Salem's Lot

11

He flicked on the overhead bar of fluorescents and turned to look at Jimmy, but Jimmy was already on his feet, holding his hands to the side of his neck. The fingers were sparkling scarlet.

‘She bit me!’ Jimmy howled. ‘Oh God-Jesus, she bit me!’

Ben went to him, tried to take him in his arms, and Jimmy pushed him away. His eyes rolled madly in their sockets.

‘Don’t touch me. I’m unclean.’ ‘Jimmy

‘Give me my bag. Jesus, Ben, I can feel it in there. I can feel it working in me. For Christ’s sake, give me my bag!’

It was in the corner. Ben got it, and Jimmy snatched it. He went to the mortician’s table and set the bag on it. His face was death pale, shining with sweat. The blood pulsed remorselessly from the torn gash in the side of his neck. He sat down on the table and opened the bag and swept through it, his breath coming in whining gasps through his open mouth.

‘She bit me,’ he muttered into the bag. ‘Her mouth… oh God, her dirty filthy mouth…’

He pulled a bottle of disinfectant out of the bag and sent the cap spinning across the tiled floor. He leaned back, supporting himself on one arm, and upended the bottle over his throat, and it splashed the wound, his slacks, the table. Blood washed away in threads. His eyes closed and he screamed once, then again. The bottle never wavered.

‘Jimmy, what can I-’

‘In a minute,’ Jimmy muttered. ‘Wait. It’s better, I think. Wait, just wait -’

He tossed the bottle away and it shattered on the floor. The wound, washed clean of the tainted blood, was clearly visible. Ben saw there was not one but two puncture wounds not far from the jugular, one of them horribly mangled.

Jimmy bad pulled an ampoule and a hypo from the bag. He stripped the protective covering from the needle and jibbed it through the ampoule. His hands were shaking so badly he had to make two thrusts at it. He filled the needle and held it out to Ben.

‘Tetanus,’ he said. ‘Give it to me. Here.’ He held his arm out, rotated to expose the armpit.

‘Jimmy, that’ll knock you out.’

‘No. No, it won’t. Do it.’

Ben took the needle and looked questioningly into Jimmy’s eyes. He nodded. Ben injected the needle.

Jimmy’s body tensed like spring steel. For a moment he was a sculpture in agony, every tendon pulled out into sharp relief. Little by little he began to relax. His body shuddered in reaction, and Ben saw that tears had mixed with the sweat on his face.

‘Put the cross on me,’ he said. ‘If I’m still dirty from her, it’ll… it’ll do something to me.’

‘Will it?’

‘I’m sure it will. When you were going after her, I looked up and I wanted to go after you. God help me, I did. And I looked at that cross and I… my belly wanted to heave up.’

Ben put the cross on his neck. Nothing happened. Its glow-if there had been a glow at all-was entirely gone. Ben took the cross away.

‘Okay,’ Jimmy said. ‘I think that’s all we can do.’ He rummaged in his bag again, found an envelope containing two pills, and crushed them into his mouth. ‘Dope,’ he said. ‘Great invention. Thank God I used the john before that… before it happened. I think I pissed myself, but it only came to about six drops. Can you bandage my neck?’

‘I think so,’ Ben said.

Jimmy handed him gauze, adhesive tape, and a pair of surgical scissors. Bending to put the bandage on, he saw that the skin around the wounds had gone an ugly, congealed red. Jimmy flinched when he pressed the bandage gently into place.

He said: ‘For a couple of minutes there, I thought I was going to go nuts. Really, clinically nuts. Her lips on me… biting me…’ His throat rippled as he swallowed. ‘And when she was doing it, I liked it, Ben. That’s the hellish part. I actually had an erection. Can you believe it? If you hadn’t been here to pull her off, I would have… would have let her… ’

‘Never mind,’ Ben said.

‘There’s one more thing I have to do that I don’t like.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Here. Look at me a minute.’

Ben finished the bandage and drew back a little to look at Jimmy. ‘What-’

And suddenly Jimmy slugged him. Stars rocketed up in his brain and he took three wandering steps backward and sat down heavily. He shook his head and saw Jimmy getting carefully I down from the table and coming toward him. He groped madly for the cross, thinking: This is what’s known as an O. Henry ending, you stupid shit, you stupid, stupid -

‘You all right?’ Jimmy was asking him. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s a little easier when you don’t know it’s coming.’

‘What the Christ-?’

Jimmy sat down beside him on the floor. ‘I’m going to tell you our story,’ he said. ‘It’s a damned poor one, but I’m pretty sure Maury Green will back it up. It will keep my practice, and keep us both out of jail or some asylum… and at this point, I’m not so concerned about those things as I am about staying free to fight these… things, whatever you want to call them, another day. Do you understand that?’

‘The thrust of it,’ Ben said. He touched his jaw and winced. There was a knot to the left of his chin.

‘Somebody barged in on us while I was examining Mrs Glick,’ Jimmy said. ‘The somebody cold-cocked you and then used me for a punching bag. During the-struggle, the somebody bit me to make me let him go. That’s all either of us remembers. All. Understand?’

Ben nodded.

‘The guy was wearing a dark CPO coat, maybe blue, maybe black, and a green or gray knitted cap. That’s all you saw. Okay?’

‘Have you ever thought about giving up doctoring in favor of a career in creative writing?’

Jimmy smiled. ‘I’m only creative in moments of extreme self-interest. Can you remember the story?’

‘Sure. And I don’t think it’s as poor as you might believe. After all, hers isn’t the first body that’s disappeared lately.’

‘I’m hoping they’ll add that up. But the county sheriff is a lot more on the ball than Parkins Gillespie ever thought of being. We have to watch our step. Don’t embellish the story.’

‘Do you suppose anyone in officialdom will begin to see the pattern in all this?’

Jimmy shook his head. ‘Not a chance in the world. We’re going to have to humble through this on our own. And remember that from this point on, we’re criminals.’

Shortly after, he went to the phone and called Maury Green, then County Sheriff Homer McCaslin.

Ben got back to Eva’s at about fifteen minutes past midnight and made himself a cup of coffee in the deserted downstairs kitchen. He drank it slowly, reviewing the night’s events with all e intense recall of a man who has just escaped falling from a high ledge.

The county sheriff was a tall, balding man. He chewed tobacco. He moved slowly, but his eyes were bright with observation. He had pulled an enormous battered notebook on a chain from his hip pocket, and an old thick-barreled fountain pen from under his green wool vest. He had questioned Ben and Jimmy while two deputies dusted for fingerprints and took pictures. Maury Green stood quietly in the background, throwing a puzzled look at Jimmy from time to time.

What had brought them to Green’s Mortuary?

Jimmy took that one, reciting the encephalitis story.

Did old Doc Reardon know about it?

Well, no. Jimmy thought it would be best to make a quiet check before mentioning it to anyone. Doc Reardon had been known to be, well, overly chatty on occasion.

What about this encephawhatzis? Did the woman have it?

No, almost certainly not. He had finished his examination before the man in the CPO coat burst in. He (Jimmy) would not be willing-or able-to state just how the woman had died, but it certainly wasn’t of encephalitis.

Could they describe this fella?

They answered in terms of the story they had worked out. Ben added a pair of brown work boots just so they wouldn’t sound too much like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

McCaslin asked a few more questions, and Ben was just beginning to feel that they were going to get out of it unscathed when McCaslin turned to him and asked:

‘What are you doing in this, Mears? You ain’t no doctor.’

His watchful eyes twinkled benignly. Jimmy opened his mouth to answer, but the sheriff quieted him with a single hand gesture.

If the purpose of McCaslin’s sudden shot had been to startle Ben into a guilty expression or gesture, it failed. He was too emotionally wrung out to react much. Being caught in a misstatement did not seem too shattering after what had gone before. ‘I’m a writer, not a doctor. I write novels. I’m writing one currently where one of the important secondary characters is a mortician’s son. I just wanted a look into the back room. I hitched a ride with Jimmy here. He told me he would rather not reveal his business, and I didn’t ask.’ He rubbed his chin, where a small, knotted bump had risen. ‘I got more than I bargained for.’

McCaslin looked neither pleased nor disappointed in Ben’s answer. ‘I should say you did. You’re the fella that wrote Conway’s Daughter, ain’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘My wife read part of that in some woman’s magazine. Cosmopolitan, I think. Laughed like hell. I took a look and couldn’t see nothing funny in a little girl strung out on drugs.’

‘No,’ Ben said, looking McCaslin in the eye. ‘I didn’t see anything funny about it, either.’

‘This new book the one they say you been workin’ on up to the Lot?’

‘Yes.’

‘P’raps you’d like Moe Green here to read it over,’ McCaslin remarked. ‘See if you got the undertaken’ parts right.’

‘That section isn’t written yet,’ Ben said. ‘I always research before I write. It’s easier.’

McCaslin shook his head wonderingly. ‘You know, your story sounds just like one of those Fu Manchu books. Some guy breaks in here an’ overpowers two strong men an’ makes off with the body of some poor woman who died of unknown causes.’

‘Listen, Homer-’ Jimmy began.

‘Don’t you Homer me,’ McCaslin said. ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like any part of it. This encephalitis is catchin’, ain’t it?’

‘Yes, it’s infectious,’ Jimmy said warily.

‘An’ you still brought this writer along? Knowin’ she might be infected with somethin’ like that?’

Jimmy shrugged and looked angry. ‘I don’t question your professional judgments, Sheriff. You’ll just have to bear with mine. Encephalitis is a fairly low-grade infection which gains slowly in the human blood stream. I felt there would be no danger to either of us. Now, wouldn’t you be better off trying to find out who carted away Mrs Glick’s body-Fu Manchu or otherwise-or are you just having fun questioning us?’

McCaslin fetched a deep sigh from his not inconsiderable belly, flipped his notebook closed, and stored it in the depths of his hip pocket again. ‘Well, we’ll put the word out, Jimmy. Doubt if we’ll get much on this unless the kook comes out of the woodwork again-if there ever was a kook, which I doubt.’

Jimmy raised his eyebrows.

‘You’re lyin’ to me,’ McCaslin said patiently. ‘I know it, these deputies know it, prob’ly even ole Moe knows it. I don’t know how much you’re lyin’-a little or a lot-but I know I can’t prove you’re lyin’ as long as you both stick to the same story. I could take you both down to the cooler, but the rules say I gotta give you one phone call, an’ even the greenest kid fresh out of law school could spring you on what I got, which could best be described as Suspicion of Unknown Hanky-panky. An’ I bet your lawyer ain’t fresh out of law school, is he?’

‘No,’ Jimmy said. ‘He’s not.’

‘I’d take you down just the same and put you to the inconvenience except I get a feelin’ you ain’t lyin’ because you did somethin’ against the law.’ He hit the pedal at the foot of the stainless-steel waste can by the mortician’s table. The top banged up and McCaslin shot a brown stream of tobacco juice into it. Maury Green jumped. ‘Would either of you like to sort of revise your story?’ he asked quietly, and the back-country twang was gone from his voice. ‘This is serious business. We’ve had four deaths in the Lot, and all four bodies are gone. I want to know what’s happening.’

‘We’ve told you everything we know,’ Jimmy said with quiet firmness. He looked directly at McCaslin. ‘If we could tell you more, we would.’

McCaslin looked back at him, just as keenly. ‘You’re scared shitless,’ he said. ‘You and this writer, both of you. You look the way some of the guys in Korea looked when they brought ‘em back from the front lines.’

The deputies were looking at them. Ben and Jimmy said nothing.

McCaslin sighed again. ‘Go on.’ get out of here. I want you both down to my office tomorrow by ten to make statements. If you ain’t there by ten, I’ll send a patrol car out to get you.’

‘You won’t have to do that,’ Ben said.

McCaslin looked at him mournfully and shook his head. ‘You ought to write books with better sense. Like the guy who writes those Travis McGee stories. A man can sink his teeth into one of those.’