Salem's Lot

12

‘Dear God,’ Father Callahan said. ‘Dear God.’

They advanced slowly into the room, Callahan and Cody a bit in the lead, Ben and Mark behind, pressed together.

Straker’s feet had been bound together; then he had been hauled up and tied there. It occurred to Ben in a distant part of his brain that it must have taken a man with enormous strength to haul Straker’s dead weight up to a point where his dangling hands did not quite touch the floor.

Jimmy touched the forehead with his inner wrist, then held one of the dead hands in his own. ‘He’s been dead for maybe eighteen hours,’ he said. He dropped the hand with a shudder. ‘My God, what an awful way to… I can’t figure this out. Why-who-’

‘Barlow did it,’ Mark said. He looked at Straker’s corpse with unflinching eyes.

‘And Straker screwed up,’ Jimmy said. ‘No eternal life for him. But why like this? Hung upside down?’

‘It’s as old as Macedonia,’ Father Callahan said. ‘Hanging the body of your enemy or betrayer upside down so his head faces earth instead of heaven. St Paul was crucified that way, on an X-shaped cross with his legs broken.’

Ben spoke, and his voice sounded old and dusty in his throat. ‘He’s still diverting us. He has a hundred tricks. Let’s go.’

They followed him back down the hall, back down the stairs, into the kitchen. Once there, he deferred to Father Callahan again. For a moment they just looked at each other, and then at the cellar door that led downward, just as twenty-five-odd years ago he had taken a set of stairs upward, to face an overwhelming question.