"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 wakeup 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 sunshanked 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.
THREE
When Jimmy Cody finally came into Ben'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 pulled off the adhesive bandage and Ben jumped. "Hell of a lump," Cody said conversationally, and then covered the wound with a slightly smaller dressing.
He shone a light into Ben's eyes, then tapped his left knee with a rubber hammer. With sudden morbidity, Ben wondered if it was the same one he had used on Mike Ryerson.
"All that seems to be satisfactory," he said, putting his things away. "What's your mother's maiden name?"
"Ashford," Ben said. They had asked him similar questions when he had first recovered consciousness.
"First-grade teacher?"
"Mrs Perkins. She rinsed her hair."
"Father's middle name?"
"Merton."
"Any dizziness or nausea?"
"No."
"Experience of strange odors, colors, or--"
"No, no, and no. I feel fine."
"I'll decide that," Cody said primly. "Any instance of double vision?"
"Not since the last time I bought a gallon of Thunderbird."
"All right," Cody said. "I pronounce you cured through the wonders of modern science and by virtue of a hard head. Now, what was on your mind? Tibbits and the little McDougall boy, I suppose. I can only tell you what I told Parkins Gillespie. Number one, I'm glad they've kept it out of the papers; one scandal per century is enough in a small town. Number two, I'm damned if I know who'd want to do such a twisted thing. It can't have been a local person. We've got our share of the weirdies, but--"
He broke off, seeing the puzzled expressions on their faces. "You don't know? Haven't heard?"
"Heard what?" Ben demanded.
"It's rather like something by Boris Karloff out of Mary Shelley. Someone snatched the bodies from the Cumberland County Morgue in Portland last night."
"Jesus Christ," Susan said. Her lips made the words stiffly.
"What's the matter?" Cody asked, suddenly concerned. "Do you know something about this?"
"I'm starting to really think we do," Ben said.
FOUR
It was ten past noon when they had finished telling everything. The nurse had brought Ben a lunch tray, and it stood untouched by his bed.
The last syllable died away, and the only sound was the rattle of glasses and cutlery coming through the half-open door as hungrier patients on the ward ate.
"Vampires," Jimmy Cody said. Then: "Matt Burke, of all people. That makes it awfully hard to laugh off."
Ben and Susan kept silent.
"And you want me to exhume the Glick kid," he ruminated. "Jesus jumped-up Christ in a sidecar."
Cody took a bottle out of his bag and tossed it to Ben, who caught it. "Aspirin," he said. "Ever use it?"
"A lot."
"My dad used to call it the good doctor's best nurse. Do you know how it works?"
"No," Ben said. He turned the bottle of aspirin idly in his hands, looking at it. He did not know Cody well enough to know what he usually showed or kept hidden, but he was sure that few of his patients saw him like this--the boyish, Norman Rockwell face overcast with thought and introspection. He didn't want to break Cody's mood.
"Neither do I. Neither does anybody else. But it's good for headache and arthritis and the rheumatism. We don't know what any of those are, either. Why should your head ache? There are no nerves in your brain. We know that aspirin is very close in chemical composition to LSD, but why should one cure the ache in the head and the other cause the head to fill up with flowers? Part of the reason we don't understand is because we don't really know what the brain is. The best-educated doctor in the world is standing on a low island in the middle of a sea of ignorance. We rattle our medicine sticks and kill our chickens and read messages in blood. All of that works a surprising amount of time. White magic. Bene gris-gris. My med schoo
l profs would tear their hair if they could hear me say that. Some of them tore it when I told them I was going into general practice in rural Maine. One of them told me that Marcus Welby always lanced the boils on the patient's ass during station identification. But I never wanted to be Marcus Welby." He smiled. "They'd roll on the ground and have fits if they knew I was going to request an exhumation order on the Glick boy."
"You'll do it?" Susan said, frankly amazed.
"What can it hurt? If he's dead, he's dead. If he's not, then I'll have something to stand the AMA convention on its ear next time. I'm going to tell the county M.E. that I want to look for signs of infectious encephalitis. It's the only sane explanation I can think of."
"Could that actually be it?" she asked hopefully.
"Damned unlikely."
"What's the earliest you could do it?" Ben asked.
"Tomorrow, tops. If I have to hassle around, Tuesday or Wednesday."
"What should he look like?" Ben asked. "I mean..."
"Yes, I know what you mean. The Glicks wouldn't have the boy embalmed, would they?"
"No."
"It's been a week?"
"Yes."
"When the coffin is opened, there's apt to be a rush of gas and a rather offensive smell. The body may be bloated. The hair will have grown down over his collar--it continues to grow for an amazing period of time--and the fingernails will also be quite long. The eyes will almost certainly have fallen in."
Susan was trying to maintain an expression of scientific impartiality and not succeeding very well. Ben was glad he hadn't eaten lunch.
"The corpse will not have begun radical mortification," Cody went on in his best recitation voice, "but enough moisture may be present to encourage growth on the exposed cheeks and hands, possibly a mossy substance called--" He broke off. "I'm sorry. I'm grossing you out."
"Some things may be worse than decay," Ben remarked, keeping his voice carefully neutral. "Suppose you find none of those signs? Suppose the body is as natural-looking as the day it was buried? What then? Pound a stake through his heart?"
"Hardly," Cody said. "In the first place, either the M.E. or his assistant will have to be there. I don't think even Brent Norbert would regard it professional of me to take a stake out of my bag and hammer it through a child's corpse."
"What will you do?" Ben asked curiously.
"Well, begging Matt Burke's pardon, I don't think that will come up. If the body was in such a condition, it would undoubtedly be brought to the Maine Medical Center for an extensive post. Once there, I would dally about my examination until dark...and observe any phenomena that might occur."
"And if he rises?"
"Like you, I can't conceive of that."
"I'm finding it more conceivable all the time," Ben said grimly. "Can I be present when all this happens--if it does?"
"That might be arranged."
"All right," Ben said. He got out of bed and walked toward the closet where his clothes were hanging. "I'm going to--"
Susan giggled, and Ben turned around. "What?"
Cody was grinning. "Hospital johnnies have a tendency to flap in the back, Mr Mears."
"Oh hell," Ben said, and instinctively reached around to pull the johnny together. "You better call me Ben."
"And on that note," Cody said, rising, "Susan and I will exit. Meet us downstairs in the coffee shop when you're decent. You and I have some business this afternoon."
"We do?"
"Yes. The Glicks will have to be told the encephalitis story. You can be my colleague if you like. Don't say anything. Just stroke your chin and look wise."
"They're not going to like it, are they?"
"Would you?"
"No," Ben said. "I wouldn't."
"Do you need their permission to get an exhumation order?" Susan asked.
"Technically, no. Realistically, probably. My only experience with the question of exhuming corpses has been in Medical Law II. But I think if the Glicks are set strongly enough against it, they could force us to a hearing. That would lose us two weeks to a month, and once we got there I doubt if my encephalitis theory would hold up." He paused and looked at them both. "Which leads us to the thing that disturbs me most about this, Mr Burke's story aside. Danny Glick is the only corpse we have a marker for. All the others have disappeared into thin air."
FIVE
Ben and Jimmy Cody got to the Glick home around one-thirty. Tony Glick's car was sitting in the driveway, but the house was silent. When no one answered the third knock, they crossed the road to the small ranch-style house that sat there--a sad, prefab refugee of the 1950s held up on one end by a rusty pair of house jacks. The name on the mailbox was Dickens. A pink lawn flamingo stood by the walk, and a small cocker spaniel thumped his tail at their approach.
Pauline Dickens, waitress and part owner of the Excellent Cafe, opened the door a moment or two after Cody rang the bell. She was wearing her uniform.
"Hi, Pauline," Jimmy said. "Do you know where the Glicks are?"
"You mean you don't know?"
"Know what?"
"Mrs Glick died early this morning. They took Tony Glick to Central Maine General. He's in shock."
Ben looked at Cody. Jimmy looked like a man who had been kicked in the stomach.
Ben took up the slack quickly. "Where did they take her body?"
Pauline ran her hands across her hips to make sure her uniform was right. "Well, I spoke to Mabel Werts on the phone an hour ago, and she said Parkins Gillespie was going to take the body right up to that Jewish fellow's funeral home in Cumberland. On account of no one knows where Carl Foreman is."
"Thank you," Cody said slowly.
"Awful thing," she said, her eyes straying to the empty house across the road. Tony Glick's car sat in the driveway like a large and dusty dog that had been chained and then abandoned. "If I was a superstitious person, I'd be afraid."
"Afraid of what, Pauline?" Cody asked.
"Oh...things." She smiled vaguely. Her fingers touched a small chain hung around her neck.
A St Christopher's medal.
SIX
They were sitting in the car again. They had watched Pauline drive off to work without speaking.
"Now what?" Ben asked finally.
"It's a balls-up," Jimmy said. "The Jewish fellow is Maury Green. I think maybe we ought to drive over to Cumberland. Nine years ago Maury's boy almost drowned at Sebago Lake. I happened to be there with a girlfriend, and I gave the kid artificial respiration. Got his motor going again. Maybe this is one time I ought to trade on somebody's goodwill."
"What good will it do? The M.E. will have taken her body for autopsy or postmortem or whatever they call it."
"I doubt it. It's Sunday, remember? The M.E. will be out in the woods someplace with a rock hammer--he's an amateur geologist. Norbert--do you remember Norbert?"
Ben nodded.
"Norbert is supposed to be on call, but he's erratic. He's probably got the phone off the hook so he can watch the Packers and the Patriots. If we go up to Maury Green's funeral parlor now, there's a pretty fair chance the body will be there unclaimed until after dark."
"All right," Ben said. "Let's go."
He remembered the call he was to have made on Father Callahan, but it would have to wait. Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged.
SEVEN
They drove in silence until they were on the turnpike, each lost in his own thoughts. Ben was thinking about what Cody had said at the hospital. Carl Foreman gone. The bodies of Floyd Tibbits and the McDougall baby gone--disappeared from under the noses of two morgue attendants. Mike Ryerson was also gone, and God knew who else. How many people in 'salem's Lot could drop out of sight and not be missed for a week...two weeks...a month? Two hundred? Three? It made the palms of his hands sweaty.
"This is beginning to seem like a paranoid's dream," Jimmy said, "or a Gahan Wilson cartoon. The scariest part of this whole thing, from
an academic point of view, is the relative ease with which a vampire colony could be founded--always if you grant the first one. It's a bedroom town for Portland and Lewiston and Gates Falls, mostly. There's no in-town industry where a rise in absenteeism would be noticed. The schools are three-town consolidated, and if the absence list starts getting a little longer, who notices? A lot of people go to church over in Cumberland, a lot more don't go at all. And TV has pretty well put the kibosh on the old neighborhood get-togethers, except for the duffers who hang around Milt's store. All this could be going on with great effectiveness behind the scenes."
"Yeah," Ben said. "Danny Glick infects Mike. Mike infects...oh, I don't know. Floyd, maybe. The McDougall baby infects...his father? Mother? How are they? Has anyone checked?"
"Not my patients. I assume Dr Plowman would have been the one to call them this morning and tell them about their son's disappearance. But I have no real way of knowing if he actually called or actually got in contact with them if he did."
"They should be checked on," Ben said. He began to feel harried. "You see how easily we could end up chasing our tails? A person from out of town could drive through the Lot and not know a thing was wrong. Just another one-horse town where they roll up the sidewalks at nine. But who knows what's going on in the houses, behind drawn shades? People could be lying in their beds...or propped in closets like brooms...down in cellars...waiting for the sun to go down. And each sunrise, less people out on the streets. Less every day." He swallowed and heard a dry click in his throat.
"Take it easy," Jimmy said. "None of this is proven."
"The proof is piling up in drifts," Ben retorted. "If we were dealing in an accepted frame of reference--with a possible outbreak of typhoid or A2 flu, say--the whole town would be in quarantine by now."
"I doubt that. You don't want to forget that only one person has actually seen anything."
"Hardly the town drunk."
"He'd be crucified if a story like this got out," Jimmy said.
"By whom? Not by Pauline Dickens, that's for sure. She's ready to start nailing hex signs on her door."
"In an era of Watergate and oil depletion, she's an exception," Jimmy said.
They drove the rest of the way without conversation. Green's Mortuary was at the north end of Cumberland, and two hearses were parked around back, between the rear door of the nondenominational chapel and a high board fence. Jimmy turned off the ignition and looked at Ben. "Ready?"