Salem's Lot

4

‘My God, don’t you look good,’ Ben said.

Against the hospital world of solid whites and anemic greens, Susan Norton looked very good indeed. She was wearing a bright yellow blouse with black vertical stripes and a short blue denim skirt.

‘You, too,’ she said, and crossed the room to him.

He kissed her deeply, and his hand slid to the warm curve of her hip and rubbed.

‘Hey,’ she said, breaking the kiss. ‘They kick you out for that.’

‘Not me.’

‘No, me.’

‘They looked at each other.

‘I love you, Ben.’

‘I love you, too.’

‘If I could jump in with you right now-’

‘Just a second, let me pull back the spread.’

‘How would I explain it to those little candy-stripers?’

‘Tell them you’re giving me the bedpan.’

She shook her head, smiling, and pulled up a chair. ‘A lot has happened in town, Ben.’

He sobered. ‘Like what?’

She hesitated. ‘I hardly know how to tell you, or what I believe myself. I’m mixed up, to say the least.’

‘Well, spill it and let me sort it out.’

‘What’s your condition, Ben?’

‘Mending. Not serious. Matt’s doctor, a guy named Cody-’

‘No. Your mind. How much of this Count Dracula stuff do you believe?’

‘Oh. That. Matt told you everything’

‘Matt’s here in the hospital. One floor up in Intensive Care.’

‘What?’ He was up on his elbows. ‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘Heart attack.’

‘Heart attack!’

‘Dr Cody says his condition is stable. He’s listed as serious, but that’s mandatory for the first forty-eight hours. I was there when it happened.’

‘Tell me everything you remember, Susan.’

The pleasure had gone out of his face. It was watchful, intent, fine-drawn. Lost in the white room and the white sheets and the white hospital johnny, he again struck her as a man drawn to a taut, perhaps fraying edge.

‘You didn’t answer my question, Ben.’

‘About how I took Matt’s story?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me answer you by saying what you think. You think the Marsten House has buggered my brain to the point where I’m seeing bats in my own belfry, to coin a phrase. Is that a fair estimate?’

‘Yes, I suppose that’s it. But I never thought about it in such… such harsh terms.’

‘I know that, Susan. Let me trace the progression of my thoughts for you, if I can. It may do me some good to sort them out. I can tell from your own face that something has knocked you back a couple of steps. Is that right?’

‘Yes… but I don’t believe, can’t-’

‘Stop a minute. That word can’t blocks up everything. That’s where I was stuck. That absolute, goddamned imperative, word. Can’t. I didn’t believe Matt, Susan, because such things can’t be true. But I couldn’t find a hole in his story any way I looked at it. The most obvious conclusion was that he had jumped the tracks somewhere, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he seem crazy to you?’

‘No. No, but-’

‘Stop.’ He held up his hand. ‘You’re thinking can’t thoughts, aren’t you?’

‘I suppose I am,’ she said.

‘He didn’t seem crazy or irrational to me, either. And we both know that paranoid fantasies or persecution complexes just don’t appear overnight. They grow over a period of time. They need careful watering, care, and feeding. Have you ever heard any talk in town about Matt having a screw loose? Ever heard Matt say that someone had the knife out for him? Has he ever been involved with any dubious causes-fluoridation causes brain cancer or Sons of the American Patriots or the NLF? Has he ever expressed an inordinate amount of interest in things such as s6ances or astral projection or reincarnation? Ever been arrested that you know of?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No to everything. But Ben… it hurts me to say this about Matt, even to suggest it, but some people go crazy very quietly. They go crazy inside.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. ‘There are signs. Sometimes you can’t read them before, but you can afterward. If you were on a jury, would you believe Matt’s testimony about a car crash?’

‘Yes… ‘

‘Would you believe him if he had told you he saw a prowler kill Mike Ryerson?’

‘Yes, I guess I would.’

‘But not this.’

‘Ben, I just can’t-’

‘There, you said it again.’ He saw her ready to protest and held up a forestalling hand. ‘I’m not arguing his case, Susan. I’m only laying out my own train of thought. Okay?’

‘Okay. Go on.’

‘My second thought was that somebody set him up. Someone with bad blood, or a grudge.’

‘Yes, that occurred to me.’

‘Matt says he has no enemies. I believe him.’

‘Everybody has enemies.’

‘There are degrees. Don’t forget the most important thing-there’s a dead man wrapped up in this mess. If someone was out to get Matt, then someone must have murdered Mike Ryerson to do it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the whole song and dance doesn’t make much sense without a body. And yet, according to Matt’s story, he met Mike purely by chance. No one led him to Dell’s last Thursday night. There was no anonymous call, no note, no nothing. The coincidence of the meeting was enough to rule out a setup.’

‘What does that leave for rational explanations?’

‘That Matt dreamed the sounds of the window going up, the laugh, and the sucking sounds. That Mike died of some natural but unknown causes.’

‘You don’t believe that, either.’

‘I don’t believe that he dreamed hearing the window go up. It was open. And the outside screen was lying on the lawn. I noticed it and Parkins Gillespie noticed it. And I noticed something else. Matt has latch-type screens on his house-they lock on the outside, not the inside. You can’t get them off from the inside unless you pry them off with a screw driver or a paint scraper. Even then it would be tough. It would leave marks. I didn’t see any marks. And here’s another thing: The ground below that window was relatively soft. If you wanted to take off a second-floor screen, you’d need to use a ladder, and that would leave marks. There weren’t any. That’s what bothers me the most. A second-floor screen removed from the outside and no ladder marks beneath.’

They looked at each other somberly.

He resumed: ‘I was running this through my head this morning. The more I thought about it, the better Matt’s story looked. So I took a chance. I took the can’t away for a while. Now, tell me what happened at Matt’s last night. If it will knock all this into a cocked hat, no one is going to be happier than I.’

‘It doesn’t,’ she said unhappily. ‘It makes it worse. He had just finished telling me about Mike Ryerson. He said he heard someone upstairs. He was scared, but he went.’ She folded her hands in her lap and was now holding them tightly, as if they might fly away. ‘Nothing else happened for a little while… and then Matt called out, something like he was revoking his invitation. Then… well, I don’t really know how to… ’

‘Go on. Don’t agonize over it.’

‘I think someone-someone else-made a kind of hissing noise. There was a bump, as if something had fallen.’ She looked at him bleakly. ‘And then I heard a voice say: I will see you sleep like the dead, teacher. That’s word for word. And when I went in later to get a blanket for Matt I found this.’

She took the ring out of her blouse pocket and dropped it into his hand.

Ben turned it over, then tilted it toward the window to let the light pick out the initials. ‘MCR. Mike Ryerson?’

‘Mike Corey Ryerson. I dropped it and then made myself pick it up again-I thought you or Matt would want to see it. You keep it. I don’t want it back.’

‘It makes you feel-?’

‘Bad. Very bad.’ She raised her head defiantly. But all rational thought goes against this, Ben. I’d rather believe that Matt somehow murdered Mike Ryerson and invented that crazy vampire story for reasons of his own. Rigged the screen to fall off. Did a ventriloquist act in that guest room while I was downstairs, planted Mike’s ring-’

‘And gave himself a heart attack to make it all seem more real,’ Ben said dryly. ‘I haven’t given up hope of rational explanations, Susan. I’m hoping for one. Almost praying for one. Monsters in the movies are sort of fun, but the thought of them actually prowling through the night isn’t fun at all. I’ll even grant you that the screen could have been rigged-a simple rope sling anchored on the roof would do the trick. Let’s go further. Matt is something of a scholar. I suppose there are poisons that would cause the symptoms that Mike had-maybe undetectable poisons. Of course, the idea of poison is a little hard to believe because Mike ate so little-’

‘You only have Matt’s word for that,’ she pointed out.

‘He wouldn’t lie, because he would know that an examination of the victim’s stomach is an important part of any autopsy. And a hypo would leave tracks. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it could be done. And a man like Matt could surely take something that would fake a heart attack. But where is the motive?’

She shook her head helplessly.

‘Even granting some motive we don’t suspect, why would he go to such Byzantine lengths, or invent such a wild cover story? I suppose Ellery Queen could explain it somehow, but life isn’t an Ellery Queen plot.’

‘But this… this other is lunacy, Ben.’

‘Yes, like Hiroshima.’

‘Will you stop doing that’ she whipcracked at him suddenly. ‘Don’t go playing the phony intellectual! It doesn’t fit you! We’re talking about wives’ tales, bad dreams, psychosis, anything you want to call it-’

‘That’s shit,’ he said. ‘Make connections. The world is coming down around our ears and you’re sticking at a few vampires.’

"Salem’s Lot is my town,’ she said stubbornly. ‘If something is happening there, it’s real. Not philosophy.’

‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ he said, and touched the bandage on his head with a rueful finger. ‘And your ex packs a hell of a right.’

‘I’m sorry. That’s a side of Floyd I never saw. I can’t understand it.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘In the town drunk tank. Parkins Gillespie told my mom he should turn him over to the county - to Sheriff McCaslin, that is-but he thought he’d wait and see if you wanted to prefer charges.’

‘Do you have any feelings in the matter?’

‘None whatever,’ she said steadily. ‘He’s out of my life.’

‘I’m not going to.’

She raised her eyebrows.

‘But I want to talk to him.’

‘About us?’

‘About why he came at me wearing an overcoat, a hat, sunglasses and Playtex rubber gloves.’

‘What?’

‘Well,’ he said, looking at her, ‘the sun was out. It was shining on him. And I don’t think he liked that.’

They looked at each other wordlessly. There seemed to be nothing else on the subject to say.