Salem’s Lot (49 page)

46

They pulled up in front of St Andrew’s at quarter of six. Lengthening shadows fell from the church across the street to the rectory, covering it like a prophecy. Ben pulled Jimmy’s bag out of the back seat and dumped it out. He found several small ampoules, and dumped their contents out the window, saving the bottles.

‘What are you doing?’

‘We’re going to put holy water in these,’ Ben said. ‘Come on.’

They went up the walk to the church and climbed the steps. Mark, about to open the middle door, paused and pointed. ‘Look at that.’

The handle was blackened and pulled slightly out of shape, as if a heavy electric charge had been pushed through it.

‘Does that mean anything to you?’ Ben asked.

‘No. No, but… ’ Mark shook his head, pushing an unformed thought away. He opened the door and they went in. The church was cool and gray and filled with the endless pregnant pause that all empty altars of faith, white and black, have in common.

The two ranks of pews were split by a wide central aisle, and flanking this, two plaster angels stood cradling bowls of holy water, their calm and sweetly knowing faces bent, as if to catch their own reflections in the still water.

Ben put the ampoules in his pocket. ‘Bathe your face and hands,’ he said.

Mark looked at him, troubled. ‘That’s sac-sacri-’

‘Sacrilege? Not this time. Go ahead.’

They dunked their hands in the still water and then splashed it over their faces, the way a man who has just wakened will splash cold water into his eyes to shock the world back into them.

Ben took the first ampoule out of his pocket and was filling it when a shrill voice cried, ‘Here! Here now! What are you doing?’

Ben turned around. It was Rhoda Curless, Father Callahan’s housekeeper, who had been sitting in the first pew and twisting a rosary helplessly between her fingers. She was wearing a black dress, and her slip hung below the hem. Her hair was in disarray; she had been pulling her fingers through it.

‘Where’s the Father? What are you doing?’ Her voice was reedy and thin, close to hysteria.

‘Who are you?’ Ben asked.

‘Mrs Curless. I’m Father Callahan’s housekeeper. Where’s the Father? What are you doing?’ Her hands came together and began to war with each other.

‘Father Callahan is gone,’ Ben said, as gently as he could.

‘Oh.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Was he getting after whatever ails this town?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said.

‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have to ask. He’s a strong, good man of the cloth. There were always those who said he’d never be man enough to fill Father Bergeron’s shoes, but he filled ‘em. They were too small for him, as it turned out.’

She opened her eyes wide and looked at them. A tear spilled from her left, and ran down her cheek. ‘He won’t be back, will he?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ben said.

‘They talked about his drinkin’,’ she said, as though she hadn’t heard. ‘Was there ever an Irish priest worth his keep who didn’t tip the bottle? None of that mollycoddlin’ wet-nursin’ church-bingo-prayer-basket for him. He was more’n that!’ Her voice rose toward the vaulted ceiling in a hoarse, almost challenging cry. ‘He was a
priest
, not some holy alderman!’

Ben and Mark listened without speech or surprise. There was no surprise left on this dream-struck day; there was not even the capacity for it. They no longer saw themselves as doers or avengers or saviors; the day had absorbed them. Helplessly, they were only living.

‘Was he strong when last you saw him?’ she demanded, peering at them. The tears magnified the gimlet lack of compromise in her eyes.

‘Yes,’ Mark said, remembering Callahan in his mother’s kitchen, holding his cross aloft.

‘And are you about his work now?’

‘Yes,’ Mark said again.

‘Then be about it,’ she snapped at them. ‘What are you waiting for?’ And she left them, walking down the center aisle in her black dress, the solitary mourner at a funeral that hadn’t been held here.

47

Eva’s again-and at the last. It was ten minutes after six. The sun hung over the western pines, peering out of the broken clouds like blood.

Ben drove into the parking lot and looked curiously up at his room. The shade was not drawn and he could see his typewriter standing sentinel, and beside it, his pile of manuscript and the glass globe paperweight on top of it. It seemed amazing that he could see all those things from here, see them clearly, as if everything in the world was sane and normal and ordered.

He let his eyes drop to the back porch. The rocking chairs where he and Susan had shared their first kiss stood side by side, unchanged. The door which gave ingress to the kitchen stood open, as Mark had left it.

‘I can’t,’ Mark muttered. ‘I just can’t.’ His eyes were wide and white. He had drawn up his knees and was now crouched on the seat.

‘It’s got to be both of us,’ Ben said. He held out two of the ampoules filled with holy water. Mark twitched away from them in horror, as if touching them would admit poison through his skin. ‘Come on,’ Ben said. He had no arguments left. ‘Come on, come on.’

‘No.’

‘Mark?’

‘No!’

‘Mark, I need you. You and me, that’s all that’s left.’

‘I’ve done enough!’ Mark cried. ‘I can’t do any more!
‘Can’t you understand I can’t look at him?’

‘Mark, it has to be the two of us. Don’t you know that?’

Mark took the ampoules and curled them slowly against his chest. ‘Oh boy,’ he whispered. ‘Oh boy, oh boy.’ He looked at Ben and nodded. The movement of his head was jerky and agonized. ‘Okay,’ he said.

‘Where’s the hammer?’ he asked as they got out.

‘Jimmy had it.’

‘Okay.’

They walked up the porch steps in the strengthening wind. The sun glared red through the clouds, dyeing everything. Inside, in the kitchen, the stink of death was palpable and wet, pressing against them like granite. The cellar door stood open.

‘I’m so scared,’ Mark said, shuddering.

‘You better be. Where’s that flashlight?’

‘In the cellar. I left it when… ’

‘Okay.’ They stood at the mouth of the cellar. As Mark had said, the stairs looked intact in the sunset light. ‘Follow me,’ Ben said.

48

Ben thought quite easily:
I’m going to my death.

The thought came naturally, and there was no fear or regret in it. Inward-turning emotions were lost under the overwhelming atmosphere of evil that hung over this place. As he slipped and scraped his way down the board Mark had set up to get out of the cellar, all he felt was an unnatural glacial calm. He saw that his hands were glowing, as if wreathed in ghost gloves. It did not surprise him.

Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream
. Who had said that? Matt? Matt was dead. Susan was dead. Miranda was dead. Wallace Stevens was dead, too. I wouldn’t look at that, if I were you. But he had looked. That’s what you looked like when it was over. Like something smashed and broken that had been filled with different-colored fluids. It wasn’t so bad. Not so bad as
his
death. Jimmy had been carrying McCaslin’s pistol; it would still be in his coat pocket. He would take it, and if sunset came before they could get to Barlow… first the boy, and then himself. Not good, but better than
his
death.

He dropped to the cellar floor and then helped Mark down. The boy’s eyes flashed to the dark, curled thing on the floor and then skipped away.

‘I can’t look at that,’ he said huskily.

‘That’s all right.’

Mark turned away and Ben knelt down. He swept away a number of the lethal plywood squares, the knife blades thrust through them glittering like dragon’s teeth. Gently, then, he turned Jimmy over.

I wouldn’t look at that, if I were you.

‘Oh, Jimmy,’ he tried to say, and the words broke open and bled in his throat. He cradled Jimmy in the curve of his left arm and pulled Barlow’s blades out of him with his right hand. There were six of them, and Jimmy had bled a great deal.

There was a neatly folded stack of living room drapes on a corner shelf. He took them over to Jimmy and spread them over his body after he had the gun and the flashlight and the hammer.

He stood up and tried the flashlight. The plastic lens cover had cracked, but the bulb still worked. He flashed it around. Nothing. He shone it under the pool table. Bare. Nothing behind the furnace. Racks of preserves, and a pegboard hung with tools. The amputated stairs, pushed over in the far corner so they would be out of sight from the kitchen. They looked like a scaffold leading nowhere.

‘Where is he?’ Ben muttered. He glanced at his watch, and the hands stood at 6:23. When was sunset? He couldn’t remember. Surely no later than 6:55. That gave them a bare half hour.

‘Where is he?’ he cried out. ‘I can
feel
him, but where is he?’

"There!’ Mark cried, pointing with one glowing hand. ‘What’s that?’

Ben centered the light on it. A Welsh dresser. ‘It’s not big enough,’ he said to Mark. ‘And it’s flush against the wall.’

‘Let’s look behind it.’

Ben shrugged. They crossed the room to the Welsh dresser and each took a side. He felt a trickle of building excitement. Surely the odor or aura or atmosphere or whatever you wanted to call it was thicker here, more offensive?

Ben glanced up at the open kitchen door. The light was dimmer now. The gold was fading out of it.

‘It’s too heavy for me,’ Mark panted.

‘Never mind,’ Ben said. ‘We’re going to tip it over. Get your best hold.’

Mark bent over it, his shoulder against the wood. His eyes looked fiercely out of his glowing face. ‘Okay.’

They threw their combined weight against it and the Welsh dresser went over with a bonelike crash as Eva Miller’s long-ago wedding china shattered inside.

‘I
knew
it!’ Mark cried triumphantly.

There was a small door, chest-high, set into the wall where the Welsh dresser had been. A new Yale padlock secured the hasp.

Two hard swings of the hammer convinced him that the lock wasn’t going to give. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered softly. Frustration welled up bitterly in his throat. To be balked like this at the end, balked by a five-dollar padlock -

No. He would bite through the wood with his teeth if he had to.

He shone the flashlight around, and its beam fell on the neatly hung too] board to the right of the stairs. Hung on two of its steel pegs was an ax with a rubber cover masking its blade.

He ran across, snatched it off the pegboard, and pulled the rubber cover from the blade. He took one of the ampoules from his pocket and dropped it. The holy water ran out on the floor, beginning to glow immediately. He got another one, twisted the small cap off, and doused the blade of the ax. It began to glimmer with eldritch fairylight. And when he set his hands on the wooden haft, the grip felt incredibly good, incredibly
right
. Power seemed to have welded his flesh into its present grip. He stood holding it for a moment, looking at the shining blade, and some curious impulse made him touch it to his forehead. A hard sense of sureness clasped him, a feeling of inevitable rightness, of
whiteness
. For the first time in weeks he felt he was no longer groping through fogs of belief and unbelief, sparring with a partner whose body was too insubstantial to sustain blows.

Power, humming up his arms like volts.

The blade glowed brighter.

‘Do it!’ Mark pleaded. ‘Quick! Please!’

Ben Mears spread his feet, slung the ax back, and brought it down in a gleaming arc that left an after-image on the eye. The blade bit wood with a booming, portentous sound and sunk to the haft. Splinters flew.

He pulled it out, the wood screaming against the steel. He brought it down again… again… again. He could feel the muscles of his back and arms flexing and meshing, moving with a sureness and a studied heat that they had never known before. Each blow sent chips and splinters flying like shrapnel. On the fifth blow the blade crashed through to emptiness and he began hacking the hole wider with a speed that approached frenzy.

Mark stared at him, amazed. The cold blue fire had crept down the ax handle and spread up his arms until he seemed to be working in a column of fire. His head was twisted to one side, the muscles of his neck corded with strain, one eye open and glaring, the other squeezed shut. The back of his shirt had split between the straining wings of his shoulder blades, and the muscles writhed beneath the skin like ropes. He was a man taken over, possessed, and Mark saw without knowing (or having to know) that the possession was not in the least Christian; the good was more elemental, less refined. It was ore, like something coughed up out of the ground in naked chunks. There was nothing finished about it. It was Force; it was Power, it was whatever moved the greatest wheels of the universe.

The door to Eva Miller’s root cellar could not stand before it. The ax began to move at a nearly blinding speed; it became a ripple, a descending arc, a rainbow from over Ben’s shoulder to the splintered wood of the final door.

He dealt it a final blow and slung the ax away. He held his hands up before his eyes. They blazed.

He held them out to Mark, and the boy flinched. ‘I love you,’ Ben said.

They clasped hands.