Salem’s Lot (28 page)

9

Corey Bryant was stumbling up the Deep Cut Road toward where he had left his phone truck parked. He stank. His eyes were bloodshot and glassy. There was a large bump on the back of his head where he had struck it on the floor when he fainted. His boots made dragging, scuffing sounds on the soft shoulder. He tried to think about the scuffing sounds and nothing else, most notably about the sudden and utter ruin of his life. It was quarter past eight.

Reggie Sawyer had still been smiling gently when he ushered Corey out the kitchen door. Bonnie’s steady, racking sobs had come from the bedroom, counterpointing his words. ‘You go on up the road like a good boy, now. Get in your truck and go back to town. There’s a bus that comes in from Lewiston for Boston at quarter to ten. From Boston you can get a bus to anywhere in the country. That bus stops at Spencer’s. You be on it. Because if I ever see you again, I’m going to kill you. She’ll be all right now. She’s broke in now. She’s gonna have to wear pants and long-sleeve blouses for a couple of weeks, but I didn’t mark her face. You just want to get out of ‘salem’s Lot before you clean yourself up and start thinking you are a man again.’

And now here he was, walking up this road, about to do just what Reggie Sawyer said. He could go south from Boston… somewhere. He had a little over a thousand dollars saved in the bank. His mother had always said he was a very saving soul. He could wire for the money, live on it until he could get a job and begin the years-long job of forgetting this night - the taste of the gun barrel, the smell of his own shit satcheled in his trousers.

‘Hello, Mr Bryant.’

Corey gave a stifled scream and stared wildly into the dark, at first seeing nothing. The wind was moving in the trees, making shadows jump and dance across the road. Suddenly his eyes made out a more solid shadow, standing by the stone wall that ran between the road and Carl Smith’s back pasture. The shadow had a manlike form, but there was something… something…

‘Who are you?’

‘A friend who sees much, Mr Bryant.’

The form shifted and came from the shadows. In the faint light, Corey saw a middle-aged man with a black mustache and deep, bright eyes.

‘You’ve been ill used, Mr Bryant.’

‘How do you know my business?’

‘I know a great deal. It’s my business to know. Smoke?’

‘Thanks.’ He took the offered cigarette gratefully. He put it between his lips. The stranger struck a light, and in the glow of the wooden match he saw that the stranger’s cheekbones were high and Slavic, his forehead pale and bony, his dark hair swept straight back. Then the light was gone and Corey was dragging harsh smoke into his lungs. It was a dago cigarette, but any cigarette was better than none. He began to feel a little calmer.

‘Who are you?’ be asked again.

The stranger laughed, a startlingly rich and full-bodied sound that drifted off on the slight breeze like the smoke of Corey’s cigarette.

‘Names!’ he said. ‘Oh, the American insistence on names! Let me sell you an auto because I am Bill Smith! Eat at this one! Watch that one on television! My name is Barlow, if that eases you.’ And he burst into laughter again, his eyes twinkling and shining. Corey felt a smile creep onto his own lips and could scarcely believe it. His troubles seemed distant, unimportant, in comparison to the derisive good humor in those dark eyes.

‘You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?’ Corey asked.

‘I am from many lands; but to me this country… this town… seems full of foreigners. You see? Eh? Eh?’ He burst into that full-throated crow of laughter again, and this time Corey found himself joining in. The laughter escaped his throat under full pressure, rising a bit with delayed hysteria.

‘Foreigners, yes,’ he resumed, ‘but beautiful, enticing foreigners, bursting with vitality, full-blooded and full of life. Do you know how beautiful the people of your country and your town are, Mr Bryant?’

Corey only chuckled, slightly embarrassed. He did not look away from the stranger’s face, however. It held him rapt.

‘They have never known hunger or want, the people of this country. It has been two generations since they knew anything close to it, and even then it was like a voice in a distant room. They think they have known sadness, but their sadness is that of a child who has spilled his ice cream on the grass at a birthday party. There is no… how is the English?… attenuation in them. They spill each other’s blood with great vigor. Do you believe it? Do you see?’

‘Yes,’ Corey said. Looking into the stranger’s eyes, he could see a great many things, all of them wonderful.

‘The country is an amazing paradox. In other lands, when a man eats to his fullest day after day, that man becomes fat… sleepy… piggish. But in this land… it seems the more you have the more aggressive you become. You see? Like Mr Sawyer. With so much; yet he begrudges you a few crumbs from his table. Also like a child at a birthday party, who will push away another baby even though he himself can eat no more. Is it not so?,

‘Yes,’ Corey said. Barlow’s eyes were so large, and so understanding. It was all a matter of -

‘It is all a matter of perspective, is it not?’

‘Yes!’ Corey exclaimed. The man had put his finger on the right, the exact, the perfect, word. The cigarette dropped unnoticed from his fingers and lay smoldering on the road.

‘I might have bypassed such a rustic community as this,’ the stranger said reflectively. ‘I might have gone to one of your great and teeming cities. Bah!’ He drew himself up suddenly, and his eyes flashed. ‘What do I know of cities? I should be run over by a hansom crossing the street! I should choke on nasty air! I should come in contact with sleek, stupid dilettantes whose concerns are… what do you say? inimical?… yes, inimical to me. How should a poor rustic like myself deal with the hollow sophistication of a great city… even an American city? No! And no and no! I
spit
on your cities!’

‘Oh yes!’ Corey whispered.

‘So I have come here, to a town which was first told of to me by a most brilliant man, a former townsman himself, now lamentably deceased. The folk here are still rich and full-blooded, folk who are stuffed with the aggression and darkness so necessary to… there is no English for it.
Pokol; vurderlak; eyalik
. Do you follow?’

‘Yes,’ Corey whispered.

‘The people have not cut off the vitality which flows from their mother, the earth, with a shell of concrete and cement. Their hands are plunged into the very waters of life. They have ripped the life from the earth, whole and beating! Is it not true?’

‘Yes!’

The stranger chuckled kindly and put a hand on Corey’s shoulder. ‘You are a good boy. A fine, strong boy. I don’t think you want to leave this so-perfect town, do you?’

‘No… ’ Corey whispered, but he was suddenly doubtful. Fear was returning. But surely it was unimportant. This man would allow no harm to come to him.

‘And so you shall not. Ever again.’

Corey stood trembling, rooted to the spot, as Barlow’s head inclined toward him.

‘And you shall yet have your vengeance on those who would fill themselves while others want.’

Corey Bryant sank into a great forgetful river, and that river was time, and its waters were red.

10

It was nine o’clock and the Saturday night movie was coming on the hospital TV bolted to the wall when the phone beside Ben’s bed rang. It was Susan, and her voice was barely under control.

‘Ben, Floyd Tibbits is dead. He died in his cell some time last night. Dr Cody says acute anemia-but I
went
with Floyd! He had high blood pressure. That’s why the Army wouldn’t take him!’

‘Slow down,’ Ben said, sitting up.

‘There’s more. A family named McDougall out in the Bend. A little ten months baby died out there. They took Mrs McDougall away in restraints.’

‘Have you heard how the baby died?’

‘My mother said Mrs Evans came over when she heard Sandra McDougall screaming, and Mrs Evans called old Dr Plowman. Plowman didn’t say anything, but Mrs Evans told my mother that she couldn’t see a thing wrong with the baby… except it was dead.’

‘And both Matt and I, the crackpots, just happen to be out of town and out of action,’ Ben said, more to himself than to Susan. ‘Almost as if it were planned.’

‘There’s more.’

‘What?’

‘Carl Foreman is missing. And so is the body of Mike Ryerson.’

‘I think that’s it,’ he heard himself saying. ‘That has to be it. I’m getting out of here tomorrow.’

‘Will they let you go so soon?’

‘They aren’t going to have anything to say about it.’ He spoke the words absently; his mind had already moved on to another subject. ‘Have you got a crucifix?’

‘Me?’ She sounded startled and a little amused. ‘Gosh, no.’

‘I’m not joking with you, Susan-I was never more serious. Is there any place where you can get one at this hour?’

‘Well, there’s Marie Boddin. I could walk-’

‘No. Stay off the streets. Stay in the house. Make one yourself, even if it only means gluing two sticks together. Leave it by your bed.’

‘Ben, I still don’t believe this. A maniac, maybe, someone who
thinks
he’s a vampire, but-’

‘Believe what you want, but make the cross.’

‘But-’

‘Will you do it? Even if it only means humoring me?’

Reluctantly: ‘Yes, Ben.’

‘Can you come to the hospital tomorrow around nine?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. We’ll go upstairs and fill in Matt together. Then you and I are going to talk to Dr James Cody.’

She said, ‘He’s going to think you’re crazy, Ben. Don’t you know that?’

‘I suppose I do. But it all seems more real after dark, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘God, yes.’

For no reason at all he thought of Miranda and Miranda’s dying: the motorcycle hitting the wet patch, going into a skid, the sound of her scream, his own brute panic, and the side of the truck growing and growing as they approached it broadside.

‘Susan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Take good care of yourself. Please.’

After she hung up, he put the phone back in the cradle and stared at the TV, barely seeing the Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedy that had begun to unreel up there. He felt naked, exposed. He had no cross himself. His eyes strayed to the windows, which showed only blackness. The old, childlike terror of the dark began to creep over him and he looked at the television where Doris Day was giving a shaggy dog a bubble bath and was afraid.

11

The county morgue in Portland is a cold and antiseptic room done entirely in green tile. The floors and walls are a uniform medium green, and the ceiling is a lighter green. The walls are lined with square doors which look like large bus-terminal coin lockers. Long parallel fluorescent tubes shed a chilly neutral light over all of this. The decor is hardly inspired, but none of the clientele have ever been known to complain.

At quarter to ten on this Saturday night, two attendants were wheeling in the sheet-covered body of a young homosexual who had been shot in a downtown bar. It was the first stiff they had received that night; the highway fatals usually came in between 1:00 and 3:00 A.M.

Buddy Bascomb was in the middle of a Frenchman joke that had to do with vaginal deodorant spray when he broke off in midsentence and stared down the line of locker doors M-Z. Two of them were standing open.

He and Bob Greenberg left the new arrival and hurried down quickly. Buddy glanced at the tag on the first door he came to while Bob went down to the next.

TIBBITS, FLOYD MARTIN

Sex: M

Admitted: 10/4/75

Autops. sched.: 10/5/75

Signator: J. M. Cody, MD

He yanked the handle set inside the door, and the slab rolled out on silent casters.

Empty.

‘Hey!’ Greenberg yelled up to him. ‘This fucking thing is empty. Whose idea of a joke-’

‘I was on the desk all the time,’ Buddy said. ‘No one went by me. I’d swear to it. It must have happened on Carty’s shift. What’s the name on that one?’

‘McDougall, Randall Fratus. What does this abbreviation inf. mean?’

‘Infant,’ Buddy said dully. ‘Jesus Christ, I think we’re in trouble.’

12

Something had awakened him.

He lay still in the ticking dark, looking at the ceiling.

A noise. Some noise. But the house was silent.

There it was again. Scratching.

Mark Petrie turned over in bed and looked through the window and Danny Glick was staring in at him through the glass, his skin grave-pale, his eyes reddish and feral.

Some dark substance was smeared about his lips and chin, and when he saw Mark looking at him, he smiled and showed teeth grown hideously long and sharp.

‘Let me in,’ the voice whispered, and Mark was not sure if the words had crossed dark air or were only in his mind.

He became aware that he was frightened-his body had known before his mind. He had never been so frightened, not even when he got tired swimming back from the float at Popham Beach and thought he was going to drown. His mind, still that of a child in a thousand ways, made an accurate judgment of his position in seconds. He was in peril of more than his life.

‘Let me in, Mark. I want to play with you.’

There was nothing for that hideous entity outside the window to hold onto; his room was on the second floor and there was no ledge. Yet somehow it hung suspended in space… or perhaps it was clinging to the outside shingles like some dark insect.

‘Mark… I finally came, Mark. Please… ’

Of course. You have to invite them inside.
He knew that from his monster magazines, the ones his mother was afraid might damage or warp him in some way.

He got out of bed and almost fell down. It was only then that he realized fright was too mild a word for this. Even terror did not express what he felt. The pallid face outside the window tried to smile, but it had lain in darkness too long to remember precisely how. What Mark saw was a twitching grimace-a bloody mask tragedy.

Yet if you looked in the eyes, it wasn’t so bad. If you looked in the eyes, you weren’t so afraid anymore and you saw that all you had to do was open the window and say, ‘C’mon in, Danny,’ and then you wouldn’t be afraid at all because you’d be at one with Danny and all of them and at one with
him
. You’d be -

No! That’s how they get you!

He dragged his eyes away, and it took all of his will power to do it.

‘Mark, let me in! I command it!
He
commands it!’

Mark began to walk toward the window again. There was no help for it. There was no possible way to deny that voice. As he drew closer to the glass, the evil little boy’s face on the other side began to twitch and grimace with eagerness. Fingernails, black with earth, scratched across the windowpane.

Think of something. Quick! Quick!

‘The rain,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In vain he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.’

Danny Glick hissed at him.

‘Mark! Open the window!’

‘Betty Bitter bought some butter-’

‘The window, Mark,
he
commands it!’

‘-but, says Betty, this butter’s bitter.’

He was weakening. That whispering voice was seeing through his barricade, and the command was imperative. Mark’s eyes fell on his desk, littered with his model monsters, now so bland and foolish -

His eyes fixed abruptly on part of the display and widened slightly.

The plastic ghoul was walking through a plastic graveyard and one of the monuments was in the shape of a cross.

With no pause for thought or consideration (both would have come to an adult-his father, for instance-and both would have undone him), Mark swept up the cross, curled it into a tight fist, and said loudly: ‘Come on in, then.’

The face became suffused with an expression of vulpine triumph. The window slid up and Danny stepped in and took two paces forward. The exhalation from that opening mouth was fetid, beyond description: a smell of charnel pits. Cold, fish-white hands descended on Mark’s shoulders. The head cocked, doglike, the upper lip curled away from those shining canines.

Mark brought the plastic cross around in a vicious swipe and laid it against Danny Glick’s cheek.

His scream was horrible, unearthly… and silent. It echoed only in the corridors of his brain and the chambers of his soul. The smile of triumph on the Glick-thing’s mouth became a yawning grimace of agony. Smoke spurted from the pallid flesh, and for just a moment, before the creature twisted away and half dived, half fell out the window, Mark felt the flesh yield like smoke.

And then it was over, as if it had never happened.

But for a moment the cross shone with a fierce light, as if an inner wire had been ignited. Then it dwindled away, leaving only a blue after-image in front of his eyes.

Through the grating in the floor, he heard the distinctive Click of the lamp in his parents’ bedroom and his father’s voice: ‘What in hell was that?’