Salem's Lot

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 thoughtless 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.

Chapter Thirteen

FATHER CALLAHAN

1

On that same Sunday evening, Father Callahan stepped hesitantly into Matt Burke’s hospital room at quarter to seven by Matt’s watch. The bedside table and the counterpane itself were littered with books, some of them dusty with age. Matt had called Loretta Starcher at her spinster’s apartment and had not only gotten her to open the library on Sunday, but had gotten her to deliver the books in person. She had come in at the head of a procession made up of three hospital orderlies, each loaded down. She had left in something of a huff because he refused to answer questions about the strange conglomeration.

Father Callahan regarded the schoolteacher curiously. He looked worn, but not so worn or wearily shocked as most of the parishioners he visited in similar circumstances. Callahan found that the common first reaction to news of cancer, strokes, heart attacks, or the failure of some major organ was one of betrayal. The patient was astounded to find that such a close (and, up to now at least, fully understood) friend as one’s own body could be so sluggard as to lie down on the job. The reaction which followed close on the heels of the first was the thought that a friend who would let one down so cruelly was not worth having. The conclusion that followed these reactions was that it didn’t matter if this friend was worth having or not. One could not refuse to speak to one’s traitorous body, or get up a petition against it, or pretend that one was not at home when it called. The final thought in this hospital-bed train of reasoning was the hideous possibility that one’s body might not be a friend at all, but an enemy implacably dedicated to destroying the superior force that had used it and abused it ever since the disease of reason set in.

Once, while in a fine drunken frenzy, Callahan had sat down to write a monograph on the subject for The Catholic Journal. He had even illustrated it with a fiendish editorial page cartoon, which showed a brain poised on the highest ledge of a skyscraper. The building (labeled ‘The Human Body’) was in flames (which were labeled ‘Cancer’-although they might have been a dozen others). The cartoon was titled ‘Too Far to Jump’. During the next day’s enforced bout with sobriety, he had torn the prospective monograph to shreds and burned the cartoon - there was no place in Catholic doctrine for either, unless you wanted to add a helicopter labeled ‘Christ’ that was dangling a rope ladder. Nonetheless, he felt that his insights had been true ones, and the result of such sickbed logic on the part of the patient was usually acute depression. The symptoms included dulled eyes, slow responses, sighs fetched from deep within the chest cavity, and sometimes tears at the sight of the priest, that black crow whose function was ultimately predicated on the problem the fact of mortality presented to the thinking being.

Matt Burke showed none of this depression. He held out his hand, and when Callahan shook it, he found the grip surprisingly strong.

‘Father Callahan. Good of you to come.’

‘Pleased to. Good teachers, like a wife’s wisdom, are pearls beyond price.’

‘Even agnostic old bears like myself?’

‘Especially those,’ Callahan said, riposting with pleasure. ‘I may have caught you at a weak moment. There are no atheists in the foxholes, I’ve been told, and precious few agnostics in the Intensive Care ward.’

‘I’m being moved soon, alas.’