Salem’s Lot (26 page)

2

Sandy McDougall knew’ something was wrong when she woke up, but couldn’t tell what. The other side of the bed was empty; it was Roy’s day off, and he had gone fishing with some friends. Would be back around noon. Nothing was burning and she didn’t hurt anywhere. So what could be wrong?

The sun. The sun was wrong.

It was high up on the wallpaper, dancing through the shadows cast by the maple outside the window. But Randy always woke her before the sun got up high enough to throw the maple’s shadow on the wall -

Her startled eyes jumped to the clock on the dresser. It was ten minutes after nine.

Trepidation rose in her throat.

‘Randy?’ she called, her dressing gown blowing out behind her as she flew down the narrow hall of the trailer. ‘Randy,
honey?
’

The baby’s bedroom was bathed in submerged light from the one small window above the crib… open. But she had closed it when she went to bed. She always closed it.

The crib was empty.

‘Randy?’ she whispered.

And saw him.

The small body, still clad in wash-faded Dr Dentons, had been flung into the corner like a piece of garbage. One leg stuck up grotesquely, like an inverted exclamation point.

‘Randy!’

She fell on her knees by the body, her face marked with the harsh lines of shock. She cradled the child. The body was cool to the touch ‘

‘Randy, honey-baby, wake up, Randy, Randy, wake up-’

The bruises were gone. All gone. They had faded overnight, leaving the small face and form flawless. His color was good. For the only time since his coming she found him beautiful, and she screamed at the sight of the beauty-a horrible, desolate sound.

‘Randy!
Wake up!
Randy? Randy? Randy?’

She got up with him and ran back down the hall, the dressing gown slipping off one shoulder. The high chair still stood in the kitchen, the tray encrusted with Randy’s supper of the night before. She slipped Randy into the chair, which stood in a patch of morning sunlight. Randy’s head lolled against his chest and he slid sideways with a slow and terrible finality until he was lodged in the angle between the tray and one of the chair’s high arms.

‘Randy?’ she said, smiling. Her eyes bulged from their sockets like flawed blue marbles. She patted his cheeks. ‘Wake up now, Randy. Breakfast, Randy. Is oo hungwy? Please-oh Jesus, please-’

She whirled away from him and pulled open one of the cabinets over the stove and pawed through it, spilling a box of Rice Chex, a can of Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli, a bottle of Wesson oil. The Wesson oil bottle shattered, spraying heavy liquid across the stove and floor. She found a small jar of Gerber’s chocolate custard and grabbed one of the plastic Dairy Queen spoons out of the dish drainer.

‘Look, Randy. Your favorite. Wake up and see the nice custard. Chocka, Randy. Chocka, chocka.’ Rage and terror swept her darkly.
‘Wake up!’
she screamed at him, her spittle beading the translucent skin of his brow and cheeks.
‘Wake up wake up for the love of God you little shit WAKE UP!’

She pulled the cover off the jar and spooned out some of the chocolate-flavored custard. Her hand, which knew the truth already, was shaking so badly that most of it spilled. She pushed what was left between the small slack lips, and more fell off onto the tray making horrid plopping sounds. The spoon clashed against his teeth.

‘Randy,’ she pleaded. ‘Stop fooling your momma.’

Her other hand stretched out, and she pulled his mouth open with a hooked finger and pushed the rest of the custard into his mouth.

‘There, said Sandy McDougall. A smile, indescribable in its cracked hope, touched her lips. She settled back in her kitchen chair, relaxing muscle by muscle. Now it would be all right. Now he would know she still loved him and he would stop this cruel trickery.

‘Good?’ she murmured. ‘Chocka good, Wandyl Will Oo make a smile for Mommy? Be Mommy’s good boy and give her a smile.’

She reached out with trembling fingers and pushed up the corners of Randy’s mouth.

The chocolate fell out onto the tray-plop.

She began to scream.

3

Tony Glick woke up on Saturday morning when his wife, Marjorie, fell down in the living room.

‘Margie?’ he called, swinging his feet out onto the floor. ‘Marge?’

And after a long, long pause, she answered, ‘I’m okay, Tony.’

He sat on the edge of the bed, looking blankly down at his feet. He was bare-chested and wearing striped pajama bottoms with the drawstring dangling between his legs. The hair on his head stood up in a crow’s nest. It was thick black hair, and both of his sons had inherited it. People thought he was Jewish, but that dago hair should have been a giveaway, he often thought. His grandfather’s name had been Gliccucchi. When someone had told him it was easier to get along in America if you had an American name, something short and snappy, Gramps had had it legally changed to Glick, unaware that he was trading the reality of one minority for the appearance of another. Tony Glick’s body was wide and dark and heavily corded with muscle. His face bore the dazed expression of a man who has been punched out leaving a bar.

He had taken a leave of absence from his job, and during the past work week he had slept a lot. It went away when you slept. There were no dreams in his sleep. He turned in at seven-thirty and got up at ten the next morning and took a nap in the afternoon from two to three. The time he had gone through between the scene he had made at Danny’s funeral and this sunny Saturday morning almost a week later seemed hazy and not real at all. People kept bringing food. Casseroles, preserves, cakes, pies. Margie said she didn’t know what they were going to do with it. Neither of them was hungry. On Wednesday night he had tried to make love to his wife and they had both begun to cry.

Margie didn’t look good at all. Her own method of coping had been to clean the house from top to bottom, and she had cleaned with a maniacal zeal that precluded all other thought. The days resounded with the clash of cleaning buckets and the whirr of the vacuum cleaner, and the air was always redolent with the sharp smells of ammonia and Lysol. She had taken all the clothes and toys, packed neatly into cartons, to the Salvation Army and the Goodwill store. When he had come out of the bedroom on Thursday morning, all those cartons had been lined up by the front door, each neatly labeled. He had never seen anything so horrible in his life as those mute cartons. She had dragged all the rugs out into the back yard, had hung them over the clothes line, and had beaten the dust out of them unmercifully. And even in Tony’s bleary state of consciousness, he had noticed how pale she had seemed since last Tuesday or Wednesday; even her lips seemed to have lost their natural color. Brown shadows had insinuated themselves beneath her eyes.

These thoughts passed through his mind in less time than it takes to tell them, and he was on the verge of tumbling back into bed when she fell down again and this time did not answer his call.

He got up and padded down to the living room and saw her lying on the floor, breathing shallowly and staring with dazed eyes at the ceiling. She had been changing the living room furniture around, and everything was pulled out of position, giving the room an odd disjointed look.

Whatever was wrong with her had advanced during the night, and her appearance was bad enough to cut through his daze like a sharp knife. She was still in her robe and it had split up to mid-thigh. Her legs were the color of marble; all the tan she had picked up that summer on their vacation had faded out of them. Her hands moved like ghosts. Her mouth gaped, as if her lungs could not get enough air, and he noticed the odd prominence of her teeth but thought nothing of it. It could have been the light.

‘Margie? Honey?’

She tried to answer, couldn’t, and real fear shot through him. He got up to call the doctor.

He was turning to the phone when she said, ‘No… no.’ The word was repeated between a harsh gasp for air. She had struggled up to a sitting position, and the whole sun-silent house was filled with her rasping struggle for breath.

‘Pull me… help me… the sun is so hot… ’

He went to her and picked her up, shocked by the lightness of his burden. She seemed to weigh no more than a bundle of sticks.

‘… sofa… ’

He laid her on it ‘ with her back propped against the armrest. She was out of the patch of sun that fell in a square through the front window and onto the rug, and her breath seemed to come a little easier. She closed her eyes for a moment, and again he was impressed by the smooth whiteness of her teeth in contrast to her lips. He felt an urge to kiss her.

‘Let me call the doctor,’ he said.

‘No. I’m better. The sun was… burning me. Made me feel faint. Better now.’ A little color had come back into her cheeks.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I’m okay.’

‘You’ve been working too hard, honey.’

‘Yes,’ she said passively. Her eyes were listless.

He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at it. ‘We’ve got to snap out of this, Margie. We’ve got to. You look… ’ He paused, not wanting to hurt her.

‘I look awful,’ she said. ‘I know. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror before I went to bed last night, and I hardly seemed to be there. For a minute I… ’ A smile touched her lips. ‘I thought I could see the tub behind me. Like there was only a little of myself left and it was… oh, so
pale…
’

‘I want Dr Reardon to look at you.’

But she seemed not to hear. ‘I’ve had the most lovely dream the last three or four nights, Tony. So real. Danny comes to me in the dream. He says, "Mommy, Mommy, I’m so glad to be home!" And he says… says… ’

‘What does he say?’ he asked her gently.

‘He says… that he’s my baby again. My own son, at my breast again. And I give him to suck and… and then a feeling of sweetness with an undertone of bitterness, so much like it was before he was weaned but after he was beginning to get teeth and he would nip-oh, this must sound
awful
. Like one of those psychiatrist things.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

He knelt beside her and she put her arms around his neck and wept weakly. Her arms were cold. ‘No doctor, Tony, please. I’ll rest today.’

‘All right,’ he said. Giving in to her made him feel uneasy.

‘It’s such a lovely dream, Tony,’ she said, speaking against his throat. The movement of her lips, the muffled hardness of her teeth beneath them, was amazingly sensual. He was getting an erection. ‘I wish I could have it again tonight.’

‘Maybe you will,’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘Maybe you will at that.’

4

‘My God, don’t you look good,’ Ben said.

Against the hospital world of solid whites and anemic greens, Susan Norton looked very good indeed. She was wearing a bright yellow blouse with black vertical stripes and a short blue denim skirt.

‘You, too,’ she said, and crossed the room to him.

He kissed her deeply, and his hand slid to the warm curve of her hip and rubbed.

‘Hey,’ she said, breaking the kiss. ‘They kick you out for that.’

‘Not me.’

‘No, me.’

‘They looked at each other.

‘I love you, Ben.’

‘I love you, too.’

‘If I could jump in with you right now-’

‘Just a second, let me pull back the spread.’

‘How would I explain it to those little candy-stripers?’

‘Tell them you’re giving me the bedpan.’

She shook her head, smiling, and pulled up a chair. ‘A lot has happened in town, Ben.’

He sobered. ‘Like what?’

She hesitated. ‘I hardly know how to tell you, or what I believe myself. I’m mixed up, to say the least.’

‘Well, spill it and let me sort it out.’

‘What’s your condition, Ben?’

‘Mending. Not serious. Matt’s doctor, a guy named Cody-’

‘No. Your mind. How much of this Count Dracula stuff do you believe?’

‘Oh. That. Matt told you everything’

‘Matt’s here in the hospital. One floor up in Intensive Care.’

‘What?’
He was up on his elbows. ‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘Heart attack.’

‘
Heart
attack!’

‘Dr Cody says his condition is stable. He’s listed as serious, but that’s mandatory for the first forty-eight hours. I was there when it happened.’

‘Tell me everything you remember, Susan.’

The pleasure had gone out of his face. It was watchful, intent, fine-drawn. Lost in the white room and the white sheets and the white hospital johnny, he again struck her as a man drawn to a taut, perhaps fraying edge.

‘You didn’t answer my question, Ben.’

‘About how I took Matt’s story?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me answer you by saying what you think. You think the Marsten House has buggered my brain to the point where I’m seeing bats in my own belfry, to coin a phrase. Is that a fair estimate?’

‘Yes, I suppose that’s it. But I never thought about it in such… such harsh terms.’

‘I know that, Susan. Let me trace the progression of my thoughts for you, if I can. It may do me some good to sort them out. I can tell from your own face that something has knocked you back a couple of steps. Is that right?’

‘Yes… but I don’t believe,
can’t
-’

‘Stop a minute. That word
can’t
blocks up everything. That’s where I was stuck. That absolute, goddamned imperative, word.
Can’t
. I didn’t believe Matt, Susan, because such things can’t be true. But I couldn’t find a hole in his story any way I looked at it. The most obvious conclusion was that he had jumped the tracks somewhere, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he seem crazy to you?’

‘No. No, but-’

‘Stop.’ He held up his hand. ‘You’re thinking
can’t
thoughts, aren’t you?’

‘I suppose I am,’ she said.

‘He didn’t seem crazy or irrational to me, either. And we both know that paranoid fantasies or persecution complexes just don’t appear overnight. They grow over a period of time. They need careful watering, care, and feeding. Have you ever heard any talk in town about Matt having a screw loose? Ever heard Matt say that someone had the knife out for him? Has he ever been involved with any dubious causes-fluoridation causes brain cancer or Sons of the American Patriots or the NLF? Has he ever expressed an inordinate amount of interest in things such as s6ances or astral projection or reincarnation? Ever been arrested that you know of?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No to everything. But Ben… it hurts me to say this about Matt, even to suggest it, but some people go crazy very quietly. They go crazy inside.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. ‘There are signs. Sometimes you can’t read them before, but you can afterward. If you were on a jury, would you believe Matt’s testimony about a car crash?’

‘Yes… ‘

‘Would you believe him if he had told you he saw a prowler kill Mike Ryerson?’

‘Yes, I guess I would.’

‘But not this.’

‘Ben, I just can’t-’

‘There, you said it again.’ He saw her ready to protest and held up a forestalling hand. ‘I’m not arguing his case, Susan. I’m only laying out my own train of thought. Okay?’

‘Okay. Go on.’

‘My second thought was that somebody set him up. Someone with bad blood, or a grudge.’

‘Yes, that occurred to me.’

‘Matt says he has no enemies. I believe him.’

‘Everybody has enemies.’

‘There are degrees. Don’t forget the most important thing-there’s a dead man wrapped up in this mess. If someone was out to get Matt, then someone must have murdered Mike Ryerson to do it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the whole song and dance doesn’t make much sense without a body. And yet, according to Matt’s story, he met Mike purely by chance. No one led him to Dell’s last Thursday night. There was no anonymous call, no note, no nothing. The coincidence of the meeting was enough to rule out a setup.’

‘What does that leave for rational explanations?’

‘That Matt dreamed the sounds of the window going up, the laugh, and the sucking sounds. That Mike died of some natural but unknown causes.’

‘You don’t believe that, either.’

‘I don’t believe that he dreamed hearing the window go up. It was open. And the outside screen was lying on the lawn. I noticed it and Parkins Gillespie noticed it. And I noticed something else. Matt has latch-type screens on his house-they lock on the outside, not the inside. You can’t get them off from the inside unless you pry them off with a screw driver or a paint scraper. Even then it would be tough. It would leave marks. I didn’t see any marks. And here’s another thing: The ground below that window was relatively soft. If you wanted to take off a second-floor screen, you’d need to use a ladder, and that would leave marks. There weren’t any. That’s what bothers me the most. A second-floor screen removed from the outside and no ladder marks beneath.’

They looked at each other somberly.

He resumed: ‘I was running this through my head this morning. The more I thought about it, the better Matt’s story looked. So I took a chance. I took the
can’t
away for a while. Now, tell me what happened at Matt’s last night. If it will knock all this into a cocked hat, no one is going to be happier than I.’

‘It doesn’t,’ she said unhappily. ‘It makes it worse. He had just finished telling me about Mike Ryerson. He said he heard someone upstairs. He was scared, but he went.’ She folded her hands in her lap and was now holding them tightly, as if they might fly away. ‘Nothing else happened for a little while… and then Matt called out, something like he was revoking his invitation. Then… well, I don’t really know how to… ’

‘Go on. Don’t agonize over it.’

‘I think someone-someone else-made a kind of hissing noise. There was a bump, as if something had fallen.’ She looked at him bleakly. ‘And then I heard a voice say:
I will see you sleep like the dead, teacher
. That’s word for word. And when I went in later to get a blanket for Matt I found this.’

She took the ring out of her blouse pocket and dropped it into his hand.

Ben turned it over, then tilted it toward the window to let the light pick out the initials. ‘MCR. Mike Ryerson?’

‘Mike Corey Ryerson. I dropped it and then made myself pick it up again-I thought you or Matt would want to see it. You keep it. I don’t want it back.’

‘It makes you feel-?’

‘Bad. Very bad.’ She raised her head defiantly. But all rational thought goes against this, Ben. I’d rather believe that Matt somehow murdered Mike Ryerson and invented that crazy vampire story for reasons of his own. Rigged the screen to fall off. Did a ventriloquist act in that guest room while I was downstairs, planted Mike’s ring-’

‘And gave himself a heart attack to make it all seem more real,’ Ben said dryly. ‘I haven’t given up hope of rational explanations, Susan. I’m hoping for one. Almost praying for one. Monsters in the movies are sort of fun, but the thought of them actually prowling through the night isn’t fun at all. I’ll even grant you that the screen could have been rigged-a simple rope sling anchored on the roof would do the trick. Let’s go further. Matt is something of a scholar. I suppose there are poisons that would cause the symptoms that Mike had-maybe undetectable poisons. Of course, the idea of poison is a little hard to believe because Mike ate so little-’

‘You only have Matt’s word for that,’ she pointed out.

‘He wouldn’t lie, because he would know that an examination of the victim’s stomach is an important part of any autopsy. And a hypo would leave tracks. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it could be done. And a man like Matt could surely take something that would fake a heart attack. But where is the motive?’

She shook her head helplessly.

‘Even granting some motive we don’t suspect, why would he go to such Byzantine lengths, or invent such a wild cover story? I suppose Ellery Queen could explain it somehow, but life isn’t an Ellery Queen plot.’

‘But this… this other is lunacy, Ben.’

‘Yes, like Hiroshima.’

‘Will you stop doing that’ she whipcracked at him suddenly. ‘Don’t go playing the phony intellectual! It doesn’t fit you! We’re talking about wives’ tales, bad dreams, psychosis, anything you want to call it-’

‘That’s shit,’ he said. ‘Make connections. The world is coming down around our ears and you’re sticking at a few vampires.’

"Salem’s Lot is my town,’ she said stubbornly. ‘If something is happening there, it’s real. Not philosophy.’

‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ he said, and touched the bandage on his head with a rueful finger. ‘And your ex packs a hell of a right.’

‘I’m sorry. That’s a side of Floyd I never saw. I can’t understand it.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘In the town drunk tank. Parkins Gillespie told my mom he should turn him over to the county - to Sheriff McCaslin, that is-but he thought he’d wait and see if you wanted to prefer charges.’

‘Do you have any feelings in the matter?’

‘None whatever,’ she said steadily. ‘He’s out of my life.’

‘I’m not going to.’

She raised her eyebrows.

‘But I want to talk to him.’

‘About us?’

‘About why he came at me wearing an overcoat, a hat, sunglasses and Playtex rubber gloves.’

‘What?’

‘Well,’ he said, looking at her, ‘the sun was out. It was shining on him. And I don’t think he liked that.’

They looked at each other wordlessly. There seemed to be nothing else on the subject to say.