Salem's Lot

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 outside, 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