Salem’s Lot (48 page)

43

Ben was walking down Jointner Avenue toward town when Jimmy’s tan Buick came up the road, moving in jerks and spasms, weaving drunkenly. He waved at it and it pulled over, bounced the left front wheel over the curb, and came to a stop.

He had lost track of time making the stakes, and when he looked at his watch, he had been startled to see that it was nearly ten minutes past four. He had shut down the lathe, taken a couple of the stakes, put them in his belt, and gone upstairs to use the telephone. He had only put his hand on it when he remembered it was out.

Badly worried now, he ran outside and looked in both cars, Callahan’s and Petrie’s. No keys in either. He could have gone back and searched Henry Petrie’s pockets, but the thought was too much. He had set off for town at a fast walk, keeping an eye peeled for Jimmy’s Buick. He had been intending to go straight to the Brock Street School when Jimmy’s car came into sight.

He ran around to the driver’s seat and Mark Petrie was sitting behind the wheel… alone. He looked at Ben numbly. His lips worked but no sound came out.

‘What’s the matter? Where’s Jimmy?’

‘Jimmy’s dead,’ Mark said woodenly. ‘Barlow thought ahead of us again. He’s in the basement of Mrs Miller’s boardinghouse somewhere. Jimmy’s there, too. I went down to help him and I couldn’t get back out. Finally I got a board that I could crawl up, but at first I thought I was going to be trapped down there… until s-s-sunset… ’

‘What happened? What are you talking about?’

‘Jimmy figured out the blue chalk, you see? While we were at a house in the Bend. Blue chalk. Pool tables. There’s a pool table in the cellar at Mrs Miller’s, it belonged to her husband. Jimmy called the boardinghouse and there was no answer so we drove over.’

He lifted his tearless face to Ben’s.

‘He told me to look around for a flashlight because the cellar light switch was broken, just like at the Marsten House. So I started to look around. I… I noticed that all the knives in the rack over the sink were gone, but I didn’t think anything of it. So in a way I killed him. I did it. It’s my fault, all my fault, all my-’

Ben shook him: two brisk snaps. ‘Stop it, Mark. Stop it!

Mark put his hands to his mouth, as if to catch the hysterical babble before it could flow out. His eyes stared hugely at Ben over his hands.

At last he went on: ‘I found a flashlight in the hall dresser, see. And that was when Jimmy fell, and he started to scream. He-I would have fallen, too, but he warned me. The last thing he said was
Look out, Mark
.’

‘What was it?’ Ben demanded.

‘Barlow and the others just took the stairs away,’ Mark said in a dead, listless voice. ‘Sawed the stairs off after the second one going down. They left a little more of the railing so it looked like… looked like…’ He shook his head. ‘In the dark, Jimmy just thought they were there. You see?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said. He saw. It made him feel sick. ‘And the knives?’

‘Set all around on the floor underneath,’ Mark whispered. ‘They pounded the blades through these thin plywood squares and then knocked off the handles so they would sit flat with the blades pointing… pointing.’

‘Oh,’ Ben said helplessly. ‘Oh, Christ.’ He reached down and took Mark by the shoulders. ‘Are you sure he’s dead, Mark?’

‘Yes. He… he was stuck in half a dozen places. The blood… ’

Ben looked at his watch. It was ten minutes of five. Again he had that feeling of being crowded, of running out of time.

‘What are we going to do now?’ Mark asked remotely.

‘Go into town. Talk to Matt on the phone and then talk to Parkins Gillespie. We’ll finish Barlow before dark. We’ve got to.’

Mark smiled a small, morbid smile. ‘Jimmy said that, too. He said we were going to stop his clock. But he keeps beating us. Better guys than us must have tried, too.’

Ben looked down at the boy and got ready to do something nasty.

‘You sound scared,’ he said.

‘I
am
scared,’ Mark said, not rising to it. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘I’m scared,’ Ben said, ‘but I’m mad, too. I lost a girl I liked one hell of a lot. I loved her, I guess. We both lost Jimmy. You lost your mother and father. They’re lying in your living room under a dust cover from your sofa.’ He pushed himself to a final brutality. ‘Want to go back and look?’

Mark winced away from him, his face horrified and hurting.

‘I want you with me,’ Ben said more softly He felt a germ of self-disgust in his stomach. He sounded like a football coach before the big game. ‘I don’t care who’s tried to stop him before. I don’t care if Attila the Run played him and lost. I’m going to have my shot. I want you with me. I need you.’ And that was the truth, pure and naked.

‘Okay,’ Mark said. He looked down into his lap, and his hands found each other and entwined in distraught pantomime.

‘Dig your feet in,’ Ben said.

Mark looked at him hopelessly. I’m trying,’ he said.

44

Sonny’s Exxon station on outer Jointner Avenue was open and Sonny James (who exploited his country-music namesake with a huge color poster in the window beside a pyramid of oil cans) came out to wait on them himself. He was a small, gnome-like man whose receding hair was lawn-mowered into a perpetual crew cut that showed his pink scalp.

‘Hey there, Mr Mears, howya doin’? Where your Citrowan?’

‘Laid up, Sonny. Where’s Pete?’ Pete Cook was Sonny’s part-time help, and lived in town. Sonny did not.

‘Never showed up today. Don’t matter. Things been slow, anyway. Town seems downright dead.’

Ben felt dark, hysterical laughter in his belly. It threatened to boil out of his mouth in a great and rancid wave.

‘Want to fill it up?’ he managed. ‘Want to use your phone.’

‘Sure. Hi, kid. No school today?’

I’m on a field trip with Mr Mears,’ Mark said. ‘I had a bloody nose.’

‘I guess to God you did. My brother used to get ‘em. They’re a sign of high blood pressure, boy. You want to watch out.’ He strolled to the back of Jimmy’s car and took off the gas cap

Ben went inside and dialed the pay phone beside the rack of New England road maps.

‘Cumberland Hospital, which department?’

‘I’d like to speak with Mr Burke, please. Room 402.

There was an uncharacteristic hesitation, and Ben was about to ask if the room had been changed when the voice said: ‘Who is this, please?’

‘Benjaman Mears.’ The possibility of Matt’s death suddenly loomed up in his mind like a long shadow. Could that be? Surely not-that would be too much. ‘Is he all right?’

‘Are you a relative?’

‘No, a close friend. He isn’t-’

‘Mr Burke died at 3:07 this afternoon, Mr Mears. If you’d like to hold for just a minute, I’ll see if Dr Cody has come in yet. Perhaps he could… ’

The voice went on but Ben had ceased hearing it, although the receiver was still glued to his ear. The realization of how much he had been depending on Matt to get them through the rest of this nightmare afternoon crashed home with sickening weight. Matt was dead. Congestive heart failure. Natural causes. It was as if God Himself had turned His face away from them.

Just Mark and I now.

Susan, Jimmy, Father Callahan, Matt. All gone.

Panic seized him and he grappled with it silently. He put the receiver back into its cradle without thinking about it, guillotining a question half-asked.

He walked back outside. It was ten after five. In the west the clouds were breaking up.

‘Comes to just three dollars even,’ Sonny told him brightly. ‘That’s Doc Cody’s car, ain’t it? I see them MD plates and it always makes me think of this movie I seen, this story about a bunch of crooks and one of them would always steal cars with MD plates because-’

Ben gave him three one-dollar bills. ‘I’ve got to split, Sonny. Sorry. I’ve got trouble.’

Sonny’s face crinkled up. ‘Gee, I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Mears. Bad news from your editor?’

‘I guess you could say that.’ He got behind the wheel, shut the door, pulled out, and left Sonny looking after him in his yellow foulweather slicker.

‘Matt’s dead, isn’t he?’ Mark asked, watching him.

‘Yes. Heart attack. How did you know?’

‘Your face. I saw your face.’

It was 5:15.

45

Parkins Gillespie was standing on the small covered porch of the Municipal Building, smoking a Pall Mall and looking out at the western sky. He turned his attention to Ben Mears and Mark Petrie reluctantly. His face looked sad and old, like the glasses of water they bring you in cheap diners.

‘How are You, Constable?’ Ben asked.

‘Tolerable,’ Parkins allowed. He considered a hangnail on the leathery arc of skin that bordered his thumbnail, ‘Seen you truckin’ back and forth. Looked like the kid was drivin’ up from Railroad Street by hisself this last time. That so?’

‘Yes,’ Mark said.

‘Almost got clipped, Fella goin’ the other way missed you by a whore’s hair.’

‘Constable,’ Ben said, ‘we want to tell you what’s been happening around here.’

Parkins Gillespie spat out the stub of his cigarette without raising his hands from the rail of the small covered porch. Without looking at either of them, he said calmly, ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

They looked at him dumbfounded.

‘Nolly didn’t show up today,’ Parkins said, still in that calm, conversational voice. ‘Somehow don’t think he will. He called in late last night and said he’d seen Homer McCaslin’s car out on the Deep Cut Road-I think it was the Deep Cut he said. He never called back in.’ Slowly, sadly, like a man under water, he dipped into his shirt pocket and reached another Pall Mall out of it. He rolled it reflectively between his thumb and finger. ‘These fucking things are going to be the death of me,’ he said.

Ben tried again. ‘The man who took the Marsten House, Gillespie. His name is Barlow. He’s in the basement of Eva Miller’s boardinghouse right now.’

‘That so?’ Parkins said with no particular surprise, ‘Vampire, ain’t he? Just like in all the comic books they used to put out twenty years ago.’

Ben said nothing. He felt more and more like a man lost in a great and grinding nightmare where clockwork ran on and on endlessly, unseen, but just below the surface of things.

‘I’m leavin’ town,’ Parkins said. ‘Got my stuff all packed up in the back of the car. I left my gun and the bubble and my badge in on the shelf. I’m done with lawin’. Goin’ t’see my sister in Kittery, I am. Figure that’s far enough to be safe.’

Ben heard himself say remotely, ‘You gutless creep. You cowardly piece of shit. This town is still alive and you’re running out on it.’

‘It ain’t alive,’ Parkins said, lighting his smoke with a wooden kitchen match. ‘That’s why
he
came here. It’s dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. Whole country’s goin’ the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin’s in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin’ popcorn and cheerin ‘em on.’ He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the broken rays of the westering sun, like a dream village. ‘They prob’ly like bein’ vampires. But not me; Nolly’d be in after me tonight. I’m goin’.’

Ben looked at him helplessly.

‘You two fellas want to get in that car and hit it out of here,’ Parkins said. ‘This town will go on without us… for a while. Then it won’t matter.’

Yes
, Ben thought.
Why don’t we do that?
Mark spoke the reason for both of them. ‘Because he’s bad, mister. He’s really bad. That’s all.’

‘Is that so?’ Parkins said. He nodded and puffed his Pall Mall. ‘Well, okay.’ He looked up toward the Consolidated High School. ‘Piss-poor attendance today, from the Lot, anyway. Buses runnin’ late, kids out sick, office phonin’ houses and not gettin’ any answer. The attendance officer called me, and I soothed him some. He’s a funny little bald-headed fella who thinks he knows what he’s doing. Well, the teachers are there, anyway. They come from out of town, mostly. They can teach each other.’

Thinking of Matt, Ben said, ‘Not all of them are from out of town.’

‘It don’t matter,’ Parkins said. His eyes dropped to the stakes in Ben’s belt. ‘You going to try to do that fella up with one of those?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can have my riot gun if you want it. That gun, it was Nolly’s idear. Nolly liked to go armed, he did. Not even a bank in town so’s he could hope someone would rob it. He’ll make a good vampire though, once he gets the hang of it.’

Mark was looking at him with rising horror, and Ben knew he had to get him away. This was the worst of all.

‘Come on,’ he said to Mark. ‘He’s done.’

‘I guess that’s it,’ Parkins said. His pale, crinkle-caught eyes surveyed the town. ‘Surely is quiet. I seen Mabel Werts, peekin’ out with her glasses, but I don’t guess there’s much to peek at, today. There’ll be more tonight, likely.’

They went back to the car. It was almost 5:30.