There was no one on the streets to mark his passage; 'salem's Lot had battened down for the night, even tighter than usual. The diner was empty, and in Spencer's Miss Coogan was sitting by her cash register and reading a confession magazine off the rack in the frosty glow of the overhead fluorescents. Outside, under the lighted sign showing the blue dog in mid-flight, a red neon sign said:
BUS
They were afraid, he supposed. They had every reason to be. Some inner part of themselves had absorbed the danger, and tonight doors were locked in the Lot that had not been locked in years...if ever.
He was on the streets alone. And he alone had nothing to fear. It was funny. He laughed aloud, and the sound of it was like wild, lunatic sobbing. No vampire would touch him. Others, perhaps, but not him. The Master had marked him, and he would walk free until the Master claimed his own.
St Andrew's loomed above him.
He hesitated, then walked up the path. He would pray. Pray all night, if necessary. Not to the new God, the God of ghettos and social conscience and free lunches, but the old God, who had proclaimed through Moses not to suffer a witch to live and who had given it unto his own son to raise from the dead. A second chance, God. All my life for penance. Only...a second chance.
He stumbled up the wide steps, his gown muddy and bedraggled, his mouth smeared with Barlow's blood.
At the top he paused a moment, and then reached for the handle of the middle door.
As he touched it, there was a blue flash of light and he was thrown backward. Pain lanced his back, then his head, then his chest and stomach and shins as he fell head over heels down the granite steps to the walk.
He lay trembling in the rain, his hand afire.
He lifted it before his eyes. It was burned.
"Unclean," he muttered. "Unclean, unclean, O God, so unclean."
He began to shiver. He slid his arms around his shoulders and shivered in the rain and the church loomed behind him, its doors shut against him.
TWENTY-FIVE
Mark Petrie sat on Matt's bed, in exactly the spot Ben had occupied when Ben and Jimmy had come in. Mark had dried his tears with his shirtsleeve, and although his eyes were puffy and bloodshot, he seemed to have himself in control.
"You know, don't you," Matt asked him, "that 'salem's Lot is in a desperate situation?"
Mark nodded.
"Even now, his Undead are crawling over it," Matt said somberly. "Taking others to themselves. They won't get them all--not tonight--but there is dreadful work ahead of you tomorrow."
"Matt, I want you to get some sleep," Jimmy said. "We'll be here, don't worry. You don't look good. This has been a horrible strain on you--"
"My town is disintegrating almost before my eyes and you want me to sleep?" His eyes, seemingly tireless, flashed out of his haggard face.
Jimmy said stubbornly, "If you want to be around for the finish, you better save something back. I'm telling you that as your physician, goddammit."
"All right. In a minute." He looked at all of them. "Tomorrow the three of you must go back to Mark's house. You're going to make stakes. A great many of them."
The meaning sank home to them.
"How many?" Ben asked softly.
"I would say you'll need three hundred at least. I advise you to make five hundred."
"That's impossible," Jimmy said flatly. "There can't be that many of them."
"The Undead are thirsty," Matt said simply. "It's best to be prepared. You will go together. You dare not split up, even in the daytime. It will be like a scavenger hunt. You must start at one end of town and work toward the other."
"We'll never be able to find them all," Ben objected. "Not even if we could start at first light and work through until dark."
"You've got to do your best, Ben. People may begin to believe you. Some will help, if you show them the truth of what you say. And when dark comes again, much of his work will be undone." He sighed. "We have to assume that Father Callahan is lost to us. That's bad. But you must press on, regardless. You'll have to be careful, all of you. Be ready to lie. If you're locked up, that will serve his purpose well. And if you haven't considered it, you might do well to consider it now: There is every possibility that some of us or all of us may live and triumph only to stand trial for murder."
He looked each of them in the face. What he saw there must have satisfied him, because he turned his attention wholly to Mark again.
"You know what the most important job is, don't you?"
"Yes," Mark said. "Barlow has to be killed."
Matt smiled a trifle thinly. "That's putting the cart before the horse, I'm afraid. First we have to find him." He looked closely at Mark. "Did you see anything tonight, hear anything, smell anything, touch anything, that might help us locate him? Think carefully before you answer! You know better than any of us how important it is!"
Mark thought. Ben had never seen anyone take a command quite so literally. He lowered his chin into the palm of his hand and shut his eyes. He seemed to be quite deliberately going over every nuance of the night's encounter.
At last he opened his eyes, looked around at them briefly, and shook his head. "Nothing."
Matt's face fell, but he did not give up. "A leaf clinging to his coat, maybe? A cattail in his pants cuff? Dirt on his shoes? Any loose thread that he has allowed to dangle?" He smote the bed helplessly. "Jesus Christ Almighty, is he seamless like an egg?"
Mark's eyes suddenly widened.
"What?" Matt said. He grasped the boy's elbow. "What is it? What have you thought of?"
"Blue chalk," Mark said. "He had one arm hooked around my neck, like this, and I could see his hand. He had long white fingers and there were smears of blue chalk on two of them. Just little ones."
"Blue chalk," Matt said thoughtfully.
"A school," Ben said. "It must be."
"Not the high school," Matt said. "All our supplies come from Dennison and Company in Portland. They supply only white and yellow. I've had it under my fingernails and on my coats for years."
"Art classes?" Ben asked.
"No, only graphic arts at the high school. They use inks, not chalk. Mark, are you sure it was--"
"Chalk," he said, nodding.
"I believe some of the science teachers use colored chalk, but where is there to hide at the high school? You saw it--all on one level, all enclosed in glass. People are in and out of the supply closets all day. That is also true of the furnace room."
"Backstage?"
Matt shrugged. "It's dark enough. But if Mrs Rodin takes over the class play for me--the students call her Mrs Rodan after a quaint Japanese science fiction film--that area would be used a great deal. It would be a horrible risk for him."
"What about the grammar schools?" Jimmy asked. "They must teach drawing in the lower grades. And I'd bet a hundred dollars that colored chalk is one of the things they keep on hand."
Matt said, "The Stanley Street Elementary School was built with the same bond money as the high school. It is also modernistic, filled to capacity, and built on one level. Many glass windows to let in the sun. Not the kind of building our target would want to frequent at all. They like old buildings, full of tradition, dark, dingy, like--"
"Like the Brock Street School," Mark said.
"Yes." Matt looked at Ben. "The Brock Street School is a wooden frame building, three stories and a basement, built at about the same time as the Marsten House. There was much talk in the town when the school bond issue was up for a vote that the school was a fire hazard. It was one reason our bond issue passed. There had been a schoolhouse fire in New Hampshire two or three years before--"
"I remember," Jimmy murmured. "In Cobbs' Ferry, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Three children were burned to death."
"Is the Brock Street School still used?" Ben asked.
"Only the first floor. Grades one through four. The entire building is due to be phased out in two years, when they put the addition on the Stanley Stre
et School."
"Is there a place for Barlow to hide?"
"I suppose so," Matt said, but he sounded reluctant. "The second and third floors are full of empty classrooms. The windows have been boarded over because so many children threw stones through them."
"That's it, then," Ben said. "It must be."
"It sounds good," Matt admitted, and he looked very tired indeed now. "But it seems too simple. Too transparent."
"Blue chalk," Jimmy murmured. His eyes were far away.
"I don't know," Matt said, sounding distracted. "I just don't know."
Jimmy opened his black bag and brought out a small bottle of pills. "Two of these with water," he said. "Right now."
"No. There's too much to go over. There's too much--"
"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.
TWENTY-SIX
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 ice-cream 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 mill-worker.
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 look, 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.
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.
TWENTY-SEVEN
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'?