Salem's Lot

33

Ben felt a hand on his arm and swam upward to wakefulness. Mark, near his right ear, said, ‘Morning.’

He opened his eyes, blinked twice to clear the gum out of them, and looked out the window at the world. Dawn had come stealing through a steady autumn rain that was neither heavy nor light. The trees which ringed the grassy pavilion on the hospital’s north side were half denuded now, and the black branches were limned against the gray sky like giant letters in an unknown alphabet. Route 30, which curved out of town to the east, was as shiny as sealskin-a car passing with its taillights still on left baleful red reflections on the macadam.

Ben stood up and looked around. Matt was sleeping, his chest rising and falling in regular but shallow respiration. Jimmy was also asleep, stretched out in the room’s one lounge chair. There was an undoctorlike stubble on the planes of his cheeks, and Ben ran a palm across his own face. It rasped.

‘Time to get going, isn’t it?’ Mark asked.

Ben nodded. He thought of the day ahead of them and all its potential hideousness, and shied away from it. The only way to get through it would be without thinking more than ten minutes ahead. He looked into the boy’s face, and the stony eagerness he saw there made him feel queasy. He went over and shook Jimmy.

‘Huh!’ Jimmy said. He thrashed in his chair like a swimmer coming up from deep water. His face twitched, his eyes fluttered open, and for a moment they showed blank terror. He looked at them both unreasoningly, without recognition.

Then recognition came, and his body relaxed. ‘Oh. Dream.’

Mark nodded in perfect understanding.

Jimmy looked out the window and said ‘Daylight’ the way a miser might say money. He got up and went over to Matt, took his wrist and held it.

‘Is he all right?’ Mark asked.

‘I think he’s better than he was last night,’ Jimmy said. ‘Ben, I want the three of us to leave by way of the service elevator in case someone noticed Mark last night. The less risk, the better.’

‘Will Mr Burke be okay alone?’ Mark asked.

‘I think so,’ Ben said. ‘We’ll have to trust to his ingenuity, I guess. Barlow would like nothing better than to have us tied up another day.’

They tiptoed down the corridor and used the service elevator. The kitchen was just cranking up at this hour almost quarter past seven. One of the cooks looked up, waved a hand, and said, ‘Hi, Doc.’ No one else spoke to them.

‘Where first?’ Jimmy asked. ‘The Brock Street School?’

‘No,’ Ben said. ‘Too many people until this afternoon. Do the little ones get out early, Mark?’

‘They go until two o’clock.’

‘That leaves plenty of daylight,’ Ben said. ‘Mark’s house first. Stakes.’