Salem’s Lot (44 page)

26

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 icecream sodas and frappés 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 millworker.

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 took, 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.

27

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’?

No, that wasn’t me. Honest to God it wasn’t.

Well, you had to hand it to them. They could lie to their own mothers with a clear and smiling face, and they probably did it, too. He had kicked the kid off two more nights and then he had confessed, by the Jesus. Charlie kicked him off once more-one to grow on, you might say-and then Dave Felsen down at the motor pool told him he better cool it for a while.

WHONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNK-

He grabbed his shirt and then got the old tennis racket standing in the corner. By Christ, he was going to whip some ass tonight!

He went out the back door and around the house to where he kept the big yellow bus parked. He felt tough and coldly competent. This was infiltration, just like the Army.

He paused behind the oleander bush and looked at the bus. Yes, he could see them, a whole bunch of them, darker shapes behind the night-darkened glass. He felt the old red rage, the hate of them like hot ice, and his grip on the tennis racket tightened until it trembled in his hand like a tuning fork. They had busted out-six, seven, eight-eight windows on
his
bus!

He slipped behind it and then crept up the long yellow side to the passenger door. It was folded open. He tensed, and suddenly sprang up the steps.

‘All right! Stay where you are! Kid, lay off that goddamn horn or I’ll-’

The kid sitting in the driver’s seat with both hands plastered on the horn ring turned to him and smiled crazily. Charlie felt a sickening drop in his gut. It was Richie Boddin. He was white-just as white as a sheet-except for the black chips of coal that were his eyes, and his lips, which were ruby red.

And his teeth -

Charlie Rhodes looked down the aisle.

Was that Mike Philbrook? Audie James? God Almighty, the Griffen boys were down there! Hal and Jack, sitting near the back with hay in their hair.
But they don’t ride on my bus!
Mary Kate Greigson and Brent Tenney, sitting side by side. She was in a nightgown, he in blue jeans and a flannel shirt that was on backward and inside out, as if he had forgotten how to dress himself.

And Danny Glick
. But-oh, Christ-he was
dead
; dead for
weeks!

‘You,’ he said through numb lips. ‘You kids-’

The tennis racket slid from his hand. There was a wheeze and a thump as Richie Boddin, still smiling that crazy smile, worked the chrome lever that shut the folding door. They were getting out of their seats now, all of them.

‘No,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘You kids… you don’t understand. It’s me. It’s Charlie Rhodes. You… you…’ He grinned at them without meaning, shook his head, held out his hands to show them they were just ole Charlie Rhodes’s hands, blameless, and backed up until his back was jammed against the wide tinted glass of the windshield.

‘Don’t,’ he whispered.

They came on, grinning. ‘Please don’t.’

And fell on him.

28

Ann Norton died on the short elevator trip from the first floor of the hospital to the second. She shivered once, and a small trickle of blood ran from the comer of her mouth.

‘Okay,’ one of the orderlies said. ‘You can turn off the siren now.’

29

Eva Miller had been dreaming.

It was a strange dream, not quite a nightmare. The fire of ‘51 was raging under an unforgiving sky that shaded from pale blue at the horizons to a hot and merciless white overhead. The sun glared from this inverted bowl like a glinting copper coin. The acrid smell of smoke was everywhere; all business activity had stopped and people stood in the streets, looking southwest, toward the Marshes, and northwest, toward the woods. The smoke had been in the air all morning, but now, at one in the afternoon, you could see the bright arteries of fire dancing in the green beyond Griffen’s pasture. The steady breeze that had allowed the flames to jump one firebreak now brought a steady fall of white ash over the town like summer snow.

Ralph was alive, off trying to save the sawmill. But it was all mixed up because Ed Craig was with her and she had never even met Ed until the fall of 1954.

She was watching the fire from her upstairs bedroom window, and she was naked. Hands touched her from behind, r ugh brown hands on the smooth whiteness of her hips, and she knew it was Ed, although she could not see even a ghost of his reflection in the glass.

Ed
, she tried to say. Not now.
It’s too early. Not for almost nine years.

But his hands were insistent, running over her belly, one finger toying with the cup of her navel, then both hands slipping up to catch her breasts with brazen knowledge.

She tried to tell him they were in the window, anyone out there in the street could look over his shoulder and see them, but the words would not come out and then his lips were on her arm, her shoulder, then fastening with firm and lustful insistence on her neck. She felt his teeth and he was biting her, sucking and biting, drawing blood, and she tried to protest again:
Don’t give me a hickey, Ralph will see -

But it was impossible to protest and she no longer even wanted to. She no longer cared who looked around and saw them, naked and brazen.

Her eyes drifted dreamily to the fire as his lips and teeth worked against her neck, and the smoke was very black, as black as night, obscuring that hot gun-metal sky, turning day to night; yet the fire moved inside it in those pulsing scarlet threads and blossoms - rioting flowers in a midnight jungle.

And then it
was
night and the town was gone but the fire still raged in the blackness, shifting through fascinating, kaleidoscopic shapes until it seemed that it limned a face in blood - a face with a hawk nose, deep-set, fiery eyes, full and sensuous lips partially hidden by a heavy mustache, and hair swept back from the brow like a musician’s.

‘The Welsh dresser,’ a voice said distantly, and she knew it was
his
. ‘The one in the attic. That will do nicely, I think. And then we’ll fix the stairs… it’s wise to be prepared.’

The voice faded. The flames faded.

There was only the darkness, and she in it, dreaming or beginning to dream. She thought dimly that the dream would be sweet and long, but bitter underneath and without light, like the waters of Lethe.

Another voice-Ed’s voice. ‘Come on, darlin’. Get up. We have to do as he says.’

‘Ed? Ed?’

His face looked over hers, not drawn in fire, but looking terribly pale and strangely empty. Yet she loved him again… more than ever. She yearned for his kiss.

‘Come on, Eva.’

‘Is it a dream, Ed?’

‘No… not a dream.’

For a moment she was frightened, and then there was no more fear. There was knowing instead. With the knowing came the hunger.

She glanced into the mirror and saw only her bedroom reflected, empty and still. The attic door was locked and the key was in the bottom drawer of the dresser, but it didn’t matter. No need for keys now.

They slipped between the door and the jamb like Shades.