by Stephen King
"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 dustcover 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 Hun 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.
FORTY-FOUR
Sonny's Exxon station on outer Jointner Avenue was open and Sonny James (who exploited his country-music namesake with a huge color poster in the window beside a pyramid of oil cans) came out to wait on them himself. He was a small, gnomelike man whose receding hair was lawnmowered into a perpetual crew cut that showed his pink scalp.
"Hey there, Mr Mears, howya doin'? Where's your Citrowan?"
"Laid up, Sonny. Where's Pete?" Pete Cook was Sonny's part-time help, and lived in town. Sonny did not.
"Never showed up today. Don't matter. Things been slow, anyway. Town seems downright dead."
Ben felt dark, hysterical laughter in his belly. It threatened to boil out of his mouth in a great and rancid wave.
"Want to fill it up?" he managed. "Want to use your phone."
"Sure. Hi, kid. No school today?"
"I'm on a field trip with Mr Mears," Mark said. "I had a bloody nose."
"I guess to God you did. My brother used to get 'em. They're a sign of high blood pressure, boy. You want to watch out." He strolled to the back of Jimmy's car and took off the gas cap.
Ben went inside and dialed the pay phone beside the rack of New England road maps.
"Cumberland Hospital, which department?"
"I'd like to speak with Mr Burke, please. Room 402."
There was an uncharacteristic hesitation, and Ben was about to ask if the room had been changed when the voice said:
"Who is this, please?"
"Benjaman Mears." The possibility of Matt's death suddenly loomed up in his mind like a long shadow. Could that be? Surely not--that would be too much. "Is he all right?"
"Are you a relative?"
"No, a close friend. He isn't--"
"Mr Burke died at 3:07 this afternoon, Mr Mears. If you'd like to hold for just a minute, I'll see if Dr Cody has come in yet. Perhaps he could..."
The voice went on but Ben had ceased hearing it, although the receiver was still glued to his ear. The realization of how much he had been depending on Matt to get them through the rest of this nightmare afternoon crashed home with sickening weight. Matt was dead. Congestive heart failure. Natural causes. It was as if God Himself had turned His face away from them.
Just Mark and I now.
Susan, Jimmy, Father Callahan, Matt. All gone.
Panic seized him and he grappled with it silently.
He put the receiver back into its cradle without thinking about it, guillotining a question half-asked.
He walked back outside. It was ten after five. In the west the clouds were breaking up.
"Comes to just three dollars even," Sonny told him brightly. "That's Doc Cody's car, ain't it? I see them M.D. plates and it always makes me think of this movie I seen, this story about a bunch of crooks and one of them would always steal cars with M.D. plates because--"
Ben gave him three one-dollar bills. "I've got to split, Sonny. Sorry. I've got trouble."
Sonny's face crinkled up. "Gee, I'm sorry to hear that, Mr Mears. Bad news from your editor?"
"I guess you could say that." He got behind the wheel, shut the door, pulled out, and left Sonny looking after him in his yellow foul-weather slicker.
"Matt's dead, isn't he?" Mark asked, watching him.
"Yes. Heart attack. How did you know?"
"Your face. I saw your face."
It was 5:15.
FORTY-FIVE
Parkins Gillespie was standing on the small covered porch of the Municipal Building, smoking a Pall Mall and looking out at the western sky. He turned his attention to Ben Mears and Mark Petrie reluctantly. His face looked sad and old, like the glasses of water they bring you in cheap diners.
"How are you, Constable?" Ben asked.
"Tolerable," Parkins allowed. He considered a hangnail on the leathery arc of skin that bordered his thumbnail. "Seen you truckin' back and forth. Looked like the kid was drivin' up from Railroad Street by hisself this last time. That so?"
"Yes," Mark said.
"Almost got clipped. Fella goin' the other way missed you by a whore's hair."
"Constable," Ben said, "we want to tell you what's been happening around here."
Parkins Gillespie spat out the stub of his cigarette without raising his hands from the rail of the small covered porch. Without looking at either of them, he said calmly, "I don't want to hear it."
They looked at him dumbfounded.
"Nolly didn't show up today," Parkins said, still in that calm, conversational voice. "Somehow don't think he will. He called in late last night and said he'd seen Homer McCaslin's car out on the Deep Cut Road--I think it was the Deep Cut he said. He never called back in." Slowly, sadly, like a man under water, he dipped into his shirt pocket and reached another Pall Mall out of it. He rolled it reflectively between his thumb and finger. "These fucking things are going to be the death of me," he said.
Ben tried again. "The man who took the Marsten House, Gillespie. His name is Barlow. He's in the basement of Eva Miller's boardinghouse right now."
"That so?" Parkins said with no particular surprise. "Vampire, ain't he? Just like in all the comic books they used to put out twenty years ago."
Ben said nothing. He felt more and more like a man lost in a great and grinding nightmare where clockwork ran on and on endlessly, unseen, but just below the surface of things.
"I'm leavin' town," Parkins said. "Got my stuff all packed up in the back of the car. I left my gun and the bubble and my badge in on the shelf. I'm done with lawin'. Goin' t'see my sister in Kittery, I am. Figure that's far enough to be safe."
Ben heard himself say remotely, "You gutless creep. You cowardly piece of shit. This town is still alive and you're running out on it."
"It ain't alive," Parkins said, lighting his smoke with a wooden kitchen match. "That's why he came here. It's dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. Whole country's goin' the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin's in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin' popcorn and cheerin' 'em on." He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the broken rays of the westering sun,
like a dream village. "They prob'ly like bein' vampires. But not me; Nolly'd be in after me tonight. I'm goin'."
Ben looked at him helplessly.
"You two fellas want to get in that car and hit it out of here," Parkins said. "This town will go on without us...for a while. Then it won't matter."
Yes, Ben thought. Why don't we do that?
Mark spoke the reason for both of them. "Because he's bad, mister. He's really bad. That's all."
"Is that so?" Parkins said. He nodded and puffed his Pall Mall. "Well, okay." He looked up toward the Consolidated High School. "Piss-poor attendance today, from the Lot, anyway. Buses runnin' late, kids out sick, office phonin' houses and not gettin' any answer. The attendance officer called me, and I soothed him some. He's a funny little baldheaded fella who thinks he knows what he's doing. Well, the teachers are there, anyway. They come from out of town, mostly. They can teach each other."
Thinking of Matt, Ben said, "Not all of them are from out of town."
"It don't matter," Parkins said. His eyes dropped to the stakes in Ben's belt. "You going to try to do that fella up with one of those?"
"Yes."
"You can have my riot gun if you want it. That gun, it was Nolly's idea. Nolly liked to go armed, he did. Not even a bank in town so's he could hope someone would rob it. He'll make a good vampire though, once he gets the hang of it."
Mark was looking at him with rising horror, and Ben knew he had to get him away. This was the worst of all.
"Come on," he said to Mark. "He's done."
"I guess that's it," Parkins said. His pale, crinkle-caught eyes surveyed the town. "Surely is quiet. I seen Mabel Werts, peekin' out with her glasses, but I don't guess there's much to peek at, today. There'll be more tonight, likely."
They went back to the car. It was almost 5:30.
FORTY-SIX
They pulled up in front of St Andrew's at quarter of six. Lengthening shadows fell from the church across the street to the rectory, covering it like a prophecy. Ben pulled Jimmy's bag out of the backseat and dumped it out. He found several small ampoules, and dumped their contents out the window, saving the bottles.
"What are you doing?"
"We're going to put holy water in these," Ben said. "Come on."
They went up the walk to the church and climbed the steps. Mark, about to open the middle door, paused and pointed. "Look at that."
The handle was blackened and pulled slightly out of shape, as if a heavy electric charge had been pushed through it.
"Does that mean anything to you?" Ben asked.
"No. No, but..." Mark shook his head, pushing an unformed thought away. He opened the door and they went in. The church was cool and gray and filled with the endless pregnant pause that all empty altars of faith, white and black, have in common.
The two ranks of pews were split by a wide central aisle, and flanking this, two plaster angels stood cradling bowls of holy water, their calm and sweetly knowing faces bent, as if to catch their own reflections in the still water.
Ben put the ampoules in his pocket. "Bathe your face and hands," he said.
Mark looked at him, troubled. "That's sac--sacri--"
"Sacrilege? Not this time. Go ahead."
They dunked their hands in the still water and then splashed it over their faces, the way a man who has just wakened will splash cold water into his eyes to shock the world back into them.
Ben took the first ampoule out of his pocket and was filling it when a shrill voice cried, "Here! Here now! What are you doing?"
Ben turned around. It was Rhoda Curless, Father Callahan's housekeeper, who had been sitting in the first pew and twisting a rosary helplessly between her fingers. She was wearing a black dress, and her slip hung below the hem. Her hair was in disarray; she had been pulling her fingers through it.
"Where's the Father? What are you doing?" Her voice was reedy and thin, close to hysteria.
"Who are you?" Ben asked.
"Mrs Curless. I'm Father Callahan's housekeeper. Where's the Father? What are you doing?" Her hands came together and began to war with each other.
"Father Callahan is gone," Ben said, as gently as he could.
"Oh." She closed her eyes. "Was he getting after whatever ails this town?"
"Yes," Ben said.
"I knew it," she said. "I didn't have to ask. He's a strong, good man of the cloth. There were always those who said he'd never be man enough to fill Father Bergeron's shoes, but he filled 'em. They were too small for him, as it turned out."
She opened her eyes wide and looked at them. A tear spilled from her left, and ran down her cheek. "He won't be back, will he?"
"I don't know," Ben said.
"They talked about his drinkin'," she said, as though she hadn't heard. "Was there ever an Irish priest worth his keep who didn't tip the bottle? None of that mollycoddlin' wet-nursin' church-bingo-prayer-basket for him. He was more'n that!" Her voice rose toward the vaulted ceiling in a hoarse, almost challenging cry. "He was a priest, not some holy alderman!"
Ben and Mark listened without speech or surprise. There was no surprise left on this dream-struck day; there was not even the capacity for it. They no longer saw themselves as doers or avengers or saviors; the day had absorbed them. Helplessly, they were only living.
"Was he strong when last you saw him?" she demanded, peering at them. The tears magnified the gimlet lack of compromise in her eyes.
"Yes," Mark said, remembering Callahan in his mother's kitchen, holding his cross aloft.
"And are you about his work now?"
"Yes," Mark said again.
"Then be about it," she snapped at them. "What are you waiting for?" And she left them, walking down the center aisle in her black dress, the solitary mourner at a funeral that hadn't been held here.
FORTY-SEVEN
Eva's again--and at the last. It was ten minutes after six. The sun hung over the western pines, peering out of the broken clouds like blood.
Ben drove into the parking lot and looked curiously up at his room. The shade was not drawn and he could see his typewriter standing sentinel, and beside it, his pile of manuscript and the glass globe paperweight on top of it. It seemed amazing that he could see all those things from here, see them clearly, as if everything in the world was sane and normal and ordered.
He let his eyes drop to the back porch. The rocking chairs where he and Susan had shared their first kiss stood side by side, unchanged. The door which gave ingress to the kitchen stood open, as Mark had left it.
"I can't," Mark muttered. "I just can't." His eyes were wide and white. He had drawn up his knees and was now crouched on the seat.
"It's got to be both of us," Ben said. He held out two of the ampoules filled with holy water. Mark twitched away from them in horror, as if touching them would admit poison through his skin. "Come on," Ben said. He had no arguments left. "Come on, come on."
"No."
"Mark?"
"No!"
"Mark, I need you. You and me, that's all that's left."
"I've done enough!" Mark cried. "I can't do any more! Can't you understand I can't look at him?"
"Mark, it has to be the two of us. Don't you know that?"
Mark took the ampoules and curled them slowly against his chest. "Oh boy," he whispered. "Oh boy, oh boy." He looked at Ben and nodded. The movement of his head was jerky and agonized. "Okay," he said.
"Where's the hammer?" he asked as they got out.
"Jimmy had it."
"Okay."
They walked up the porch steps in the strengthening wind. The sun glared red through the clouds, dyeing everything. Inside, in the kitchen, the stink of death was palpable and wet, pressing against them like granite. The cellar door stood open.
"I'm so scared," Mark said, shuddering.
"You better be. Where's that flashlight?"
"In the cellar. I left it when..."
"Okay." They stood at the mouth of the cellar. As Mark had said, the
stairs looked intact in the sunset light. "Follow me," Ben said.
FORTY-EIGHT
Ben thought quite easily: I'm going to my death.
The thought came naturally, and there was no fear or regret in it. Inward-turning emotions were lost under the overwhelming atmosphere of evil that hung over this place. As he slipped and scraped his way down the board Mark had set up to get out of the cellar, all he felt was an unnatural glacial calm. He saw that his hands were glowing, as if wreathed in ghost gloves. It did not surprise him.
Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. Who had said that? Matt? Matt was dead. Susan was dead. Miranda was dead. Wallace Stevens was dead, too. I wouldn't look at that, if I were you. But he had looked. That's what you looked like when it was over. Like something smashed and broken that had been filled with different-colored fluids. It wasn't so bad. Not so bad as his death. Jimmy had been carrying McCaslin's pistol; it would still be in his coat pocket. He would take it, and if sunset came before they could get to Barlow...first the boy, and then himself. Not good, but better than his death.
He dropped to the cellar floor and then helped Mark down. The boy's eyes flashed to the dark, curled thing on the floor and then skipped away.
"I can't look at that," he said huskily.
"That's all right."
Mark turned away and Ben knelt down. He swept away a number of the lethal plywood squares, the knife blades thrust through them glittering like dragon's teeth. Gently, then, he turned Jimmy over.
I wouldn't look at that, if I were you.
"Oh, Jimmy," he tried to say, and the words broke open and bled in his throat. He cradled Jimmy in the curve of his left arm and pulled Barlow's blades out of him with his right hand. There were six of them, and Jimmy had bled a great deal.
There was a neatly folded stack of living room drapes on a corner shelf. He took them over to Jimmy and spread them over his body after he had the gun and the flashlight and the hammer.
He stood up and tried the flashlight. The plastic lens cover had cracked, but the bulb still worked. He flashed it around. Nothing. He shone it under the pool table. Bare. Nothing behind the furnace. Racks of preserves, and a wallboard hung with tools. The amputated stairs, pushed over in the far corner so they would be out of sight from the kitchen. They looked like a scaffold leading nowhere.
"Where is he?" Ben muttered. He glanced at his watch, and the hands stood at 6:23. When was sunset? He couldn't remember. Surely no later than 6:55. That gave them a bare half hour.
