Looking through those dusty, broken slats was like looking through a science fiction time-lens into some stately Victorian mansion after the family had gone to Brighton for the summer. The walls were covered with a heavy, silken paper, wine-colored. Several wing chairs stood about, and a deep green velour sofa. In the alcove just off the main living room she could see a huge mahogany rolltop desk. Over it, in a heavily-scrolled frame, was a reproduction of Rembrandt's Boy at his Studies--of course, it had to be a reproduction, didn't it? Sliding doors, half-open, fronted the hallway that led past the stairwell and down toward the kitchen where Hubert Marsten's wife had met her end. In the passage's brown depths, she could see the crystal glimmer of a chandelier.
She stepped away fighting an urge to rub her eyes. It was so unlike the Marsten House of town rumor, or the stories passed from mouth to horrified mouth around the Girl Scout campfires that it was almost indecent. And all the changes had been made invisibly, it seemed.
"What is it?" Mark hissed again. "Is it him?"
"No," she said. "The house, it...it's been redone," she finished lamely.
"Sure," he said, in perfect understanding. "They like to have all their stuff. Why shouldn't they? They've got tons of money and gold."
She boosted herself up with a smooth flex of her muscles, and suddenly thought of Ben telling her about the hoods who had stuck up John Stennis: We're going to shoot you anyway.
She dropped lightly to the carpet, which was smooth and soft and deep. Across the room, a grandfather clock with its wonderfully convoluted works in an oblong glass case, ticked away the minutes. The highly polished pendulum made a sunstreak on the opposing wall. There was an open humidor by one of the wing chairs, and beside it, an old-looking book with a calfskin binding. A black satin bookmark was placed into it perhaps three quarters of the way through. The overhead light fixture was a wonderfully convoluted thing composed of oblique prisms.
There were no mirrors in the room.
"Hey," Mark hissed. His hands waved above the windowsill. "Help me get up."
She leaned out, caught him under the armpits, and dragged him up until he could catch a grip on the sill. Then he jackknifed himself in neatly. His sneakered feet thumped to the carpet, and then the house was still again.
They found themselves listening to the silence, fascinated by it. There did not even seem to be the faint, high hum in the ears that comes in utter stillness, the sound of nerve-endings idling in neutral. There was only a great dead soundlessness. And that wasn't right because--
She looked wildly across the room.
The clock had stopped. The pendulum hung straight down.
The cellar door was standing ajar.
"That's where we have to go," he said.
"Oh," she said weakly. "Oh."
The door was open just a crack, and the light did not penetrate at all. The tongue of darkness seemed to lick at the kitchen, hungrily, waiting for night to come so it could swallow it whole. That quarter inch of darkness was hideous, unspeakable in its possibilities. She stood beside Mark, helpless and moveless.
Then he moved forward and pulled the door open, and she felt her legs fall in behind him.
His fingers found a light switch and thumbed it back and forth several times.
"Busted," he muttered. "That's no surprise." He reached into his back pocket and brought out a greasy, crooked candle that had been slightly flattened by its trip in Mark's back pocket. He turned to her and made himself offer: "Look, maybe you better stay up here and keep a watch out for Straker."
"No," she said. "I'm coming."
It did not occur to either of them that the time had come to go back, to get Ben and perhaps even Jimmy Cody, to come back here with powerful eight-cell flashlights and shotguns. They were beyond reality; they had gone around the bend that so many discuss so lightly at parties where the electric lights are on and shadows are kept sensibly under tables and locked in closets.
He lit the candle and they went through the door.
The throat of the stairway was narrow stone, the steps themselves dusty and old. The candle flame danced and fluttered in the noisome exhalation from below.
Now she heard something: the faint whisk and patter of many small feet. She pressed her lips together to still the sound that wanted to come between them--it might have been a scream.
"Rats," he said. "You scared of rats?"
"No," she lied.
They went down.
She counted the steps--thirteen of them. Didn't they say that the old English gallows had thirteen steps? Only of course that was going up, not down.
(Ben had mentioned Psycho; what was that line from the book, not Hitchcock's movie? You've made your grave and now you have to lie in it. Only it wasn't a grave, it was a bed. Or Poe: My God, I had walled the monster up in the tomb! Or nameless hoodlums on a Washington, D.C. street: We're going to kill you anyway.)
They stepped on the hard-packed earth floor, and Mark held the candle up. The ceiling was low; the top of Susan's head nearly brushed the cobwebby beams. In the glow of the candle they could see moving shadows in the darkness, and every now and again the ruby glint of an eye. There was an old table covered by a piece of oilcloth, and beside it stood an opened crate, with aluminum retaining bands snapped. The smell of rot and putridity was thick in the throat, nearly overwhelming.
"Take your cross in your hand," he said.
She fumbled it out of her blouse and held it tightly. Closed in her fist, it seemed to be the only warmth in a cold world. She began to feel a little better, a little comforted. She looked down at her tightly curled hand and saw a faint, luminous glow escaping between her fingers in rays.
"It's glowing," she whispered.
"Yes. We don't have to worry about the rats. Come on. This way."
They began to walk forward, single file, toward the long southern spread of the cellar. She could see that it took an L-turn up ahead, and knew that whatever they had come for would reach its culmination beyond that turn. She looked aside and felt her blood cool in her veins.
The rats were everywhere, seemingly millions of them, two and three deep, squirming over each other in their eagerness. She saw some as big as small cats. Their beady eyes stared at them with cold impudence. They had left a small pathway for them, about two feet across, and were closing in behind them as the Red Sea had closed behind Moses.
One of them darted forward and nipped at Mark's foot and without thought she thrust her crucifix at it, hissing. The rat squealed and scrabbled off into the darkness, a brown elastic sock fiber hanging from its jaw.
They stopped at the cellar's elbow-bend. "Remember," he told her. "Don't look at his eyes. No matter what happens."
"Yes...all right."
He took her hand again. "I'm scared," he said. "I couldn't ever do this again."
"It's too late to go back, isn't it?"
"Yes. I...I think it is."
"Then go on, Mark. We'll do what we have to." She was stunned by the calmness which seemed to flow from her own voice.
They were around the corner, and a warm carrion breeze immediately whiffed out the candle, plunging them into utter, womblike darkness. She screamed; was unable to help it. In her ears was the sound of the rats, squeaking and rustling and drawing closer with tenebrous eagerness.
"Hold your cross up!" Mark shouted.
She did.
Its glow spilled forth with an effulgent, unearthly radiance that was brighter by far than the candle that now lay at Mark's feet. It spilled off these crumbled brick walls with a frosty luminescence which was deeply comforting. The rats squealed and scampered.
Mark, also holding up his cross, was looking around. "Judas Priest!" he muttered.
Hubert Marsten must have been a bootlegger indeed, Susan thought. They stood at the mouth of what must once have been an extensive wine cellar (Poe again: For the love of God, Montressor--!), full of casks covered with dust and cobwebs, and lined with crisscrossing wine holders. F
rom some of these, ancient magnums still peeked forth. Some of them had popped their corks, and where sparkling burgundy had once waited for some discerning palate, the spider now made his home. Others would have turned to vinegar. Still others might be good, still waiting...waiting for...
She shifted her eyes up. The wine cellar opened out to an underground dais, freshly hung with circular velvet drapes. Unlit black tapers stood about. On the far wall, a cross with broken arms hung upside down. Obscene statues stood to either side of the main podium--and on it rested a huge coffin of banded oak, and on top of it was an embossed coat of arms with a wolf rampant, and one word:
SARLINOV.
This was it, then. True--all true. The word echoed dismally into the depths of her mind, as if through channels of fog. She felt waves of faintness sweep over her, and her cross wavered. She felt frozen in indecision, unable to move. It would be so much simpler, so blessed, to just wait here...wait here until the world turned into his nighted sphere above them.
"Now!" Mark shouted at her. "Now!"
"No," she whispered weakly. "I can't. Let me alone." The scene wavered and danced in front of her eyes, as if seen from behind a burning haze of heat. The statues which flanked the coffin, statues she faintly recognized as the Holy Family in unthinkable postures, seemed to writhe and move.
"Our Father, who art in Heaven..." he began.
"No...no..."
His hand flashed out, and her head rocked back. One eye watered and twitched.
This section is from Father Callahan's chapter, when he is talking to Matt Burke. This scene was omitted from the final novel but still carries peripheral interest.
"I'm not going to say no, not at this point," Callahan said. "But I want you to understand my position. Let me make three points, and then I'll ask you if you have changed your mind. Agreed?"
"Yes."
"Okay. One: During the black plague which covered Europe during the Middle Ages, vampire hysteria was roughly equal to the flying saucer hysteria of a few years ago in this country. People in many cases observed the unquiet dead writhing on the carts of the dead-wagons that went through the streets, collecting plague victims, and in many cases, a traveler passing a cemetery would see a hand clawing up through the earth, followed by the mud-clotted, wild-eyed face of what the illiterate, frightened 'man-in-the-street' of the day quite reasonably took to be an Undead. In the countries of Eastern Europe, the peasants recently converted to Catholicism besieged their priests, begging them to do something about the vampires that were abroad in the countryside. Most priests had never heard of such a thing, but were loath to admit it. Many of them, therefore, blessed the rite of vampire-killing forthwith. Are you following?"
"Yes."
"Good. Then imagine you are Joe Smithov, a typical Romanian peasant. You are stricken with the black plague, and for two weeks you thrash in a delirium of fever. At last it breaks, and you plunge down into a cooling, restorative unconsciousness. At this point you are pronounced dead by an unlettered country quack who held a mirror in front of your mouth for four seconds and then felt for your pulse by pressing his ear to your stomach. Still unconscious, you are piled into a rude coffin by frightened relatives, and carried to the local graveyard, where you are buried in a shallow pit. Later, you awake to the horror of all horrors: buried alive! Perhaps you scream. Perhaps you are able to pull away one of the boards and thrust an arm up through the loose earth, waving wildly. And then...blessed rescue! You hear the shovels, then see the good light of day again. Instead of stale air, the fresh, sweet breeze of God's heaven. And then...what's this? A delegation with an ash stake, tied with ceremonial red ribbons. Two men hold you down, screaming and begging. A third places the stake against your chest. A fourth holds a mallet, ready to send your blood-sucking soul back to Father Satan. And behind this delegation, who should you see with your dying gaze but the village priest, reading the rite of exorcism and sprinkling everything in sight with holy water! Fade out. Not pretty, is it?"
"No."
"The church is desperately ashamed of the whole episode--they use it as a case in point whenever someone in its body shows a sign of jumping to conclusions--of proceeding on the basis of two hundred years' study rather than five hundred."
In the scene when Ben, Mark, Cody and Callahan come into the Marsten House cellar, they are greeted with a tape recording of Barlow's voice, rather than the handwritten note that is in the finished novel.
When the priest opened the door, Mark felt the rank, rotten odor assail his nostrils again--but that, also, was different. Not so strong. Less...less malevolent.
The priest started down the stairs, and his cross did not glow as theirs had done the day before. Still, it took all his willpower to continue down after them into that pit of horror.
Jimmy had produced a flashlight from his bag and clicked it on. The beam illuminated again the old table, the dusty, monolithic coal furnace with its many projecting pipes like tentacles, the overturned crate. Yet there was no squirming tide of rats, no ominous sensation of moving to meet a dark force of illimitable power and cold hate. And somehow that frightened him more than anything else, although he could not have told why.
"Around the corner," he said, his voice flat and dead in the enclosed space.
Holding the crucifix high, Callahan advanced. And now, at last, the crucifix he held aloft began to glow belatedly. As he turned the corner, he thundered: "In the name of God the Father--" His words clogged suddenly in his throat, and a huge, monstrous chuckle smote their ears.
Mark screamed: "It's him, it's him!"
"A recording!" Callahan shouted. "Some kind of tape! I felt a wire across my chest--"
"Hello, my young friends!" the voice boomed. It was gentle, mocking, jeering. "How lovely of you to have dropped in."
Ben darted forward, ignoring the coldness which rose in him at that reptilian voice. He swept his hands in the empty air, found a length of something very like piano wire, and followed it on a diagonal from the corner.
"I am never averse to company--it has always been one of my great joys," the voice continued, booming hollowly in the dark and rank smelling cellar. "Had you come in the evening, I should have welcomed you in person...however, since I suspected you might come in daylight, I thought it might be best to be out." The chuckle again, booming and racketing, heart-freezing. It struck a familiar cord in Jimmy Cody, and he isolated it. As a young boy, crouching in front of a very large Zenith radio in his father's house, he had heard a chuckle much like that echo from the vocal cords of the Shadow.
Ben found the tape recorder, sitting on a high shelf to the left of the wine cellar's entrance. It was a modern Wollensak reel-to-reel, the piano wire tightly snubbed around the spring-loaded PLAY/RECORD button.
"I have left you a token of my appreciation," the voice continued, becoming soft and caressing. "Someone very near and dear to one of you is now in the place where I occupied my days until yesterday...you are there, aren't you, Mr Mears?"
Ben jumped and regarded the tape recorder as if it were a snake that had just bitten him.
"I do not need her," the voice said with frightening indifference. "I have left her for you to--how is the idiom?--to warm up for the main event. To whet your appetite, if you like. Let us see how well you like the appetizer to the main course you contemplate."
"Turn it off!" Jimmy cried.
"No!" Ben shouted. "He may say something about--"
"--want to say something special to one of you," the voice continued, and it had become silky with menace. "Young Master Petrie."
Mark stiffened.
"Master Petrie, in some way unknown to me, you have robbed me of the most faithful and resourceful servant I have ever known--and that covers a long, long period of time. How dare you?" the voice asked, rage creeping in. "Did you sneak up behind him and push him? You cowardly little whelp, how dare you?"
Mark bared his teeth unconsciously at the voice. His hands had doubled up into fists.
/> "I am going to enjoy dealing with you," the voice continued, still rising. "Your parents first, I think. Tonight...or tomorrow night...or the next. And then you. But you shall enter my church as a choirboy castratum. I take the blood not from your neck, but from your very manhood: the testicles. I send you into the outer darknesses of my service unshod, eh? Eh?" The voice pealed off into laughter, but even to Father Callahan's ear, frozen with wonder and fear, the laughter sounded false, brassy with rage...and uncertainty. What a turn it must have given him to rise on Sunday evening and find his right arm had been cut off!
"Father Callahan?" the voice asked teasingly, and he jumped as Ben had a moment earlier. "Are you there? Pardonez-moi, I cannot see you. Have they persuaded you to come? Perhaps so. I have observed you at some length since I arrived in Momson...much as a good chess player will study the games of his opposition, eh? The Catholic Church is not yet the oldest of my adversaries, no! I was old even when it was young, this claque which you and your fellows venerate so for its antiquity. This simpering club of bread-eaters and wine-drinkers who venerate the sheep-savior. Yet I do not underestimate. I am wise in the ways of goodness as well as evil. I am not jaded. Even now I love the game as well as the prize, so I do not underestimate.
"So how do I see you? Better, perhaps, than you see yourself. Braver. How is your word? Courage? No. Spanish is machismo. Much-man. More than courage. Thinking, also. Coolness. When coupled with white magic, that is much. These others...fut, I spit on them. When I am ready, I will take them one by one and break them. It is only you I fear, coupled to your Church. How is this, that I feel fear? It is also machismo. You yourself fear, even now when it is not me but only my voice in this box, is it not so?"
Yes, Callahan thought. Yes, yes. I know fear. So much that it seems like the first ever in my life.
"It is wise to fear one's opponent," the bodiless voice comforted him. "This is how we live in the world.
"Yet I will best you," the voice added, almost as an afterthought. "How? you say. Do I not bear the symbol of White? Can I not move in the day as well as the night? Are there not charms and potions, both Christian and pagan, which my so-good friend Matthew Burke has informed me of? Yes, yes, and yes. But I have lived longer than you. I am crafty. I am not the serpent, but the father of serpents.