Salem's Lot

2

When he had finished, Matt allowed a moment of silence and then said, ‘So. Am I crazy?’

‘You’re determined that people will think you so, anyway,’ Callahan said, ‘in spite of the fact that you seem to have convinced Mr Mears and your own doctor. No, I don’t think you’re crazy. After all, I am in the business of dealing with the supernatural. If I may be allowed a small pun, it is my bread and wine.’

‘But-’

‘Let me tell you a story. I won’t vouch for its truth, but I will vouch for my own belief that it is true. It concerns a good friend of mine, Father Raymond Bissonette, who has been ministering to a parish in Cornwall for some Years now-along the so-called Tin Coast. Do you know of it?’

‘Through reading, yes.’

‘Some five years ago he wrote me that he had been called to an out-of-the-way corner of his parish to conduct a funeral service for a girl who had just "pined away". The girl’s coffin was filled with wild roses, which struck Ray as unusual. What he found downright grotesque was the fact that her mouth had been propped open with a stick and then filled with garlic and wild thyme.’

‘But those are-’

‘Traditional protections against the rising of the Undead, yes. Folk remedies. When Ray inquired, he was told quite matter-of-factly by the girl’s father that she had been killed by an incubus. You know the meaning?’

‘A sexual vampire.’

‘The girl had been betrothed to a young man named Bannock, who had a large strawberry-colored birthmark on the side of his neck. He was struck and killed by a car on his way home from work two weeks before the wedding. Two years later, the girl became engaged to another man. She broke it off quite suddenly during the week before the banns were to be cried for the second time. She told her parents and friends that John Bannock had been coming to her in the night and she had been unfaithful with him. Her present lover, according to Ray, was more distressed by the thought that she might have become mentally unbalanced than by the possibility of demon visitation. Nonetheless, she wasted away, died, and was buried in the old ways of the church.

‘All of that did not occasion Ray’s letter. What did was an occurrence some two months after the girl’s burial. While he was on an early morning walk, Ray spied a young man standing by the girl’s grave - a young man with a strawberry-colored birthmark on his neck. Nor is that the end of the story. He had gotten a Polaroid camera from his parents the Christmas before and had amused himself by snapping various views of the Cornish countryside. I have some of them in a picture album at the rectory-they’re quite good. The camera was around his neck that morning, and he took several snaps of the young man. When he showed them around the village, the reaction was quite amazing. One old lady fell down in a faint, and the dead girl’s mother began to pray in the street.

‘But when Ray got up the next morning, the young man’s figure had completely faded out of the pictures, and all that was left were several views of the local churchyard.’

‘And you believe that?’ Matt asked.

‘Oh yes. And I suspect most people would. The ordinary fellow isn’t half so leery of the supernatural as the fiction writers like to make out. Most writers who deal in that particular subject, as a matter of fact, are more hardheaded about spirits and demons and boogies than your ordinary man in the street. Lovecraft was an atheist. Edgar Allen Poe was sort of a half-assed transcendentalist. And Hawthorne was only conventionally religious.’

‘You’re amazingly conversant on the subject,’ Matt said.

The priest shrugged. ‘I had a boy’s interest in the occult and the outré,’ he said, ‘and as I grew older, my calling to the priesthood enhanced rather than retarded it.’ He sighed deeply. ‘But lately I’ve begun to ask myself some rather hard questions about the nature of evil in the world.’ With a twisted smile he added, ‘It’s spoiled a lot of the fun.’

‘Then… would you investigate a few things for me? And would you be averse to taking along some holy water and a bit of the Host?’

‘You’re treading on uneasy theological ground now, Callahan said with genuine gravity.

‘Why?’

‘I’m not going to say no, not at this point,’ Callahan said. ‘And I ought to tell you that if you’d gotten a younger priest, he probably would have said yes almost at once, with few if any qualms at all.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘They view the trappings of the church as symbolic rather than practical-like a shaman’s headdress and medicine stick. This young priest might decide you were crazy, but if shaking a little holy water around would case your craziness, fine and dandy. I can’t do that. If I should proceed to make your investigations in a neat Harris tweed with nothing under my arm but a copy of Sybil Leek’s The Sensuous Exorcist or whatever, that would be between you and me. But if I go with the Host… then I go as an agent of the Holy Catholic Church, prepared to execute what I would consider the most spiritual rites of my office. Then I go as Christ’s representative on earth.’ He was now looking at Matt seriously, solemnly. ‘I may be a poor excuse for a priest - at times I’ve thought so - a bit jaded, a bit cynical, and just lately suffering a crisis of… what? faith? identity?… but I still believe enough in the awesome, mystical, and apotheotic power of the church which stands behind me to tremble a bit at the thought of accepting your request lightly. The church is more than a bundle of ideals, as these younger fellows seem to believe. It’s more than a spiritual Boy Scout troop. The church is a Force… and one does not set a Force in motion lightly.’ He frowned severely at Matt. ‘Do you understand that? Your understanding is vitally important.’

‘I understand.’

‘You see, the over-all concept of evil in the Catholic Church has undergone a radical change in this century. Do you know what caused it?’

‘I imagine it was Freud.’

‘Very good. The Catholic Church began to cope with a new concept as it marched into the twentieth century: evil with a small "e". With a devil that was not a red-horned monster complete with spiked tall and cloven hooves, or a serpent crawling through the garden-although that is a remarkably apt psychological image. The devil, according to the Gospel According to Freud, would be a gigantic composite id, the subconscious of all of us.’

‘Surely a more stupendous concept than red-tailed boogies or demons with such sensitive noses that they can be banished with one good fart from a constipated churchman,’ Matt said.

‘Stupendous, of course. But impersonal. Merciless. Untouchable. Banishing Freud’s devil is as impossible as Shylock’s bargain to extract a pound of flesh without spilling a drop of blood. The Catholic Church has been forced to reinterpret its whole approach to evil-bombers over Cambodia, the war in Ireland and the Middle East, cop-killings and ghetto riots, the billion smaller evils loosed on the world each day like a plague of gnats. It is in the process of shedding its old medicine-man skin and re-emerging as a socially active, socially conscious body. The inner city rap-center ascendant over the confessional. Communion playing second fiddle to the civil rights movement and urban renewal. The church has been in the process of planting both feet in this world.’

‘Where there are no witches or incubi or vampires,’ Matt said, ‘but only child-beating, incest, and the rape of the environment.’

‘Yes.’

Matt said deliberately, ‘And you hate it, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Callahan said quietly. ‘I think it’s an abomination. It’s the Catholic Church’s way of saying that God isn’t dead, only a little senile. And I guess that’s my answer, isn’t it? What do you want me to do?’

Matt told him.

Callahan thought it over and said, ‘You realize it flies in the face of everything I just told you?’

‘On the contrary, I think it’s your chance to put your church-your church-to the test.’

Callahan took a deep breath. ‘Very well, I agree. On one condition.’

‘What would that be?

‘That all of us who go on this little expedition first go to the shop this Mr Straker is managing. That Mr Mears, as spokesman, should speak to him frankly about all of this. That we all have a chance to observe his reactions. And finally, that he should have, his chance to laugh in our faces.’

Matt was frowning. ‘It would be warning him.’

Callahan shook his head. ‘I believe the warning would be of no avail if the three of us-Mr Mears, Dr Cody, and myself-still agreed that we should move ahead regardless.’

‘All right,’ Matt said. ‘I agree, contingent on the approval of Ben and Jimmy Cody.’

‘Fine.’ Callahan sighed. ‘Will it hurt you if I tell you that I hope this is all in your mind? That I hope this man Straker does laugh in our faces, and with good reason?’

‘Not in the slightest.’

‘I do hope it. I have agreed to more than you know. It frightens me.’

‘I am frightened, too,’ Matt said softly.