Salem's Lot

4

It was ten past n6on when they had finished telling everything. The nurse had brought Ben a lunch tray, and it stood untouched by his bed.

The last syllable died away, and the only sound was the rattle of glasses and cutlery coming through the half-open door as hungrier patients on the ward ate.

‘Vampires,’ Jimmy Cody said. Then: ‘Matt Burke, of all people. That makes it awfully hard to laugh off.’ Ben and Susan kept silent.

‘And you want me to exhume the Glick kid,’ he ruminated. ‘Jesus jumped-up Christ in a sidecar.’

Cody took a bottle out of his bag and tossed it to Ben, who caught it. ‘Aspirin,’ he said. ‘Ever use it?’

‘A lot.’

‘My dad used to call it the good doctor’s best nurse. Do you know how it works?’

‘No,’ Ben said. He turned the bottle of aspirin idly in his hands, looking at it. He did not know. Cody well enough to know what he usually showed or kept hidden, but he was sure that few of his patients saw him like this-the boyish, Norman Rockwell face overcast with thought and introspection. He didn’t want to break Cody’s mood.

‘Neither do I. Neither does anybody else. But it’s good for headache and arthritis and the rheumatism. We don’t know what any of those are, either. Why should your head ache? There are no nerves in your brain. We know that aspirin is very close in chemical composition to LSD, but why should one cure the ache in the head and the other cause the head to fill up with flowers? Part of the reason we don’t understand is because we don’t really know what the brain is. The best-educated doctor in the world is standing on a low island in the middle of a sea of ignorance.

We rattle our medicine sticks and kill our chickens and read messages in blood. All of that works a surprising amount of time. White magic. Bene gris-gris. My med school profs would tear their hair if they could hear me say that. Some of them tore it when I told them I was going into general practice in rural Maine, One of them told me that Marcus Welby always lanced the boils on the patient’s ass during station identification. But I never wanted to be Marcus Welby.’ He smiled. ‘They’d roll on the ground and have fits if they knew I was going to request an exhumation order on the Glick boy.’

‘You’ll do it?’ Susan said, frankly amazed.

‘What can it hurt? If he’s dead, he’s dead. If he’s not, then I’ll have something to stand the AMA convention on its ear next time. I’m going to tell the county ME that I want to look for signs of infectious encephalitis. It’s the only sane explanation I can think of.’

‘Could that actually be it?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Damned unlikely.’

‘What’s the earliest you could do it?’ Ben asked.

‘Tomorrow, tops. If I have to hassle around, Tuesday or Wednesday.’

‘What should he look like?’ Ben asked. ‘I mean… ’

‘Yes, I know what you mean. The Glicks wouldn’t have the boy embalmed, would they?’

‘No.

‘It’s been a week?’

‘Yes.’

‘When the coffin is opened, there’s apt to be a rush of gas and a rather offensive smell. The body may be bloated. The hair will have grown down over his collar-it continues to grow for an amazing period of time-and the fingernails will also be quite long. The eyes will almost certainly have fallen in.’

Susan was trying to maintain an expression of scientific impartiality and not succeeding very well. Ben was glad he hadn’t eaten lunch.

‘The corpse will not have begun radical mortification,’ Cody went on in his best recitation voice, ‘but enough moisture may be present to encourage growth on the exposed cheeks and hands, possibly a mossy substance called-’ He broke off. ‘I’m sorry. I’m grossing you out.’

‘Some things may be worse than decay, ‘Ben remarked, keeping his voice carefully neutral. ‘Suppose you find none of those signs? Suppose the body is as natural-looking as the day it was buried? What then? Pound a stake through his heart?’

‘Hardly,’ Cody said. ‘in the first place, either the ME or his assistant will have to be there. I don’t think even Brent Norbert would regard it professional of me to take a stake out of my bag and hammer it through a child’s corpse.’

‘What will you do?’ Ben asked curiously.

‘Well, begging Matt Burke’s pardon, I don’t think that will come up. If the body was in such a condition, it would undoubtedly be brought to the Maine Medical Center for an extensive post. Once there, I would daily about my examination until dark… and observe any phenomena that might occur.’

‘And if he rises?’

‘Like you, I can’t conceive of that.

‘I’m finding it more conceivable all the time,’ Ben said grimly. ‘Can I be present when all this happens-if it does?’

‘That might be arranged.’

‘All right,’ Ben said. He got out of bed and walked toward the closet where his clothes were hanging. "I’m going to-’

Susan giggled, and Ben turned around. ‘What?’

Cody was grinning. ‘Hospital johnnies have a tendency to flap in the back, Mr Mears.’

‘Oh hell,’ Ben said, and instinctively reached around to pull the johnny together. ‘You better call me Ben.’

‘And on that note,’ Cody said, rising, ‘Susan and I will exit. Meet us downstairs in the coffee shop when you’re decent. You and I have some business this afternoon.’

‘We do?’

‘Yes. The Glicks will have-to be told the encephalitis story. You can be my colleague if you like. Don’t say anything. Just stroke your chin and look wise.’

‘They’re not going to like it, are they?’

‘Would you?’

‘No,’ Ben said. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Do you need their permission to get an exhumation order?’ Susan asked.

‘Technically, no. Realistically, probably. My only experience with the question of exhuming corpses has been in Medical Law II. But I think if the Glicks are set strongly enough against it, they could force us to a hearing. That would lose us two Weeks to a month, and once we got there I doubt if my encephalitis theory would hold up.’ He paused and looked at them both. ‘Which leads us to the thing that disturbs me most about this, Mr Burke’s story aside. Danny Glick is the only corpse we have a marker for. All the others have disappeared into thin air.’