Salem's Lot

Chapter Thirteen

FATHER CALLAHAN

1

On that same Sunday evening, Father Callahan stepped hesitantly into Matt Burke’s hospital room at quarter to seven by Matt’s watch. The bedside table and the counterpane itself were littered with books, some of them dusty with age. Matt had called Loretta Starcher at her spinster’s apartment and had not only gotten her to open the library on Sunday, but had gotten her to deliver the books in person. She had come in at the head of a procession made up of three hospital orderlies, each loaded down. She had left in something of a huff because he refused to answer questions about the strange conglomeration.

Father Callahan regarded the schoolteacher curiously. He looked worn, but not so worn or wearily shocked as most of the parishioners he visited in similar circumstances. Callahan found that the common first reaction to news of cancer, strokes, heart attacks, or the failure of some major organ was one of betrayal. The patient was astounded to find that such a close (and, up to now at least, fully understood) friend as one’s own body could be so sluggard as to lie down on the job. The reaction which followed close on the heels of the first was the thought that a friend who would let one down so cruelly was not worth having. The conclusion that followed these reactions was that it didn’t matter if this friend was worth having or not. One could not refuse to speak to one’s traitorous body, or get up a petition against it, or pretend that one was not at home when it called. The final thought in this hospital-bed train of reasoning was the hideous possibility that one’s body might not be a friend at all, but an enemy implacably dedicated to destroying the superior force that had used it and abused it ever since the disease of reason set in.

Once, while in a fine drunken frenzy, Callahan had sat down to write a monograph on the subject for The Catholic Journal. He had even illustrated it with a fiendish editorial page cartoon, which showed a brain poised on the highest ledge of a skyscraper. The building (labeled ‘The Human Body’) was in flames (which were labeled ‘Cancer’-although they might have been a dozen others). The cartoon was titled ‘Too Far to Jump’. During the next day’s enforced bout with sobriety, he had torn the prospective monograph to shreds and burned the cartoon - there was no place in Catholic doctrine for either, unless you wanted to add a helicopter labeled ‘Christ’ that was dangling a rope ladder. Nonetheless, he felt that his insights had been true ones, and the result of such sickbed logic on the part of the patient was usually acute depression. The symptoms included dulled eyes, slow responses, sighs fetched from deep within the chest cavity, and sometimes tears at the sight of the priest, that black crow whose function was ultimately predicated on the problem the fact of mortality presented to the thinking being.

Matt Burke showed none of this depression. He held out his hand, and when Callahan shook it, he found the grip surprisingly strong.

‘Father Callahan. Good of you to come.’

‘Pleased to. Good teachers, like a wife’s wisdom, are pearls beyond price.’

‘Even agnostic old bears like myself?’

‘Especially those,’ Callahan said, riposting with pleasure. ‘I may have caught you at a weak moment. There are no atheists in the foxholes, I’ve been told, and precious few agnostics in the Intensive Care ward.’

‘I’m being moved soon, alas.’

‘Pish-posh,’ Callahan said. ‘We’ll have you Hail Marying and Our Fathering yet.’

‘That,’ Matt said, ‘is not as far-fetched as you might think.’

Father Callahan sat down, and his knee bumped the bedstand as he drew his chair up. A carelessly piled stack of books cascaded into his lap. He read the titles aloud as he put them back.

‘Dracula. Dracula’s Guest. The Search for Dracula. The Golden Bough. The Natural History of the Vampire-natural? Hungarian Folk Tales. Monsters of the Darkness. Monsters in Real Life. Peter Kurtin, Monster of Düsseldorf. And…’ He brushed a thick patina of dust from the last cover and revealed a spectral figure poised menacingly above a sleeping damsel. ‘Varney the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood. Goodness-required reading for convalescent heart attack patients?’

Matt smiled. ‘Poor old Varney. I read it a long time ago for a class report in Eh-279 at the university… Romantic Lit. The professor, whose idea of fantasy began with Beowulf and ended with The Screwtape Letters, was quite shocked. I got a D plus on the report and a written command to elevate my sights.’

‘The case of Peter Kurtin is interesting enough, though,’ Callahan said. ‘In a repulsive sort of way.’

‘You know his history?’

‘Most of it, yes. I took an interest in such things as a divinity student. My excuse to the highly skeptical elders was that, in order to be a successful priest, one had to plumb the depths of human nature as well as aspire to its heights. All eyewash, actually. I just liked a shudder as well as the next one. Kurtin, I believe, murdered two of his playmates as a young boy by drowning them-he simply gained possession of a small float anchored in the middle of a wide river and kept pushing them away until they tired and went under.’

‘Yes,’ Matt said. ‘As a teenager, he twice tried to kill the parents of a girl who refused to go walking with him. He later burned down their house. But that is not the part of his, uh, career that I’m interested in.’

‘I guessed not, from the trend of your reading matter.’

He picked a magazine off the coverlet which showed an incredibly endowed young woman in a skintight costume who was sucking the blood of a young man. The young man’s expression seemed to be an uneasy combination of extreme terror and extreme lust. The name of the magazine-and of the young woman, apparently-was Vampirella. Callahan put it down, more intrigued than ever.

‘Kurtin attacked and killed over a dozen women,’ Callahan said. ‘Mutilated many more with a hammer. If it was their time of the month, he drank their discharge.’ Matt Burke nodded again. ‘What’s not so generally known,’ he said, ‘is that he also mutilated animals. At the height of his obsession, he ripped the heads from the bodies of two swans in Düsseldorf’s central park and drank the blood which gushed from their necks.’

‘Has all this to do with why you wanted to see me?’ Callahan asked. ‘Mrs Curless told me you said it was a matter of some importance.’

‘Yes, it does and it is.’

‘What might it be, then? If you’ve meant to intrigue me, you’ve certainly succeeded.’

Matt looked at him calmly. ‘A good friend of mine, Ben Mears, was to have gotten in touch with you today. Your housekeeper said he had not.’

‘That’s so. I’ve seen no one since two o’clock this afternoon.’

‘I have been unable to reach him. He left the hospital in the company of my doctor, James Cody. I have also been unable to reach him. I have likewise been unable to reach Susan Norton, Ben’s lady friend. She went out early this afternoon, promising her parents she would be in by five. They are worried.’

Callahan sat forward at this. He had a passing acquaintance with Bill Norton, who had once come to see him about a problem that had to do with some Catholic co-workers. ‘You suspect something?’

‘Let me ask you a question,’ Matt said. ‘Take it very seriously and think it over before you answer. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary in town just lately?’

Callahan’s original impression, now almost a certainty, was that this man was proceeding very carefully indeed, not wanting to frighten him off by whatever was on his mind. Something sufficiently outrageous was suggested by the litter of books.

‘Vampires in ‘salem’s Lot?’ he asked.

He was thinking that the deep depression which followed grave illness could sometimes be avoided if the person afflicted had a deep enough investment in life: artists, musicians, a carpenter whose thoughts centered on some half-completed building. The interest could just as well be linked to some harmless (or not so harmless) psychosis, perhaps incipient before the illness.

He had spoken at some length with an elderly man named Horris from Schoolyard Hill who had been in the Maine Medical Center with advanced cancer of the lower intestine. In spite of pain which must have been excruciating, be had discoursed with Callahan in great and lucid detail concerning the creatures from Uranus who were infiltrating every walk of American life. ‘One day the fella who fills your gas tank down at Sonny’s Amoco is just Joe Blow from Falmouth,’ this bright-eyed, talking skeleton told him, ‘and the next day it’s a Uranian who just 0 like Joe Blow. He even has Joe Blow’s memories and speech patterns, you see. Because Uranians eat alpha waves… smack, smack, smack!’ According to Horris, he did not have cancer at all, but an advanced case of laser poisoning. The Uranians, alarmed at his knowledge of their machinations, had decided to put him out of the way. Horris accepted this, and was prepared to go down fighting. Callahan made no effort to disabuse him. Leave that to well-meaning but thickheaded relatives. Callahan’s experience was that psychosis, like a good knock of Cutty Sark, could be extremely beneficial.

So now he simply folded his hands and waited for Matt to continue.

Matt said, ‘It’s difficult to proceed as it is. It’s going to be more difficult still if you think I’m suffering from sickbed dementia.’

Startled by hearing his thoughts expressed just as he had finished thinking them, Callahan kept his poker face only with difficulty - although the emotion that would have come through would not have been disquiet but admiration.

‘On the contrary, you seem extremely lucid,’ he said.

Matt sighed. ‘Lucidity doesn’t presuppose sanity-as you well know.’ He shifted in bed, redistributing the books that lay around him. ‘If there is a God, He must be making me do penance for a life of careful academicism - of refusing to plant an intellectual foot on any ground until it had been footnoted in triplicate. Now for the second time in one day, I’m compelled to make the wildest declarations without a shred of proof to back them up. All I can say in defense of my own sanity is that my statements can be either proved or disproved without too much difficulty, and hope that you will take me seriously enough to make the test before it’s too late.’ He chuckled. ‘Before it’s too late. Sounds straight out of the thirties’ pulp magazines, doesn’t it?’

‘Life is full of melodrama,’ Callahan remarked, reflecting that if it were so, he had seen precious little of it lately.

‘Let me ask you again if you have noticed anything anything-out of the way or peculiar this weekend.’

‘To do with vampires, or-’

‘To do with anything.’

Callahan thought it over. ‘The dump’s closed,’ he said finally. ‘But the gate was broken off, so I drove in anyway.’ He smiled. ‘I rather enjoy taking my own garbage to the dump. It’s so practical and humble that I can indulge my elitist fantasies of a poor but happy proletariat to the fullest. Dud Rogers wasn’t around, either.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Well… the Crocketts weren’t at mass this morning, and Mrs Crockett hardly ever misses.’

‘More?’

‘Poor Mrs Glick, of course-’

Matt got up on one elbow. ‘Mrs Glick? What about her?’

‘She ‘s dead.

‘Of what?’

‘Pauline Dickens seemed to think it was a heart attack,’

Callahan said, but hesitatingly.

‘Has anyone else died in the Lot today?’ Ordinarily, it would have been a foolish question. Deaths in a small town like ‘salem’s Lot were generally spread apart, in spite of the higher proportion of elderly in the population.

‘No,’ Callahan said slowly. ‘But the mortality rate has certainly been high lately, hasn’t’ it? Mike Ryerson… Floyd Tibbits… the McDougall baby…’

Matt nodded, looking tired. ‘Passing strange,’ he said. ‘Yes. But things are reaching the point where they’ll be able to cover up for each other. A few more nights and I’m afraid… afraid… ’

‘Let’s stop beating around the bush,’ Callahan said.

‘All right. There’s been rather too much of that already, hasn’t there?’

He began to tell his story from beginning to end, weaving in Ben’s and Susan’s and Jimmy’s additions as he went along, holding back nothing. By the time he had finished, the evening’s horror had ended for Ben and Jimmy. Susan Norton’s was just beginning.