Salem's Lot

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

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

It was quarter after ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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 icecream sodas and frappes 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.