Salem's Lot

Matt sighed. ‘Lucidity doesn’t presuppose sanity-as you well know.’ He shifted in bed, redistributing the books that lay around him. ‘If there is a God, He must be making me do penance for a life of careful academicism - of refusing to plant an intellectual foot on any ground until it had been footnoted in triplicate. Now for the second time in one day, I’m compelled to make the wildest declarations without a shred of proof to back them up. All I can say in defense of my own sanity is that my statements can be either proved or disproved without too much difficulty, and hope that you will take me seriously enough to make the test before it’s too late.’ He chuckled. ‘Before it’s too late. Sounds straight out of the thirties’ pulp magazines, doesn’t it?’

‘Life is full of melodrama,’ Callahan remarked, reflecting that if it were so, he had seen precious little of it lately.

‘Let me ask you again if you have noticed anything anything-out of the way or peculiar this weekend.’

‘To do with vampires, or-’

‘To do with anything.’

Callahan thought it over. ‘The dump’s closed,’ he said finally. ‘But the gate was broken off, so I drove in anyway.’ He smiled. ‘I rather enjoy taking my own garbage to the dump. It’s so practical and humble that I can indulge my elitist fantasies of a poor but happy proletariat to the fullest. Dud Rogers wasn’t around, either.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Well… the Crocketts weren’t at mass this morning, and Mrs Crockett hardly ever misses.’

‘More?’

‘Poor Mrs Glick, of course-’

Matt got up on one elbow. ‘Mrs Glick? What about her?’

‘She ‘s dead.

‘Of what?’

‘Pauline Dickens seemed to think it was a heart attack,’

Callahan said, but hesitatingly.

‘Has anyone else died in the Lot today?’ Ordinarily, it would have been a foolish question. Deaths in a small town like ‘salem’s Lot were generally spread apart, in spite of the higher proportion of elderly in the population.

‘No,’ Callahan said slowly. ‘But the mortality rate has certainly been high lately, hasn’t’ it? Mike Ryerson… Floyd Tibbits… the McDougall baby…’

Matt nodded, looking tired. ‘Passing strange,’ he said. ‘Yes. But things are reaching the point where they’ll be able to cover up for each other. A few more nights and I’m afraid… afraid… ’

‘Let’s stop beating around the bush,’ Callahan said.

‘All right. There’s been rather too much of that already, hasn’t there?’

He began to tell his story from beginning to end, weaving in Ben’s and Susan’s and Jimmy’s additions as he went along, holding back nothing. By the time he had finished, the evening’s horror had ended for Ben and Jimmy. Susan Norton’s was just beginning.

2

When he had finished, Matt allowed a moment of silence and then said, ‘So. Am I crazy?’

‘You’re determined that people will think you so, anyway,’ Callahan said, ‘in spite of the fact that you seem to have convinced Mr Mears and your own doctor. No, I don’t think you’re crazy. After all, I am in the business of dealing with the supernatural. If I may be allowed a small pun, it is my bread and wine.’

‘But-’

‘Let me tell you a story. I won’t vouch for its truth, but I will vouch for my own belief that it is true. It concerns a good friend of mine, Father Raymond Bissonette, who has been ministering to a parish in Cornwall for some Years now-along the so-called Tin Coast. Do you know of it?’

‘Through reading, yes.’

‘Some five years ago he wrote me that he had been called to an out-of-the-way corner of his parish to conduct a funeral service for a girl who had just 'pined away'. The girl’s coffin was filled with wild roses, which struck Ray as unusual. What he found downright grotesque was the fact that her mouth had been propped open with a stick and then filled with garlic and wild thyme.’

‘But those are-’

‘Traditional protections against the rising of the Undead, yes. Folk remedies. When Ray inquired, he was told quite matter-of-factly by the girl’s father that she had been killed by an incubus. You know the meaning?’

‘A sexual vampire.’

‘The girl had been betrothed to a young man named Bannock, who had a large strawberry-colored birthmark on the side of his neck. He was struck and killed by a car on his way home from work two weeks before the wedding. Two years later, the girl became engaged to another man. She broke it off quite suddenly during the week before the banns were to be cried for the second time. She told her parents and friends that John Bannock had been coming to her in the night and she had been unfaithful with him. Her present lover, according to Ray, was more distressed by the thought that she might have become mentally unbalanced than by the possibility of demon visitation. Nonetheless, she wasted away, died, and was buried in the old ways of the church.

‘All of that did not occasion Ray’s letter. What did was an occurrence some two months after the girl’s burial. While he was on an early morning walk, Ray spied a young man standing by the girl’s grave - a young man with a