Salem's Lot

4

They were at the kitchen table again. It was 5:35 A.M. They could hear the lowing of the Griffen cows as they were let into their east pasturage down the hill and beyond the belt of shrubbery and underbrush that screened Taggart Stream from view.

‘According to folklore, the marks disappear,’ Matt said suddenly. ‘When the victim dies, the marks disappear.’

‘I know that,’ Ben said. He remembered it both from Stoker’s Dracula and from the Hammer films starring Christopher Lee.

‘We have to put an ash stake through his heart.’

‘You better think again,’ Ben said, and sipped his coffee. That would be damned hard to explain to a coroner’s jury. You’d go to jail for desecrating a corpse at the very least. More likely to the funny farm.’

‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ Matt asked quietly.

With no discernible hesitation, Ben said, ‘No.’

‘Do you believe me about the marks?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I have to. Why would you lie to me? I can’t see any gain for you in a lie. I suppose you’d lie if you had killed him.’

‘Perhaps I did, then,’ Matt said, watching him.

‘There are three things going against it. First, what’s your motive? Pardon me, Matt, but you’re just too old for the classic ones like jealousy and money to fit very well. Second, what was your method? If it was poison, he must have gone very easily. He certainly looks peaceful enough. And that eliminates most of the common poisons right there.’

‘What’s your third reason?’

‘No murderer in his right mind would invent a story like yours to cover up murder. It would be insane.’

‘We keep coming back to my mental health,’ Matt said. He sighed. ‘I knew we would.’

‘I don’t think you’re crazy,’ Ben said, accenting the first word slightly. ‘You seem rational enough.’

‘But you’re not a doctor, are you?’ Matt asked. ‘And crazy people are sometimes able to counterfeit sanity remarkably well.’

Ben agreed. ‘So where does that put us?’

‘Back to square one.’

‘No. Neither one of us can afford that, because there’s a dead man upstairs and pretty soon he’s going to have to be explained. The constable is going to want to know what happened, and so is the medical examiner, and so is the county sheriff. Matt, could it be that Mike Ryerson was just sick with some virus all week and happened to drop dead in your house?’

For the first time since they had come back down, Matt showed signs of agitation. ‘Ben, I told you what he said! I saw the marks on his neck! And I heard him invite someone into my house! Then I heard… God, I heard that laugh!’ His eyes had taken on that peculiar blank look again.

‘All right,’ Ben said. He got up and went to the window,’ trying to set his thoughts in order. They didn’t go well. As he had told Susan, things seemed to have a way of getting out of hand.

He was looking toward the Marsten House.

‘Matt, do you know what’s going to happen to you if you even let out a whisper of what you’ve told me?’ Matt didn’t answer.

‘People are going to start tapping their foreheads behind your back when you go by in the street. Little kids are going to get out their Halloween wax teeth when they see you coming and jump out and yell Boo! when you walk by their hedge. Somebody will invent a rhyme like One, two, three, four, I’m gonna suck your blood some more. The high school kids will pick it up and you’ll hear it in the halls when you pass. Your colleagues will begin looking at you strangely. There’s apt to be anonymous phone calls from people purporting to be Danny Glick or Mike Ryerson. They’ll turn your life into a nightmare. They’ll hound you out of town in six months.’

‘They wouldn’t. They know me.’

Ben turned from the window. ‘Who do they know? A funny old duck who lives alone out on Taggart Stream Road. Just the fact that you’re not married is apt to make them believe you’ve got a screw loose anyway. And what backup can I give you? I saw the body but nothing else. Even if I had, they would just say I was an outsider. They would even get around to telling each other we were a couple of queers and, this was the way we got our kicks.’

Matt was looking at him with slowly dawning horror.

‘One word, Matt. That’s all it will take to finish you in salem’s Lot.’

‘So there’s nothing to be done.’

‘Yes, there is. You have a certain theory about who-or what-killed Mike Ryerson. The theory is relatively simple to prove or disprove, I think. I’m in a hell of a fix. I can’t believe you’re crazy, but I can’t believe that Danny Glick came back from the dead and sucked Mike Ryerson’s blood for a whole week before killing him, either. But I’m going to put the idea to the test. And you’ve got to help.’

‘How?’

‘Call your doctor, Cody is his name? Then call Parkins Gillespie. Let the machinery take over. Tell your story just as though you I d never heard a thing in the night. You went into Dell’s and sat down with Mike. He said he’d been feeling sick since last Sunday. You invited him home with you. You went in to check him around three-thirty this morning, couldn’t wake him, and called me.’

‘That’s all?’

‘That’s it. When you speak to Cody, don’t even say he’s dead.’

‘Not dead-’

‘Christ, how do we know he is?’ Ben exploded. ‘You took his pulse and couldn’t find it; I tried to find his breath and couldn’t do it. If I thought someone was going to shove me into my grave on that basis, I’d damn well pack a lunch. Especially if I looked as lifelike as he does.’

‘That bothers you as much as it does me, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, it bothers me,’ Ben admitted. ‘He looks like a goddamn waxwork.’

‘All right,’ Matt said. ‘You’re talking sense… as much as anyone can in a business like this. I guess I sounded nuts, at that.’

Ben started to deprecate, but Matt waved it off. ‘But suppose… just hypothetically… that my first suspicion is right? Would you want even the remotest possibility in the back of your mind? The possibility that Mike might… come back?’

‘As I said, that theory is easy enough to prove or disprove. And it isn’t what bothers me about all this.’

‘What is?’

‘Just a minute. First things first. Proving or disproving it ought to be no more than an exercise in logic-ruling out possibilities. First possibility: Mike died of some disease a virus or something. How do you confirm that or rule it out?’

Matt shrugged. ‘Medical examination, I suppose.’

‘Exactly. And the same method to confirm or rule out foul play. If somebody poisoned him or shot him or got him to eat a piece of fudge with a bundle of wires in it-’

‘Murder has gone undetected before.’

‘Sure it has. But I’ll bet on the medical examiner.’

‘And if the medical examiner’s verdict is "unknown cause"?’

‘Then,’ Ben said deliberately, ‘we can visit the grave after the funeral and see if he rises. If he does-which I can’t conceive of-we’ll know. If he doesn’t, we’re faced with the thing that bothers me.’

‘The fact of my insanity,’ Matt said slowly. ‘Ben, I swear on my mother’s name that those marks were there, that I heard the window go up, that-’

‘I believe you,’ Ben said quietly.

Matt stopped. His expression was that of a man who has braced himself for a crash that never came.

‘You do?’ he said uncertainly.

‘To put it another way, I refuse to believe that you’re crazy or had a hallucination. I had an experience once… an experience that had to do with that damned house on the hill… that makes me extremely sympathetic to people whose stories seem utterly insane in light of rational knowledge. I’ll tell you about that, one day.’

‘Why not now?’

‘There’s no time. You have those calls to make. And I have one more question. Think about it carefully. Do you have any enemies?’

‘No one who qualifies for something like this.’

‘An ex-student, maybe? One with a grudge?’

Matt, who knew exactly to what extent he influenced the lives of his students, laughed politely.

‘Okay,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t like it. First that dog shows up on the cemetery gates. Then Ralphie Glick disappears, his brother dies, and Mike Ryerson. Maybe they all tie in somehow. But this… I can’t believe it.’

‘I better call Cody’s home,’ Matt said, getting up. ‘Parkins will be at home.’

‘Call in sick at school, too.’

‘Right.’ Matt laughed without force. ‘It will be my first sick day in three years. A real occasion.’

He went into the living room and began to make his calls, waiting at the end of each number sequence for the bell to prod sleepers awake. Cody’s wife apparently referred him to Cumberland Receiving, for he dialed another number, asked for Cody, and went into his story after a short wait.

He hung up and called into the kitchen: ‘Jimmy will be here in an hour.’

‘Good,’ Ben said. ‘I’m going upstairs.’

‘Don’t touch anything.’

‘No.’

By the time he reached the second-floor landing he could hear Matt on the phone to Parkins Gillespie, answering questions. The words melted into a background murmur as he went down the hall.

That feeling of half-remembered, half-imagined terror washed over him again as he contemplated the door to the guest room. In his mind’s eye he could see himself stepping forward, pushing it open. The room looks larger, seen from a child’s eye view. The body lies as they left it, left arm dangling to the floor, left cheek pressed against the pillow which still shows the fold lines from the linen closet. The eyes suddenly open, and they are filled with blank, animalistic triumph. The door slams shut. The left arm comes up, the hand hooked into a claw, and the lips twist into a vulpine smile that shows incisors grown wondrously long and sharp -

He stepped forward and pushed the door with tented fingers. The lower hinges squeaked slightly.

The body lay as they had left it, left arm fallen, left cheek pressed against the pillowcase -

‘Parkins is coming,’ Matt said from the hallway behind him, and Ben nearly screamed.