Why don’t Ben and I just go up to the Marsten House and have done with it? That was on the docket just last week.’
‘I’ll tell you why,’ Ben said. ‘Because we are proceeding on the premise that all this is real. Are you so anxious to put your head in the lion’s mouth?’
‘I thought vampires slept in the daytime.’
‘Whatever Straker may be, he’s not a vampire,’ Ben said, ‘unless the old legends are completely wrong. He’s been highly visible in the daytime. At best we’d be turned away as trespassers with nothing learned. At worst, he might overpower us and keep us there until dark. A wake-up snack for Count Comic Book.’
‘Barlow?’ Susan asked.
Ben shrugged. ‘Why not? That story about the New York buying expedition is a little too good to be true.’ The expression in her eyes remained stubborn, but she said nothing more.
‘What will you do if Cody laughs you off?’ Matt asked.
‘Always assuming he doesn’t call for the restraints immediately.’
‘Off to the graveyard at sunset,’ Ben said. ‘To watch Danny Glick’s grave. Call it a test case.’
Matt half rose from his reclining position. ‘Promise me that you’ll be careful. Ben, promise me!’
‘We will,’ Susan said soothingly. ‘We’ll both positively clank with crosses.’
‘Don’t joke,’ Matt muttered. ‘if you’d seen what I have-’ He turned his head and looked out the window, which showed the sun-shanked leaves of an alder and the autumn-bright sky beyond.
‘If she’s joking, I’m not,’ Ben said. ‘We’ll take all precautions.’
‘See Father Callahan,’ Matt said. ‘Make him give you some holy water… and if possible, some of the wafer.’
‘What kind of man is he?’ Ben asked.
Matt shrugged. ‘A little strange. A drunk, maybe. If he is, he’s a literate, polite one. Perhaps chafing a little under the yoke of enlightened Popery.’
‘Are you sure that Father Callahan is a… that he drinks?’ Susan asked, her eyes a trifle wide.
‘Not positive,’ Matt said. ‘But an ex-student of mine, Brad Campion, works in the Yarmouth liquor store and he says Callahan’s a regular customer. A Jim Beam man, Good taste.’
‘Could he be talked to?’ Ben asked.
‘I don’t know. I think you must try.’
‘Then you don’t know him at all?’
‘No, not really. He’s writing a history of the Catholic Church in New England, and he knows a great deal about the poets of our so-called golden age-Whittier, Longfellow, Russell, Holmes, that lot. I had him in to speak to my American Lit students late last year. He has a quick, acerbic mind-the students enjoyed him.’
‘I’ll see him ‘Ben said, ‘and follow my nose.’
A nurse peeked in, nodded, and a moment later Jimmy Cody entered with a stethoscope around his neck.
‘Disturbing my patient?’ he asked amiably.
‘Not half so much as you are,’ Matt said. ‘I want my pipe.’
‘You can’t have it,’ Cody said absently, reading Matt’s chart.
‘Goddamn quack,’ Matt muttered.
Cody put the chart back and drew the green -curtain that went around the bed on a C-shaped steel runner overhead. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you two to step out in a moment. How is your head, Mr Mears?’
‘Well, nothing seems to have leaked out.’
‘You heard about Floyd Tibbits?’
‘Susan told me. I’d like to speak to you, if you have a moment after your rounds.’
‘I can make you the last patient on my rounds, if you like. Around eleven.’
‘Fine.’
Cody twitched the curtain again. ‘And now, if you and Susan would excuse us-’
‘Here we go, friends, into isolation,’ Matt said. ‘Say the secret word and win a hundred dollars.’
The curtain came between Ben and Susan and the bed. From beyond it they heard Cody say: ‘The next time I have you under gas I think I’ll take out your tongue and about half of your prefrontal lobe.’
They smiled at each other, the way young couples will when they are in sunshine and there is nothing seriously the matter with their works, and the smiles faded almost simultaneously. For a moment they both wondered if they might not be crazy.
3
When Jimmy Cody finally came into ten’s room, it was twenty after eleven and Ben began, ‘What I wanted to talk to you about-’
‘First the head, then the talk.’ He parted Ben’s hair gently, looked at something, and said, ‘This’ll hurt.’ He
