Salem's Lot

10

It was nearing one o’clock when they all got in Jimmy Cody’s large Buick and set off. None of them spoke. Father Donald Callahan was wearing his full gown, a surplice, and a white stole bordered with purple. He had given them each a small tube of water from the Holy Font, and had blessed them each with the sign of the cross. He held a small silver pyx on his lap which contained several pieces of the Host.

They stopped at Jimmy’s Cumberland office first, and Jimmy left the motor idling while he went inside. When he came out, he was wearing a baggy sport coat that concealed the bulge of McCaslin’s revolver and carrying an ordinary Craftsman hammer in his right hand.

Ben looked at it with some fascination and saw from the tail of his eye that Mark and Callahan were also staring. The hammer had a blue steel head and a perforated rubber handgrip.

‘Ugly, isn’t it?’ Jimmy remarked.

Ben thought of using that hammer on Susan, using it to ram a stake between her breasts, and felt his stomach flip over slowly, like an airplane doing a slow roll.

‘Yes,’ he said, and moistened his lips. ‘It’s ugly, all right.’

They drove to the Cumberland Stop and Shop. Ben and Jimmy went into the supermarket and picked up all the garlic that was displayed along the vegetable counter-twelve boxes of the whitish-gray bulbs. The check-out girl raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Glad I ain’t going on a long ride with you boys t’night.’

Going out, Ben said idly, ‘I wonder what the basis of garlic’s effectiveness against them is? Something in the Bible, or an ancient curse, or-’

‘I suspect it’s an allergy,’ Jimmy said.

‘Allergy?’

Callahan caught the last of it and asked for a repetition as they drove toward the Northern Belle Flower Shop.

‘Oh yes, I agree with Dr Cody,’ he said. ‘Probably is an allergy… if it works as a deterrent at all. Remember, that’s not proved yet.’

‘That’s a funny idea for a priest,’ Mark said.

‘Why? If I must accept the existence of vampires (and; it seems I must, at least for the time being), must I also accept them as creatures beyond the bounds of all natural laws? Some, certainly. Folklore says they can’t be seen in mirrors, that they can transform themselves into bats or wolves or birds-the so-called psychopompos-that they can narrow their bodies and slip through the tiniest cracks. Yet we know they see, and hear, and speak… and they most certainly taste. Perhaps they also know discomfort, pain-’

‘And love?’ Ben asked, looking straight ahead.

‘No,’ Jimmy answered. ‘I suspect that love is beyond them.’ He pulled into a small parking lot beside an L-shaped flower shop with an attached greenhouse.

A small bell tinkled over the door when they went in, and the heavy aroma of flowers struck them. Ben felt sickened by the cloying heaviness of their mixed perfumes, and was reminded of funeral parlors.

‘Hi there.’ A tall man in a canvas apron came toward them, holding an earthen flowerpot in one hand.

Ben had only started to explain what they wanted when the man in the apron shook his head and interrupted.

‘You’re late, I’m afraid. A man came in last Friday and bought every rose I had in stock-red, white, and yellow. I’ll have no more until Wednesday at least. If you’d care to order-’

‘What did this man look like?’

‘Very striking,’ the proprietor said, putting his poi down. ‘Tall, totally bald. Piercing eyes. Smoked foreign cigarettes, by the smell. He had to take the flowers out in three armloads. He put them in the back of a very old car, a Dodge, I think-’

‘Packard,’ Ben said. ‘A black Packard.’

‘You know him, then.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘He paid cash. Very unusual, considering the size of the order. But perhaps if you get in touch with him, he would sell you- ‘

‘Perhaps,’ Ben said.

In the car again, they talked it over.

‘There’s a shop in Falmouth-’ Father Callahan began doubtfully.

‘No!’ Ben said. ‘No!’ And the raw edge of hysteria in his voice made them all look around. ‘And when we got to Falmouth and found that Straker had been there, too? What then? Portland? Kittery? Boston? Don’t you realize what’s happening? He’s foreseen us! He’s leading us by the nose!’

‘Ben, be reasonable,’ Jimmy said. ‘Don’t you think we ought to at least-’

‘Don’t you remember what Matt said? "You mustn’t go into this feeling that because he can’t rise in the daytime he can’t harm you." Look at your watch, Jimmy.’

Jimmy did. ‘Two-fifteen,’ he said slowly, and looked up at the sky as if doubting the truth on the dial. But it was true; now the shadows were going the other way.

‘He’s anticipated us,’ Ben said. ‘He’s been four jumps ahead every mile of the way. Did we-could we-actually think that he would be blissfully unaware of us? That he never took the possibility of discovery and opposition into account? We have to go now, before we waste the rest of the day arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.’

‘He’s right,’ Callahan said quietly. ‘I think we had better stop talking and get going.’

‘Then drive,’ Mark said urgently.

Jimmy pulled out of the flower-shop parking lot fast, screeching the tires on the pavement. The proprietor stared after them, three men, one of them a priest, and a little boy who sat in a car with MD plates and shouted at each other of total lunacies.