voice. 'How could you kill the Master?'
  +
  +
'I'll be back,' he told her. 'For all of you.'
  +
  +
He went up the board, climbing bent over, using his hands. It groaned under his weight, but held. At the top, he spared one glance back down. They were gathered around the coffin now, looking in silently. They reminded him of the people who had gathered around Miranda's body after the accident with the moving van.
  +
  +
He looked around for Mark, and saw him lying by the porch door, on his face.
  +
  +
50
  +
  +
Ben told himself that the boy had just fainted, and nothing more. It might be true. His pulse was strong and regular. He gathered him in his arms and carried him out to the Citro?n.
  +
  +
He got behind the wheel and started the engine. As he pulled out onto Railroad Street, delayed reaction struck him like a physical blow, and he had to stifle a scream.
  +
  +
They were in the streets, the walking dead.
  +
  +
Cold and hot, his head full of a wild roaring sound, he turned left on Jointner Avenue and drove out of 'salem's Lot.
  +
  +
  +
  +
----
  +
  +
  +
  +
1
  +
  +
Mark woke up a little at a time, letting the Citro?n's steady hum bring him back without thought or memory. At last he looked out the window, and fright took him in rough hands. It was dark. The trees at the sides of the road were vague blurs, and the cars that passed them had their parking lights and headlights on. A gagging, inarticulate groan escaped him, and he clawed at his neck for the cross that still hung there.
  +
  +
'Relax,' Ben said. 'We're out of town. It's twenty miles behind us.'
  +
  +
The boy reached over him, almost making him swerve, and locked the driver's side door. Whirling, he locked his own door. Then he crouched slowly down in a ball on his side of the seat. He wished the nothingness would come back. The nothingness was nice. Nice nothingness with no nasty pictures in it.
  +
  +
The steady sound of the Citro?n's engine was soothing. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Nice. He closed his eyes.
  +
  +
'Mark?'
  +
  +
Safer not to answer.
  +
  +
'Mark, are you all right?'
  +
  +
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
  +
  +
' - mark - '
  +
  +
Far away. That was all right. Nice nothingness came back, and shades of gray swallowed him.
  +
  +
2
  +
  +
Ben checked them into a motel just across the New Hampshire state line, signing the register Ben Cody and Son, scrawling it. Mark walked into the room holding his cross out. His eyes darted from side to side in their sockets like small, trapped beasts. He held the cross until Ben had closed the door, locked it, and hung his own cross from the doorknob. There was a color TV and Ben watched it for a while. Two African nations had gone to war. The President had a cold but it wasn't considered serious. And a man in Los Angeles had gone berserk and shot fourteen people. The weather forecast was for rain - snow flurries in northern Maine.
  +
  +
3
  +
  +
'Salem's Lot slept darkly, and the vampires walked its streets and country roads like a trace memory of evil. Some of them had emerged enough from the shadows of death to have regained some rudimentary cunning. Lawrence Crockett called up Royal Snow and invited him over to the office to play some cribbage. When Royal pulled up front and walked in, Lawrence and his wife fell on him. Glynis Mayberry called Mabel Werts, said she was fright?ened, and asked if she could come over and spend the evening with her until her husband got back from Water?ville. Mabel agreed with almost pitiful relief, and when she opened the door ten minutes later, Glynis was standing there stark naked, her purse over her arm, grinning with huge, ravenous incisors. Mabel had time to scream, but only once. When Delbert Markey stepped out of his de?serted tavern just after eight o'clock, Carl Foreman and a grinning Homer McCaslin stepped out of the shadows and said they had come for a drink. Milt Crossen was visited at his store just after closing time by a number of his most faithful customers and oldest cronies. And George Middler visited several of the high school boys who bought things at his store and always had looked at him with a mixture of scorn and knowledge; and his darkest fantasies were satisfied.
  +
  +
Tourists and through-travelers still passed by on Route 12, seeing nothing of the Lot but an Elks billboard and a thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed sign. Outside of town they went back up to sixty and perhaps dismissed it with a single thought: Christ, what a dead little place.
  +
  +
The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.
  +
  +
4
  +
  +
Ben drove back the next day at dawn, leaving Mark in the motel room. He stopped at a busy hardware store in Westbrook and bought a spade and a pick.
  +
  +
'Salem's Lot lay silent under a dark sky from which rain had not yet begun to fall. Few cars moved on the streets. Spencer's was open but now the Excellent Caf�� was shut up, all the green blinds drawn, the menus removed from the windows, the small daily special chalk board erased clean.
  +
  +
The empty streets made him feel cold in his bones, and an image came to mind, an old rock 'n' roll album with a picture of a transvestite on the front, profile shot against a black background, the strangely masculine face bleeding with rouge and paint; title: 'They Only Come Out at Night.'
  +
  +
He went to Eva's first, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and pushed the door to his room open. Just the same as he had left it, the bed unmade, an open roll of Life Savers on his desk. There was an empty tin wastebasket under the desk and he pulled it out into the middle of the floor.
  +
  +
He took his manuscript, threw it in, and made a paper spill of the title page. He lit it with his Cricket, and when it flared up he tossed it in on top of the drift of typewritten pages. The flame tasted them, found them good, and began to crawl eagerly over the paper. Corners charred, turned upward, blackened. Whitish smoke began to billow out of the wastebasket, and without thinking about it, he leaned over his desk and opened the window.
  +
  +
His hand found the paperweight - the glass globe that had been with him since his boyhood in his nighted town - grabbed unknowing in a dreamlike visit to a monster's house. Shake it up and watch the snow float down.
  +
  +
He did it now, holding it up before his eyes as he had as a boy, and it did its old, old trick. Through the floating snow you could see a little gingerbread house with a path leading up to it. The gingerbread shutters were closed, but as an imaginative boy (as Mark Petrie was now), you could fancy that one of the shutters was being folded back (as indeed, one of them seemed to be folding back now) by a long white hand, and then a pallid face would be looking out at you, grinning with long teeth, inviting you into this house beyond the world in its slow and endless fantasy-land of false snow, where time was a myth. The face was looking out at him now, pallid and hungry, a face that would never look on daylight or blue skies again.
  +
  +
It was his own face.
  +
  +
He threw the paperweight into the corner and it shat?tered.
  +
  +
He left without waiting to see what might leak out of it.
  +
  +
5
  +
  +
He went down into the cellar to get Jimmy's body, and that was the hardest trip of all. The coffin lay where it had the night before, empty even of dust. Yet . . . not entirely empty. The stake was in there, and something else. He felt his gorge rise. Teeth. Barlow's teeth - all that was left of him. Ben reached down, picked them up - and they twisted in his hand like tiny white animals, trying to come together and bite.
  +
  +
With a disgusted cry he threw them outward, scattering them.
  +
  +
'God,' he whispered, rubbing his hand against his shirt 'Oh, my dear God. Please let that be the end. Let it be the end of him.'
  +
  +
6
  +
  +
Somehow he managed to get Jimmy, still bundled up in Eva's drapes, out of the cellar. He tucked the bundle into the trunk of Jimmy's Buick and then drove out to the Petrie house, the pick and shovel resting next to Jimmy's black bag in the back seat. In a wooded clearing behind the Petrie house and close to the babble of Taggart Stream, he spent the rest of the morning and half the afternoon digging a wide grave four feet deep. Into it he put Jimmy's body and the Petries, still wrapped in the sofa dust cover.
  +
  +
He began filling in the grave of these clean ones at two-thirty. He began to shovel faster and faster as the light began its long drain from the cloudy sky. Sweat that was not wholly from exertion condensed on his skin.
  +
  +
The hole was filled in by four. He tamped in the sods as well as he could, and drove back to town with the earth-clotted pick and shovel in the trunk of Jimmy's car. He parked it in front of the Excellent Caf��, leaving the keys in the ignition.
  +
  +
He paused for a moment, looking around. The deserted business buildings with their false fronts seemed to lean crepitatingly over the street. The rain, which had started around noon, fell softly and slowly, as if in mourning. The little park where he had met Susan Norton was empty and forlorn. The shades of the Municipal Building were drawn. A 'Be back soon' sign hung in the window of Larry Crock?ett's Insurance and Real Estate office with hollow jaunti?ness. And the only sound was soft rain.
  +
  +
He walked up toward Railroad Street, his heels clicking emptily on the sidewalk. When he got to Eva's, he paused by his car for a moment, looking around for the last time.
  +
  +
Nothing moved.
  +
  +
The town was dead. All at once he knew it for sure and true, just as he had known for sure that Miranda was dead when he had seen her shoe lying in the road.
  +
  +
He began to cry.
  +
  +
He was still crying when he drove past the Elks sign, which read: 'You are now leaving Jerusalem's Lot, a nice little town. Come again!'
  +
  +
He got on the turnpike. The Marsten House was blotted out by the trees as he went down the feeder ramp. He began to drive south toward Mark, toward his life.
  +
  +
---
  +
  +
  +
  +
1
  +
  +
From a scrapbook kept by Ben Mears (all clippings from the Portland 'Press-Herald'):
  +
  +
November 19, 1975 (p. 27):
  +
  +
JERUSALEM'S LOT - The Charles V. Pritchett family, who bought a farm in the Cumberland County town of Jerusalem's Lot only a month ago, are moving out because things keep going bump in the night, according to Charles and Amanda Pritchett, who moved here from Portland. The farm, a local landmark on Schoolyard Hill, was previously owned by Charles Griffen. Griffen's father was the owner of Sunshine Dairy, Inc., which was absorbed by the Slewfoot Dairy Corporation in 1962. Charles Griffen, who sold the farm through a Portland realtor for what Pritchett called 'a bargain basement price', could not be reached for comment. Amanda Pritchett first told her husband about the 'funny noises' in the hayloft shortly after . . .
  +
  +
January 4, 1976 (p. 1):
  +
  +
JERUSALEM'S LOT - A bizarre car crash occurred last night or early this morning in the small southern Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot. Police theorize from skid marks found near the scene that the car, a late-model sedan, was traveling at an excessive speed when it left the road and struck a Central Maine Power utility pole. The car was a total wreck, but although blood was found on the front seat and the dashboard, no passengers have yet been found. Police say that the car was registered to Mr Gordon Phillips of Scarborough. According to a neighbor, Phillips and his family had been on their way to see relatives in Yarmouth. Police theorize that Phillips, his wife, and their two children may have wand?ered off in a daze and become lost. Plans for a search have been . . .
  +
  +
February 14, 1976 (p. 4):
  +
  +
CUMBERLAND - Mrs Fiona Coggins, a widow who lived alone on the Smith Road in West Cumberland, was reported missing this morning to the Cumberland County sheriff's office by her niece, Mrs Gertrude Hersey. Mrs Hersey told police officers that her aunt was a shut-in and is in poor health. Sheriff's deputies are investigating, but claim that at this point it is imposs?ible to say what . . .
  +
  +
February 2 7, 1976 (p. 6):
  +
  +
FALMOUTH - John Farrington, an elderly farmer and lifelong Falmouth resident was found dead in his barn early this morning by his son-in-law, Frank Vickery. Vickery said Farrington was lying face down outside a low haymow, a pitchfork near one hand. County Medi?cal Examiner David Rice says Farrington apparently died of a massive hemorrhage, or perhaps internal bleed?ing . . .
  +
  +
May 20, 1976 (p. 17):
  +
  +
PORTLAND - Cumberland County game wardens have been instructed by the Maine State Wildlife Service to be on the lookout for a wild dog pack that may be running in the Jerusalem's Lot-Cumberland-Falmouth area. During the last month, several sheep have been found dead with their throats and bellies mangled. In some cases, sheep have been disemboweled. Deputy Game Warden Upton Pruitt said 'As you know, this situation has worsened a good deal in southern Maine . . .
  +
  +
May 29, 1976 (p. 1):
  +
  +
JERUSALEM 'S LOT - Possible foul play is suspected in the disappearance of the Daniel Holloway family, who had moved into a house on the Taggart Stream Road in this small Cumberland County township recently. Police were alerted by Daniel Holloway's grandfather, who became alarmed at the repeated failure of anyone to answer his telephone calls.
  +
  +
The Holloways and their two children moved onto the Taggart Stream Road in April, and had complained to both friends and relatives of hearing 'funny noises' after dark.
  +
  +
Jerusalem's Lot has been at the center of several strange occurrences during the last several months, and a great many families have . . .
  +
  +
June 4, 1976 (p.2):
  +
  +
CUMBERLAND - Mrs Elaine Tremont, a widow who owns a small house on the Back Stage Road in the western part of this small Cumberland County village, was admitted to Cumberland Receiving Hospital early this morning with a heart attack. She told a reporter from this paper that she had heard a scratching noise at her bedroom window while she was watching television, and looked up to see a face peering in at her.
  +
  +
'It was grinning,' Mrs Tremont said. 'It was horrible. I've never been so frightened in my life. And since that family was killed just a mile away on the Taggart Stream Road, I've been frightened all the time.'
  +
  +
Mrs Tremont referred to the Daniel Holloway family, who disappeared from their Jerusalem's Lot residence some time early last week. Police said the connection was being investigated, but . . .
  +
  +
2
  +
  +
The tall man and the boy arrived in Portland in mid-?September and stayed at a local motel for three weeks. They were used to heat, but after the dry climate of Los Zapatos, they both found the high humidity enervating. They both swam in the motel pool a great deal and watched the sky a great deal. The man got the Portland Press-Herald every day, and now the copies were fresh, unmarked by time or dog urine. He read the weather forecasts and he watched for items concerning Jerusalem's Lot. On the ninth day of their stay in Portland, a man in Falmouth disappeared. His dog was found dead in the yard. Police were looking into it.
  +
  +
The man rose early on October 6 and stood in the forecourt of the motel. Most of the tourists were gone now, back to New York and New Jersey and Florida, to Ontario and Nova Scotia, to Pennsylvania and California. The tourists left their litter and their summer dollars and the natives to enjoy their state's most beautiful season.
  +
  +
This morning there was something new in the air. The smell of exhaust from the main road was not so great. There was no haze on the horizon, and no ground fog lying milkily around the legs of the billboard in the field across the way. The morning sky was very clear, and the air was chill. Indian summer seemed to have left overnight.
  +
  +
The boy came out and stood beside him.
  +
  +
The man said: 'Today.'
  +
  +
3
  +
  +
It was almost noon when they got to the 'salem's Lot turnoff, and Ben was reminded achingly of the day he had arrived here determined to exorcise all the demons that had haunted him, and confident of his success. That day had been warmer than this, the wind had not been so strong out of the west, and Indian summer had only been beginning. He remembered two boys with fishing poles. The sky today was a harder blue, colder.
  +
  +
The car radio proclaimed that the fire index was at five, its second-highest reading. There had been no significant rainfall in southern Maine since the first week of Sep?tember. The deejay on WJAB cautioned drivers to crush their smokes and then played a record about a man who was going to jump off a water tower for love.
  +
  +
They drove down Route 12 past the Elks sign and were on Jointner Avenue. Ben saw at once that the blinker was dark. No need of a warning light now.
  +
  +
Then they were in town. They drove through it slowly, and Ben felt the old fear drop over him, like a coat found in the attic which has grown tight but still fits. Mark sat rigidly beside him, holding a vial of holy water brought all the way from Los Zapatos. Father Gracon had presented him with it as a going-away present.
  +
  +
With the fear came memories: almost heartbreaking.
  +
  +
They had changed Spencer's Sundries to a LaVerdiere's, but it had fared no better. The closed windows were dirty and bare. The Greyhound bus sign was gone. A for-sale sign had fallen askew in the window of the Excellent Caf6, and all the counter stools had been uprooted and ferried away to some more prosperous lunchroom. Up the street the sign over what had once been a Laundromat still read 'Barlow and Straker - Fine Furnishings,' but now the gilt letters were tarnished and they looked out on empty sidewalks. The show window was empty, the deep-pile carpet dirty. Ben thought of Mike Ryerson and wondered if he was still lying in the crate in the back room. The thought made his mouth dry.
  +
  +
Ben slowed at the crossroads. Up the hill he could see the Norton house, the grass grown long and yellow in front and behind it, where Bill Norton's brick barbecue had stood. Some of the windows were broken.
  +
  +
Further up the street he pulled in to the curb and looked into the park. The War Memorial presided over a jungle-like growth of bushes and grass. The wading pool had been choked by summer waterweeds. The green paint on the benches was flaked and peeling. The swing chairs had rusted, and to ride in one would produce squealing noises unpleasant enough to spoil the fun. The slippery slide had fallen over and Jay with its legs sticking stiff y out, like a dead antelope. And perched in one corner of the sandbox, a floppy arm trailing on the grass, was some child's forgotten Raggedy Andy doll. Its shoe-button eyes seemed to reflect a black, vapid horror, as if it had seen all the secrets of darkness during its long stay in the sandbox. Perhaps it had.
  +
  +
He looked up and saw the Marsten House, its shutters still closed, looking down on the town with rickety malevol?ence. It was harmless now, but after dark . . .
  +
  +
The rains would have washed away the wafer with which Callahan had sealed it. It could be theirs again if they wanted it, a shrine, a dark lighthouse overlooking this shunned and deadly town. Did they meet up there? he wondered. Did they wander, pallid, through its nighted halls and hold revels, twisted services to the Maker of their Maker?
  +
  +
He looked away, cold.
  +
  +
Mark was looking at the houses. In most of them the shades were drawn; in others, uncovered windows looked in on empty rooms. They were worse than those decently closed, Ben thought. They seemed to look out at these daylight interlopers with the vapid stares of mental defectives.
  +
  +
'They're in those houses,' Mark said tightly. 'Right now in all those houses. Behind the shades. In beds and closet! and cellars. Under the floors. Hiding.'
  +
  +
'Take it easy,' Ben said.
  +
  +
The village dropped behind them. Ben turned onto the Brooks Road and they drove past the Marsten House - its shutters still sagging, its lawn a complex maze of knee-high witch grass and goldenrod.
  +
  +
Mark pointed, and Ben looked. A path had been beaten across the grass, beaten white. It cut across the lawn from the road to the porch. Then it was behind them, and he felt a loosening in his chest. The worst had been faced and was behind them.
  +
  +
Far out on the Burns Road, not too far distant from the Harmony Hill graveyard, Ben stopped the car and they got out. They walked into the woods together. The undergrowth snapped harshly, dryly, under their feet. There was a gin-sharp smell of juniper berries and the sound of late locusts. They came out on a small, knoll-like prominence of land that looked down on a slash through the woods where the Central Maine Power lines twinkled in the day's cool windiness. Some of the trees were beginning to show color.
  +
  +
'The old-timers say this is where it started,' Ben said. 'Back in 1951. The wind was blowing from the west. They think maybe a guy got careless with a cigarette. One little cigarette. It took off across the Marshes and no one could stop it.'
  +
  +
Malls from his pocket, looked at the emblem thoughtfully - in hoc signo vinces - and then tore the cellophane off. He lit one and shook out the match. The cigarette tasted surprisingly good, although he had not smoked in months.
  +
  +
'They have their places,' he said. 'But they could lose them. A lot of them could be killed . . . or destroyed. That's a better word. But not all of them. Do you understand?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Mark said.
  +
  +
'They're not very bright. If they lose their hiding places, they'll hide badly the second time. A couple of people just looking in obvious places could do well. Maybe it could be finished in 'salem's Lot by the time the first snow flew. Maybe it would never be finished. No guarantee, one way or the other. But without . . . something . . . to drive them out, to upset them, there would be no chance at all.'
  +
  +
'Yes.'
  +
  +
'It would be ugly and dangerous.'
  +
  +
'I know that.'
  +
  +
'But they say fire purifies,' Ben said reflectively. 'Purification should count for something, don't you think?'
  +
  +
'Yes,' Mark said again.
  +
  +
Ben stood up. 'We ought to go back.'
  +
  +
He flicked the smoldering cigarette into a pile of dead brush and old brittle leaves. The white ribbon of smoke rose thinly against the green background of junipers for two or three feet, and then was pulled apart by the wind. Twenty feet away, downwind, was a large, jumbled deadfall.
  +
  +
They watched the smoke, transfixed, fascinated.
  +
  +
It thickened. A tongue of flame appeared. A small popping noise issued from the pile of dead brush as twigs caught.
  +
  +
'Tonight they won't be running sheep or visiting farms.' Ben said softly. 'Tonight they'll be on the run. And tomorrow - '
  +
  +
'You and me,' Mark said, and closed his fist. His face was no longer pale; bright color glowed there. His eye flashed.
  +
  +
They went back to the road and drove away
  +
  +
In the small clearing overlooking the power lines, the fire in the brush began to burn more strongly, urged by the autumn wind that blew from the west.
  +
  +
October 1972
  +
  +
June 1975
  +
  +
  +
  +
  +
  +
  +
</ref>
 
[[Category:Characters]]
 
[[Category:Characters]]
 
[[Category:Males]]
 
[[Category:Males]]

Revision as of 21:46, 1 June 2016

Mark Petrie is a young boy and resident of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine. He is one of the first to realize that vampires are beginning to overtake the town.

He goes to the Marsten House with the intention of killing Kurt Barlow, accompanied by Susan Norton. Unfortunately the plan fails. He escapes, but Susan is caught and turned into a vampire.

Mark accompanies Susan's love Ben Mears and Donald Callahan on their quest to stop the vampires. In the end, Mark and Ben are the only survivors and are forced to flee the town.

Appearance

He is described as wearing steel-rimmed glasses. He is as tall as Richie Boddin, so he toward over most of his classmates. He was slender and his face looked defenceless and bookish.



[1]

  1. 10:00 A.M. It was recess time at Stanley Street Elementary School, which was the Lot's newest and proudest school building. It was a low, glassine four-classroom building that the school district was still paying for, as new and bright and modern as the Brock Street Elementary School was old and dark. Richie Boddin, who was the school bully and proud of it, stepped out onto the playground grandly, eyes searching for that smart-ass new kid 'who knew all the answers in math. No new kid came waltzing into his school without knowing who was boss. Especially some four-eyes queer?boy teacher's pet like this one. Richie was eleven years old and weighed 140 pounds. All his life his mother had been calling on people to see what a huge young man her son was. And so he knew he was big. Sometimes he fancied that he could feel the? ground tremble underneath his feet when he walked. And when he grew up he was going to smoke Camels, just like his old man, The fourth- and fifth-graders were terrified of him, and the smaller kids regarded him as a schoolyard totem. When he, moved on to the seventh grade at Brock Street School, their pantheon would be empty of its devil. All this pleased him immensely. And there was the Petrie kid, waiting to be chosen up for the recess touch football game. 'Hey!' Richie yelled. Everyone looked around except Petrie. Every eye had a glassy sheen on it, and every pair of eyes showed relief when they saw that Richie's rested elsewhere. 'Hey you! Four-eyes!' Mark Petrie turned and looked at Richie. His steel-rimmed glasses flashed in the morning sun. He was as tall as Richie, which meant he towered over most of his classmates, but he was slender and his face looked defenseless and bookish. 'Are you speaking to me?' "'Are you speaking to me?" Richie mimicked, his voice a high falsetto. 'You sound like a queer, four-eyes. You know that?' 'No, I didn't know that,' Mark Petrie said. Richie took a step forward. 'I bet you suck, you know that, four-eyes? I bet you suck the old hairy root.' 'Really?' His polite tone was infuriating. 'Yeah, I heard you really suck it. Not just Thursdays for you. You can't wait. Every day for you.' Kids began to drift over to watch Richie stomp the new boy. Miss Holcomb, who was playground monitor this week, was out front watching the little kids on the swings and seesaws. 'What's your racket?' Mark Petrie asked. He was looking at Richie as if he had discovered an interesting new beetle. "'What's your racket?" Richie mimicked falsetto. 'I ain't got no racket. I just heard you were a big fat queer, that's all.' 'Is that right?' Mark asked, still polite. 'I heard that you were a big clumsy stupid turd, that's what I heard.' Utter silence. The other boys gaped (but it was an interested gape; none of them had ever seen a fellow sign his own death warrant before). Richie was caught entirely by surprise and gaped with the rest. Mark took off his glasses and handed them to the boy next to him. 'Hold these, would you?' The boy took them and goggled at Mark silently. Richie charged. It was a slow, lumbering charge, with not a bit of grace or finesse in it. The ground trembled under his feet. He was filled with confidence and the clear, joyous urge to stomp and break. He swung his haymaker right, which would catch ole four-eyes queer-boy right in the mouth and send his teeth flying like piano keys. Get ready for the dentist, queer-boy. Here I come. Mark Petrie ducked and sidestepped at the same instant. The haymaker went over his head. Richie was pulled halfway around by the force of his own blow, and Mark had only to stick out a foot. Richie Boddin thumped to the ground. He grunted. The crowd of watching children went 'Aaaah.' Mark knew perfectly well that if the big, clumsy boy on the ground regained the advantage, he would be beaten up badly. Mark was agile, but agility could not stand up for long in a schoolyard brawl. In a street situation this would have been the time to run, to outdistance his slower pursuer, then turn and thumb his nose. But this wasn't the street or the city, and he knew perfectly well that if he didn't whip this big ugly turd now the harassment would never stop. These thoughts went through his mind in a fifth of a second. He jumped on Richie Boddin's back. Richie grunted. The crowd went 'Aaaah' again. Mark grabbed Richie's arm, careful to get it above the shirt cuff so he couldn't sweat out of his grip, and twisted it behind Richie's back. Richie screamed in pain. 'Say uncle,' Mark told him. Richie's reply would have pleased a twenty-year Navy man. Mark yanked Richie's arm no to his shoulder blades, and Richie screamed again. He was filled with indignation, fright, and puzzlement. This had never happened to him before. It couldn't be happening now. Surely no four-eyes queer-boy could be sitting on his back and twisting his arm and making him scream before his subjects. 'Say uncle,' Mark repeated. Richie heaved himself to his knees; Mark squeezed his own knees into Richie's sides, like a man riding a horse bareback, and stayed on. They were both covered with dust, but Richie was much the worse for wear. His face was red and straining, his eyes bulged, and there was a scratch on his cheek. He tried to dump Mark over his shoulders, and Mark yanked upward on the arm again. This time Richie didn't scream. He wailed. 'Say uncle, or so help me God I'll break it.' Richie's shirt had pulled out of his pants. His belly felt hot and scratched. He began to sob and wrench his shoulders from side to side. Yet the hateful four-eyes queer-boy stayed on. His forearm was ice, his shoulder fire. 'Get off me, you son of a whore! You don't fight fair!' An explosion of pain. 'Say uncle.' 'No!' He overbalanced on his knees and went face-down in the dust. The pain in his arm was paralyzing. He was eating dirt. There was dirt in his eyes. He thrashed his legs helplessly. He had forgotten about being huge. He had forgotten about how the ground trembled under his feet when he walked. He had forgotten that he was going to smoke Camels, just like his old man, when he grew up. 'Uncle! Uncle! Uncle!' Richie screamed. He felt that he could go on screaming uncle for hours, for days, if it would get his arm back. 'Say: "I'm a big ugly turd."' 'I'm a big ugly turd!' Richie screamed into the dirt. 'Good enough.' Mark Petrie got off him and stepped back warily out of reach as Richie got up. His thighs hurt from squeezing them together. He hoped that all the fight was out of Richie. If not, he was going to get creamed. Richie got up. He looked around. No one met his eyes. They turned away and went back to whatever they had been doing. That stinking Glick kid was standing next to the queer-boy and looking at him as though he were some kind of God. Richie stood by himself, hardly able to believe how quickly his ruination had come. His face was dusty except where it had been streaked clean with his tears of rage and shame. He considered launching himself at Mark Petrie. Yet his shame and fear, new and shining and huge, would not allow it. Not yet. His arm ached like a rotted tooth. Son of a whoring dirty fighter. If I ever land on you and get you down - But not today. He turned away and walked off and the ground didn't tremble a bit. He looked at the ground so he wouldn't have to look anyone in the face. Someone on the girl's side laughed - a high, mocking sound that carried with cruel clarity on the morning air. He didn't took up to see who was laughing at him.

    'You be home early,' Marjorie Glick said to her eldest son, Danny. 'School tomorrow. I want your brother in bed by quarter past nine.'

    Danny shuffled his feet. 'I don't see why I have to take him at all.'

    'You don't,' Marjorie said with dangerous pleasantness. 'You can always stay home.'

    She turned back to the counter, where she was freshening fish, and Ralphie stuck out his tongue. Danny made a fist and shook it, but his putrid little brother only smiled.

    'We'll be back,' he muttered and turned to leave the kitchen, Ralphie in tow.

    'By nine.'

    'Okay, okay.'

    In the living room Tony Glick was sitting in front of the TV with his feet up, watching the Red Sox and the Yankees. 'Where are you going, boys?'

    'Over to see that new kid,' Danny said. 'Mark Petrie.' 'Yeah,' Ralphie said. 'We're gonna look at his electric trains.'

    Danny cast a baleful eye on his brother, but their father noticed neither the pause nor the emphasis. Doug Griffen had just struck out. 'Be home early,' he said absently.

    Outside, afterlight still lingered in the sky, although sunset had passed. As they crossed the back yard Danny said, 'I ought to beat the stuff out of you, punko.'

    'I'll tell,' Ralphie said smugly. 'I'll tell why you really wanted to go.'

    'You creep,' Danny said hopelessly.

    At the back of the mowed yard, a beaten path led down the slope to the woods. The Glick house was on Brock Street, Mark Petrie's on South Jointner Avenue. The path was a short cut that saved considerable time if you were twelve and nine years old and willing to pick your way across the Crockett Brook stepping stones. Pine needles and twigs crackled under their feet. Somewhere in the woods, a whippoorwill sang, and crickets chirred all around them.

    Danny had made the mistake of telling his brother that Mark Petrie had the entire set of Aurora plastic monsters - wolfman, mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, the mad doc?tor, and even the Chamber of Horrors. Their mother thought all that stuff was bad news, rotted your brains or something, and Danny's brother had immediately turned blackmailer. He was putrid, all right.


    ---

    Danny and Ralphie Glick had gone out to see Mark Petrie with orders to be in by nine, and when they hadn't come home by ten past, Marjorie Glick called the Petrie house. No, Mrs Petrie said, the boys weren't there. Hadn't been there. Maybe your husband had better talk to Henry. Mrs Glick handed the phone to her husband, feeling the lightness of fear in her belly.


    ---

    They came up Burns Road in a long line, twisting up and out of sight over the next hill. All the cars had their lights turned on in spite of the day's brilliance. First came Carl Foreman's hearse, its rear windows filled with flowers, then Tony Glick's 1965 Mercury, its deteriorating muffler bellowing and farting. Behind that, in the next four cars, came relatives on both sides of the family, one bunch from as far away as Tulsa, Oklahoma. Others in that long, lights-on parade included: Mark Petrie (the boy Ralphie and Danny had been on their way to see the night Ralphie disappeared) and his mother and father; Richie Boddin and family; Mabel Werts in a car containing Mr and Mrs William Norton (sitting in the back seat with her cane planted between her swelled legs, she talked with unceas?ing constancy about other funerals she had attended all the way back to 1930); Lester Durham and his wife, Harriet; Paul Mayberry and his wife, Glynis; Pat Middler, Joe Crane, Vinnie Upshaw, and Clyde Corliss, all riding in a car driven by Milt Crossen (Milt had opened the beer cooler before they left, and they had all shared out a solemn six-pack in front of the stove); Eva Miller in a car which also contained her close friends Loretta Starcher and Rhoda Curless, who were both maiden ladies; Parkins Gillespie and his deputy, Nolly Gardener, riding in the Jerusalem's Lot police car (Parkins's Ford with a stick-on dashboard bubble); Lawrence Crockett and his sallow wife; Charles Rhodes, the sour bus driver, who went to all funerals on general principles; the Charles Griffen family, including wife and two sons, Hat and Jack, the only off?spring still living at home.

    ---


    Mark Petrie was working on a model of Frankenstein's monster in his room and listening to his parents down in the living room. His room was on the second floor of the farmhouse they had bought on South Jointner Avenue, and although the house was heated by a modern oil furnace now, the old second-floor grates were still there. Orig?inally, when the house had been heated by a central kitchen stove, the warm-air grates had kept the second floor from becoming too cold - although the woman who had orig?inally lived in this house with her dour Baptist husband from 1873 to 1896 had still taken a hot brick wrapped in flannel to bed with her - but now the grates served another purpose. They conducted sound excellently.

    Although his parents were down in the living room, they might as well have been discussing him right outside the door.

    Once, when his father had caught him listening at the door in their old house - Mark had only been six then ?his father had told him an old English proverb: Never listen at a knothole lest you be vexed. That meant, his father said, that you may hear something about yourself that you don't like.

    Well, there was another one, too. Forewarned is fore?armed.

    At age twelve, Mark Petrie was a little smaller than the average and slightly delicate-looking. Yet he moved with a grace and litheness that is not the common lot of boys his age, who seem mostly made up of knees and elbows and scabs. His complexion was fair, almost milky, and his features, which would be considered aquiline later in life, now seemed a trifle feminine. It had caused him some trouble even before the Richie Boddin incident in the schoolyard, and he had determined to handle it himself. He had made an analysis of the problem. Most bullies, he had decided, were big and ugly and clumsy. They scared people by being able to hurt them. They fought dirty. Therefore, if you were not afraid of being hurt a little, and if you were willing to fight dirty, a bully might be bested. Richie Boddin had been the first full vindication of his theory. He and the bully at the Kittery Elementary School had come off even (which had been a victory of a kind; the Kittery bully, bloody but unbowed, had proclaimed to the schoolyard community at large that he and Mark Petrie were pals. Mark, who thought the Kittery bully was a dumb piece of shit, did not contradict him. He understood discretion.). Talk did no good with bullies. Hurting was the only language that the Richie Boddins of the world seemed to understand, and Mark supposed that was why the world always had such a hard time getting along. He had been sent from school that day, and his father had been very angry until Mark, resigned to his ritual whipping with a rolled - up magazine, told him that Hitler had just been a Richie Boddin at heart. That had made his father laugh like hell, and even his mother snickered. The whip?ping had been averted.

    Now June Petrie was saying: 'Do you think it's affected him, Henry?'

    'Hard . . . to tell.' And Mark knew by the pause that his father was lighting his pipe. 'He's got a hell of a poker face.'

    'Still waters run deep, though.' She paused. His mother was always saying things like still waters run deep or it's a long, long road that has no turning. He loved them both dearly, but sometimes they seemed just as ponderous as the books in the folio section of the library . . . and just as dusty.

    'They were on their way to see Mark,' she resumed. 'To play with his train set . . . now one dead and one missing! Don't fool yourself, Henry. The boy feels something.'

    'He's got his feet pretty solidly planted on the ground,' Mr Petrie said. 'Whatever his feelings are, I'm sure he's got them in hand.'

    Mark glued the Frankenstein m6nster's left arm into the shoulder socket. It was a specially treated Aurora model that glowed green in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus he had gotten for memorizing all of the 119th Psalm in Sunday school class in Kittery.

    'I've sometimes thought we should have had another,' his father was saying. 'Among other things, it would have been good for Mark.'

    And his mother, in an arch tone: 'Not for lack of trying, dear.'

    His father grunted.

    There was a long pause in the conversation. His father, he knew, would be rattling through The Wall Street Journal. His mother would be holding a novel by Jane Austen on her lap, or perhaps Henry James. She read them over and over again, and Mark was darned if he could see the sense in reading a book more than once. You knew how it was going to end.

    'D'you think it's safe to let him go in the woods behind the house?' his mother asked presently. 'They say there's quicksand somewhere in town - '

    'Miles from here.'

    Mark relaxed a little and glued the monster's other arm on. He had a whole table of Aurora horror monsters, arranged in a scene that he changed each time a new element was added. It was a pretty good set. Danny and Ralphie had really been coming to see that the night when . . . whatever.

    'I think it's okay,' his father said. 'Not after dark, of course.'

    'Well, I hope that awful funeral won't give him nightmares.'

    Mark could almost see his father shrug. 'Tony Glick . . . unfortunate. But death and grief are part of living. Time he got used to the idea.'

    'Maybe.' Another long pause. What was coming now? he wondered. The child is the father of the man, maybe. Or as the twig is bent the tree is shaped. Mark glued the monster onto his base, which was a grave mound with a leaning headstone in the background. 'In the midst of life we're in death. But I may have nightmares.'

    'Oh?'

    'That Mr Foreman must be quite an artist, grisly as it sounds. He really looked as if he was just asleep. That any second he might open his eyes and yawn and . . . I don't know why these people insist on torturing themselves with open-coffin services. It's . . . heathenish.'

    'Well, it's over.'

    'Yes, I suppose. He's a good boy, isn't he, Henry?'

    'Mark? The best.'

    Mark smiled.

    'Is there anything on TV?'

    'I'll look.'

    Mark turned the rest off; the serious discussion was done. He set his model on the window sill to dry and harden. In another fifteen minutes his mother would be calling up for him to get ready for bed. He took his pajamas out of the top dresser drawer and began to undress.

    In point of fact, his mother was worrying needlessly about his psyche, which was not tender at all. There was no particular reason why it should have been; he was a typical boy in most ways, despite his economy and his gracefulness. His family was upper middle class and still upwardly mobile, and the marriage of his parents was sound. They loved each other firmly, if a little stodgily. There had never been any great trauma in Mark's life. The few school fights had not scarred him. He got along with his peers and in general wanted the same things they wanted.

    If there was anything that set him apart, it was a reservoir of remoteness, of cool self-control. No one had inculcated it in him; he seemed to have been born with it. When his pet dog, Chopper, had been hit by a car, he had insisted on going with his mother to the vet's. And when the vet had said, The dog has got to be put to sleep, my boy. Do you understand why? Mark said, You're not going to put him to sleep. You're going to gas him to death, aren't you? The vet said yes. Mark told him to go ahead, but he had kissed Chopper first. He had felt sorry but he hadn't cried and tears had never been close to the surface. His mother had cried but three days later Chopper was in the dim past to her, and he would never be in the dim past for Mark. That was the value in not crying. Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.

    He had been shocked by the disappearance of Ralphie Glick, and shocked again by Danny's death, but he had not been frightened. He had heard one of the men in the store say that probably a sex pervert had gotten Ralphie. Mark knew what perverts were. They did something to you that got their rocks off and when they were done they strangled you (in the comic books, the guy getting strangled always said Arrrgggh) and buried you in a gravel pit or under the boards of a deserted shed. If a sex pervert ever offered him candy, he would kick him in the balls and then run like a split streak.

    'Mark?' His mother's voice, drifting up the stairs. 'I am,' he said, and smiled again.

    'Don't forget your ears when you wash.'

    'I won't.'

    He went downstairs to kiss them good night, moving lithely and gracefully, sparing one glance backward to the table where his monsters rested in tableau: Dracula with his mouth open, showing his fangs, was menacing a girl lying on the ground while the Mad Doctor was torturing a lady on the rack and Mr Hyde was creeping up on an old guy walking home.

    Understand death? Sure. That was when the monsters got you.



    ---


    Something had awakened him.

    He lay still in the ticking dark, looking at the ceiling.

    A noise. Some noise. But the house was silent.

    There it was again. Scratching.

    Mark Petrie turned over in bed and looked through the window and Danny Glick was staring in at him through the glass, his skin grave-pale, his eyes reddish and feral.

    Some dark substance was smeared about his lips and chin, and when he saw Mark looking at him, he smiled and showed teeth grown hideously long and sharp.

    'Let me in,' the voice whispered, and Mark was not sure if the words had crossed dark air or were only in his mind.

    He became aware that he was frightened - his body had known before his mind. He had never been so frightened, not even when he got tired swimming back from the float at Popham Beach and thought he was going to drown. His mind, still that of a child in a thousand ways, made an accurate judgment of his position in seconds. He was in peril of more than his life.

    'Let me in, Mark. I want to play with you.'

    There was nothing for that hideous entity outside the window to hold onto; his room was on the second floor and there was no ledge. Yet somehow it hung suspended in space . . . or perhaps it was clinging to the outside shingles like some dark insect.

    'Mark . . . I finally came, Mark. Please . . . '

    Of course. You have to invite them inside. He knew that from his monster magazines, the ones his mother was afraid might damage or warp him in some way.

    He got out of bed and almost fell down. It was only then that he realized fright was too mild a word for this. Even terror did not express what he felt. The pallid face outside the window tried to smile, but it had lain in darkness too long to remember precisely how. What Mark saw was a twitching grimace - a bloody mask tragedy.

    Yet if you looked in the eyes, it wasn't so bad. If you looked in the eyes, you weren't so afraid anymore and you saw that all you had to do was open the window and say, 'C'mon in, Danny,' and then you wouldn't be afraid at all because you'd be at one with Danny and all of them and at one with him. You'd be -

    No! That's how they get you!

    He dragged his eyes away, and it took all of his will power to do it.

    'Mark, let me in! I command it! He commands it!'

    Mark began to walk toward the window again. There was no help for it. There was no possible way to deny that voice. As he drew closer to the glass, the evil little boy's face on the other side began to twitch and grimace with eagerness. Fingernails, black with earth, scratched across the windowpane.

    Think of something. Quick! Quick!

    'The rain,' he whispered hoarsely. 'The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In vain he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.'

    Danny Glick hissed at him.

    'Mark! Open the window!'

    'Betty Bitter bought some butter - '

    'The window, Mark, he commands it!'

    ' - but, says Betty, this butter's bitter.'

    He was weakening. That whispering voice was seeing through his barricade, and the command was imperative. Mark's eyes fell on his desk, littered with his model mon?sters, now so bland and foolish -

    His eyes fixed abruptly on part of the display and widened slightly.

    The plastic ghoul was walking through a plastic grave?yard and one of the monuments was in the shape of a cross.

    With no pause for thought or consideration (both would have come to an adult - his father, for instance - and both would have undone him), Mark swept up the cross, curled it into a tight fist, and said loudly: 'Come on in, then.'

    The face became suffused with an expression of vulpine triumph. The window slid up and Danny stepped in and took two paces forward. The exhalation from that opening mouth was fetid, beyond description: a smell of charnel pits. Cold, fish-white hands descended on Mark's shoulders. The head cocked, doglike, the upper lip curled away from those shining canines.

    Mark brought the plastic cross around in a vicious swipe and laid it against Danny Glick's cheek.

    His scream was horrible, unearthly . . . and silent. It echoed only in the corridors of his brain and the chambers of his soul. The smile of triumph on the Glick-thing's mouth became a yawning grimace of agony. Smoke spurted from the pallid flesh, and for just a moment, before the creature twisted away and half dived, half fell out the window, Mark felt the flesh yield like smoke.

    And then it was over, as if it had never happened.

    But for a moment the cross shone with a fierce light, as if an inner wire had been ignited. Then it dwindled away, leaving only a blue after-image in front of his eyes.

    Through the grating in the floor, he heard the distinctive Click of the lamp in his parents' bedroom and his father's voice: 'What in hell was that?'

    13

    His bedroom door opened two minutes later, but that was' still time enough to set things to rights.

    'Son?' Henry Petrie asked softly. 'Are you awake?'

    'I guess so,' Mark answered sleepily.

    'Did you have a bad dream?'

    'I . . . think so. I don't remember.

    'You called out in your sleep - '

    'Sorry.'

    'No, don't be sorry.' He hesitated and then earlier memories of his son, a small child in a blue blanket?suit that had been much more trouble but infinitely more explicable: 'Do you want a drink of water?'

    'No thanks, Dad.'

    Henry Petrie surveyed the room briefly, unable to under?stand the trembling feeling of dread he had wakened with, and which lingered still - a feeling of disaster averted by cold inches. Yes, everything seemed all right. The window was shut. Nothing was knocked over.

    'Mark, is anything wrong?'

    'No, Dad.'

    'Well . . . g'night, then.'

    'Night.' The door shut softly and his father's slippered feet descended the stairs. Mark let himself go limp with relief and delayed reaction. An adult might have had hysterics at this point, and a slightly younger or older child might also have done. But Mark felt the terror slip from him in almost imperceptible degrees, and the sensation reminded him of letting the wind dry you after you had been swimming on a cool day. And as the terror left, drowsiness began to come in its place.

    Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting - not for the first time - on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job I the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

    In some shorter, simpler mental shorthand, these thoughts passed through his brain. The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child's rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys.



    ---


    When he first heard the distant snapping of twigs, he crept behind the trunk of a large spruce and stood there, waiting to see who would show up. They couldn't come out in the daytime, but that didn't mean they couldn't get people who could; giving them money was one way, but it wasn't that guy Straker in town, the only way. Mark had seen of a toad sunning itself on and his eyes were like the eyes a rock. He looked like he could break a baby's arm and smile while he did it.

    He touched the heavy shape of his father's target pistol in his jacket pocket. Bullets were no good against them ?except maybe silver ones - but a shot between the eyes would punch that Straker's ticket, all right.

    His eyes shifted downward momentarily to the roughly cylindrical shape propped against the tree, wrapped in an old piece of toweling. There was a woodpile behind his house, half a cord of yellow ash stove lengths which he and his father had cut with the McCulloch chain saw in July and August. Henry Petrie was methodical, and each length, Mark knew, would be within an inch of three feet, one way or the other. His father knew the proper length just as he knew that winter followed fall and that yellow ash would burn longer and cleaner in the living room fireplace.

    His son, who knew other things, knew that ash was for men - things - like him. This morning, while his mother and father were out on their Sunday bird walk, he had taken one of the lengths and whacked one end into a rough point with his Boy Scout hatchet. It was rough, but it would serve.

    He saw a flash of color and shrank back against the tree, peering around the rough bark with one eye. A moment later he got his first clear glimpse of the person climbing the hill. It was a girl. He felt a sense of relief mingled with disappointment. No henchman of the devil there; that was Mr Norton's daughter.

    His gaze sharpened again. She was carrying a stake of her own! As she drew closer, he felt an urge to laugh bitterly - a piece of snow fence, that's what she had. Two swings with an ordinary tool box hammer would split it right in two.

    She was going to pass his tree on the right. As she drew closer, he began to slide carefully around his tree to the left, avoiding any small twigs that might pop and give him away. At last the synchronized little movement was done; her back was to him as she went on up the hill toward the break in the trees. She was going very carefully, he noted with approval. That was good. In spite of the silly snow fence stake, she apparently had some idea of what she was getting into. Still, if she went much further, she was going to be in trouble. Straker was at home. Mark had been here since twelve-thirty, and he had seen Straker go out to the driveway and look down the road and then go back into the house. Mark had been trying to make up his mind on what to do himself when this girl had entered things, upsetting the equation.

    Perhaps she was going to be all right. She had stopped behind a screen of bushes and was crouching there, just looking at the house. Mark turned it over in his mind. Obviously she knew. How didn't matter, but she would not have had even that pitiful stake with her if she didn't know. He supposed he would have to go up and warn her that Straker was still around, and on guard. She probably didn't have a gun, not even a little one like his.

    He was pondering how to make his presence known to her without having her scream her head off when the motor of Straker's car roared into life. She jumped visibly, and at first he was afraid she was going to break and run, crashing through the woods and advertising her presence for a hundred miles. But then she hunkered down again, holding on to the ground like she was afraid it would fly away from her. She's got guts even if she is stupid, he thought, approvingly.

    Straker's car backed down the driveway - she would have a much better view from where she was; he could only see the Packard's black roof - hesitated for a moment, and then went off down the road toward town.

    He decided they had to team up. Anything would be better than going up to that house alone. He had already sampled the poison atmosphere that enveloped it. He had felt it from a half a mile away, and it thickened as you got closer.

    Now he ran lightly up the carpeted incline and put his hand on her shoulder. He felt her body tense, knew she was going to scream, and said, 'Don't yell. It's all right. It's me.'

    She didn't scream. What escaped was a terrified exha?lation of air. She turned around and looked at him, her face white. 'W-Who's me?'

    He sat down beside her. 'My name is Mark Petrie. I know you; you're Sue Norton. My dad knows your dad.'

    'Petrie . . . ? Henry Petrie?'

    'Yes, that's my father.'

    'What are you doing here?' Her eyes were moving continually over him, as if she hadn't been able to take in his actuality yet.

    'The same thing you are. Only that stake won't work. It's too . . . He groped for a word that had checked into his vocabulary through sight and definition but not by use. 'It's too flimsy.'

    She looked down at her piece of snow fence and actu?ally blushed. 'Oh, that. Well, I found that in the woods and . . . and thought someone might fall over it, so I just - '

    He cut her adult temporizing short impatiently: 'You came to kill the vampire, didn't you?'

    'Wherever did you get that idea? Vampires and things like that?'

    He said somberly, 'A vampire tried to get me last night. It almost did, too.'

    'That's absurd. A big boy like you should know better than to make up - '

    'It was Danny Glick.'

    She recoiled, her eyes wincing as if he had thrown a mock punch instead of words. She groped out, found his arm, and held it. Their eyes locked. 'Are you making this up, Mark?'

    'No,' he said, and told his story in a few simple sentences.

    'And you came here alone?' she asked when he had finished. 'You believed it and came up here alone?'

    'Believed it?' He looked at her, honestly puzzled. 'Sure I believed it. I saw it, didn't I?'

    There was no response to that, and suddenly she was ashamed of her instant doubt (no, doubt was too kind a word) of Matt's story and of Ben's tentative acceptance.

    'How come you're here?'

    She hesitated a moment and then said, 'There are some men in town who suspect that there is a man in that house whom no one has seen. That he might be a . . . a . . .' Still she could not say the word, but he nodded his understand?ing. Even on short acquaintance, he seemed quite an extraordinary little boy.

    Abridging all that she might have added, she said simply, 'So I came to look and find out.'

    He nodded at the stake. 'And brought that to pound through him?'

    'I don't know if I could do that.'

    'I could,' he said calmly. 'After what I saw last night. Danny was outside my window, holding on like a great big fly. And his teeth . . .' He shook his head, dismissing the nightmare as a businessman might dismiss a bankrupt client.

    'Do your parents know you're here?' she asked, knowing they must not.

    'No,' he said matter-of-factly. 'Sunday is their nature day. They go on bird walks in the mornings and do other things in the afternoon. Sometimes I go and sometimes I don't. Today they went for a ride up the coast.'

    'You're quite a boy,' she said.

    'No, I'm not,' he said, his composure unruffled by the praise. 'But I'm going to get rid of him.' He looked up at the house.

    'Are you sure - '

    'Sure I am. So're you. Can't you feel how bad he is? Doesn't that house make you afraid, just looking at it?'

    'Yes,' she said simply, giving in to him. His logic was the logic of nerve endings, and unlike Ben's or Matt's, it was resistless.

    'How are we going to do it?' she asked, automatically giving over the leadership of the venture to him.

    'Just go up there and break in,' he said. 'Find him, pound the stake - my stake - through his heart, and get out again. He's probably down cellar. They like dark places. Did you bring a flashlight?'

    'No.'

    'Damn it, neither did I.' He shuffled his sneakered feet aimlessly in the leaves for a moment. 'Probably didn't bring a cross either, did you?'

    'Yes, I did,' Susan said. She pulled the link chain out of her blouse and showed him. He nodded and then pulled a chain out of his own shirt.

    'I hope I can get this back before my folks come home,' he said gloomily. 'I crooked it from my mother's jewelry box. I'll catch hell if she finds out.' He looked around. The shadows had lengthened even as they talked, and they both felt an impulse to delay and delay.

    'When we find him, don't look in his eyes,' Mark told her. 'He can't move out of his coffin, not until dark, but he can still book you with his eyes. Do you know anything religious by heart?'

    They had started through the bushes between the woods and the unkempt lawn of the Marsten House.

    'Well, the Lord's Prayer - '

    'Sure, that's good. I know that one, too. We'll both say it while I pound the stake in.'

    He saw her expression, revolted and half flagging, and he took her hand and squeezed it. His self-possession was disconcerting. 'Listen, we have to. I bet he's got half the town after last night. If we wait any longer, he'll have it all. It will go fast, now.'

    'After last night?'

    'I dreamed it,' Mark said. His voice was still calm, but his eyes were dark. 'I dreamed of them going to houses and calling on phones and begging to be let in. Some people knew, way down deep they knew, but they let them in just the same. Because it was easier to do that than to think something so bad might be real.'

    'Just a dream,' she said uneasily.

    'I bet there's a lot of people lying around in bed today with the curtains closed or the shades drawn, wondering if they've got a cold or the flu or something. They feel all weak and fuzzy-headed. They don't want to eat. The idea of eating makes them want to puke.'

    'How do you know so much?'

    'I read the monster magazines,' he said, 'and go to see the movies when I can. Usually I have to tell my mom I'm going to see Walt Disney. And you can't trust all of it. Sometimes they just make stuff up so the story will be bloodier.'

    They were at the side of the house. Say, we're quite a crew, we believers, Susan thought. An old teacher half-?cracked with books, a writer obsessed with his childhood nightmares, a little boy who has taken a postgraduate course in vampire lore from the films and the modern penny-dreadfuls. And me? Do I really believe? Are para?noid fantasies catching?

    She believed.

    As Mark had said, this close to the house it was just not possible to scoff. All the thought processes, the act of conversation itself, were overshadowed by a more funda?mental voice that was screaming danger! danger! in words that were not words at all. Her heart-beat and respiration were up, yet her skin was cold with the capillary-dilating effect of adrenaline, which keeps the blood hiding deep in the body's wells during moments of stress. Her kidneys were tight and heavy. Her eyes seemed preternaturally sharp, taking in every splinter and paint flake on the side of the house. And all of this had been triggered by no external stimuli at all: no men with guns, no large and snarling dogs, no smell of fire. A deeper watchman than her five senses had been wakened after a long season of sleep. And there was no ignoring it.

    She peered through a break in the lower shutters. 'Why, they haven't done a thing to it,' she said almost angrily. 'It's a mess.'

    'Let me see. Boost me up.'

    She laced her fingers together so he could look through the broken slats and into the crumbling living room of the Marsten House. He saw a deserted, boxy parlor with a thick patina of dust on the floor (many footprints had been tracked through it), peeling wallpaper, two or three old easy chairs, a scarred table. There were cobwebs festooned in the room's upper corners, near the ceiling.

    Before she could protest, he had rapped the hook-and?-eye combination that held the shutter closed with the blunt end of his stake. The lock fell to the ground in two rusty pieces, and the shutters creaked outward an inch or two.

    'Hey!' she protested. 'You shouldn't - '

    'What do you want to do? Ring the doorbell?'

    He accordioned back the right-hand shutter and rapped one of the dusty, wavy panes of glass. It tinkled inward. The fear leaped up in her, hot and strong, making a coppery taste in her mouth.

    'We can still run,' she said, almost to herself.

    He looked down at her and there was no contempt in his glance - only an honesty and a fear that was as great as her own. 'You go if you have to,' he said.

    'No. I don't have to.' She tried to swallow away the obstruction in her throat and succeeded not at all. 'Hurry it up. You're getting heavy.'

    He knocked the protruding shards of glass out of the pane he had broken, switched the stake to his other hand, then reached through and unlatched the window. It moaned slightly as he pushed it up, and then the way was open.

    She let him down and they looked wordlessly at the window for a moment. Then Susan stepped forward, pushed the right-hand shutter open all the way, and put her hands on the splintery windowsill preparatory to boosting herself up. The fear in her was sickening with its greatness, settled in her belly like a horrid pregnancy. At last, she understood how Matt Burke had felt as he had gone up the stairs to whatever waited in his guest room.

    She had always consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fears = unknown. And to solve the equation, one simply reduced the problem to simple algebraic terms, thus: unknown = creaky board (or whatever), creaky board = nothing to be afraid of. In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of equality. Some fears were justified, of course (you don't drive when you're too plowed to see, don't extend the hand of friendship to snarling dogs, don't go parking with boys you don't know - how did the old joke go? Screw or walk?), but until now she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insol?uble. The act of moving forward at all became heroism.

    She boosted herself with a smooth flex of muscles, swung one leg over the sill, and then dropped to the dusty parlor floor and looked around. There was a smell. It oozed out of the walls in an almost visible miasma. She tried to tell herself it was only plaster rot, or the accumulated damp guano of all the animals that had nested behind those broken lathings - woodchucks, rats, perhaps even a rac?coon or two. But it was more. The smell was deeper than animal-stink, more entrenched. It made her think of tears and vomit and blackness.

    'Hey,' Mark called softly. His hands waved above the windowsill. 'A little help.'

    She leaned out, caught him under the armpits, and dragged him up until he had caught a grip on the window?sill. Then he jackknifed himself in neatly. His sneakered feet thumped the carpet, and then the house was still again.

    They found themselves listening to the silence, fasci?nated by it. There did not even seem to be the faint, high hum that comes in utter stillness, the sound of nerve endings idling in neutral. There was only a great dead soundlessness and the beat of blood in their own ears.

    And yet they both knew, of course. They were not alone.

    2

    'Come on,' he said. 'Let's took around.' He clutched the stake very tightly and for just a moment looked longingly back at the window.

    She moved slowly toward the hall and he came after her. Just outside the door there was a small end table with a book on it. Mark picked it up.

    'Hey,' he said. 'Do you know Latin?'

    'A little, from high school.'

    'What's this mean?' He showed her the binding.

    She sounded the words out, a frown creasing her fore?head. Then she shook her head. 'Don't know.'

    He opened the book at random, and flinched. There was a picture of a naked man holding a child's gutted body toward something you couldn't see. He put the book down, glad to let go of it - the stretched binding felt uncomfortably familiar under his hand - and they went down the hallway toward the kitchen together. The shadows were more prominent here. The sun had gotten around to the other side of the house.

    'Do you smell it?' he asked.

    'Yes.'

    'It's worse back here, isn't it?'

    'Yes.'

    He was remembering the cold-pantry his mother had kept in the other house, and how one year three bushel baskets of tomatoes had gone bad down there in the dark. This smell was like that, like the smell of tomatoes decaying into putrescence.

    Susan whispered: 'God, I'm so scared.'

    His hand groped out, found hers, and they locked tightly.

    The kitchen linoleum was old and gritty and pocked, worn black in front of the old porcelain-tub sink. A large, scarred table stood in the middle of the floor, and on it was a yellow plate, a knife and fork, and a scrap of raw hamburger.

    The cellar door was standing ajar.

    'That's where we have to go,' he said.

    'Oh,' she said weakly.

    The door was open just a crack and the light did not penetrate at all. The tongue of darkness seemed to lick hungrily at the kitchen, waiting for night to come so it could swallow it whole. That quarter inch of darkness was hideous, unspeakable in its possibilities. She stood beside Mark, helpless and moveless.

    Then he stepped forward and pulled the door open and stood for a moment, looking down. She saw a muscle jump beneath his jaw.

    'I think - ' he began, and she heard something behind her and turned, suddenly feeling slow, feeling too late. It was Straker. He was grinning.

    Mark turned, saw, and tried to dive around him. Straker's fist crashed into his chin and he knew no more.

    3

    When Mark came to, he was being carried up a flight of stairs - not the cellar stairs, though. There was not that feeling of stone enclosure, and the air was not so fetid. He allowed his eyelids to unclose themselves a tiny fraction, letting his head still loll limply on his neck. A stair landing coming up . . . the second floor. He could see quite clearly. The sun was not down yet. Thin hope, then.

    They gained the landing, and suddenly the arms holding him were gone. He thumped heavily onto the floor, hitting his head.

    'Do you not think I know when someone is playing the possum, young master?' Straker asked him. From the floor he seemed easily ten feet tall. His bald head glistened with a subdued elegance in the gathering gloom. Mark saw with growing terror that there was a coil of rope around his shoulder.

    He grabbed for the pocket where the pistol had been.

    Straker threw back his head and laughed. 'I have taken the liberty of removing the gun, young master. Boys should I not be allowed weapons they do not understand . . . any more than they should lead young ladies to houses where their commerce has not been invited.'

    'What did you do with Susan Norton?'

    Straker smiled. 'I have taken her where she wished to go, my boy. Into the cellar. Later, when the sun goes down, she will meet the man she came here to meet. You will meet him yourself, perhaps later tonight, perhaps tomorrow night. He may give you to the girl, of course . . . but I rather think he'll want to deal with you himself. The girl will have friends of her own, some of them perhaps meddlers like yourself.'

    Mark lashed out with both feet at Straker's crotch, and Straker side-stepped liquidly, like a dancer. At the same moment he kicked his own foot out, connecting squarely with Mark's kidneys.

    Mark bit his lips and writhed on the floor.

    Straker chuckled. 'Come, young master. To your feet.'

    'I . . . I can't.'

    'Then crawl,' Straker said contemptuously. He kicked again, this time striking the large muscle of the thigh. The pain was dreadful, but Mark clenched his teeth together. He got to his knees, and then to his feet.

    They progressed down the hall toward the door at the far end. The pain in his kidneys was subsiding to a dull ache. 'What are you going to do with me?'

    'Truss you like a spring turkey, young master. Later, after my Master holds intercourse with you, you will be set free.'

    'Like the others?'

    Straker smiled.

    As Mark pushed open -the door and stepped into the room where Hubert Marsten had committed suicide, some?thing odd seemed to happen in his mind. The fear did not fall away from it, but it seemed to stop acting as a brake on his thoughts, jamming all productive signals. His thoughts began to flicker past with amazing speed, not in words or precisely images, but in a kind of symbolic shorthand. He felt like a light bulb that has suddenly received a surge of power from no known source.

    The room itself was utterly prosaic. The wallpaper hung in strips, showing the white plaster and sheet rock beneath. The floor was heavily dusted with time and plaster, but there was only one set of footprints in it, suggesting some?one had come up once, looked around, and left again. There were two stacks of magazines, a cast-iron cot with no spring or mattress, and a small tin plate with a faded Currier & Ives design that had once blocked the stove hole in the chimney. The window was shuttered, but enough light filtered dustily through the broken slats to make Mark think there might be an hour of daylight left. There was an aura of old nastiness about the room.

    It took perhaps five seconds to open the door, see these things, and cross to the center of the room where Straker told him to stop. In that short period, his mind raced along three tracks and saw three possible outcomes to the situation he found himself in.

    On one, he suddenly sprinted across the room toward the shuttered window and tried to crash through both glass and shutter like a Western movie hero, taking the drop to whatever lay below with blind hope. In one mental eye he saw himself crashing through only to fall onto a rusty pile of junked farm machinery, twitching away the last seconds of his life impaled on blunt harrow blades like a bug on a pin. In the other eye he saw himself crashing through the glass and into the shutter which trembled but did not break. He saw Straker pulling him back, his clothes torn, his body lacerated and bleeding in a dozen places.

    On the second track, he saw Straker tie him up and leave. He saw himself trussed on the floor, saw the light fading, saw his struggles become more frenzied (but just as useless), and heard, finally, the steady tread on the stairs of one who was a million times worse than Straker.

    On the third track, he saw himself using a trick he had read about last summer in a book on Houdini. Houdini had been a famous magician who had escaped jail cells, chained boxes, bank vaults, steamer trunks thrown into rivers. He could get out of ropes, police handcuffs, and Chinese finger-pullers. And one of the things the book said he did was hold his breath and tighten his hands into fists when a volunteer from the audience was tying him up. You bulged your thighs and forearms and neck muscles, too. If your muscles were big, you had a little slack when you relaxed them. The trick then was to relax completely, and go at your escape slowly and surely, never letting panic hurry you up. Little by little, your body would give you sweat for grease, and that helped, too. The book made it sound very easy.

    'Turn around,' Straker said. 'I am going to tie you up. While I tie you up, you will not move. If you move, I take this' - he cocked his thumb before Mark like a hitchhiker - 'and pop your right eye out. Do you understand?'

    Mark nodded. He took a deep breath, held it, and bunched all his muscles.

    Straker threw his coil of rope over one of the beams.

    'Lie down,' he said.

    Mark did.

    He crossed Mark's hands behind his back and bound them tightly with the rope. He made a loop, slipped it around Mark's neck, and tied it in a hangman's knot. 'You're made fast to the very beam my Master's friend and sponsor in this country hung himself from, young master. Are you flattered?'

    Mark grunted, and Straker laughed. He passed the rope through Mark's crotch, and he groaned as Straker took up the slack with a brutal jerk.

    He chuckled with monstrous good nature. 'So your jewels hurt? They will not for long. You are going to lead an ascetic's life, my boy - a long, long life.'

    He banded the rope over Mark's taut thighs, made the knot tight, banded it again over his knees, and again over his ankles. Mark needed to breathe very badly now, but he held on stubbornly.

    'You're trembling, young master,' Straker said mock?ingly. 'Your body is all in hard little knots. Your flesh is white - but it, will be whiter! Yet you need not be so afraid. My Master has the capacity for kindness. He is much loved, right here in your own town. There is only a little sting, like the doctor's needle, and then sweetness. And later on you will be let free. You will go see your mother and father, yes? You will see them after they sleep.'

    He stood up and looked down at Mark benignly. 'I will say good-by for a bit now, young master. Your lovely consort is to be made comfortable. When we meet again, you will like me better.'

    He left, slamming the door behind him. A key rattled in the lock. And as his feet descended the stairs, Mark Jet out his breath and relaxed his muscles with a great, whooping sigh.

    The ropes holding him loosened - a little.

    He lay moveless, collecting himself. His mind was still flying with that same unnatural, exhilarating speed. From his position, he looked across the swelled, uneven floor to the iron cot frame. He could see the wall beyond it. The wallpaper was peeled away from that section and lay beneath the cot frame like a discarded snake-skin. He focused on a small section of the wall and examined it closely. He flushed everything else from his mind. The book on Houdini said that concentration was all? important. No fear or taint of panic must be allowed in the mind. The body must be completely relaxed. And the escape must take place in the mind before a single finger did so much as twitch. Every step must exist concretely in the mind.

    He looked at the wall, and minutes passed.

    The wall was white and bumpy, like an old drive-i n movie screen. Eventually, as his body relaxed to its greatest degree, he began to see himself projected there, a small boy wearing a blue T-shirt and Levi's jeans. The boy was on his side, arms pulled behind him, wrists nestling the small of the back above the buttocks. A noose looped around his neck, and any hard struggling would tighten that running slipknot inexorably until enough air was cut off to black out the brain.

    He looked at the wall.

    The figure there had begun to move cautiously, although he himself lay perfectly still. He watched all the movements of the simulacrum raptly. He had achieved a level of concentration necessary to the Indian fakirs and yogis, who are able to contemplate their toes or the tips of their noses for days, the state of certain mediums who levitate tables in a state of unconsciousness or extrude long tendrils of teleplasm from the nose, the mouth, the fingertips. His state was close to sublime. He did not think of Straker or the fading daylight. He no longer saw the gritty floor, the cot frame, or even the wall. He only saw the boy, a perfect figure which went through a tiny dance of carefully controlled muscles.

    He looked at the wall.

    And at last he began to move his wrists in half circles toward each other. At the limit of each half circle, the thumb sides of his palms touched. No muscles moved but those in his lower forearms. He did not hurry. He looked at the wall.

    As sweat rose through his pores, his wrists began to turn more freely. The half circles became three-quarters. At the limit of each, the backs of his hands pressed together. The loops holding them had loosened a tiny bit more.

    He stopped.

    After a moment had passed, he began to flex his thumbs against his palms and press his fingers together in a wrig?gling motion. His face was utterly expressionless, the plas?ter face of a department store dummy.

    Five minutes passed. His hands were sweating freely now. The extreme level of his concentration had put him in partial control of his own sympathetic nervous system, another device of yogis and fakirs, and he had, unknow?ingly, gained some control over his body's involuntary functions. More sweat trickled from his pores than his careful movements could account for. His hands had be?come oily. Droplets fell from his forehead, darkening the white dust on the floor.

    He began to move his arms in an up-and-down piston motion, using his biceps and back muscles now. The noose tightened a little, but he could feel one of the loops holding his hands beginning to drag lower on his right palm. It was sticking against the pad of the thumb now, and that was all. Excitement shot through him and he stopped at once until the emotion had passed away completely. When it had, he began again. Up-down. Up-down. Up-down. He gained an eighth of an inch at a time. And suddenly, shockingly, his right hand was free.

    He left it where it was, flexing it. When he was sure it was limber, he eased the fingers under the loop holding the left wrist and tented them. The left hand slid free.

    He brought both hands around and put them on the floor. He closed his eyes for a moment. The trick now was to not think he had it made. The trick was to move with great deliberation.

    Supporting himself with his left hand, he let his right roam over the bumps and valleys of the knot which secured the noose at his neck. He saw immediately that he would have to nearly choke himself to free it - and he was going to tighten the pressure on his testicles, which already throbbed dully.

    He took a deep breath and began to work on the knot. The rope tightened by steady degrees, pressing into his neck and crotch. Prickles of coarse hemp dug into his throat like miniature tattoo needles. The knot defied him for what seemed an endless time. His vision began to fade under the onslaught of large black flowers that burst into soundless bloom before his eyes. He refused to hurry. He wiggled the knot steadily, and at last felt new slack in it. For a moment the pressure on his groin tightened unbearably, and then with a convulsive jerk, he threw the noose over his head and the pain lessened.

    He sat up and hung his head over, breathing raggedly, cradling his wounded testicles in both hands. The sharp pain became a dull, pervading ache that made him feel nauseated.

    When it began to abate a little, he looked over at the shuttered window. The light coming through the broken slats had faded to a dull ocher - it was almost sundown. And the door was locked.

    He pulled the loose loop of rope over the beam, and set to work on the knots that held his legs. They were maddeningly tight, and his concentration had begun to slip away from him as reaction set in.

    He freed his thighs, the knees, and after a seemingly endless struggle, his ankles. He stood up weakly among the harmless loops of rope and staggered. He began to rub his thighs.

    There was a noise from below: footsteps.

    He looked up, panicky, nostrils dilating. He hobbled over to the window and tried to lift it. Nailed shut, with rusted tenpennies bent over the cheap wood of the half sill like staples.

    The feet were coming up the stairs.

    He wiped his mouth with his hand and stared wildly around the room. Two bundles of magazines. A small tin plate with a picture of an 1890s summer picnic on the back. The iron cot frame.

    He went to it despairingly and pulled up one end. And some distant gods, perhaps seeing how much luck he had manufactured by himself, doled out a little of their own.

    The steps had begun down the hall toward the door when he unscrewed the steel cot leg to its final thread and pulled it free.

    4

    When the door opened, Mark was standing behind it with the bed leg upraised, like a wooden Indian with a tomahawk.

    'Young master, I've come to - '

    He saw the empty coils of rope and froze for perhaps one full second in utter surprise. He was halfway through the door.

    To Mark, things seemed to have slowed to the speed of a football maneuver seen in instant replay. He seemed to have minutes rather than bare seconds to aim at the one-quarter skull circumference visible beyond the edge of the door.

    He brought the leg down with both hands, not as hard as he could - he sacrificed some force for better aim. It struck Straker just above the temple, as he started to turn to look behind the door. His eyes, open wide, squeezed shut in pain. Blood flew from the scalp in an amazing spray.

    Straker's body recoiled and he stumbled backward into the room. His face was twisted into a terrifying grimace. He reached out and Mark hit him again. This time the pipe struck his bald skull just above the bulge of the forehead, and there was another gout of blood. ?He went down bonelessly, his eyes rolling up in his head. Mark skirted the body, looking at it with eyes that were bulging and wide. The end of the bed leg was painted with blood. It was darker than Technicolor movie blood. Looking at it made him feet sick, but looking at Straker made him feel nothing.

    I killed him, he thought. And on the heels of that: Good. Good.

    Straker's hand closed around his ankle.

    Mark gasped and tried to pull his foot away. The hand held fast like a steel trap and now Straker was looking up at him, his eyes cold and bright through a dripping mask of blood. His lips were moving, but no sound came out. Mark pulled harder, to no avail. With a half groan, he began to hammer at Straker's clutching hand with the bed leg. Once, twice, three times, four. There was the awful pencil sound of snapping fingers. The hand loosened, and he pulled free with a yank that sent him stumbling out through the doorway and into the hall.

    Straker's head had dropped to the floor again, but his mangled hand opened and closed on the air with tenebrous vitality, like the jerking of a dog's paws in dreams of cat-chasing.

    The bed leg fell from his nerveless fingers and he backed away, trembling. Then panic took him and he turned and fled down the stairs, leaping two or three at a time on his numb legs, his hand skimming the splintered banister.

    The front hall was shadow-struck, horribly dark.

    He went into the kitchen, casting lunatic, shying glances at the open cellar door. The sun was going down in a blazing mullion of reds and yellows and purples. In a funeral parlor sixteen miles distant, Ben Mears was watching the clock as the hands hesitated between 7:01 and 7:02.

    Mark knew nothing of that, but he knew the vampire's time was imminent. To stay longer meant confrontation on top of confrontation; to go back down into that cellar and try to save Susan meant induction into the ranks of the Undead.

    Yet he went to the cellar door and actually walked down the first three steps before his fear wrapped him in almost physical bonds and would allow him to go no further. He was weeping, and his body was trembling wildly, as if with ague.

    'Susan!' he screamed. 'Run!'

    'M - Mark?' Her voice, sounding weak and dazed. 'I can't see. It's dark - '

    There was a sudden booming noise, like a hollow gun?shot, followed by a profound and soulless chuckle.

    Susan screamed . . . a sound that trailed away to a moan and then to silence.

    Still he paused, on feather-feet that trembled to blow him away.

    And from below came a friendly voice, amazingly like his father's: 'Come down, my boy. I admire you' '

    The power in the voice alone was so great that he felt the fear ebbing from him, the feathers in his feet turning to lead. He actually began to grope down another step before he caught hold of himself - and the catching hold took all the ragged discipline he had left.

    'Come down,' the voice said, closer now. It held, be?neath the friendly fatherliness, the smooth steel of com?mand.

    Mark shouted down: 'I know your name! It's Barlow!'

    And fled.

    By the time he reached the front hall the fear had come on him full again, and if the door had not been unlocked he might have burst straight through the center of it, leaving a cartoon cutout of himself behind.

    He fled down the driveway (much like that long-ago boy Benjaman Mears) and then straight down the center of the Brooks Road toward town and dubious safety. Yet might not the king vampire come after him, even now?

    He swerved off the road and made his way blunderingly through the woods, splashi ' ng through Taggart Stream and failing in a tangle of burdocks on the other side, and finally out into his own back yard.

    He walked through the kitchen door and looked through the arch into the living room to where his mother, with worry written across her face in large letters, was talking into the telephone with the directory open on her lap.

    She looked up and saw him, and relief spread across her face in a physical wave.

    ' - here he is - '

    She set the phone into its cradle without waiting for a response and walked toward him. He saw with greater sorrow than she would have believed that she had been crying.

    'Oh, Mark . . . where have you been?'

    'He's home?' His father called from the den. His face, unseen, was filling with thunder.

    'Where have you been?' She caught his shoulders and shook them.

    'Out,' he said wanly. 'I fell down running home.'

    There was nothing else to say. The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.

    He added: 'The time got away from me. It - '

    Then his father, descending upon him.

    5

    Some time in the darkness before Monday's dawn.

    Scratching at the window.

    He came up from sleep with no pause, no intervening period of drowsiness or orientation. The insanities of sleep and waking had become remarkably similar.

    The white face in the darkness outside the glass was Susan's.

    'Mark . . . let me in.'

    He got out of bed. The floor was cold under his bare feet. He was shivering.

    'Go away,' he said tonelessly. He could see that she was still wearing the same blouse, the same slacks. I wonder if her folks are worried, he thought. If they've called the police.

    'It's not so bad, Mark,' she said, and her eyes were flat and obsidian. She smiled, showing her teeth, which shone in sharp relief below her pale gums. 'It's ever so nice. Let me in, I'll show you. I'll kiss you, Mark. I'll kiss you all over like your mother never did.'

    'Go away,' he repeated.

    'One of us will get you sooner or later,' she said. 'There are lots more of us now. Let it be me, Mark. I'm . . . I'm hungry.' She tried to smile, but it turned into a nightshade grimace that made his bones cold.

    He held up his cross and pressed it against the window.

    She hissed, as if scalded, and let go of the window frame. For a moment she hung suspended in air, her body becoming misty and indistinct. Then, gone. But not before he saw (or thought he saw) a look of desperate unhappiness on her face.

    The night was still and silent again.

    There are lots more of us now.

    His thoughts turned to his parents, sleeping in thought?less peril below him, and dread gripped his bowels.

    Some men knew, she had said, or suspected.

    Who?

    The writer, of course. The one she dated. Mears, his name was. He lived at Eva's boardinghouse. Writers knew a lot. It would be him. And he would have to get to Mears before she did -

    He stopped on his way back to bed.

    If she hadn't already.

    ---

    When Ben came downstairs at quarter to nine, Eva Miller said from the sink, 'There's someone waiting to see you on the porch.'

    He nodded and went out the back door, still in his slippers, expecting to see either Susan or Sheriff McCaslin. But the visitor was a small, economical boy sitting on the top step of the porch and looking out over the town, which was coming slowly to its Monday morning vitality.

    'Hello?' Ben said, and the boy turned around quickly-

    They looked at each other for no great space of time, but for Ben the moment seemed to undergo a queer stretching, and a feeling of unreality swept him. The boy reminded him physically of the boy he himself had been, but it was more than that. He seemed to feel a weight settle onto his neck, as if in a curious way he sensed the more-than-chance coming together of their lives. It made him think of the day he had met Susan in the park, and how their light, get-acquainted conversation had seemed queerly heavy and fraught with intimations of the future.

    Perhaps the boy felt something similar, for his eyes widened slightly and his hand found the porch railing, as if for support.

    'You're Mr Mears,' the boy said, not questioning.

    'Yes. You have the advantage, I'm afraid.'

    'My name is Mark Petrie,' the boy said. 'I have some bad news for you.'

    And I bet he does, too, Ben thought dismally, and tried to tighten his mind against whatever it might be - but when it came, it was a total, shocking surprise.

    'Susan Norton is one of them,' the boy said. 'Barlow got her at the house. But I killed Straker. At least, I think I did.'

    Ben tried to speak and couldn't. His throat was locked.

    The boy nodded, taking charge effortlessly. 'Maybe we could go for a ride in your car and talk. I don't want anyone to see me around. I'm playing hooky and I'm already in dutch with my folks.'

    Ben said something - he didn't know what. After the motorcycle accident that had killed Miranda, he had picked himself up off the pavement shaken but unhurt (except for a small scratch across the back of his left hand, mustn't forget that, Purple Hearts had been awarded for less) and the truck driver had walked over to him, casting two shadows in the glow of the streetlight and the head lamps of the truck - he was a big, balding man with a pen in the breast pocket of his white shirt, and stamped in gold letters on the barrel of the pen he could read 'Frank's Mobil Sta' and the rest was hidden by the pocket, but Ben had guessed shrewdly that the final letters were 'tion', elementary, my dear Watson, elementary. The truck driver had said something to Ben, he didn't remember what, and then he took Ben's arm gently, trying to lead him away. He saw one of Miranda's flat-heeled shoes lying near the large rear wheels of the moving van and had shaken the trucker off and started toward it and the trucker had taken two steps after him and said, I wouldn't do that, buddy. And Ben had looked up at him dumbly, unhurt except for the small scratch across the back of his left hand, wanting to tell the trucker that five minutes ago this hadn't happened, wanting to tell the trucker that in some parallel world he and Miranda had taken a left at the corner one block back and were riding into an entirely different future. A crowd was gathering, coming out of a liquor store on one comer and a small milk-and-sandwich bar on the other. And he had begun to feel then what he was feeling now: the complex and awful mental and physical interaction that is the begin?ning of acceptance, and the only counterpart to that feeling is rape. The stomach seems to drop. The lips become numb. A thin foam forms on the roof of the mouth. There is a ringing noise in the ears. The skin on the testicles seems to crawl and tighten. The mind goes through a turning away, a hiding of its face, as from a light too brilliant to bear. He had shaken off the well-meaning truck driver's hands a second time and had walked over to the shoe. He picked it up. He turned it over. He placed his hand inside it, and the insole was still warm from her foot. Carrying it, he had gone two steps further and had seen her sprawled legs under the truck's front wheels, clad in the yellow Wranglers she had pulled on with such careless and laughing ease back at the apartment. It was impossible to believe that the girl who had pulled on those slacks was dead, yet the acceptance was there, in his belly, his mouth, his balls. He had groaned aloud, and that was when the tabloid photographer had snapped his picture for Mabel's paper. One shoe off, one shoe on. People looking at her bare foot as if they had never seen one before. He had taken two steps away and leaned over and -

    ?'I'm going to be sick,' he said.

    'That's all right.'

    Ben stepped behind his Citro?n and doubled over, hold?ing on to the door handle. He closed his eyes, feeling dark?ness wash over him, and in the darkness Susan's face appeared, smiling at him and looking at him with those lovely deep eyes. He opened his eyes again. It occurred to him that the kid might be lying, or mixed up, or an out-and?-out psycho. Yet the thought brought him no hope. The kid was not set up like that. He turned back and looked into the kid's face and read concern there - nothing else.

    'Come on,' he said.

    The boy got in the car and they drove off. Eva Miller watched them go from the kitchen window, her brow creased. Something bad was happening. She felt it, was filled with it, the same way she had been filled with an obscure and cloudy dread on the day her husband died.

    She got up and dialed Loretta Starcher. The phone rang over and over without answer until she put it back in the cradle. Where could she be? Certainly not at the library. It was closed Mondays.

    She sat, looking pensively at the telephone. She felt that some great disaster was in the wind - perhaps something as terrible as the fire of '51.

    At last she picked up the phone again and called Mabel Werts, who was filled with the gossip of the hour and eager for more. The town hadn't known such a weekend in years.

    4

    Ben drove aimlessly and without direction as Mark told his story. He told it well, beginning with the night Danny Glick had come to his window and ending with his noctur?nal visitor early this morning.

    'Are you sure it was Susan?' he asked. Mark Petrie nodded.

    Ben pulled an abrupt U-turn and accelerated back up Jointner Avenue.

    'Where are you going? To the - '

    'Not there. Not yet.

    5

    'Wait. Stop.'

    Ben pulled over and they got-out together. They had been driving slowly down the Brooks Road, at the bottom of Marsten's Hill. The wood-road where Homer McCaslin had spotted Susan's Vega. They had both caught the glint of sun on metal. They walked up the disused road together, not speaking. There were deep and dusty wheel ruts, and the grass grew high between them. A bird twitted somewhere.

    They found the car shortly.

    Ben hesitated, then halted. He felt sick to his stomach again. The sweat on his arms was old.

    'Go look,' he said.

    Mark went down to the car and leaned in the driver's side window. 'Keys are in it,' he called back.

    Ben began to walk toward the car and his foot kicked something. He looked down and saw a .38 revolver lying in the dust. He kicked it up and turned it over in his hands. It looked very much like a police issue revolver.

    'Whose gun?' Mark asked, walking toward him. He had Susan's keys in his hand.

    'I don't know.' He checked the safety to be sure it was on, and then put the gun in his pocket.

    Mark offered him the keys and Ben took them and walked toward the Vega, feeling like a man in a dream. His hands were shaking and he had to poke twice before he could get the right key into the trunk slot. He twisted it and pulled the back deck up without allowing himself to think.

    They looked in together. The trunk held a spare tire, a jack, and nothing else. Ben felt his breath come out in a rush.

    'Now?' Mark asked.

    Ben didn't answer for a moment. When he felt that his voice would be under control, he said, 'We're going to see a friend of mine named Matt Burke, who is in the hospital. He's been researching vampires.'

    The urgency in the boy's gaze remained. 'Do you believe me?'

    'Yes,' Ben said, and hearing the word on the air seemed to confirm it and give it weight. It was beyond recall. 'Yes, I believe you.'

    'Mr Burke is from the high school, isn't he? Does he know about this?'

    'Yes. So does his doctor.'

    'Dr Cody?'

    'Yes.'

    They were both looking at the car as they spoke, as if it were a relic of some dark, lost race which they had dis?covered in these sunny woods to the west of town. The trunk gaped open like a mouth, and as Ben slammed it shut, the dull thud of its latching echoed in his heart.

    'And after we talk,' he said, 'we're going up to the Marsten House and get the son of a bitch who did this.' Mark looked at him without moving. 'It may not be as easy as you think. She will be there, too. She's his now.'

    'He is going to wish he never saw 'salem's Lot,' he said softly. 'Come on.'

    6

    They arrived at the hospital at nine-thirty, and Jimmy Cody was in Matt's room. He looked at Ben, unsmiling, and then his eyes flicked to Mark Petrie with curiosity.

    'I've got some bad news for you, Ben. Sue Norton has disappeared.'

    'She's a vampire,' Ben said flatly, and Matt grunted from his bed.

    'Are you sure of that?' Jimmy asked sharply.

    Ben cocked his thumb at Mark Petrie and introduced him. 'Mark here had a little visit from Danny Glick on Saturday night. He can tell you the rest.'

    Mark told it from beginning to end, just as he had told Ben earlier.

    Matt spoke first when he had finished. 'Ben, there are no words to say how sorry I am.'

    'I can give you something if you need it,' Jimmy said.

    'I know what medicine I need, Jimmy. I want to move against this Barlow today. Now. Before dark.'

    'All right,' Jimmy said. 'I've canceled all my calls. And I phoned the county sheriff s office. McCaslin is gone, too.'

    'Maybe that explains this,' Ben said, and took the pistol out of his pocket and dropped it onto Matt's bedside table. It looked strange and out of place in the hospital room.

    'Where did you get this?' Jimmy asked, picking it up.

    'Out by Susan's car.'

    'Then I can guess. McCaslin went to the Norton house sometime after he left us. He got the story on Susan, including the make, model, and license number of her car. Went out cruising some of the back roads, just on the off-chance. And - '

    Broken silence in the room. None of them needed it filled.

    'Foreman's is still closed,' Jimmy said. 'And a lot of the old men who hang around Crossen's have been complain?ing about the dump. No one has seen Dud Rogers for a week.'

    They looked at each other bleakly.

    'I spoke with Father Callahan last night,' Matt said. 'He has agreed to go along, providing you two - plus Mark, of course - will stop at this new shop and talk to Straker first.'

    'I don't think he'll be talking to anyone today,' Mark said quietly.

    'What did you find out about them?' Jimmy asked Matt.

    'Anything useful?'

    'Well, I think I've put some of the pieces together. Straker must be this thing's human watchdog and body?guard . . . a kind of human familiar. He must have been in town long before Barlow appeared. There were certain rites to be performed, in propitiation of the Dark Father. Even Barlow has his Master, you see.' He looked at them somberly. 'I rather suspect no one will ever find a trace of Ralphie Glick. I think he was Barlow's ticket of admission. Straker took him and sacrificed him.'

    'Bastard,' Jimmy said distantly.

    'And Danny Glick?' Ben asked.

    'Straker bled him first,' Matt said. 'His Master's gift. First blood for the faithful servant. Later, Barlow would have taken over that job himself. But Straker performed another service for his Master before Barlow ever arrived. Do any of you know what?'

    For a moment there was silence, and then Mark said quite distinctly, 'The dog that man found on the cemetery gate.'

    'What?' Jimmy said. 'Why? Why would he do that?'

    'The white eyes,' Mark said, and then looked questioningly at Matt, who was nodding with some surprise.

    'All last night I nodded over these books, not knowing we had a scholar in our midst.' The boy blushed a little. 'What Mark says is exactly right. According to several of the standard references on folklore and the supernatural, one way to frighten a vampire away is to paint white 'angel eyes' over the real eyes of a black dog. Win's Doc was all black except for two white patches. Win used to call them his headlights - they were directly over his eyes. He let the dog run at night. Straker must have spotted it, killed it, and then hung it on the cemetery gate.'

    'And how about this Barlow?' Jimmy asked. 'How did he get to town?'

    Matt shrugged. 'I have no way of telling. I think that we must assume, in line with the legends, that he is old . . . very old. He may have changed his name a dozen times, or a thousand. He may have been a native of almost every country in the world at one time or another, although I suspect his origins may have been Romanian or Magyar or Hungarian. It doesn't really matter how he got to town anyway . . . although I wouldn't be surprised to find out Larry Crockett had a hand in it. He's here. That's the important thing.

    'Now, here is what you must do: Take a stake when you go. And a gun, in case Straker is still alive. Sheriff McCaslin's revolver will serve the purpose. The stake must pierce the heart or the vampire may rise again. Jimmy, you can check that. When you have staked him you must cut off his head, stuff the mouth with garlic, and turn it face down in the coffin. In most vampire fiction, Hollywood and otherwise, the staked vampire mortifies almost in?stantly into dust. This may not happen in real life. If it doesn't, you must weight the coffin and throw it into ?running water. I would suggest the Royal River. Do you have questions?'

    There were none.

    'Good. You must each carry a vial of holy water and a bit of the Host. And you must each have Father Callahan hear your confession before you go.'

    'I don't think any of us are Catholic,' Ben said.

    'I am,' Jimmy said. 'Nonpracticing.'

    'Nonetheless, you will make a confession and an act of contrition. Then you go pure, washed in Christ's blood . . . clean blood, not tainted.'

    'All right,' Ben said.

    'Ben, had you slept with Susan? Forgive me, but - '

    'Yes,' he said.

    'Then you must pound the stake - first into Barlow, then into her. You are the only person in this little party who has been hurt personally. You will act as her husband. And you mustn't falter. You'll be releasing her.'

    'All right,' he said again.

    'Above all' - his glance swept all of them - 'you must not look in his eyes! If you do, he'll catch you and turn you against the others, even at the expense of your own life.

    Remember Floyd Tibbits! That makes it dangerous to carry a gun, even if it's necessary. Jimmy, you take it, and hang back a little. If you have to examine either Barlow or Susan, give it to Mark.'

    'Understood,' Jimmy said.

    'Remember to buy garlic. And roses, if you can. Is that little flower shop in Cumberland still open, Jimmy?'

    'The Northern Belle? I think so. '

    'A white rose for each of you. Tie them in your hair or around your neck. And I'll repeat myself - don't look in his eyes! I could keep you here and tell you a hundred other things, but you better go along. It's ten o'clock already, and Father Callahan may be having second thoughts. My best wishes and my prayers go with you. Praying is quite a trick for an old agnostic like me, too. But I don't think I'm as agnostic as I once was. Was it Carlyle who said that if a man dethrones God in his heart, then Satan must ascend to His position?'

    No one answered, and Matt sighed. 'Jimmy, I want a closer look at your neck.'

    Jimmy stepped to the bedside and lifted his chin. The wounds were obviously punctures, but they had both scabbed over and seemed to be healing nicely.

    'Any pain? Itching?' Matt asked.

    'No.'

    'You were very lucky,' he said, looking at Jimmy soberly.

    'I'm starting to think I was luckier than I'II ever know.' Matt leaned back in his bed. His face looked drawn, the eyes deeply socketed. 'I will take the pill Ben refused, if you please.'

    'I'll tell one of the nurses.'

    'I'll sleep while you go about your work,' Matt said. 'Later there is another matter . . . well, enough of that.' His eyes shifted to Mark. 'You did a remarkable thing yesterday, boy. Foolish and reckless, but remarkable.'

    'She paid for it,' Mark said quietly, and clasped his hands together in front of him. They were trembling.

    'Yes, and you may have to pay again. Any of you, or all of you. Don't underestimate him' And now, if you don't mind, I'm very tired. I was reading most of the night. Call me the very minute the work is done.'

    They left. In the hall Ben looked at Jimmy and said, 'Did be remind you of anyone?'

    'Yes,' Jimmy said. 'Van Helsing.'

    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 mil?dewed 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 con?fessional, 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 Command?ments 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 hate?fulness 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 con?fession 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 ciga?rettes, 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.

    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 configur?ation 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 mo?ment 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 hesi?tantly.

    '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 out?ward, 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. 'Some?thing'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 over?head 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. 'Hang?ing 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 envel?ope, and they crowded around. Jimmy focused his flash?light 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 com?patriots 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 M��doc 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 conver?sational 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 ciga?rette 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.

    15

    Beyond the table where the letter had been propped the cellar made an L-turn, and they were now in what once had been a wine cellar. Hubert Marsten must have been a bootlegger indeed, Ben thought. There were small and medium casks covered with dust and cobwebs. One wall was covered with a crisscrossed wine rack, and ancient magnums still peered forth from some of the diamond?-shaped pigeonholes. Some of them had exploded, and where sparkling burgundy had once waited for some dis?cerning palate, the spider now made his home. Others had undoubtedly turned to vinegar; that sharp odor drifted in the air, mingled with that of slow corruption.

    'No,' Ben said, speaking quietly, as a man speaks a fact. 'I can't.'

    'You must,' Father Callahan said. 'I'm not telling you it will be easy, or for the best. Only that you must.'

    'I can't!' Ben cried, and this time the words echoed in the cellar.

    In the center, on a raised dais and spotlighted by Jimmy's flashlight, Susan Norton lay still. She was covered from shoulders to feet in a drift of simple white linen, and when they reached her, none of them had been able to speak. Wonder had swallowed words.

    In life she had been a cheerfully pretty girl who had missed the turn to beauty somewhere (perhaps by inches), not through any lack in her features but - just possibly ?because her life had been so calm and unremarkable. But now she had achieved beauty. Dark beauty.

    Death had not put its mark on her. Her face was blushed with color, and her lips, innocent of make-up, were a deep and glowing red. Her forehead was pale but flawless, the skin like cream. Her eyes were closed, and the dark lashes lay sootily against her cheeks. One hand was curled at her side, and the other was thrown lightly across her waist. Yet the total impression was not of angelic loveliness but a cold, disconnected beauty. Something in her face - not stated but hinted at - made Jimmy think of the young Saigon girls, some not yet thirteen, who would kneel before soldiers in the alleys behind the bars, not for the first time or the hundredth. Yet with those girls, the corruption hadn't been evil but only a knowledge of the world that had come too soon. The change in Susan's face was quite different - but he could not have said just how.

    Now Callahan stepped forward and pressed his fingers against the springiness of her left breast. 'Here,' he said. 'The heart.'

    'No,' Ben repeated. 'I can't.'

    'Be her lover,' Father Callahan said softly. 'Better, be her husband. You won't hurt her, Ben. You'll free her. The only one hurt will be you.'

    Ben looked at him dumbly. Mark had taken the stake from Jimmy's black bag and held it out wordlessly. Ben took it in a hand that seemed to stretch out for miles.

    If I don't think about it when I do it, then maybe -

    ?But it would be impossible not to think about it. And suddenly a line came to him from Dracula, that amusing bit of fiction that no longer amused him in the slightest. It was Van Heising's speech to Arthur Holmwood when Arthur had been faced with this same dreadful task: We must go through bitter waters before we reach the sweet.

    Could there be sweetness for any of them, ever again?

    'Take it away!' he groaned. 'Don't make me do this - '

    No answer.

    He felt a cold, sick sweat spring out on his brow, his cheeks, his forearms. The stake that had been a simple baseball bat four hours before seemed infused with eerie heaviness, as if invisible yet titanic lines of force had converged on it.

    He lifted the stake and pressed it against her left breast, just above the last fastened button of her blouse. The point made a dimple in her flesh, and he felt the side of his mouth begin to twitch in an uncontrollable tic.

    'She's not dead,' he said. His voice was hoarse and thick. It was his last line of defense.

    'No,' Jimmy said implacably. 'She's Undead, Ben.' He had shown them; had wrapped the blood-pressure cuff around her still arm and pumped it. The reading had been 00/00. He had put his stethoscope on her chest, and each of them had listened to the silence inside her.

    Something was put into Ben s other hand - years later he still did not remember which of them had put it there. The hammer. The Craftsman hammer with the rubber perforate grip. The head glimmered in the flashlight's glow.

    'Do it quickly,' Callahan said, land go out into the daylight. We'll do the rest.'

    We must go through bitter waters before we reach the sweet.

    'God forgive me,' Ben whispered.

    He raised the hammer and brought it down.

    The hammer struck the top of the stake squarely, and the gelatinous tremor that vibrated up the length of ash would haunt him forever in his dreams. Her eyes flew open, wide and blue, as if from the very force of the blow. Blood gushed upward from the stake's point of entry in a bright and astonishing flood, splashing his hands, his shirt, his cheeks. In an instant the cellar was filled with its hot, coppery odor.

    She writhed on the table. Her hands came up and beat madly at the air like birds. Her feet thumped an aimless, rattling tattoo on the wood of the platform. Her mouth yawned open, revealing shocking, wolflike fangs, and she began to peal forth shriek after shriek, like hell's clarion. Blood gushed from the corners of her mouth in freshets.

    The hammer rose and fell: again . . . again . again.

    Ben's brain was filled with the shrieks of large black crows. It whirled with awful, unremembered images. His hands were scarlet, the stake was scarlet, the remorselessly rising and failing hammer was scarlet. In Jimmy's trembling hands the flashlight became stroboscopic, illuminating Susan's crazed, lashing face in spurts and flashes. Her teeth sheared through the flesh of her lips, tearing them to ribbons. Blood splattered across the fresh linen sheet which Jimmy had so neatly turned back, making patterns like Chinese ideograms.

    And then, suddenly, her back arched like a bow, and her mouth stretched open until it seemed her jaws must break. A huge explosion of darker blood issued forth from the wound the stake had made - almost black in this chancy, lunatic light: heart's blood. The scream that welled from the sounding chamber of that gaping mouth came from all the subcellars of deepest race memory and beyond that, to the moist darknesses of the human soul. Blood suddenly boiled from her mouth and nose in a tide . . . and something else. In the faint light it was only a suggestion, a shadow, of something leaping up and out, cheated and ruined. It merged with the darkness and was gone.

    She settled back, her mouth relaxing, closing. The mangled lips parted in a last, susurating pulse of air. For a moment the eyelids fluttered and Ben saw, or fancied he saw, the Susan he had met in the park, reading his book.

    It was done.

    He backed away, dropping the hammer, holding his hands out before him, a terrified conductor whose sym?phony has run riot.

    Callahan put a hand on his shoulder. 'Ben - '

    He fled.

    He stumbled going up the stairs, fell, and crawled toward the light at the top. Childhood horror and adult horror had merged. If he looked over his shoulder, he would see Hubie Marsten (or perhaps Straker) only a hand's breadth behind, grinning out of his puffed and greenish face, the rope embedded deep into his neck - the grin revealing fangs instead of teeth. He screamed once, miserably.

    Dimly, he heard Callahan cry out, 'No, let him go - '

    He burst through the kitchen and out the back door. The back porch steps were gone under his feet and he pitched headlong into the dirt. He got to his knees, crawled, got to his feet, and cast a glance behind him.

    Nothing.

    The house loomed without purpose, the last of its evil stolen away. It was just a house again.

    Ben Mears stood in the great silence of the weed-choked back yard, his head thrown back, breathing in great white snuffles of air.

    16

    In the fall, night comes like this in the Lot:

    The sun loses its thin grip on the air first, turning it cold, making it remember that winter is coming and winter will be long. Thin clouds form, and the shadows lengthen out. They have no breadth, as summer shadows have; there are no leaves on the trees or fat clouds in the sky to make them thick. They are gaunt, mean shadows that bite the ground like teeth.

    As the sun nears the horizon, its benevolent yellow begins to deepen, to become infected, until it glares an angry inflamed orange. It throws a variegated glow over the horizon - a cloud-congested caul that is alternately red, orange, vermilion, purple. Sometimes the clouds break apart in great, slow rafts, letting through beams of innocent yellow sunlight that are bitterly nostalgic for the summer that has gone by.

    This is six o'clock, the supper hour (in the Lot, dinner is eaten at noon and the lunch buckets that men grab from counters before going out the door are known as dinner pails). Mabel Werts, the unhealthy fat of old age hanging doughily on her bones, is sitting down to a broiled breast of chicken and a cup of Lipton tea, the phone by her elbow. In Eva's the men are getting together whatever they have to get together: TV dinners, canned corned beef, canned beans which are woefully unlike the beans their mothers used to bake all Saturday morning and afternoon years ago, spaghetti dinners, or reheated hamburgers picked up at the Falmouth McDonald's on the way home from work. Eva sits at the table in the front room, irritably playing gin rummy with Grover Verrill, and snapping at the others to wipe up their grease and to stop that damn slopping around. They cannot remember ever having seen her this way, cat-nervous and feisty. But they know what the matter is, even if she does not.

    Mr and Mrs Petrie eat sandwiches in their kitchen, trying to puzzle out the call they have just received, a call from the local Catholic priest, Father Callahan: Your son is with me. He's fine. I will have him home shortly. Good-by. They have debated calling the local lawman, Parkins Gillespie, and have decided to wait a bit longer. They have sensed some sort of change in their son, who has always been what his mother likes to call A Deep One. Yet the specters of Ralphie and Danny Glick hang over them, unacknowl?edged.

    Milt Crossen is having bread and milk in the back of his store. He has had damned little appetite since his wife died back in '68. Delbert Markey, proprietor of Dell's, is working his way methodically through the five hamburgers which he has fried himself on the grill. He eats them with mustard and heaps of raw onions, an wi comp am most of the night to anyone who will listen that his goddamn acid indigestion is killing him. Father Callahan's housekeeper, Rhoda Curless, eats nothing. She is worried about the Father, who is out someplace ramming the roads. Harriet Durham and her family are eating pork chops. Carl Smith, a widower since 1957, has one boiled potato and a bottle of Moxie. The Derek Boddins are having an Armour Star ham and brussels sprouts. Yechhh, says Richie Boddin, the deposed bully. Brussels sprouts. You eat 'em or I'll clout your ass backward, Derek says. He hates them himself.

    Reggie and Bonnie Sawyer are having a rib roast of beef, frozen corn, french-fried potatoes, and for dessert a chocolate bread pudding with hard sauce. These are all Reggie's favorites. Bonnie, her bruises just beginning to fade, serves silently with downcast eyes. Reggie eats with steady, serious attention, killing three cans of Bud with the meal. Bonnie eats standing up. She is still too sore to sit down. She hasn't much appetite, but she eats anyway, so Reggie won't notice and say something. After he beat her up on that night, he flushed all her pills down the toilet and raped her. And has raped her every night since then.

    By quarter of seven, most meals have been eaten, most after-dinner cigarettes and cigars and pipes smoked, most tables cleared. Dishes are being washed, rinsed, and stacked in drainers. Young children are being packed into Dr Dentons and sent into the other room to watch game shows on TV until bedtime.

    Roy McDougall, who has burned the shit out of a fry pan full of veal steaks, curses and throws them - fry pan and all - into the swill. He puts on his denim jacket and sets out for Dell's, leaving his goddamn good-for-nothing pig of a wife to sleep in the bedroom. Kid's dead, wife's slacking off, supper's burned to hell. Time to get drunk. And maybe time to haul stakes and roll out of this two-bit town.

    In a small upstairs flat on Taggart Street, which runs a short distance from Jointner Avenue to a dead end behind the Municipal Building, Joe Crane is given a left-handed gift from the gods. He has finished a small bowl of Shred?ded Wheat and is sitting down to watch the TV when he feels a large and sudden pain paralyze the left side of his chest and his left arm. He thinks: What's this? Ticker? As it happens, this is exactly right. He gets up and makes it halfway to the telephone before the pain suddenly swells and drops him in his tracks like a steer hit with a hammer. His small color TV babbles on and on, and it will be twenty-four hours before anyone finds him. His death, which occurs at 6:51 P.M., is the only natural death to occur in Jerusalem's Lot on October 6.

    By 7:00 the panoply of colors on the horizon has shrunk to a bitter orange line on the western horizon, as if furnace fires had been banked beyond the edge of the world. In the east the stars are already out. They gleam steadily, like fierce diamonds. There is no mercy in them at this time of year, no comfort for lovers. They gleam in beautiful indifference.

    For the small children, bedtime is come. Time for the babies to be packed into their beds and cribs by parents who smile at their cries to be let up a little longer, to leave the light on. They indulgently open closet doors to show there is nothing in there.

    And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire's time has come.

    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 centur?ies, 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 Ph.D 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 unimagin?ative little crook with all the finesse of a shoplifter in Woolworth's - but because the opposition was a crack?brained 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 abb�� 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 Ad?eline' 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 de?cisions 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 'sa?lem'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.

    20

    Father Donald Callahan stood on one side of the spacious Petrie kitchen, holding his mother's cross high above his head, and it spilled its ghostly effulgence across the room. Barlow stood on the other side, near the sink, one hand pinning Mark's hands behind his back, the other slung around his neck. Between them, Henry and June Petrie lay sprawled on the floor in the shattered glass of Barlow's entry.

    Callahan was dazed. It had all happened with such swiftness that he could not take it in. At one moment he had been discussing the matter rationally (if maddeningly) with Petrie, under the brisk, no-nonsense glow of the kitchen lights. At the next, he had been plunged into the insanity that Mark's father had denied with such calm and understanding firmness.

    His mind tried to reconstruct what had happened.

    Petrie had come back and told them the phone was out. Moments later they had lost the lights. June Petrie screamed. A chair fell over. For several moments all of them had stumbled around in the new dark, calling out to each other. Then the window over the sink had crashed inward, spraying glass across the kitchen counter and onto the linoleum floor. All this had happened in a space of thirty seconds.

    Then a shadow had moved in the kitchen, and Callahan had broken the spell that held him. He clutched at the cross that hung around his neck, and even as his flesh touched it, the room was lit with its unearthly light.

    He saw Mark, trying to drag his mother toward the arch which led into the living room. Henry Petrie stood beside them, his head turned, his calm face suddenly slack-jawed with amazement at this totally illogical invasion. And be?hind him, looming over them, a white, grinning face like something out of a Frazetta painting, which split to reveal long, sharp fangs - and red, lurid eyes like furnace doors to hell. Barlow's hands flew out (Callahan had just time to see how long and sensitive those livid fingers were, like a concert pianist's) and then he had seized Henry Petrie's head in one hand, June's in the other, and had brought them together with a grinding, sickening crack. They had both dropped down like stones, and Barlow's first threat had been carried out.

    Mark had uttered a high, keening scream and threw himself at Barlow without thought.

    'And here you are!' Barlow had boomed good-naturedly in his rich, powerful voice. Mark attacked without thought and was captured instantly.

    Callahan moved forward, holding his cross up.

    Barlow's grin of triumph was instantly transformed into a rictus of agony. He fell back toward the sink, dragging the boy in front of him. Their feet crunched in the broken glass.

    'In Gods' name - 'Callahan began.

    At the name of the Deity, Barlow screamed aloud as if he had been struck by a whip, his mouth open in a downward grimace, the needle fangs glimmering within, The cords of muscle on his neck stood out in stark, etched relief. 'No closer!' he said. 'No closer, shaman! Or I sever the boy's jugular and carotid before you can draw a breath!' As he spoke, his upper lip lifted from those long, needlelike teeth, and as he finished, his head made a predatory downward pass with adder's speed, missing Mark's flesh by a quarter-inch.

    Callahan stopped.

    'Back up,' Barlow commanded, now grinning again. 'You on your side of the board and I on mine, eh?'

    Callahan backed up slowly, still holding the cross before him at eye level, so that he looked over its arms. The cross seemed to thrum with chained fire, and its power coursed up his forearm until the muscles bunched and trembled.

    They faced each other.

    'Together at last!' Barlow said, smiling. His face was strong and intelligent and handsome in a sharp, forbidding sort of way - yet, as the light shifted, it seemed almost effeminate. Where had he seen a face like that before? And it came to him, in this moment of the most extreme terror he had ever known. It was the face of Mr Flip, his own personal bogeyman, the thing that hid in the closet during the days and came out after his mother closed the bedroom door. He was not allowed a night light - both his mother and his father had agreed that the way to conquer these childish fears was to face them, not toady to them ?and every night, when the door snicked shut and his mother's footsteps padded off down the hall, the closet door slid open a crack and he could sense (or actually see?) the thin white face and burning eyes of Mr Flip. And here he was again, out of the closet, staring over Mark's shoulder with his clown-white face and glowing eyes and red, sensual lips.

    'What now?' Callahan said, and his voice was not his own at all. He was looking at Barlow's fingers, those long, sensitive fingers, which lay against the boy's throat. There were small blue blotches on them.

    'That depends. What will you give for this miserable wretch?' He suddenly jerked Mark's wrists high behind his back, obviously hoping to punctuate his question with a scream, but Mark would not oblige. Except for the sudden whistle of air between his set teeth, he was silent.

    'You'll scream,' Barlow whispered, and his lips had twisted into a grimace of animal hate. 'You'll scream until your throat bursts!'

    'Stop that!' Callahan cried.

    ---


    'And should I?' The hate was wiped from his face. A darkly charming smile shone forth in its place. 'Should I reprieve the boy, save him for another night?'

    'Yes!'

    Softly, almost purring, Barlow said, 'Then will you throw away your cross and face me on even terms - black against white? Your faith against my own?'

    'Yes,' Callahan said, but a trifle less firmly.

    'Then do it!' Those full lips became pursed, anticipatory. The high forehead gleamed in the weird fairy light that filled the room.

    'And trust you to let him go? I would be wiser to put a rattlesnake in my shirt and trust it not to bite me.'

    'But I trust you . . . look!'

    He let Mark go and stood back, both hands in the air, empty.

    Mark stood still, unbelieving for a moment, and then ran to his parents without a backward look at Barlow.

    'Run, Mark!' Callahan cried. 'Run!'

    Mark looked up at him, his eyes huge and dark. 'I think they're dead - '

    'R UN!'

    Mark got slowly to his feet. He turned around and looked at Barlow.

    'Soon, little brother,' Barlow said, almost benignly. 'Very soon now you and I will - '

    Mark spit in his face.

    Barlow's breath stopped. His brow darkened with a depth of fury that made his previous expressions seem like what they might well have been: mere play-acting. For a moment Callahan saw a madness in his eyes blacker than the soul of murder.

    'You spit on me,' Barlow whispered. His body was trembling, nearly rocking with his rage. He took a shudder?ing step forward like some awful blind man.

    'Get back!' Callahan screamed, and thrust the cross forward. Barlow cried out and threw his hands in front of his face. The cross flared with preternatural, dazzling brilliance, and it was at that moment that Callahan might have banished him if he had dared to press forward.

    'I'm going to kill you,' Mark said.

    He was gone, like a dark eddy of water.

    Barlow seemed to grow taller. His hair, swept back from his brow in the European manner, seemed to float around his skull. He was wearing a dark suit and a wine-colored tie, impeccably knotted, and to Callahan he seemed part and parcel of the darkness that surrounded him. His eyes glared out of their sockets like sly and sullen embers.

    'Then fulfill your part of the bargain, shaman.'

    'I'm a priest!' Callahan flung at him.

    Barlow made a small, mocking bow. 'Priest,' he said, and the word sounded like a dead haddock in his mouth.

    Callahan stood indecisive. Why throw it down? Drive him off, settle for a draw tonight, and tomorrow -

    But a deeper part of his mind warned. To deny the vampire's challenge was to risk possibilities far graver than any he had considered. If he dared not throw the cross aside, it would be as much as admitting . . . admitting . . . what? If only things weren't going so fast, if one only had time to think, to reason it out -

    The cross's glow was dying.

    He looked at it, eyes widening. Fear leaped into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. His head jerked up and he stared at Barlow. He was walking toward him across the kitchen and his smile was wide, almost voluptuous.

    'Stay back,' Callahan said hoarsely, retreating a step. 'I command it, in the name of God.'

    Barlow laughed at him.

    The glow in the cross was only a thin and guttering light in a cruciform shape. The shadows had crept across the vampire's face again, masking his features in strangely barbaric lines and triangles under the sharp cheekbones.

    Callahan took another step backward, and his buttocks bumped the kitchen table, which was set against the wall.

    'Nowhere left to go,' Barlow murmured sadly. His dark eyes bubbled with infernal mirth. 'Sad to see a man's faith fail. Ah, well . . .'

    The cross trembled in Callahan's hand and suddenly the last of its light vanished. It was only a piece of plaster that his mother had bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper's price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough power to smash down walls and shatter stone, was gone. The muscles remembered the thrumming but could not duplicate it.

    Barlow reached from the darkness and plucked the cross from his fingers. Callahan cried out miserably, the cry that had vibrated in the soul - but never the throat - of that long-ago child who had been left alone each night with Mr Flip peering out of the closet at him from between the shutters of sleep. And the next sound would haunt him for the rest of his life: two dry snaps as Barlow broke the arms of the cross, and a meaningless thump as he threw it on the floor.

    'God damn you!' he cried out.

    'It's too late for such melodrama,' Barlow said from the darkness. His voice was almost sorrowful. 'There is no need of it. You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross . . . the bread and wine . . . the confessional . . . only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night. In a way, I hoped it might be so. It has been long since I have met an opponent of any real worth. The boy makes ten of you, false priest.'

    Suddenly, out of the darkness, hands of amazing strength gripped Callahan's shoulders.

    'You would welcome the oblivion of my death now, I think. There is no memory for the Undead; only the hunger and the need to serve the Master. I could make use of you. I could send you among your friends. Yet is there need of that? Without you to lead them, I think they are little. And the boy will tell them. One moves against them at this time. There is, perhaps, a more fitting punishment for you, false priest.'

    He remembered Matt saying: Some things are worse than death.

    He tried to struggle away, but the hands held him in a viselike grip. Then one hand left him. There was the sound of cloth moving across bare skin, and then a scraping sound.

    The hands moved to his neck.

    'Come, false priest. Learn of a true religion. Take my communion.'

    Understanding washed over Callahan in a ghastly flood.

    'No! Don't . . . don't - '

    But the hands were implacable. His head was drawn forward, forward, forward.

    'Now, priest,' Barlow whispered

    And Callahan's mouth was pressed-against the reeking flesh of the vampire's cold throat, where an open vein pulsed. He held his breath for what seemed like aeons, twisting his head wildly and to no avail, smearing the blood across his cheeks and forehead and chin like war paint.

    Yet at last, he drank.

    ---

    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 took 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 com?mand 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 encoun?ter.

    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 Is 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 trans?parent.'

    '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 fantasti?cal 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.

    26

    Miss Coogan was reading a story called 'I Tried to Strangle Our Baby' in Real Life Confessions when the door opened and her first customer of the evening came in.

    She had never seen things so slow. Ruthie Crockett and her friends hadn't even been in for a soda at the fountain - not that she missed that crowd - and Loretta Starcher hadn't stopped in for The New York Times. It was still under the counter, neatly folded. Loretta was the only person in Jerusalem's Lot who bought the Times (she pronounced it that way, in italics) regularly. And the next day she would put it out in the reading room.

    Mr Labree hadn't come back from his supper, either, although there was nothing unusual about that. Mr Labree was a widower with a big house out on Schoolyard Hill near the Griffens, and Miss Coogan knew perfectly well that he didn't go home for his supper. He went out to Dell's and ate hamburgers and drank beer. If he wasn't back by eleven (and it was quarter of now), she would get the key out of the cash drawer and lock up herself. Wouldn't be the first time, either. But they would-all be in a pretty pickle if someone came in needing medicine badly.

    She sometimes missed the after-movie rush that had always come about this time before they had demolished the old Nordica across the street - people wanting ice?cream sodas and frapp��s and malteds, dates holding hands and talking about homework assignments. It had been hard, but it had been wholesome, too. Those children hadn't been like Ruthie Crockett and her crowd, sniggering and flaunting their busts and wearing jeans tight enough to show the line of their panties - if they were wearing any. The reality of her feelings for those bygone patrons (who, although she had forgotten it, had irritated her just as much) was fogged by nostalgia, and she looked up eagerly when the door opened, as if it might be a member of the class of '64 and his girl, ready for a chocolate fudge sundae with extra nuts.

    But it was a man, a grown-up man, someone she knew but could not place. As he carried his suitcase down to the counter, something in his walk or the motion of his head identified him for her.

    'Father Callahan!' she said, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice. She had never seen him without his priest suit on. He was wearing plain dark slacks and a blue chambray shirt, like a common millworker.

    She was suddenly frightened. The clothes he wore were clean and his hair was neatly combed, but there was something in his face, something -

    She suddenly remembered the day, twenty years ago, when she had come from the hospital where her mother had died of a sudden stroke - what the old-timers called a shock. When she had told her brother, he had looked something like Father Callahan did now. His face had a haggard, doomed took, and his eyes were blank and stunned. There was a burned-out look in them that made her uncomfortable. And the skin around his mouth looked red and irritated, as if he had overshaved or rubbed it for a long period of time with a washcloth, trying to get rid of a bad stain.

    'I want to buy a bus ticket,' he said.

    That's it, she thought. Poor man, someone's died and he just got the call down at the directory, or whatever they call it.

    'Certainly,' she said. 'Where - '

    'What's the first bus?'

    'To where?'

    'Anywhere,' he said, throwing her theory into shambles.

    'Well . . . I don't . . . let me see . . .' She fumbled out the schedule and looked at it, flustered. 'There's a bus at eleven-ten that connects with Portland, Boston, Hartford, and New Y - '

    'That one,' he said. 'How much?'

    'For how long - I mean, how far?' She was thoroughly flustered now.

    'All the way,' he said hollowly, and smiled. She had never seen such a dreadful smile on a human face, and she flinched from it. If he touches me, she thought, I'll scream. Scream blue murder.

    'T-th-that would be to New York City,' she said. 'Twenty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents.'

    He dug his wallet out of his back pocket with some difficulty, and she saw that his right hand was bandaged. He put a twenty and two ones before her, and she knocked a whole pile of blank tickets onto the floor taking one off the top of the stack. When she finished picking them up, he had added five more ones and a pile of change.

    She wrote the ticket as fast as she could, but nothing would have been fast enough. She could feel his dead gaze on her. She stamped it and pushed it across the counter so she wouldn't have to touch his hand.

    'Y-you'll have to wait outside, Father C-Callahan. I've got to close in about five minutes.' She scraped the bills and change into the cash drawer blindly, making no attempt to count it.

    'That's fine,' he said. He stuffed the ticket into his breast pocket. Without looking at her he said, 'And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, that whosoever found him should not kill him. And Cain went out from the face of the Lord, and dwelt as a fugitive on the earth, at the east side of Eden. That's Scripture, Miss Coogan. The hardest scripture in the Bible.'

    'Is that so?' she said. 'I'm afraid you'll have to go out?side, Father Callahan. I . . . Mr Labree is just in back a minute and he doesn't like doesn't like me to . . . to . . .'

    'Of course,' he said, and turned to go. He stopped and looked around at her. She flinched before those wooden eyes. 'You live in Falmouth, don't you, Miss Coogan?'

    'Yes - '

    'Have your own car?'

    'Yes, of course. I really have to ask you to wait for the bus outside - '

    'Drive home quickly tonight, Miss Coogan. Lock all your car doors and don't stop for anybody. Anybody. Don't even stop if it's someone you know.'

    'I never pick up hitchhikers,' Miss Coogan said righteously.

    'And when you get home, stay away from Jerusalem's Lot,' Callahan went on. He was looking at her fixedly. 'Things have gone bad in the Lot now.'

    She said faintly, 'I don't know what you're talking about, but you'll have to wait for the bus outside.'

    'Yes. All right.'

    He went out.

    She became suddenly aware of how quiet the drugstore was ' how utterly quiet. Could it be that no one - no one - had come in since it got dark except Father Callahan? It was. No one at all.

    Things have gone bad in the Lot now.

    She began to go around and turn off the lights.

    27

    In the Lot the dark held hard.

    At ten minutes to twelve, Charlie Rhodes was awakened by a long, steady honking. He came awake in his bed and sat bolt upright.

    His bus!

    And on the heels of that:

    The little bastards! The children had tried things like this before. He knew them, the miserable little sneaks. They had let the air out of his tires with matchsticks once. He hadn't seen who did it, but he had a damned good idea. He had gone to that damned wet-ass principal and reported Mike Philbrook and Audie James. He had known it was them - who had to see?

    Are you sure it was them, Rhodes?

    I told you, didn't I?

    And there was nothing that fucking Mollycoddle could do; he had to suspend them. Then the bastard had called him to the office a week later.

    Rhodes, we suspended Andy Garvey today.

    Yeah? Not surprised. What was he up to?

    Bob Thomas caught him letting the air out of his bus tires. And he had given Charlie Rhodes a long, cold, measuring look.

    Well, so what if it had been Garvey instead of Philbrook and James? They all hung around together, they were all creeps, they all deserved to have their nuts in the grinder.

    Now, from outside, the maddening sound of his horn, running down the battery, really laying on it:

    WHONK, WHONNK, WHOONNNNNNNNK -

    'You sons of whores,' he whispered, and slid out of bed. He dragged his pants on without using the light. The light would scare the little scumbags away, and he didn't want that.

    Another time, someone had left a cow pie on his driver's seat, and he had a pretty good idea of who had done that, too. You could read it in their eyes. He had learned that standing guard at the repple depple in the war. He had taken care of the cow-pie business in his own way. Kicked the little son of a whore off the bus three days' running, four miles from home. The kid finally came to him crying.

    I ain't done nothin', Mr Rhodes. Why you keep kickin' me off.?

    You call puttin' a cow flop on my seat nothin'?

    No, that wasn't me. Honest to God it wasn't.

    Well, you had to hand it to them. They could lie to their own mothers with a clear and smiling face, and they probably did it, too. He had kicked the kid off two more nights and then he had confessed, by the Jesus. Charlie kicked him off once more - one to grow on, you might say - and then Dave Felsen down at the motor pool told him he better cool it for a while.

    WHONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNK-

    He grabbed his shirt and then got the old tennis racket standing in the corner. By Christ, he was going to whip some ass tonight!

    He went out the back door and around the house to where he kept the big yellow bus parked. He felt tough and coldly competent. This was infiltration, just like the Army.

    He paused behind the oleander bush and looked at the bus. Yes, he could see them, a whole bunch of them, darker shapes behind the night-darkened glass. He felt the old red rage, the hate of them like hot ice, and his grip on the tennis racket tightened until it trembled in his hand like a tuning fork. They had busted out - six, seven, eight - eight windows on his bus!

    He slipped behind it and then crept up the long yellow side to the passenger door. It was folded open. He tensed, and suddenly sprang up the steps.

    'All right! Stay where you are! Kid, lay off that goddamn horn or I'll - '

    The kid sitting in the driver's seat with both hands plastered on the horn ring turned to him and smiled crazily. Charlie felt a sickening drop in his gut. It was Richie Boddin. He was white - just as white as a sheet - except for the black chips of coal that were his eyes, and his lips, which were ruby red.

    And his teeth -

    Charlie Rhodes looked down the aisle.

    Was that Mike Philbrook? Audie James? God Almighty, the Griffen boys were down there! Hal and Jack, sitting near the back with hay in their hair. But they don't ride on my bus! Mary Kate Greigson and Brent Tenney, sitting side by side. She was in a nightgown, he in blue jeans and a flannel shirt that was on backward and inside out, as if he had forgotten how to dress himself.

    And Danny Glick. But - oh, Christ - he was dead; dead for weeks!

    'You,' he said through numb lips. 'You kids - '

    The tennis racket slid from his hand. There was a wheeze and a thump as Richie Boddin, still smiling that crazy smile, worked the chrome lever that shut the folding door. They were getting out of their seats now, all of them.

    'No,' he said, trying to smile. 'You kids . . . you don't understand. It's me. It's Charlie Rhodes. You . . . you . . .' He grinned at them without meaning, shook his head, held out his hands to show them they were just ole Charlie Rhodes's hands, blameless, and backed up until his back was jammed against the wide tinted glass of the windshield.

    'Don't,' he whispered.

    They came on, grinning. 'Please don't.'

    And fell on him.

    28

    Ann Norton died on the short elevator trip from the first floor of the hospital to the second. She shivered once, and a small trickle of blood ran from the comer of her mouth.

    ---


    Ben felt a hand on his arm and swam upward to wakeful?ness. Mark, near his right ear, said, 'Morning.'

    He opened his eyes, blinked twice to clear the gum out of them, and looked out the window at the world. Dawn had come stealing through a steady autumn rain that was neither heavy nor light. The trees which ringed the grassy pavilion on the hospital's north side were half denuded now, and the black branches were limned against the gray sky like giant letters in an unknown alphabet. Route 30, which curved out of town to the east, was as shiny as sealskin - a car passing with its taillights still on left baleful red reflections on the macadam.

    Ben stood up and looked around. Matt was sleeping, his chest rising and falling in regular but shallow respiration. Jimmy was also asleep, stretched out in the room's one lounge chair. There was an undoctorlike stubble on the planes of his cheeks, and Ben ran a palm across his own face. It rasped.

    'Time to get going, isn't it?' Mark asked.

    Ben nodded. He thought of the day ahead of them and all its potential hideousness, and shied away from it. The only way to get through it would be without thinking more than ten minutes ahead. He looked into the boy's face, and the stony eagerness he saw there made him feel queasy. He went over and shook Jimmy.

    'Huh!' Jimmy said. He thrashed in his chair like a swim?mer coming up from deep water. His face twitched, his eyes fluttered open, and for a moment they showed blank terror. He looked at them both unreasoningly, without recognition.

    Then recognition came, and his body relaxed. 'Oh. Dream.'

    Mark nodded in perfect understanding.

    Jimmy looked out the window and said 'Daylight' the way a miser might say money. He got up and went over to Matt, took his wrist and held it.

    'Is he all right?' Mark asked.

    'I think he's better than he was last night,' Jimmy said. 'Ben, I want the three of us to leave by way of the service elevator in case someone noticed Mark last night. The less risk, the better.'

    'Will Mr Burke be okay alone?' Mark asked.

    'I think so,' Ben said. 'We'll have to trust to his ingenuity, I guess. Barlow would like nothing better than to have us tied up another day.'

    They tiptoed down the corridor and used the service elevator. The kitchen was just cranking up at this hour ?almost quarter past seven. One of the cooks looked up, waved a hand, and said, 'Hi, Doc.' No one else spoke to them.

    'Where first?' Jimmy asked. 'The Brock Street School?'

    'No,' Ben said. 'Too many people until this afternoon. Do the little ones get out early, Mark?'

    'They go until two o'clock.'

    'That leaves plenty of daylight,' Ben said. 'Mark's house first. Stakes.'

    34

    As they drew closer to the Lot, an almost palpable cloud of dread formed in Jimmy's Buick, and conversation lagged. When Jimmy pulled off the turnpike at the large green reflectorized sign that read ROUTE 12 JERUSALEM 'S LOT CUMBERLAND CUMBERLAND CTR, Ben thought that this was the way he and Susan had come home after their first date - she had wanted to see something with a car chase in it.

    'It's gone bad,' Jimmy said. His boyish face looked pale and frightened and angry. 'Christ, you can almost smell it.'

    And you could, Ben thought, although the smell was mental rather than physical: a psychic whiff of tombs.

    Route 12 was nearly deserted. On the way in they passed Win Purinton's milk truck, parked off the road and deserted. The motor was idling, and Ben turned it off after looking in the back. Jimmy glanced at him inquiringly as he got back in. Ben shook his head. 'He's not there. The engine light was on, and it was almost out of gas. Been idling there for hours.' Jimmy pounded his leg with a closed fist.

    But as they entered town, Jimmy said in an almost absurdly relieved tone, 'Look there. Crossen's is open.'

    It was. Milt was out front, fussing a plastic drop cover over his rack of newspapers, and Lester Silvius was stand?ing next to him, dressed in a yellow slicker.

    'Don't see the rest of the crew, though,' Ben said.

    Milt glanced up at them and waved, and Ben thought be saw lines of strain on both men's faces. The 'Closed' sign was still posted inside the door of Foreman's Mortu?ary. The hardware store was also closed, and Spencer's was locked and dark. The diner was open, and after they had passed it, Jimmy pulled his Buick up to the curb in front of the new shop. Above the show window, simple goldfaced letters spelled out the name: 'Barlow and Straker - Fine Furnishings.' And taped to the door, as Callahan had said, a sign which had been hand-lettered in a fine script which they all recognized from the note they had seen the day before: 'Closed until further notice.'

    'Why are you stopping here?' Mark asked.

    'Just on the off-chance that he might be holing up inside,' Jimmy said. 'It's so obvious he might figure we'd overlook it. And I think that sometimes customs men put an okay on boxes they've checked through. They write it on with chalk.'

    They went around to the back, and while Ben and Mark hunched their shoulders against the rain, Jimmy poked one overcoated elbow through the glass in the back door until they could all climb inside.

    The air was noxious and stale, the air of a room shut up for centuries rather than days. Ben poked his head out into the showroom, but there was no place to hide out there. Sparsely furnished, there was no sign that Straker had been replenishing his stock.

    'Come here!' Jimmy called hoarsely, and Ben's heart leaped into his throat.

    Jimmy and Mark were standing by a long crate which Jimmy had partly pried open with the claw end of his hammer. Looking in, they could see one pale hand and a darksleeve.

    Without thinking, Ben attacked the crate. Jimmy was fumbling at the far end with the hammer.

    'Ben,' Jimmy said, 'you're going to cut your hands. You - '

    He hadn't heard. He snapped boards off the crate, regardless of nails and splinters. They had him, they had the slimy night-thing, and he would pound the stake into him as he had pounded it into Susan, he would - He snapped back another piece of the cheap wooden crating and looked into the dead, moon-pallid face of Mike Ryer?son.

    For a moment there was utter silence, and then they all let out their breath . . . it was as if a soft wind had coursed through the room.

    'What do we do now?' Jimmy asked.

    'We better get out to Mark's house first,' Ben said. His voice was dull with disappointment. 'We know where he is. We don't even have a finished stake yet.'

    They put the splintered strips of wood back helter?skelter.

    'Better let me look at those hands, Jimmy said. 'They're bleeding.'

    'Later,' Ben said. 'Come on.'

    They went back around the building, all of them word?lessly glad to be back in the open air, and Jimmy drove the Buick up Jointner Avenue and into the residential part of town, just outside the skimpy business district. They arrived at Mark's house perhaps sooner than any of them would have liked.

    Father Callahan's old sedan was parked behind Henry Petrie's sensible Pinto runabout in the circular Petrie drive?way. At the sight of it, Mark sucked in his breath and looked away. All color had drained out of his face.

    'I can't go in there,' he muttered. 'I'm sorry. I'll wait in the car.'

    'Nothing to be sorry for, Mark,' Jimmy said.

    He parked, turned off the ignition, and got out. Ben hesitated a minute, then put a hand on Mark's shoulder. 'Are you going to be all right?'

    'Sure.' But he did not look all right. His chin was trembling and his eyes looked hollow. He suddenly turned to Ben and the hollowness was gone from the eyes and they were filled with simple pain, swimming with tears. 'Cover them up, will you? If they're dead, cover them up.'

    'Sure I will,' Ben said.

    'It's better this way,' Mark said. 'My father . . . he would have made a very successful vampire. Maybe as good as Barlow, in time. He . . . he was good at everything he tried. Maybe too good.'

    'Try not to think too much,' Ben said, hating the lame sound of the words as they left his mouth. Mark looked up at him and smiled wanly.

    'The woodpile's around in the back,' Mark said. 'You can go faster if you use my father's lathe down in the basement.'

    'All right,' Ben said. 'Be easy, Mark. As easy as you can.'

    But the boy was looking away now, swiping at his eyes with his arm.

    He and Jimmy went up the back steps and inside.

    35

    'Callahan's not here,' Jimmy said flatly. They had gone through the entire house.

    Ben forced himself to say it. 'Barlow must have gotten him.'

    He looked at the broken cross in his hand. It had been around Callahan's neck yesterday. It was the only trace of him they had found. It had been lying next to the bodies of the Petries, who were very dead indeed. Their heads had been crushed together with force enough to literally shatter the skulls. Ben remembered the unnatural strength Mrs Glick had displayed and felt sick.

    'Come on,' he said to Jimmy. 'We've got to cover them up. I promised.'

    36

    They took the dust cover from the couch in the living room and covered them with that. Ben tried not to look at or think about what they were doing, but it was impossible. When the job was done, one hand - the cultivated, lac?quered nails revealed it to be June Petrie's - protruded from under the gaily patterned dust cover, and he poked it underneath with his toe, grimacing in an effort to keep his stomach under control. The shapes of the bodies under the cover were undeniable and unmistakable, making him think of news photos from Vietnam - battlefield dead and soldiers carrying dreadful burdens in black rubber sacks that looked absurdly like golf bags.

    They went downstairs, each with an armload of yellow ash stove lengths.

    The cellar had been Henry Petrie's domain, and it re?flected his personality perfectly: Three high-intensity lights had been hung in a straight line over the work area, each shaded with a wide metal shell that allowed the light to fall with strong brilliance on the planer, the jigsaw, the bench saw, the lathe, the electric sander. Ben saw that he had been building a bird hotel, probably to place in the back yard next spring, and the blueprint he had been working from was neatly laid out and held at each corner with machined metal paperweights. He had been doing a competent but uninspired job, and now it would never be finished. The floor was neatly swept, but a pleasantly nostalgic odor of sawdust hung in the air.

    'This isn't going to work at all,' Jimmy said.

    'I know that,' Ben said.

    'The woodpile,' Jimmy snorted, and let the wood fall from his arms in a lumbering crash. The stove lengths rolled wildly on the floor like jackstraws. He uttered a high, hysterical laugh.

    'Jimmy - '

    But his laugh cut across Ben's attempt to speak like jags of piano wire. 'We're going to go out and end the scourge with a pile of wood from Henry Petrie's back lot. How about some chair legs or baseball bats?'

    'Jimmy, what else can we do?'

    Jimmy looked at him and got himself under control with a visible effort. 'Some treasure hunt,' he said. 'Go forty paces into Charles Griffen's north pasture and look under the large rock. Ha. Jesus. We can get out of town. We can do that.'

    'Do you want to quit? Is that what you want?'

    'No. But it isn't going to be just today, Ben. It's going to be weeks before we get them all, if we ever do. Can you stand that? Can you stand doing . . . doing what you did to Susan a thousand times? Pulling them out of their closets and their stinking little bolt holes screaming and struggling, only to pound a stake into their chest cavities and smash their hearts? Can you keep that up until November without going nuts?'

    Ben thought about it and met a blank wall: utter incom?prehension.

    'I don't know,' he said.

    'Well, what about the kid? Do you think he can take it? He'll be ready for the fucking nut hatch. And Matt will be dead. I'll guarantee you that. And what do we do when the state cops start nosing around to find out what in hell happened to 'salem's Lot? What do we tell them? "Pardon me while I stake this bloodsucker"? What about that, Ben?'

    'How the hell should I know? Who's had a chance to stop and think this thing out?'

    They realized simultaneously that they were standing nose to nose, yelling at each other. 'Hey,' Jimmy said. 'Hey.'

    Ben dropped his eyes. 'I'm sorry-'

    'No, my fault. We're under pressure . . . what Barlow would undoubtedly call an end game.' He ran a hand through his carroty hair and looked around aimlessly. His eye suddenly lit on something beside Petrie's blueprint and he picked it up. It was a black grease pencil.

    'Maybe this is the best way,' he said.

    'What?'

    'You stay here, Ben. Start turning out stakes. If we're going to do this, it's got to be scientific. You're the pro?duction department. Mark and I will be research. We'll go through the town, looking for them. We'll find them, too, just the way we found Mike. I can mark the locations with this grease pencil. Then, tomorrow, the stakes.'

    'Won't they see the marks and move?'

    'I don't think so. Mrs Glick didn't look as though she was connecting too well. I think they move more on instinct than real thought. They might wise up after a while, start hiding better, but I think at first it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.'

    'Why don't I go?'

    'Because I know the town, and the town knows me - like they knew my father. The live ones in the Lot are hiding in their houses today. If you come knocking, they won't answer. If I come, most of them will. I know some of the hiding places. I know where the winos shack up out in the Marshes and where the pulp roads go. You don't. Can you run that lathe?'

    'Yes,' Ben said.

    Jimmy was right, of course. Yet the relief he felt at not having to go out and face them made him feel guilty.

    'Okay. Get going. It's after noon now.'

    Ben turned to the lathe, then paused. 'If you want to wait a half hour, I can give you maybe half a dozen stakes to take with you.'

    Jimmy paused a moment, then dropped his eyes. 'Uh, I think tomorrow . . . tomorrow would be . . .'

    'Okay,' Ben said. 'Go on. Listen, why don't you come back around three? Things ought to be quiet enough around that school by then so we can check it out.'

    'Good.'

    Jimmy stepped away from Petrie's shop area and started for the stairs. Something - a half thought or perhaps inspiration - made him turn. He saw Ben across the base?ment, working under the bright glare of those three lights, hung neatly in a row.

    Something . . . and it was gone.

    He walked back.

    Ben shut off the lathe and looked at him. 'Something else?'

    'Yeah,' Jimmy said. 'On the tip of my tongue. But it's stuck there.'

    Ben raised his eyebrows.

    'When I looked back from the stairs and saw you, something clicked. It's gone now.'

    'Important?'

    'I don't know.' He shuffled his feet purposelessly, want?ing it to come back. Something about the image Ben had made, standing under those work lights, bent over the lathe. No good. Thinking about it only made it seem more distant.

    He went up the stairs, but paused once more to look back. The image was hauntingly familiar, but it wouldn't come. He went through the kitchen and out to the car. The rain had faded to drizzle.

    37

    Roy McDougall's car was standing in the driveway of the trailer lot on the Bend Road, and seeing it there on a weekday made Jimmy suspect the worst.

    He and Mark got out, Jimmy carrying his black bag. They mounted the steps and Jimmy tried the bell. It didn't work and so he knocked instead. The pounding roused no one in the McDougall trailer or in the neighboring one twenty yards down the road. There was a car in that driveway, too.

    Jimmy tried the storm door and it was locked. 'There's a hammer in the back seat of the car,' he said.

    Mark got it, and Jimmy smashed the glass of the storm door beside the knob. He reached through and unsnapped the catch. The inside door was unlocked. They went in.

    The smell was definable instantly, and Jimmy felt his nostrils cringe against it and try to shut it out. The smell was not as strong as it had been in the basement of the Marsten House, but it was just as basically offensive - the smell of rot and deadness. A wet, putrified stink. Jimmy found himself remembering when, as boys, he and his buddies had gone out on their bikes during spring vacation to pick up the returnable beer and soft-drink bottles the retreating snows had uncovered. In one of those (an Orange Crush bottle) he saw a small, decayed field mouse which had been attracted by the sweetness and had then been unable to get out. He had gotten a whiff of it and had immediately turned away and thrown up. This smell was plangently like that - sickish sweet and decayed sour, mixed together and fermenting wildly. He felt his gorge rise.

    'They're here,' Mark said. 'Somewhere.'

    They went through the place methodically - kitchen, dining nook, living room, the two bedrooms. They opened closets as they went. Jimmy thought they had found some?thing in the master bedroom closet, but it was only a heap of dirty clothes.

    'No cellar?' Mark asked.

    'No, but there might be a crawl space.

    They went around to the back and saw a small door that swung inward, set into the trailer's cheap concrete foundation. It was fastened with an old padlock. Jimmy knocked it off with five hard blows of the hammer, and when he pushed the half-trap open, the smell hit them in a ripe wave.

    'There they are,' Mark said.

    Peering in, Jimmy could see three sets of feet, like corpses lined up on a battlefield. One set wore work boots, one wore knitted bedroom slippers, and the third set - tiny feet indeed - were bare.

    Family scene, Jimmy thought crazily. Reader's Digest, where are you when we need you? Unreality washed over him. The baby, he thought. How are we supposed to do that to a little baby?

    He made a mark with the black grease pencil on the trap and picked up the broken padlock. 'Let's go next door,' he said.

    'Wait,' Mark said. 'Let me pull one of them out.'

    'Pull . . . ? Why?'

    'Maybe the daylight will kill them,' Mark said. 'Maybe we won't have to do that with the stakes.'

    Jimmy felt hope. 'Yeah, okay. Which one?'

    'Not the baby,' Mark said instantly. 'The man. You catch one foot.'

    'All right,' Jimmy said. His mouth had gone cotton-dry, and when he swallowed there was a click in his throat.

    Mark wriggled in on his stomach, the dead leaves that had drifted in crackling under his weight. He seized one of Roy McDougall's workboots and pulled. Jimmy squirmed in beside him, scraping his back on the low overhang, fighting claustrophobia. He got hold of the other boot and together they pulled him out into the lessening drizzle and white light.

    What followed was almost unbearable. Roy McDougall began to writhe as soon as the light struck him full, like a man who has been disturbed in sleep. Steam and moisture came from his pores, and the skin underwent a slight sagging and yellowing. Eyeballs rolled behind the thin skin of his closed lids. His feet kicked slowly and dreamily in the wet leaves. His upper lip curled back, showing upper incisors like those of a large dog - a German shepherd or a collie. His arms thrashed slowly, the hands clenching and unclenching, and when one of them brushed Mark's shirt, he jerked back with a disgusted cry.

    Roy turned over and began to hunch slowly back into the crawl space, arms and knees and face digging grooves in the rain-softened humus. Jimmy noted that a hitching, Cheyne-Stokes type of respiration had begun as soon as the light struck the body; it stopped as soon as McDougall was wholly in shadow again. So did the moisture extrusion.

    When he had reached his previous resting place, McDougall turned over and lay still.

    'Shut it,' Mark said in a strangled voice. 'Please shut it.' Jimmy closed the trap and replaced the hammered lock as well as he could. The image of McDougall's body, struggling in the wet, rotted leaves like a dazed snake, remained in his mind. He did not think there would ever be a time when it was not within hand's reach of his memory - even if he lived to be a hundred.

    38

    They stood in the rain, I trembling, looking at each other. 'Next door?' Mark asked.

    'Yes. They'd be the logical ones for the McDougalls to attack first.'

    They went across, and this time their nostrils picked up the telltale odor of rot in the dooryard. The name below the doorbell was Evans. Jimmy nodded. David Evans and family. He worked as a mechanic in the auto department of Sears in Gates Falls. He had treated him a couple of years ago, for a cyst or something.

    This time the bell worked, but there was no response. They found Mrs Evans in bed. The two children were in a bunk bed in a single bedroom, dressed in identical pajamas that featured characters from the Pooh stories. It took longer to find Dave Evans. He had hidden himself away in the unfinished storage space over the small garage.

    Jimmy marked a check inside a circle on the front door and the garage door. 'We're doing good,' he said. 'Two for two.'

    Mark said diffidently, 'Could you hold on a minute or two? I'd like to wash my hands.'

    'Sure,' Jimmy said. 'I'd like that, too. The Evanses won't mind if we use their bathroom.'

    They went inside, and Jimmy sat down in one of the living room chairs and closed his eyes. Soon he heard Mark running water in the bathroom.

    On the darkened screen of his eyes he saw the mor?tician's table, saw the sheet covering Marjorie Glick's body start to tremble, saw her hand fall out and begin its delicate toe dance on the air - He opened his eyes.

    This trailer was in nicer condition than the McDougalls', neater, taken care of. He had never met Mrs Evans, but it seemed she must have taken pride in her home. There was a neat pile of the dead children's toys in a small storage room, a room that had probably been called the laundry room in the mobile home dealer's original brochure. Poor kids, he hoped they'd enjoyed the toys while there had still been bright days and sunshine to enjoy them in. There was a tricycle, several large plastic trucks and a play gas station, one of those caterpillars on wheels (there must have been some dandy fights over that), a toy pool table.

    He started to look away and then looked back, startled.

    Blue chalk.

    Three shaded lights in a row.

    Men walking around the green table under the bright lights, cueing up, brushing the grains of blue chalk off their fingertips -

    'Mark!' he shouted, sitting bolt upright in the chair. 'Mark!' And Mark came running with his shirt off, to see what the matter was.

    39

    An old student of Matt's (class of '64, A's in literature, C's in composition) had dropped by to see him around two-thirty, had commented on the stacks of arcane litera?ture, and had asked Matt if he was studying for a degree in the occult. Matt couldn't remember if his name was Herbert or Harold.

    Matt, who had been reading a book called Strange Disappearances when Herbert-or-Harold walked in, wel?comed the interruption. He was waiting for the phone to ring even now, although he knew the others could not safely enter the Brock Street School until after three o'clock. He was desperate to know what had happened to Father Callahan. And the day seemed to be passing with alarming rapidity - he had always heard that time passed slowly in the hospital. He felt slow and foggy, an old man at last.

    He began telling Herbert-or-Harold about the town of Momson, Vermont, whose history he had just been read?ing. He bad found it particularly interesting because he thought the story, if true, might be a precursor of the Lot's fate.

    'Everyone disappeared,' he told Herbert-or-Harold, who was listening with polite but not very well masked boredom. 'Just a small town in the upcountry of northern Vermont, accessible by Interstate Route 2 and Vermont Route 19. Population of 312 in the census of 1920. In August of 1923 a woman in New York got worried because her sister hadn't written her for two months. She and her husband took a ride out there, and they were the first to break the story to the newspapers, although I don't doubt that the locals in the surrounding area had known about the disappearance for some time. The sister and her hus?band were gone, all right, and so was everyone else in Momson. The houses and the barns were all standing, and in one place supper had been put on the table. The case was rather sensational at the time. I don't believe that I would care to stay there overnight. The author of this book claims the people in the neighboring townships tell some odd stories . . . ha'ants and goblins and all that. Several of the outlying barns have hex signs and large crosses painted on them, even to this day. Look, here's a photo?graph of the general store and ethyl station and feed-and?-grain store - what served in Momson as downtown. What do you suppose ever happened there?'

    Herbert-or-Harold looked at the picture politely. Just a little town with a few stores and a few houses. Some of them were falling down, probably from the weight of snow in the winter. Could be any town in the country. Driving through most of them, you wouldn't know if anyone was alive after eight o'clock when they rolled up the sidewalks. The old man had certainly gone dotty in his old age. Herbert-or-Harold thought about an old aunt of his who had become convinced in the last two years of her life that her daughter had killed her pet parakeet and was feeding it to her in the meat loaf. Old people got funny ideas.

    'Very interesting,' he said, looking up. 'But I don't think. . . Mr Burke? Mr Burke, is something wrong? Are you. . . nurse! Hey, nurse!'

    Matt's eyes had grown very fixed. One hand gripped the top sheet of the bed. The other was pressed against his chest. His face had gone pallid, and a pulse beat in the center of his forehead.

    Too soon, he thought. No, too soon -

    Pain, smashing into him in waves, driving him down into darkness. Dimly he thought: Watch that last step, it's a killer.

    Then, falling.

    Herbert-or-Harold ran out of the room, knocking over his chair and spilling a pile of books. The nurse was already coming, nearly running herself.

    'It's Mr Burke,' Herbert-or-Harold told her. He was still holding the book, with his index finger inserted at the picture of Momson, Vermont.

    The nurse nodded curtly and entered the room. Matt was lying with his head half off the bed, his eyes closed.

    'Is he - ?' Herbert-or-Harold asked timidly. It was a complete question.

    'Yes, I think so,' the nurse answered, at the same time pushing the button that would summon the ECV unit. 'You'll have to leave now.'

    She was calm again now that all was known, and had time to regret her lunch, left half-eaten.

    40

    'But there's no pool hall in the Lot,' Mark said. 'The closest one is over in Gates Falls. Would he go there?'

    'No,' Jimmy said. 'I'm sure he wouldn't. But some people have pool tables or billiard tables in their houses.'

    'Yes, I know that.'

    'There's something else,' Jimmy said. 'I can almost get it.'


    ---


    He leaned back, closed his eyes, and put his hands over them. There was something else, and in his mind he associated it with plastic. Why plastic? There were plastic toys and plastic utensils for picnics and plastic drop covers to put over your boat when winter came -

    And suddenly a picture of a pool table draped in a large plastic dust cover formed in his mind, complete with sound track, a voiceover that was saying, I really ought to sell it before the felt gets mildew or something - Ed Craig says it might mildew - but it was Ralph's . . .

    He opened his eyes. 'I know where he is,' he said. 'I know where Barlow is. He's in the basement of Eva Miller's boardinghouse.' And it was true; he knew it was. It felt incontrovertibly right in his mind.

    Mark's eyes flashed brilliantly. 'Let's go get him.'

    'Wait.'

    He went to the phone, found Eva's number in the book, and dialed it swiftly. It rang with no answer. Ten rings, eleven, a dozen. He put it back in its cradle, frightened. There had been at least ten roomers at Eva's, many of them old men, retired. There was always someone around. Always before this.

    He looked at his watch. It was quarter after three and time was racing, racing.

    'Let's go,' he said.

    'What about Ben?'

    Jimmy said grimly, 'We can't call. The line's out at your house. If we go straight to Eva's, there'll be plenty of daylight left if we're wrong. If we're right, we'll come back and get Ben and stop his fucking clock.'

    'Let me put my shirt on again,' Mark said, and ran down the hall to the bathroom.

    41

    Ben's Citro?n was still sitting in Eva's parking lot, now plastered with wet leaves from the elms that shaded the square of gravel. The wind had picked up but the rain had stopped. The sign that said 'Eva's Rooms' swung and squeaked in the gray afternoon. The house had an eerie silence about it, a waiting quality, and Jimmy made a mental connection and was chilled by it. It was just like the Marsten House. He wondered if anyone had ever committed suicide here. Eva would know, but he didn't think Eva would be talking . . . not anymore.

    'It would be perfect,' he said aloud. 'Take up residence in the local boardinghouse and then surround yourself with your children,'

    'Are you sure we shouldn't get Ben?'

    'Later. Come on.'

    They got out of the car and walked toward the porch.

    The wind pulled at their clothes, riffled their hair. All the shades were drawn, and the house seemed to brood over them.

    'Can you smell it?' Jimmy asked.

    'Yes. Thicker than ever.'

    'Are you up to this?'

    'Yes,' Mark said firmly. 'Are you.

    'I hope to Christ I am,' Jimmy said.

    They went up the porch steps and Jimmy tried the door. It was unlocked. When they stepped into Eva Miller's compulsively neat big kitchen, the odor smote them both, like an open garbage pit - yet dry, as with the smoke of years.

    Jimmy remembered his conversation with Eva - it had been almost four years ago, just after he had begun practic?ing. Eva had come in for a check-up. His father had had her for a patient for years, and when Jimmy took his place, even running things out of the same Cumberland office, she had come to him without embarrassment. They had spoken of Ralph, dead twelve years even then, and she had told him that Ralph's ghost was still in the house ?every now and then she would turn up something new and temporarily forgotten in the attic or a bureau drawer. And of course there was the pool table in the basement. She said that she really ought to get rid of it; it was just taking up space she could use for something else. But it had been Ralph's and she just couldn't bring herself to take out an ad in the paper or call up the local radio 'Yankee Trader' program.

    Now they walked across the kitchen to the cellar door and Jimmy opened it. The stench was thick, powering. He thumbed the light switch but got no response. He would have broken that, of course.

    'Look around,' he told Mark. 'She's got to have a flashlight, or candles.'

    Mark began nosing around, pulling open drawers and looking into them. He noticed that the knife rack over the sink was empty, but thought nothing of it at the time. His heart was thudding with painful slowness, like a muffled drum. He recognized the fact that he was now on the far, ragged edges of his endurance, at the outer limits. His mind did not seem to be thinking, but only reacting. He kept seeing movement at the corners of his eyes and jerking his head around to look, seeing nothing. A war veteran might have recognized the symptoms which signaled the onset of battle fatigue.

    He went out into the hall and looked through the dresser there. In the third drawer he found a long four?cell flashlight. He took it back to the kitchen. 'Here it is, J - '

    There was a rattling noise, followed by a heavy thump. The cellar door stood open.

    And the screams began.

    42

    When Mark stepped back into the kitchen of Eva's Rooms, it was twenty minutes of five. His eyes were hollow, and his T-shirt was smeared with blood. His eyes were stunned and slow.

    Suddenly he shrieked.

    The sound came roaring out of his belly, up the dark passage of his throat, and through his distended jaws. He shrieked until he felt some of the madness begin to leave his brain. He shrieked until his throat cracked and an awful pain lodged in his vocal cords like a sliver of bone. And even when he had externalized all the fear, the horror, the rage, the disappointment that he could, that awful pressure remained, coming up out of the cellar in waves - the knowledge of Barlow's presence somewhere down there - ?and now it was close to dark.

    He went outside onto the porch and breathed great gasps of the windy air. Ben. He had to get Ben. But an odd sort of lethargy seemed to have wrapped his legs in lead. What was the use? Barlow was going to win. They had been crazy to go against him. And now Jimmy had paid the full price, as well as Susan and the Father.

    The steel in him came up. No. No. No.

    He went down the porch steps on trembling legs and got into Jimmy's Buick. The keys hung in the ignition.

    Get Ben. Try once more.

    His legs were too short to reach the pedals. He pulled the seat up and twisted the key. The engine roared. He put the gearshift lever in drive and put his foot on the gas. The car leaped forward. He slammed his foot down on the power brake and was thrown painfully into the steering wheel. The horn honked.

    I can't drive it!

    And he seemed to hear his father saying in his logical, pedantic voice: You must be careful when you learn to drive, Mark. Driving is the only means of transportation that is not fully regulated by federal law. As a result, all the operators are amateurs. Many of these amateurs are suicidal. Therefore, you must be extremely careful. You use the gas pedal like there was an egg between it and your foot. When you're driving a car with an automatic transmission, like ours, the left foot is not used at all. Only the right is used; first brake and then gas.

    He let his foot off the brake and the car crawled forward down the driveway. It bumped over the curb and he brought it to a jerky stop. The windshield had fogged up. He rubbed it with his arm and only smeared it more.

    'Screw it,' he muttered.

    He started up jerkily and performed a wide, drunken U-turn, driving over the far curb in the process, and set off for his house. He had to crane his neck to see over the steering wheel. He fumbled out with his right hand and turned on the radio and played it loud. He was crying.

    43

    Ben was walking down Jointner Avenue toward town when Jimmy's tan Buick came up the road, moving in jerks and spasms, weaving drunkenly. He waved at it and it pulled over, bounced the left front wheel over the curb, and came to a stop.

    He had lost track of time making the stakes, and when he looked at his watch, he had been startled to see that it was nearly ten minutes past four. He had shut down the lathe, taken a couple of the stakes, put them in his belt, and gone upstairs to use the telephone. He had only put his hand on it when he remembered it was out.

    Badly worried now, he ran outside and looked in both cars, Callahan's and Petrie's. No keys in either. He could have gone back and searched Henry Petrie's pockets, but the thought was too much. He had set off for town at a fast walk, keeping an eye peeled for Jimmy's Buick. He had been intending to go straight to the Brock Street School when Jimmy's car came into sight.

    He ran around to the driver's seat and Mark Petrie was sitting behind the wheel . . . alone. He looked at Ben numbly. His lips worked but no sound came out.

    'What's the matter? Where's Jimmy?'

    'Jimmy's dead,' Mark said woodenly. 'Barlow thought ahead of us again. He's in the basement of Mrs Miller's boardinghouse somewhere. Jimmy's there, too. I went down to help him and I couldn't get back out. Finally I got a board that I could crawl up, but at first I thought I was going to be trapped down there . . . until s-s-sunset. . . . '

    'What happened? What are you talking about?'

    'Jimmy figured out the blue chalk, you see? While we were at a house in the Bend. Blue chalk. Pool tables. There's a pool table in the cellar at Mrs Miller's, it belonged to her husband. Jimmy called the boardinghouse and there was no answer so we drove over.'

    He lifted his tearless face to Ben's.

    'He told me to look around for a flashlight because the cellar light switch was broken, just like at the Marsten House. So I started to look around. I . . . I noticed that all the knives in the rack over the sink were gone, but I didn't think anything of it. So in a way I killed him. I did it. It's my fault, all my fault, all my - '

    Ben shook him: two brisk snaps. 'Stop it, Mark. Stop it!

    Mark put his hands to his mouth, as if to catch the hysterical babble before it could flow out. His eyes stared hugely at Ben over his hands.

    At last he went on: 'I found a flashlight in the hall dresser, see. And that was when Jimmy fell, and he started to scream. He - I would have fallen, too, but he warned me. The last thing he said was Look out, Mark.'

    'What was it?' Ben demanded.

    'Barlow and the others just took the stairs away,' Mark said in a dead, listless voice. 'Sawed the stairs off after the second one going down. They left a little more of the railing so it looked like . . . looked like . . .' He shook his head. 'In the dark, Jimmy just thought they were there. You see?'

    'Yes,' Ben said. He saw. It made him feel sick. 'And the knives?'

    'Set all around on the floor underneath,' Mark whis?pered. 'They pounded the blades through these thin ply?wood squares and then knocked off the handles so they would sit flat with the blades pointing . . . pointing.'

    'Oh,' Ben said helplessly. 'Oh, Christ.' He reached down and took Mark by the shoulders. 'Are you sure he's dead, Mark?'

    'Yes. He . . . he was stuck in half a dozen places. The blood . . . '

    Ben looked at his watch. It was ten minutes of five. Again he had that feeling of being crowded, of running out of time.

    'What are we going to do now?' Mark asked remotely.

    'Go into town. Talk to Matt on the phone and then talk to Parkins Gillespie. We'll finish Barlow before dark. We've got to.'

    Mark smiled a small, morbid smile. 'Jimmy said that, too. He said we were going to stop his clock. But he keeps beating us. Better guys than us must have tried, too.'

    Ben looked down at the boy and got ready to do some?thing nasty.

    'You sound scared,' he said.

    'I am scared,' Mark said, not rising to it. 'Aren't you?'

    'I'm scared,' Ben said, 'but I'm mad, too. I lost a girl I liked one hell of a lot. I loved her, I guess. We both lost Jimmy. You lost your mother and father. They're lying in your living room under a dust cover from your sofa.' He pushed himself to a final brutality. 'Want to go back and look?'

    Mark winced away from him, his face horrified and hurting.

    'I want you with me,' Ben said more softly He felt a germ of self-disgust in his stomach. He sounded like a football coach before the big game. 'I don't care who's tried to stop him before. I don't care if Attila the Run played him and lost. I'm going to have my shot. I want you with me. I need you.' And that was the truth, pure and naked.

    'Okay,' Mark said. He looked down into his lap, and his hands found each other and entwined in distraught pantomime.

    'Dig your feet in,' Ben said.

    Mark looked at him hopelessly. I'm trying,' he said.

    44

    Sonny's Exxon station on outer Jointner Avenue was open and Sonny James (who exploited his country-music name?sake with a huge color poster in the window beside a pyramid of oil cans) came out to wait on them himself. He was a small, gnome-like man whose receding hair was lawn-mowered into a perpetual crew cut that showed his pink scalp.

    'Hey there, Mr Mears, howya doin'? Where your Citrowan?'

    'Laid up, Sonny. Where's Pete?' Pete Cook was Sonny's part-time help, and lived in town. Sonny did not.

    'Never showed up today. Don't matter. Things been slow, anyway. Town seems downright dead.'

    Ben felt dark, hysterical laughter in his belly. It threatened to boil out of his mouth in a great and rancid wave.

    'Want to fill it up?' he managed. 'Want to use your phone.'

    'Sure. Hi, kid. No school today?'

    I'm on a field trip with Mr Mears,' Mark said. 'I had a bloody nose.'

    'I guess to God you did. My brother used to get 'em. They're a sign of high blood pressure, boy. You want to watch out.' He strolled to the back of Jimmy's car and took off the gas cap

    Ben went inside and dialed the pay phone beside the rack of New England road maps.

    'Cumberland Hospital, which department?'

    'I'd like to speak with Mr Burke, please. Room 402.

    There was an uncharacteristic hesitation, and Ben was about to ask if the room had been changed when the voice said: 'Who is this, please?'

    'Benjaman Mears.' The possibility of Matt's death sud?denly loomed up in his mind like a long shadow. Could that be? Surely not - that would be too much. 'Is he all right?'

    'Are you a relative?'

    'No, a close friend. He isn't - '

    'Mr Burke died at 3:07 this afternoon, Mr Mears. If you'd like to hold for just a minute, I'll see if Dr Cody has come in yet. Perhaps he could . . . '

    The voice went on but Ben had ceased hearing it, although the receiver was still glued to his ear. The realiz?ation of how much he had been depending on Matt to get them through the rest of this nightmare afternoon crashed home with sickening weight. Matt was dead. Congestive heart failure. Natural causes. It was as if God Himself had turned His face away from them.

    Just Mark and I now.

    Susan, Jimmy, Father Callahan, Matt. All gone.

    Panic seized him and he grappled with it silently. He put the receiver back into its cradle without thinking about it, guillotining a question half-asked.

    He walked back outside. It was ten after five. In the west the clouds were breaking up.

    'Comes to just three dollars even,' Sonny told him brightly. 'That's Doc Cody's car, ain't it? I see them MD plates and it always makes me think of this movie I seen, this story about a bunch of crooks and one of them would always steal cars with MD plates because - '

    Ben gave him three one-dollar bills. 'I've got to split, Sonny. Sorry. I've got trouble.'

    Sonny's face crinkled up. 'Gee, I'm sorry to hear that, Mr Mears. Bad news from your editor?'

    'I guess you could say that.' He got behind the wheel, shut the door, pulled out, and left Sonny looking after him in his yellow foulweather slicker.

    'Matt's dead, isn't he?' Mark asked, watching him.

    'Yes. Heart attack. How did you know?'

    'Your face. I saw your face.'

    It was 5:15.

    45

    Parkins Gillespie was standing on the small covered porch of the Municipal Building, smoking a Pall Mall and looking out at the western sky. He turned his attention to Ben Mears and Mark Petrie reluctantly. His face looked sad and old, like the glasses of water they bring you in cheap diners.

    'How are You, Constable?' Ben asked.

    'Tolerable,' Parkins allowed. He considered a hangnail on the leathery arc of skin that bordered his thumbnail, 'Seen you truckin' back and forth. Looked like the kid was drivin' up from Railroad Street by hisself this last time. That so?'

    'Yes,' Mark said.

    'Almost got clipped, Fella goin' the other way missed you by a whore's hair.'

    'Constable,' Ben said, 'we want to tell you what's been happening around here.'

    Parkins Gillespie spat out the stub of his cigarette with?out raising his hands from the rail of the small covered porch. Without looking at either of them, he said calmly, 'I don't want to hear it.'

    They looked at him dumbfounded.

    'Nolly didn't show up today,' Parkins said, still in that calm, conversational voice. 'Somehow don't think he will. He called in late last night and said he'd seen Homer McCaslin's car out on the Deep Cut Road - I think it was the Deep Cut he said. He never called back in.' Slowly, sadly, like a man under water, he dipped into his shirt pocket and reached another Pall Mall out of it. He rolled it reflectively between his thumb and finger. 'These fucking things are going to be the death of me,' he said.

    Ben tried again. 'The man who took the Marsten House, Gillespie. His name is Barlow. He's in the basement of Eva Miller's boardinghouse right now.'

    'That so?' Parkins said with no particular surprise, 'Vam?pire, ain't he? Just like in all the comic books they used to put out twenty years ago.'

    Ben said nothing. He felt more and more like a man lost in a great and grinding nightmare where clockwork ran on and on endlessly, unseen, but just below the surface of things.

    'I'm leavin' town,' Parkins said. 'Got my stuff all packed up in the back of the car. I left my gun and the bubble and my badge in on the shelf. I'm done with lawin'. Goin' t'see my sister in Kittery, I am. Figure that's far enough to be safe.'

    Ben heard himself say remotely, 'You gutless creep. You cowardly piece of shit. This town is still alive and you're running out on it.'

    'It ain't alive,' Parkins said, lighting his smoke with a wooden kitchen match. 'That's why he came here. It's dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. Whole country's goin' the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin's in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin' popcorn and cheerin 'em on.' He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the broken rays of the westering sun, like a dream village. 'They prob'ly like bein' vampires. But not me; Nolly'd be in after me tonight. I'm goin'.'

    Ben looked at him helplessly.

    'You two fellas want to get in that car and hit it out of here,' Parkins said. 'This town will go on without us . . . for a while. Then it won't matter.'

    Yes, Ben thought. Why don't we do that? Mark spoke the reason for both of them. 'Because he's bad, mister. He's really bad. That's all.'

    'Is that so?' Parkins said. He nodded and puffed his Pall Mall. 'Well, okay.' He looked up toward the Consolidated High School. 'Piss-poor attendance today, from the Lot, anyway. Buses runnin' late, kids out sick, office phonin' houses and not gettin' any answer. The attendance officer called me, and I soothed him some. He's a funny little bald-headed fella who thinks he knows what he's doing. Well, the teachers are there, anyway. They come from out of town, mostly. They can teach each other.'

    Thinking of Matt, Ben said, 'Not all of them are from out of town.'

    'It don't matter,' Parkins said. His eyes dropped to the stakes in Ben's belt. 'You going to try to do that fella up with one of those?'

    'Yes.'

    'You can have my riot gun if you want it. That gun, it was Nolly's idear. Nolly liked to go armed, he did. Not even a bank in town so's he could hope someone would rob it. He'll make a good vampire though, once he gets the hang of it.'

    Mark was looking at him with rising horror, and Ben knew he had to get him away. This was the worst of all.

    'Come on,' he said to Mark. 'He's done.'

    'I guess that's it,' Parkins said. His pale, crinkle-caught eyes surveyed the town. 'Surely is quiet. I seen Mabel Werts, peekin' out with her glasses, but I don't guess there's much to peek at, today. There'll be more tonight, likely.'

    They went back to the car. It was almost 5:30.

    46

    They pulled up in front of St Andrew's at quarter of six. Lengthening shadows fell from the church across the street to the rectory, covering it like a prophecy. Ben pulled Jimmy's bag out of the back seat and dumped it out. He found several small ampoules, and dumped their contents out the window, saving the bottles.

    'What are you doing?'

    'We're going to put holy water in these,' Ben said. 'Come on.'

    They went up the walk to the church and climbed the steps. Mark, about to open the middle door, paused and pointed. 'Look at that.'

    The handle was blackened and pulled slightly out of shape, as if a heavy electric charge had been pushed through it.

    'Does that mean anything to you?' Ben asked.

    'No. No, but . . . ' Mark shook his head, pushing an unformed thought away. He opened the door and they went in. The church was cool and gray and filled with the endless pregnant pause that all empty altars of faith, white and black, have in common.

    The two ranks of pews were split by a wide central aisle, and flanking this, two plaster angels stood cradling bowls of holy water, their calm and sweetly knowing faces bent, as if to catch their own reflections in the still water.

    Ben put the ampoules in his pocket. 'Bathe your face and hands,' he said.

    Mark looked at him, troubled. 'That's sac - sacri - '

    'Sacrilege? Not this time. Go ahead.'

    They dunked their hands in the still water and then splashed it over their faces, the way a man who has just wakened will splash cold water into his eyes to shock the world back into them.

    Ben took the first ampoule out of his pocket and was filling it when a shrill voice cried, 'Here! Here now! What are you doing?'

     Ben turned around. It was Rhoda Curless, Father Calla?han's housekeeper, who had been sitting in the first pew and twisting a rosary helplessly between her fingers. She was wearing a black dress, and her slip hung below the hem. Her hair was in disarray; she had been pulling her fingers through it.
    

    'Where's the Father? What are you doing?' Her voice was reedy and thin, close to hysteria.

    'Who are you?' Ben asked.

    'Mrs Curless. I'm Father Callahan's housekeeper. Where's the Father? What are you doing?' Her hands came together and began to war with each other.

    'Father Callahan is gone,' Ben said, as gently as he could.

    'Oh.' She closed her eyes. 'Was he getting after whatever ails this town?'

    'Yes,' Ben said.

    'I knew it,' she said. 'I didn't have to ask. He's a strong, good man of the cloth. There were always those who said he'd never be man enough to fill Father Bergeron's shoes, but he filled 'em. They were too small for him, as it turned out.'

    She opened her eyes wide and looked at them. A tear spilled from her left, and ran down her cheek. 'He won't be back, will he?'

    'I don't know,' Ben said.

    'They talked about his drinkin',' she said, as though she hadn't heard. 'Was there ever an Irish priest worth his keep who didn't tip the bottle? None of that mollycoddlin' wet-nursin' church-bingo-prayer-basket for him. He was more'n that!' Her voice rose toward the vaulted ceiling in a hoarse, almost challenging cry. 'He was a priest, not some holy alderman!'

    Ben and Mark listened without speech or surprise. There was no surprise left on this dream-struck day; there was not even the capacity for it. They no longer saw themselves as doers or avengers or saviors; the day had absorbed them. Helplessly, they were only living.

    'Was he strong when last you saw him?' she demanded, peering at them. The tears magnified the gimlet lack of compromise in her eyes.

    'Yes,' Mark said, remembering Callahan in his mother's kitchen, holding his cross aloft.

    'And are you about his work now?'

    'Yes,' Mark said again.

    'Then be about it,' she snapped at them. 'What are you waiting for?' And she left them, walking down the center aisle in her black dress, the solitary mourner at a funeral that hadn't been held here.

    47

    Eva's again - and at the last. It was ten minutes after six. The sun hung over the western pines, peering out of the broken clouds like blood.

    Ben drove into the parking lot and looked curiously up at his room. The shade was not drawn and he could see his typewriter standing sentinel, and beside it, his pile of manuscript and the glass globe paperweight on top of it. It seemed amazing that he could see all those things from here, see them clearly, as if everything in the world was sane and normal and ordered.

    He let his eyes drop to the back porch. The rocking chairs where he and Susan had shared their first kiss stood side by side, unchanged. The door which gave ingress to the kitchen stood open, as Mark had left it.

    'I can't,' Mark muttered. 'I just can't.' His eyes were wide and white. He had drawn up his knees and was now crouched on the seat.

    'It's got to be both of us,' Ben said. He held out two of the ampoules filled with holy water. Mark twitched away from them in horror, as if touching them would admit poison through his skin. 'Come on,' Ben said. He had no arguments left. 'Come on, come on.'

    'No.'

    'Mark?'

    'No!'

    'Mark, I need you. You and me, that's all that's left.'

    'I've done enough!' Mark cried. 'I can't do any more! 'Can't you understand I can't look at him?'

    'Mark, it has to be the two of us. Don't you know that?'

    Mark took the ampoules and curled them slowly against his chest. 'Oh boy,' he whispered. 'Oh boy, oh boy.' He looked at Ben and nodded. The movement of his head was jerky and agonized. 'Okay,' he said.

    'Where's the hammer?' he asked as they got out.

    'Jimmy had it.'

    'Okay.'

    They walked up the porch steps in the strengthening wind. The sun glared red through the clouds, dyeing every?thing. Inside, in the kitchen, the stink of death was palpable and wet, pressing against them like granite. The cellar door stood open.

    'I'm so scared,' Mark said, shuddering.

    'You better be. Where's that flashlight?'

    'In the cellar. I left it when . . . '

    'Okay.' They stood at the mouth of the cellar. As Mark had said, the stairs looked intact in the sunset light. 'Follow me,' Ben said.

    48

    Ben thought quite easily: I'm going to my death.

    The thought came naturally, and there was no fear or regret in it. Inward-turning emotions were lost under the overwhelming atmosphere of evil that hung over this place. As he slipped and scraped his way down the board Mark had set up to get out of the cellar, all he felt was an unnatural glacial calm. He saw that his hands were glowing, as if wreathed in ghost gloves. It did not surprise him.

    Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. Who had said that? Matt? Matt was dead. Susan was dead. Miranda was dead. Wallace Stevens was dead, too. I wouldn't look at that, if I were you. But he had looked. That's what you looked like when it was over. Like something smashed and broken that had been filled with different-colored fluids. It wasn't so bad. Not so bad as his death. Jimmy had been carrying McCaslin's pistol; it would still be in his coat pocket. He would take it, and if sunset came before they could get to Barlow . . . first the boy, and then himself. Not good, but better than his death.

    He dropped to the cellar floor and then helped Mark down. The boy's eyes flashed to the dark, curled thing on the floor and then skipped away.

    'I can't look at that,' he said huskily.

    'That's all right.'

    Mark turned away and Ben knelt down. He swept away a number of the lethal plywood squares, the knife blades thrust through them glittering like dragon's teeth. Gently, then, he turned Jimmy over.

    I wouldn't look at that, if I were you.

    'Oh, Jimmy,' he tried to say, and the words broke open and bled in his throat. He cradled Jimmy in the curve of his left arm and pulled Barlow's blades out of him with his right hand. There were six of them, and Jimmy had bled a great deal.

    There was a neatly folded stack of living room drapes on a corner shelf. He took them over to Jimmy and spread them over his body after he had the gun and the flashlight and the hammer.

    He stood up and tried the flashlight. The plastic lens cover had cracked, but the bulb still worked. He flashed it around. Nothing. He shone it under the pool table. Bare. Nothing behind the furnace. Racks of preserves, and a pegboard hung with tools. The amputated stairs, pushed over in the far corner so they would be out of sight from the kitchen. They looked like a scaffold leading nowhere.

    'Where is he?' Ben muttered. He glanced at his watch, and the hands stood at 6:23. When was sunset? He couldn't remember. Surely no later than 6:55. That gave them a bare half hour.

    'Where is he?' he cried out. 'I can feel him, but where is he?'

    "There!' Mark cried, pointing with one glowing hand. 'What's that?'

    Ben centered the light on it. A Welsh dresser. 'It's not big enough,' he said to Mark. 'And it's flush against the wall.'

    'Let's look behind it.'

    Ben shrugged. They crossed the room to the Welsh dresser and each took a side. He felt a trickle of building excitement. Surely the odor or aura or atmosphere or whatever you wanted to call it was thicker here, more offensive?

    Ben glanced up at the open kitchen door. The light was dimmer now. The gold was fading out of it.

    'It's too heavy for me,' Mark panted.

    'Never mind,' Ben said. 'We're going to tip it over. Get your best hold.'

    Mark bent over it, his shoulder against the wood. His eyes looked fiercely out of his glowing face. 'Okay.'

    They threw their combined weight against it and the Welsh dresser went over with a bonelike crash as Eva Miller's long-ago wedding china shattered inside.

    'I knew it!' Mark cried triumphantly.

    There was a small door, chest-high, set into the wall where the Welsh dresser had been. A new Yale padlock secured the hasp.

    Two hard swings of the hammer convinced him that the lock wasn't going to give. 'Jesus Christ,' he muttered softly. Frustration welled up bitterly in his throat. To be balked like this at the end, balked by a five-dollar padlock -

    No. He would bite through the wood with his teeth if he had to.

    He shone the flashlight around, and its beam fell on the neatly hung too] board to the right of the stairs. Hung on two of its steel pegs was an ax with a rubber cover masking its blade.

    He ran across, snatched it off the pegboard, and pulled the rubber cover from the blade. He took one of the ampoules from his pocket and dropped it. The holy water ran out on the floor, beginning to glow immediately. He got another one, twisted the small cap off, and doused the blade of the ax. It began to glimmer with eldritch fairy?light. And when he set his hands on the wooden haft, the grip felt incredibly good, incredibly right. Power seemed to have welded his flesh into its present grip. He stood holding it for a moment, looking at the shining blade, and some curious impulse made him touch it to his forehead. A hard sense of sureness clasped him, a feeling of inevitable rightness, of whiteness. For the first time in weeks he felt he was no longer groping through fogs of belief and unbelief, sparring with a partner whose body was too insubstantial to sustain blows.

    Power, humming up his arms like volts.

    The blade glowed brighter.

    'Do it!' Mark pleaded. 'Quick! Please!'

    Ben Mears spread his feet, slung the ax back, and brought it down in a gleaming arc that left an after-image on the eye. The blade bit wood with a booming, portentous sound and sunk to the haft. Splinters flew.

    He pulled it out, the wood screaming against the steel. He brought it down again . . . again . . . again. He could feel the muscles of his back and arms flexing and meshing, moving with a sureness and a studied heat that they had never known before. Each blow sent chips and splinters flying like shrapnel. On the fifth blow the blade crashed through to emptiness and he began hacking the hole wider with a speed that approached frenzy.

    Mark stared at him, amazed. The cold blue fire had crept down the ax handle and spread up his arms until he seemed to be working in a column of fire. His head was twisted to one side, the muscles of his neck corded with strain, one eye open and glaring, the other squeezed shut. The back of his shirt had split between the straining wings of his shoulder blades, and the muscles writhed beneath the skin like ropes. He was a man taken over, possessed, and Mark saw without knowing (or having to know) that the possession was not in the least Christian; the good was more elemental, less refined. It was ore, like something coughed up out of the ground in naked chunks. There was nothing finished about it. It was Force; it was Power, it was whatever moved the greatest wheels of the universe.

    The door to Eva Miller's root cellar could not stand before it. The ax began to move at a nearly blinding speed; it became a ripple, a descending arc, a rainbow from over Ben's shoulder to the splintered wood of the final door.

    He dealt it a final blow and slung the ax away. He held his hands up before his eyes. They blazed.

    He held them out to Mark, and the boy flinched. 'I love you,' Ben said.

    They clasped hands.

    49

    The root cellar was small and cell-like, empty except for a few dusty bottles, some crates, and a dusty bushel basket of very old potatoes that were sprouting eyes in every direction - and the bodies. Barlow's coffin stood at the far end, propped up against the wall like a mummy's sarcophagus, and the crest on it blazed coldly in the light they carried with them like St Elmo's fire.

    In front of the coffin, leading up to it like railroad ties, were the bodies of the people Ben had lived with and broken bread with: Eva Miller, and Weasel Craig beside her; Mabe Mullican from the room at the end of the second-floor hall; John Snow, who had been on the county and could barely walk down to the breakfast table with his arthritis; Vinnie Upshaw; Grover Verrill.

    They stepped over them and stood by the coffin. Ben glanced down at his watch; it was 6:40.

    'We're going to take it out there,' he said. 'By Jimmy.'

    'It must weigh a ton,' Mark said.

    'We can do it.' He reached out, almost tentatively, and then grasped the upper right corner of the coffin. The crest glittered like an impassioned eye. The wood was crawlingly unpleasant to the touch, smooth and stone-like with years. There seemed to be no pores in the wood, no small imperfections for the fingers to recognize and mold to. Yet it rocked easily. One hand did it.

    He tipped it forward with a small push, feeling the great weight held in check as if by invisible counterweights. Something thumped inside. Ben took the weight of the coffin on one hand.

    'Now,' he said. 'Your end.'

    Mark lifted and the end of the coffin came up easily. The boy's face filled with pleased amazement. 'I think I could do it with one finger.'

    'You probably could. Things are finally running our way. But we have to be quick.'

    They carried the coffin through the shattered door. It threatened to stick at its widest point, and Mark lowered his head and shoved. It went through with a wooden scream.

    They carried it across to where Jimmy lay, covered with Eva Miller's drapes.

    'Here he is, Jimmy,' Ben said. 'Here the bastard is. Set it down, Mark.'

    He glanced at his watch again. 6:45. Now the light coming through the kitchen door above them was an ashy gray.

    'Now?' Mark asked.

    They looked at each other over the coffin.

    'Yes,' Ben said.

    Mark came around and they stood together in front of the coffin's locks and seals. They bent together, and the locks split as they touched them, making a sound like thin, snapping clapboards. They lifted.

    Barlow lay before them, his eyes glaring upward.

    He was a young man now, his black hair vibrant and lustrous, flowing over the satin pillow at the head of his narrow apartment. His skin glowed with life. The cheeks were as ruddy as wine. His teeth curved out over his full lips, white with strong streaks of yellow, like ivory.

    'He - ' Mark began, and never finished.


    ---


    Barlow's red eyes rolled in their sockets, filling with a hideous life and mocking triumph. They locked with Mark's eyes and Mark gaped down into them, his own eyes growing blank and far away.

    'Don't look at him!' Ben cried, but it was too late.

    He knocked Mark away. The boy whined deep in his throat and suddenly attacked Ben. Taken by surprise, Ben staggered backward. A moment later the boy's hands were in his coat pocket, digging for Homer McCaslin's pistol.

    'Mark! Don't - '

    But the boy didn't hear. His face was as blank as a washed blackboard. The whining went on and on in his throat, the sound of a very small trapped animal. He had I! both hands around the pistol. They struggled for it, Ben trying to rip it from the boy's grasp and keep it pointed away from both of them.

    'Mark!' he bellowed. 'Mark, wake up! For Christ's sake - '

    The muzzle jerked down toward his head and the gun went off. He felt the slug pass by his temple. He wrapped his hands around Mark's and kicked out with one foot. Mark staggered backward, and the gun clattered on the floor between them. The boy leaped at it, whining, and Ben punched him in the mouth with all the stren2th he had. He felt the boy's lips mash back against his teeth and cried out as if he himself had been hit. Mark slipped to his knees, and Ben kicked the gun away. Mark tried to go after it crawling, and Ben hit him again.

    With a tired sigh, the boy collapsed.

    The strength had left him now, and the sureness. He was only Ben Mears again, and he was afraid.

    The square of light in the kitchen doorway had faded to thin purple; his watch said 6:51.

    A huge force seemed to be dragging at his head, com?manding him to look at the rosy, gorged parasite in the coffin beside him.

    Look and see me, puny man. Look upon Barlow, who has passed the centuries as you have passed hours before a fireplace with a book. Look and see the great creature of the night whom you would slay with your miserable little stick. Look upon me, scribbler. I have written in human lives, and blood has been my ink. Look upon me and despair!

    Jimmy, I can't do it. It's too late, he's too strong for me -

    ?LOOK AT ME!

    It was 6:53.

    Mark groaned on the floor. 'Mom? Momma, where are you? My head hurts . . . it's dark . . .'

    He shall enter my service castratum . . .

    Ben fumbled one of the stakes from his belt and dropped it. He cried out miserably, in utter despair. Outside, the sun had deserted Jerusalem's Lot. Its last rays lingered on the roof of the Marsten House.

    He snatched the stake up. But where was the hammer? Where was the fucking hammer?

    By the root cellar door. He had swung at the padlock with it.

    He scrambled across the cellar and picked it up where it lay.

    Mark was half sitting, his mouth a bloody gash. He wiped a hand across it and looked dazedly at the blood. 'Momma!' he cried. 'Where's my mother?'

    6:55 now. Light and darkness hung perfectly balanced.

    Ben ran back across the darkening cellar, the stake clutched in his left hand, the hammer in his right.

    There was a booming, triumphant laugh. Barlow was sitting up in his coffin, those red eyes flashing with hellish triumph. They locked with Ben's, and he felt the will draining away from him.

    With a mad, convulsive yell, he raised the stake over his head and brought it down in a whistling arc. Its razored point sheared through Barlow's shirt, and he felt it strike into the flesh beneath.

    Barlow screamed. It was an eerie, hurt sound, like the howl of a wolf. The force of the stake slamming home drove him back into the coffin on his back. His hands rose out of it, hooked into claws, waving crazily.

    Ben brought the hammer down on the top of the stake, and Barlow screamed again. One of his hands, as cold as the grave, seized Ben's left hand, which was locked around the stake.

    Ben wriggled into the coffin, his knees planted on Barlow's knees. He stared down into the hate and pain?-driven face.

    'Let me GO!' Barlow cried.

    'Here it comes, you bastard,' Ben sobbed. 'Here it is, leech. Here it is for you.'

    He brought the hammer down again. Blood splashed upward in a cold gush, blinding him momentarily. Barlow's head lashed from side to side on the satin pillow.

    'Let me go, you dare not, you dare not, you dare not do this - '

    He brought the hammer down again and again. Blood burst from Barlow's nostrils. His body began to jerk in the coffin like a stabbed fish. The hands clawed at Ben's cheeks, pulling long gouges in his skin.

    'LET ME GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO - '

    He brought the hammer down on the stake once more, and the blood that pulsed from Barlow's chest turned black.

    Then, dissolution.

    It came in the space of two seconds, too fast to ever be believed in the daylight of later years, yet slow enough to recur again and again in nightmares, with awful stop?motion slowness.

    The skin yellowed, coarsened, blistered like old sheets of canvas. The eyes faded, filmed white, fell in. The hair went white and fell like a drift of feathers. The body inside the dark suit shriveled and retreated. The mouth widened gapingly as the lips drew back and drew back, meeting the nose and disappearing in an oral ring of jutting teeth. The fingernails went black and peeled off, and then there were only bones, still dressed with rings, clicking and clenching like castanets. Dust puffed through the fibers of the linen shirt. The bald and wrinkled head became a skull. The pants, with nothing to fill them out, fell away to broom?sticks clad in black silk. For a moment a hideously ani?mated scarecrow writhed beneath him, and Ben lunged out of the coffin with a strangled cry of horror. But it was impossible to tear the gaze away from Barlow's last metamorphosis; it hypnotized. The fleshless skull whipped from side to side on the satin pillow. The nude jawbone opened in a soundless scream that had no vocal cords to power it. The skeletal fingers danced and clicked on the dark air like marionettes.

    Smells struck his nose and then vanished, each in a light little puff: gas; putrescence, horrid and fleshy; a moldy library smell; acrid dust; then nothing. The twisting, pro?testing finger bones shredded and flaked away like pencils. The nasal cavity of the skull widened and met the oral cavity. The empty eye sockets widened in a fleshless ex?pression of surprise and horror, met, and were no more. The skull caved in like an ancient Ming vase. The clothes settled flat and became as neutral as dirty laundry.

    And still there was no end to its tenacious hold on the world - even the dust billowed and writhed in tiny dust devils within the coffin. And then, suddenly, he felt the passage of something which buffeted past him like a strong wind, making him shudder. At the same instant, every window of Eva Miller's boardinghouse blew out?ward.

    'Look out, Ben!' Mark screamed. 'Look out!'

    He whirled over on his back and saw them coming out of the root cellar - Eva, Weasel, Mabe, Grover, and the others. Their time was on the world.

    Mark's screams echoed in his ears like great fire bells, and he grabbed the boy by the shoulders.

    'The holy water!' he yelled into Mark's tormented face. 'They can't touch us!'

    Mark's cries turned to whimpers.

    'Go up the board,' Ben said. 'Go on.' He had to turn the boy to face it, and then slap his bottom to make him climb. When he was sure the boy was going up, he turned back and looked at them, the Undead.

    They were standing passively some fifteen feet away, looking at him with a flat hate that was not human.

    'You killed the Master,' Eva said, and he could almost believe there was grief in her voice. 'How could you kill the Master?'

    'I'll be back,' he told her. 'For all of you.'

    He went up the board, climbing bent over, using his hands. It groaned under his weight, but held. At the top, he spared one glance back down. They were gathered around the coffin now, looking in silently. They reminded him of the people who had gathered around Miranda's body after the accident with the moving van.

    He looked around for Mark, and saw him lying by the porch door, on his face.

    50

    Ben told himself that the boy had just fainted, and nothing more. It might be true. His pulse was strong and regular. He gathered him in his arms and carried him out to the Citro?n.

    He got behind the wheel and started the engine. As he pulled out onto Railroad Street, delayed reaction struck him like a physical blow, and he had to stifle a scream.

    They were in the streets, the walking dead.

    Cold and hot, his head full of a wild roaring sound, he turned left on Jointner Avenue and drove out of 'salem's Lot.




    1

    Mark woke up a little at a time, letting the Citro?n's steady hum bring him back without thought or memory. At last he looked out the window, and fright took him in rough hands. It was dark. The trees at the sides of the road were vague blurs, and the cars that passed them had their parking lights and headlights on. A gagging, inarticulate groan escaped him, and he clawed at his neck for the cross that still hung there.

    'Relax,' Ben said. 'We're out of town. It's twenty miles behind us.'

    The boy reached over him, almost making him swerve, and locked the driver's side door. Whirling, he locked his own door. Then he crouched slowly down in a ball on his side of the seat. He wished the nothingness would come back. The nothingness was nice. Nice nothingness with no nasty pictures in it.

    The steady sound of the Citro?n's engine was soothing. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Nice. He closed his eyes.

    'Mark?'

    Safer not to answer.

    'Mark, are you all right?'

    Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

    ' - mark - '

    Far away. That was all right. Nice nothingness came back, and shades of gray swallowed him.

    2

    Ben checked them into a motel just across the New Hampshire state line, signing the register Ben Cody and Son, scrawling it. Mark walked into the room holding his cross out. His eyes darted from side to side in their sockets like small, trapped beasts. He held the cross until Ben had closed the door, locked it, and hung his own cross from the doorknob. There was a color TV and Ben watched it for a while. Two African nations had gone to war. The President had a cold but it wasn't considered serious. And a man in Los Angeles had gone berserk and shot fourteen people. The weather forecast was for rain - snow flurries in northern Maine.

    3

    'Salem's Lot slept darkly, and the vampires walked its streets and country roads like a trace memory of evil. Some of them had emerged enough from the shadows of death to have regained some rudimentary cunning. Lawrence Crockett called up Royal Snow and invited him over to the office to play some cribbage. When Royal pulled up front and walked in, Lawrence and his wife fell on him. Glynis Mayberry called Mabel Werts, said she was fright?ened, and asked if she could come over and spend the evening with her until her husband got back from Water?ville. Mabel agreed with almost pitiful relief, and when she opened the door ten minutes later, Glynis was standing there stark naked, her purse over her arm, grinning with huge, ravenous incisors. Mabel had time to scream, but only once. When Delbert Markey stepped out of his de?serted tavern just after eight o'clock, Carl Foreman and a grinning Homer McCaslin stepped out of the shadows and said they had come for a drink. Milt Crossen was visited at his store just after closing time by a number of his most faithful customers and oldest cronies. And George Middler visited several of the high school boys who bought things at his store and always had looked at him with a mixture of scorn and knowledge; and his darkest fantasies were satisfied.

    Tourists and through-travelers still passed by on Route 12, seeing nothing of the Lot but an Elks billboard and a thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed sign. Outside of town they went back up to sixty and perhaps dismissed it with a single thought: Christ, what a dead little place.

    The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.

    4

    Ben drove back the next day at dawn, leaving Mark in the motel room. He stopped at a busy hardware store in Westbrook and bought a spade and a pick.

    'Salem's Lot lay silent under a dark sky from which rain had not yet begun to fall. Few cars moved on the streets. Spencer's was open but now the Excellent Caf�� was shut up, all the green blinds drawn, the menus removed from the windows, the small daily special chalk board erased clean.

    The empty streets made him feel cold in his bones, and an image came to mind, an old rock 'n' roll album with a picture of a transvestite on the front, profile shot against a black background, the strangely masculine face bleeding with rouge and paint; title: 'They Only Come Out at Night.'

    He went to Eva's first, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and pushed the door to his room open. Just the same as he had left it, the bed unmade, an open roll of Life Savers on his desk. There was an empty tin wastebasket under the desk and he pulled it out into the middle of the floor.

    He took his manuscript, threw it in, and made a paper spill of the title page. He lit it with his Cricket, and when it flared up he tossed it in on top of the drift of typewritten pages. The flame tasted them, found them good, and began to crawl eagerly over the paper. Corners charred, turned upward, blackened. Whitish smoke began to billow out of the wastebasket, and without thinking about it, he leaned over his desk and opened the window.

    His hand found the paperweight - the glass globe that had been with him since his boyhood in his nighted town - grabbed unknowing in a dreamlike visit to a monster's house. Shake it up and watch the snow float down.

    He did it now, holding it up before his eyes as he had as a boy, and it did its old, old trick. Through the floating snow you could see a little gingerbread house with a path leading up to it. The gingerbread shutters were closed, but as an imaginative boy (as Mark Petrie was now), you could fancy that one of the shutters was being folded back (as indeed, one of them seemed to be folding back now) by a long white hand, and then a pallid face would be looking out at you, grinning with long teeth, inviting you into this house beyond the world in its slow and endless fantasy-land of false snow, where time was a myth. The face was looking out at him now, pallid and hungry, a face that would never look on daylight or blue skies again.

    It was his own face.

    He threw the paperweight into the corner and it shat?tered.

    He left without waiting to see what might leak out of it.

    5

    He went down into the cellar to get Jimmy's body, and that was the hardest trip of all. The coffin lay where it had the night before, empty even of dust. Yet . . . not entirely empty. The stake was in there, and something else. He felt his gorge rise. Teeth. Barlow's teeth - all that was left of him. Ben reached down, picked them up - and they twisted in his hand like tiny white animals, trying to come together and bite.

    With a disgusted cry he threw them outward, scattering them.

    'God,' he whispered, rubbing his hand against his shirt 'Oh, my dear God. Please let that be the end. Let it be the end of him.'

    6

    Somehow he managed to get Jimmy, still bundled up in Eva's drapes, out of the cellar. He tucked the bundle into the trunk of Jimmy's Buick and then drove out to the Petrie house, the pick and shovel resting next to Jimmy's black bag in the back seat. In a wooded clearing behind the Petrie house and close to the babble of Taggart Stream, he spent the rest of the morning and half the afternoon digging a wide grave four feet deep. Into it he put Jimmy's body and the Petries, still wrapped in the sofa dust cover.

    He began filling in the grave of these clean ones at two-thirty. He began to shovel faster and faster as the light began its long drain from the cloudy sky. Sweat that was not wholly from exertion condensed on his skin.

    The hole was filled in by four. He tamped in the sods as well as he could, and drove back to town with the earth-clotted pick and shovel in the trunk of Jimmy's car. He parked it in front of the Excellent Caf��, leaving the keys in the ignition.

    He paused for a moment, looking around. The deserted business buildings with their false fronts seemed to lean crepitatingly over the street. The rain, which had started around noon, fell softly and slowly, as if in mourning. The little park where he had met Susan Norton was empty and forlorn. The shades of the Municipal Building were drawn. A 'Be back soon' sign hung in the window of Larry Crock?ett's Insurance and Real Estate office with hollow jaunti?ness. And the only sound was soft rain.

    He walked up toward Railroad Street, his heels clicking emptily on the sidewalk. When he got to Eva's, he paused by his car for a moment, looking around for the last time.

    Nothing moved.

    The town was dead. All at once he knew it for sure and true, just as he had known for sure that Miranda was dead when he had seen her shoe lying in the road.

    He began to cry.

    He was still crying when he drove past the Elks sign, which read: 'You are now leaving Jerusalem's Lot, a nice little town. Come again!'

    He got on the turnpike. The Marsten House was blotted out by the trees as he went down the feeder ramp. He began to drive south toward Mark, toward his life.

    ---


    1

    From a scrapbook kept by Ben Mears (all clippings from the Portland 'Press-Herald'):

    November 19, 1975 (p. 27):

    JERUSALEM'S LOT - The Charles V. Pritchett family, who bought a farm in the Cumberland County town of Jerusalem's Lot only a month ago, are moving out because things keep going bump in the night, according to Charles and Amanda Pritchett, who moved here from Portland. The farm, a local landmark on Schoolyard Hill, was previously owned by Charles Griffen. Griffen's father was the owner of Sunshine Dairy, Inc., which was absorbed by the Slewfoot Dairy Corporation in 1962. Charles Griffen, who sold the farm through a Portland realtor for what Pritchett called 'a bargain basement price', could not be reached for comment. Amanda Pritchett first told her husband about the 'funny noises' in the hayloft shortly after . . .

    January 4, 1976 (p. 1):

    JERUSALEM'S LOT - A bizarre car crash occurred last night or early this morning in the small southern Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot. Police theorize from skid marks found near the scene that the car, a late-model sedan, was traveling at an excessive speed when it left the road and struck a Central Maine Power utility pole. The car was a total wreck, but although blood was found on the front seat and the dashboard, no passengers have yet been found. Police say that the car was registered to Mr Gordon Phillips of Scarborough. According to a neighbor, Phillips and his family had been on their way to see relatives in Yarmouth. Police theorize that Phillips, his wife, and their two children may have wand?ered off in a daze and become lost. Plans for a search have been . . .

    February 14, 1976 (p. 4):

    CUMBERLAND - Mrs Fiona Coggins, a widow who lived alone on the Smith Road in West Cumberland, was reported missing this morning to the Cumberland County sheriff's office by her niece, Mrs Gertrude Hersey. Mrs Hersey told police officers that her aunt was a shut-in and is in poor health. Sheriff's deputies are investigating, but claim that at this point it is imposs?ible to say what . . .

    February 2 7, 1976 (p. 6):

    FALMOUTH - John Farrington, an elderly farmer and lifelong Falmouth resident was found dead in his barn early this morning by his son-in-law, Frank Vickery. Vickery said Farrington was lying face down outside a low haymow, a pitchfork near one hand. County Medi?cal Examiner David Rice says Farrington apparently died of a massive hemorrhage, or perhaps internal bleed?ing . . .

    May 20, 1976 (p. 17):

    PORTLAND - Cumberland County game wardens have been instructed by the Maine State Wildlife Service to be on the lookout for a wild dog pack that may be running in the Jerusalem's Lot-Cumberland-Falmouth area. During the last month, several sheep have been found dead with their throats and bellies mangled. In some cases, sheep have been disemboweled. Deputy Game Warden Upton Pruitt said 'As you know, this situation has worsened a good deal in southern Maine . . .

    May 29, 1976 (p. 1):

    JERUSALEM 'S LOT - Possible foul play is suspected in the disappearance of the Daniel Holloway family, who had moved into a house on the Taggart Stream Road in this small Cumberland County township recently. Police were alerted by Daniel Holloway's grandfather, who became alarmed at the repeated failure of anyone to answer his telephone calls.

    The Holloways and their two children moved onto the Taggart Stream Road in April, and had complained to both friends and relatives of hearing 'funny noises' after dark.

    Jerusalem's Lot has been at the center of several strange occurrences during the last several months, and a great many families have . . .

    June 4, 1976 (p.2):

    CUMBERLAND - Mrs Elaine Tremont, a widow who owns a small house on the Back Stage Road in the western part of this small Cumberland County village, was admitted to Cumberland Receiving Hospital early this morning with a heart attack. She told a reporter from this paper that she had heard a scratching noise at her bedroom window while she was watching television, and looked up to see a face peering in at her.

    'It was grinning,' Mrs Tremont said. 'It was horrible. I've never been so frightened in my life. And since that family was killed just a mile away on the Taggart Stream Road, I've been frightened all the time.'

    Mrs Tremont referred to the Daniel Holloway family, who disappeared from their Jerusalem's Lot residence some time early last week. Police said the connection was being investigated, but . . .

    2

    The tall man and the boy arrived in Portland in mid-?September and stayed at a local motel for three weeks. They were used to heat, but after the dry climate of Los Zapatos, they both found the high humidity enervating. They both swam in the motel pool a great deal and watched the sky a great deal. The man got the Portland Press-Herald every day, and now the copies were fresh, unmarked by time or dog urine. He read the weather forecasts and he watched for items concerning Jerusalem's Lot. On the ninth day of their stay in Portland, a man in Falmouth disappeared. His dog was found dead in the yard. Police were looking into it.

    The man rose early on October 6 and stood in the forecourt of the motel. Most of the tourists were gone now, back to New York and New Jersey and Florida, to Ontario and Nova Scotia, to Pennsylvania and California. The tourists left their litter and their summer dollars and the natives to enjoy their state's most beautiful season.

    This morning there was something new in the air. The smell of exhaust from the main road was not so great. There was no haze on the horizon, and no ground fog lying milkily around the legs of the billboard in the field across the way. The morning sky was very clear, and the air was chill. Indian summer seemed to have left overnight.

    The boy came out and stood beside him.

    The man said: 'Today.'

    3

    It was almost noon when they got to the 'salem's Lot turnoff, and Ben was reminded achingly of the day he had arrived here determined to exorcise all the demons that had haunted him, and confident of his success. That day had been warmer than this, the wind had not been so strong out of the west, and Indian summer had only been beginning. He remembered two boys with fishing poles. The sky today was a harder blue, colder.

    The car radio proclaimed that the fire index was at five, its second-highest reading. There had been no significant rainfall in southern Maine since the first week of Sep?tember. The deejay on WJAB cautioned drivers to crush their smokes and then played a record about a man who was going to jump off a water tower for love.

    They drove down Route 12 past the Elks sign and were on Jointner Avenue. Ben saw at once that the blinker was dark. No need of a warning light now.

    Then they were in town. They drove through it slowly, and Ben felt the old fear drop over him, like a coat found in the attic which has grown tight but still fits. Mark sat rigidly beside him, holding a vial of holy water brought all the way from Los Zapatos. Father Gracon had presented him with it as a going-away present.

    With the fear came memories: almost heartbreaking.

    They had changed Spencer's Sundries to a LaVerdiere's, but it had fared no better. The closed windows were dirty and bare. The Greyhound bus sign was gone. A for-sale sign had fallen askew in the window of the Excellent Caf6, and all the counter stools had been uprooted and ferried away to some more prosperous lunchroom. Up the street the sign over what had once been a Laundromat still read 'Barlow and Straker - Fine Furnishings,' but now the gilt letters were tarnished and they looked out on empty sidewalks. The show window was empty, the deep-pile carpet dirty. Ben thought of Mike Ryerson and wondered if he was still lying in the crate in the back room. The thought made his mouth dry.

    Ben slowed at the crossroads. Up the hill he could see the Norton house, the grass grown long and yellow in front and behind it, where Bill Norton's brick barbecue had stood. Some of the windows were broken.

    Further up the street he pulled in to the curb and looked into the park. The War Memorial presided over a jungle-like growth of bushes and grass. The wading pool had been choked by summer waterweeds. The green paint on the benches was flaked and peeling. The swing chairs had rusted, and to ride in one would produce squealing noises unpleasant enough to spoil the fun. The slippery slide had fallen over and Jay with its legs sticking stiff y out, like a dead antelope. And perched in one corner of the sandbox, a floppy arm trailing on the grass, was some child's forgotten Raggedy Andy doll. Its shoe-button eyes seemed to reflect a black, vapid horror, as if it had seen all the secrets of darkness during its long stay in the sandbox. Perhaps it had.

    He looked up and saw the Marsten House, its shutters still closed, looking down on the town with rickety malevol?ence. It was harmless now, but after dark . . .

    The rains would have washed away the wafer with which Callahan had sealed it. It could be theirs again if they wanted it, a shrine, a dark lighthouse overlooking this shunned and deadly town. Did they meet up there? he wondered. Did they wander, pallid, through its nighted halls and hold revels, twisted services to the Maker of their Maker?

    He looked away, cold.

    Mark was looking at the houses. In most of them the shades were drawn; in others, uncovered windows looked in on empty rooms. They were worse than those decently closed, Ben thought. They seemed to look out at these daylight interlopers with the vapid stares of mental defectives.

    'They're in those houses,' Mark said tightly. 'Right now in all those houses. Behind the shades. In beds and closet! and cellars. Under the floors. Hiding.'

    'Take it easy,' Ben said.

    The village dropped behind them. Ben turned onto the Brooks Road and they drove past the Marsten House - its shutters still sagging, its lawn a complex maze of knee-high witch grass and goldenrod.

    Mark pointed, and Ben looked. A path had been beaten across the grass, beaten white. It cut across the lawn from the road to the porch. Then it was behind them, and he felt a loosening in his chest. The worst had been faced and was behind them.

    Far out on the Burns Road, not too far distant from the Harmony Hill graveyard, Ben stopped the car and they got out. They walked into the woods together. The undergrowth snapped harshly, dryly, under their feet. There was a gin-sharp smell of juniper berries and the sound of late locusts. They came out on a small, knoll-like prominence of land that looked down on a slash through the woods where the Central Maine Power lines twinkled in the day's cool windiness. Some of the trees were beginning to show color.

    'The old-timers say this is where it started,' Ben said. 'Back in 1951. The wind was blowing from the west. They think maybe a guy got careless with a cigarette. One little cigarette. It took off across the Marshes and no one could stop it.'

    Malls from his pocket, looked at the emblem thoughtfully - in hoc signo vinces - and then tore the cellophane off. He lit one and shook out the match. The cigarette tasted surprisingly good, although he had not smoked in months.

    'They have their places,' he said. 'But they could lose them. A lot of them could be killed . . . or destroyed. That's a better word. But not all of them. Do you understand?'

    'Yes,' Mark said.

    'They're not very bright. If they lose their hiding places, they'll hide badly the second time. A couple of people just looking in obvious places could do well. Maybe it could be finished in 'salem's Lot by the time the first snow flew. Maybe it would never be finished. No guarantee, one way or the other. But without . . . something . . . to drive them out, to upset them, there would be no chance at all.'

    'Yes.'

    'It would be ugly and dangerous.'

    'I know that.'

    'But they say fire purifies,' Ben said reflectively. 'Purification should count for something, don't you think?'

    'Yes,' Mark said again.

    Ben stood up. 'We ought to go back.'

    He flicked the smoldering cigarette into a pile of dead brush and old brittle leaves. The white ribbon of smoke rose thinly against the green background of junipers for two or three feet, and then was pulled apart by the wind. Twenty feet away, downwind, was a large, jumbled deadfall.

    They watched the smoke, transfixed, fascinated.

    It thickened. A tongue of flame appeared. A small popping noise issued from the pile of dead brush as twigs caught.

    'Tonight they won't be running sheep or visiting farms.' Ben said softly. 'Tonight they'll be on the run. And tomorrow - '

    'You and me,' Mark said, and closed his fist. His face was no longer pale; bright color glowed there. His eye flashed.

    They went back to the road and drove away

    In the small clearing overlooking the power lines, the fire in the brush began to burn more strongly, urged by the autumn wind that blew from the west.

    October 1972

    June 1975