Salem's Lot

43

Ben was walking down Jointner Avenue toward town when Jimmy’s tan Buick came up the road, moving in jerks and spasms, weaving drunkenly. He waved at it and it pulled over, bounced the left front wheel over the curb, and came to a stop.

He had lost track of time making the stakes, and when he looked at his watch, he had been startled to see that it was nearly ten minutes past four. He had shut down the lathe, taken a couple of the stakes, put them in his belt, and gone upstairs to use the telephone. He had only put his hand on it when he remembered it was out.

Badly worried now, he ran outside and looked in both cars, Callahan’s and Petrie’s. No keys in either. He could have gone back and searched Henry Petrie’s pockets, but the thought was too much. He had set off for town at a fast walk, keeping an eye peeled for Jimmy’s Buick. He had been intending to go straight to the Brock Street School when Jimmy’s car came into sight.

He ran around to the driver’s seat and Mark Petrie was sitting behind the wheel… alone. He looked at Ben numbly. His lips worked but no sound came out.

‘What’s the matter? Where’s Jimmy?’

‘Jimmy’s dead,’ Mark said woodenly. ‘Barlow thought ahead of us again. He’s in the basement of Mrs Miller’s boardinghouse somewhere. Jimmy’s there, too. I went down to help him and I couldn’t get back out. Finally I got a board that I could crawl up, but at first I thought I was going to be trapped down there… until s-s-sunset… ’

‘What happened? What are you talking about?’

‘Jimmy figured out the blue chalk, you see? While we were at a house in the Bend. Blue chalk. Pool tables. There’s a pool table in the cellar at Mrs Miller’s, it belonged to her husband. Jimmy called the boardinghouse and there was no answer so we drove over.’

He lifted his tearless face to Ben’s.

‘He told me to look around for a flashlight because the cellar light switch was broken, just like at the Marsten House. So I started to look around. I… I noticed that all the knives in the rack over the sink were gone, but I didn’t think anything of it. So in a way I killed him. I did it. It’s my fault, all my fault, all my-’

Ben shook him: two brisk snaps. ‘Stop it, Mark. Stop it!

Mark put his hands to his mouth, as if to catch the hysterical babble before it could flow out. His eyes stared hugely at Ben over his hands.

At last he went on: ‘I found a flashlight in the hall dresser, see. And that was when Jimmy fell, and he started to scream. He-I would have fallen, too, but he warned me. The last thing he said was Look out, Mark.’

‘What was it?’ Ben demanded.

‘Barlow and the others just took the stairs away,’ Mark said in a dead, listless voice. ‘Sawed the stairs off after the second one going down. They left a little more of the railing so it looked like… looked like…’ He shook his head. ‘In the dark, Jimmy just thought they were there. You see?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said. He saw. It made him feel sick. ‘And the knives?’

‘Set all around on the floor underneath,’ Mark whispered. ‘They pounded the blades through these thin plywood squares and then knocked off the handles so they would sit flat with the blades pointing… pointing.’

‘Oh,’ Ben said helplessly. ‘Oh, Christ.’ He reached down and took Mark by the shoulders. ‘Are you sure he’s dead, Mark?’

‘Yes. He… he was stuck in half a dozen places. The blood… ’

Ben looked at his watch. It was ten minutes of five. Again he had that feeling of being crowded, of running out of time.

‘What are we going to do now?’ Mark asked remotely.

‘Go into town. Talk to Matt on the phone and then talk to Parkins Gillespie. We’ll finish Barlow before dark. We’ve got to.’

Mark smiled a small, morbid smile. ‘Jimmy said that, too. He said we were going to stop his clock. But he keeps beating us. Better guys than us must have tried, too.’

Ben looked down at the boy and got ready to do something nasty.

‘You sound scared,’ he said.

‘I am scared,’ Mark said, not rising to it. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘I’m scared,’ Ben said, ‘but I’m mad, too. I lost a girl I liked one hell of a lot. I loved her, I guess. We both lost Jimmy. You lost your mother and father. They’re lying in your living room under a dust cover from your sofa.’ He pushed himself to a final brutality. ‘Want to go back and look?’

Mark winced away from him, his face horrified and hurting.

‘I want you with me,’ Ben said more softly He felt a germ of self-disgust in his stomach. He sounded like a football coach before the big game. ‘I don’t care who’s tried to stop him before. I don’t care if Attila the Run played him and lost. I’m going to have my shot. I want you with me. I need you.’ And that was the truth, pure and naked.

‘Okay,’ Mark said. He looked down into his lap, and his hands found each other and entwined in distraught pantomime.

‘Dig your feet in,’ Ben said.

Mark looked at him hopelessly. I’m trying,’ he said.