Salem's Lot

20

Father Donald Callahan stood on one side of the spacious Petrie kitchen, holding his mother’s cross high above his head, and it spilled its ghostly effulgence across the room. Barlow stood on the other side, near the sink, one hand pinning Mark’s hands behind his back, the other slung around his neck. Between them, Henry and June Petrie lay sprawled on the floor in the shattered glass of Barlow’s entry.

Callahan was dazed. It had all happened with such swiftness that he could not take it in. At one moment he had been discussing the matter rationally (if maddeningly) with Petrie, under the brisk, no-nonsense glow of the kitchen lights. At the next, he had been plunged into the insanity that Mark’s father had denied with such calm and understanding firmness.

His mind tried to reconstruct what had happened.

Petrie had come back and told them the phone was out. Moments later they had lost the lights. June Petrie screamed. A chair fell over. For several moments all of them had stumbled around in the new dark, calling out to each other. Then the window over the sink had crashed inward, spraying glass across the kitchen counter and onto the linoleum floor. All this had happened in a space of thirty seconds.

Then a shadow had moved in the kitchen, and Callahan had broken the spell that held him. He clutched at the cross that hung around his neck, and even as his flesh touched it, the room was lit with its unearthly light.

He saw Mark, trying to drag his mother toward the arch which led into the living room. Henry Petrie stood beside them, his head turned, his calm face suddenly slack-jawed with amazement at this totally illogical invasion. And behind him, looming over them, a white, grinning face like something out of a Frazetta painting, which split to reveal long, sharp fangs-and red, lurid eyes like furnace doors to hell. Barlow’s hands flew out (Callahan had just time to see how long and sensitive those livid fingers were, like a concert pianist’s) and then he had seized Henry Petrie’s head in one hand, June’s in the other, and had brought them together with a grinding, sickening crack. They had both dropped down like stones, and Barlow’s first threat had been carried out.

Mark had uttered a high, keening scream and threw himself at Barlow without thought.

‘And here you are!’ Barlow had boomed good-naturedly in his rich, powerful voice. Mark attacked without thought and was captured instantly.

Callahan moved forward, holding his cross up.

Barlow’s grin of triumph was instantly transformed into a rictus of agony. He fell back toward the sink, dragging the boy in front of him. Their feet crunched in the broken glass.

‘In Gods’ name-’Callahan began.

At the name of the Deity, Barlow screamed aloud as if he had been struck by a whip, his mouth open in a downward grimace, the needle fangs glimmering within. The cords of muscle on his neck stood out in stark, etched relief. ‘No closer!’ he said. ‘No closer, shaman! Or I sever the boy’s jugular and carotid before you can draw a breath!’ As he spoke, his upper lip lifted from those long, needlelike teeth, and as he finished, his head made a predatory downward pass with adder’s speed, missing Mark’s flesh by a quarter-inch.

Callahan stopped.

‘Back up,’ Barlow commanded, now grinning again. ‘You on your side of the board and I on mine, eh?’

Callahan backed up slowly, still holding the cross before him at eye level, so that he looked over its arms. The cross seemed to thrum with chained fire, and its power coursed up his forearm until the muscles bunched and trembled.

They faced each other.

‘Together at last!’ Barlow said, smiling. His face was strong and intelligent and handsome in a sharp, forbidding sort of way-yet, as the light shifted, it seemed almost effeminate. Where had he seen a face like that before? And it came to him, in this moment of the most extreme terror he had ever known. It was the face of Mr Flip, his own personal bogeyman, the thing that hid in the closet during the days and came out after his mother closed the bedroom door. He was not allowed a night light-both his mother and his father had agreed that the way to conquer these childish fears was to face them, not toady to them and every night, when the door snicked shut and his mother’s footsteps padded off down the hall, the closet door slid open a crack and he could sense (or actually see?) the thin white face and burning eyes of Mr Flip. And here he was again, out of the closet, staring over Mark’s shoulder with his clown-white face and glowing eyes and red, sensual lips.

‘What now?’ Callahan said, and his voice was not his own at all. He was looking at Barlow’s fingers, those long, sensitive fingers, which lay against the boy’s throat. There were small blue blotches on them.

‘That depends. What will you give for this miserable wretch?’ He suddenly jerked Mark’s wrists high behind his back, obviously hoping to punctuate his question with a scream, but Mark would not oblige. Except for the sudden whistle of air between his set teeth, he was silent.

‘You’ll scream,’ Barlow whispered, and his lips had twisted into a grimace of animal hate. ‘You’ll scream until your throat bursts!’

‘Stop that!’ Callahan cried.

‘And should I?’ The hate was wiped from his face. A darkly charming smile shone forth in its place. ‘Should I reprieve the boy, save him for another night?’

‘Yes!’

Softly, almost purring, Barlow said, ‘Then will you throw away your cross and face me on even terms-black against white? Your faith against my own?’

‘Yes,’ Callahan said, but a trifle less firmly.

‘Then do it!’ Those full lips became pursed, anticipatory. The high forehead gleamed in the weird fairy light that filled the room.

‘And trust you to let him go? I would be wiser to put a rattlesnake in my shirt and trust it not to bite me.’

‘But I trust you… look!’

He let Mark go and stood back, both hands in the air, empty.

Mark stood still, unbelieving for a moment, and then ran to his parents without a backward look at Barlow.

‘Run, Mark!’ Callahan cried. ‘Run!’

Mark looked up at him, his eyes huge and dark. ‘I think they’re dead-’

‘RUN!’

Mark got slowly to his feet. He turned around and looked at Barlow.

‘Soon, little brother,’ Barlow said, almost benignly. ‘Very soon now you and I will-’

Mark spit in his face.

Barlow’s breath stopped. His brow darkened with a depth of fury that made his previous expressions seem like what they might well have been: mere play-acting. For a moment Callahan saw a madness in his eyes blacker than the soul of murder.

‘You spit on me,’ Barlow whispered. His body was trembling, nearly rocking with his rage. He took a shuddering step forward like some awful blind man.

‘Get back!’ Callahan screamed, and thrust the cross forward. Barlow cried out and threw his hands in front of his face. The cross flared with preternatural, dazzling brilliance, and it was at that moment that Callahan might have banished him if he had dared to press forward.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ Mark said.

He was gone, like a dark eddy of water.

Barlow seemed to grow taller. His hair, swept back from his brow in the European manner, seemed to float around his skull. He was wearing a dark suit and a wine-colored tie, impeccably knotted, and to Callahan he seemed part and parcel of the darkness that surrounded him. His eyes glared out of their sockets like sly and sullen embers.

‘Then fulfill your part of the bargain, shaman.’

‘I’m a priest!’ Callahan flung at him.

Barlow made a small, mocking bow. ‘Priest,’ he said, and the word sounded like a dead haddock in his mouth.

Callahan stood indecisive. Why throw it down? Drive him off, settle for a draw tonight, and tomorrow -

But a deeper part of his mind warned. To deny the vampire’s challenge was to risk possibilities far graver than any he had considered. If he dared not throw the cross aside, it would be as much as admitting… admitting… what? If only things weren’t going so fast, if one only had time to think, to reason it out -

The cross’s glow was dying.

He looked at it, eyes widening. Fear leaped into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. His head jerked up and he stared at Barlow. He was walking toward him across the kitchen and his smile was wide, almost voluptuous.

‘Stay back,’ Callahan said hoarsely, retreating a step. ‘I command it, in the name of God.’

Barlow laughed at him.

The glow in the cross was only a thin and guttering light in a cruciform shape. The shadows had crept across the vampire’s face again, masking his features in strangely barbaric lines and triangles under the sharp cheekbones.

Callahan took another step backward, and his buttocks bumped the kitchen table, which was set against the wall.

‘Nowhere left to go,’ Barlow murmured sadly. His dark eyes bubbled with infernal mirth. ‘Sad to see a man’s faith fail. Ah, well…’

The cross trembled in Callahan’s hand and suddenly the last of its light vanished. It was only a piece of plaster that his mother had bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper’s price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough power to smash down walls and shatter stone, was gone. The muscles remembered the thrumming but could not duplicate it.

Barlow reached from the darkness and plucked the cross from his fingers. Callahan cried out miserably, the cry that had vibrated in the soul-but never the throat-of that long-ago child who had been left alone each night with Mr Flip peering out of the closet at him from between the shutters of sleep. And the next sound would haunt him for the rest of his life: two dry snaps as Barlow broke the arms of the cross, and a meaningless thump as he threw it on the floor.

‘God damn you!’ he cried out.

‘It’s too late for such melodrama,’ Barlow said from the darkness. His voice was almost sorrowful. ‘There is no need of it. You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross… the bread and wine… the confessional… only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night. In a way, I hoped it might be so. It has been long since I have met an opponent of any real worth. The boy makes ten of you, false priest.’

Suddenly, out of the darkness, hands of amazing strength gripped Callahan’s shoulders.

‘You would welcome the oblivion of my death now, I think. There is no memory for the Undead; only the hunger and the need to serve the Master. I could make use of you. I could send you among your friends. Yet is there need of that? Without you to lead them, I think they are little. And the boy will tell them. One moves against them at this time. There is, perhaps, a more fitting punishment for you, false priest.’

He remembered Matt saying: Some things are worse than death.

He tried to struggle away, but the hands held him in a viselike grip. Then one hand left him. There was the sound of cloth moving across bare skin, and then a scraping sound.

The hands moved to his neck.

‘Come, false priest. Learn of a true religion. Take my communion.’

Understanding washed over Callahan in a ghastly flood.

‘No! Don’t… don’t-’

But the hands were implacable. His head was drawn forward, forward, forward.

‘Now, priest,’ Barlow whispered

And Callahan’s mouth was pressed-against the reeking flesh of the vampire’s cold throat, where an open vein pulsed. He held his breath for what seemed like aeons, twisting his head wildly and to no avail, smearing the blood across his cheeks and forehead and chin like war paint.

Yet at last, he drank.