'Salem's Lot(109)

Once, while in a fine drunken frenzy, Callahan had sat down to write a monograph on the subject for The Catholic Journal. He had even illustrated it with a fiendish editorial? page cartoon, which showed a brain poised on the highest ledge of a skyscraper. The building (labeled 'The Human Body') was in flames (which were labeled 'Cancer' - ?although they might have been a dozen others). The car?toon was titled 'Too Far to Jump'. During the next day's enforced bout with sobriety, he had torn the prospective monograph to shreds and burned the cartoon - there was no place in Catholic doctrine for either, unless you wanted to add a helicopter labeled 'Christ' that was dangling a rope ladder. Nonetheless, he felt that his insights had been true ones, and the result of such sickbed logic on the part of the patient was usually acute depression. The symptoms included dulled eyes, slow responses, sighs fetched from deep within the chest cavity, and sometimes tears at the sight of the priest, that black crow whose function was ultimately predicated on the problem the fact of mortality presented to the thinking being.

Matt Burke showed none of this depression. He held out his hand, and when Callahan shook it, he found the grip surprisingly strong.

'Father Callahan. Good of you to come.'

'Pleased to. Good teachers, like a wife's wisdom, are pearls beyond price.'

'Even agnostic old bears like myself?'

'Especially those,' Callahan said, riposting with pleasure. 'I may have caught you at a weak moment. There are no atheists in the foxholes, I've been told, and precious few agnostics in the Intensive Care ward.'

'I'm being moved soon, alas.'

'Pish-posh,' Callahan said. 'We'll have you Hail Marying and Our Fathering yet.'

'That,' Matt said, 'is not as far-fetched as you might think.'

Father Callahan sat down, and his knee bumped the bedstand as he drew his chair up. A carelessly piled stack of books cascaded into his lap. He read the titles aloud as he put them back.

'Dracula. Dracula's Guest. The Search for Dracula. The Golden Bough. The Natural History of the Vampire - ?natural? Hungarian Folk Tales. Monsters of the Darkness. Monsters in Real Life. Peter Kurtin, Monster of Düsseldorf. And . . .' He brushed a thick patina of dust from the last cover and revealed a spectral figure poised menacingly above a sleeping damsel. 'Varney the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood. Goodness - required reading for convalesc?ent heart attack patients?'

Matt smiled. 'Poor old Varney. I read it a long time ago for a class report in Eh-279 at the university . . . Romantic Lit. The professor, whose idea of fantasy began with Beowulf and ended with The Screwtape Letters, was quite shocked. I got a D plus on the report and a written command to elevate my sights.'

'The case of Peter Kurtin is interesting enough, though,' Callahan said. 'In a repulsive sort of way.'

'You know his history?'

'Most of it, yes. I took an interest in such things as a divinity student. My excuse to the highly skeptical elders was that, in order to be a successful priest, one had to plumb the depths of human nature as well as aspire to its heights. All eyewash, actually. I just liked a shudder as well as the next one. Kurtin, I believe, murdered two of his playmates as a young boy by drowning them - he simply gained possession of a small float anchored in the middle of a wide river and kept pushing them away until they tired and went under.'

'Yes,' Matt said. 'As a teenager, he twice tried to kill the parents of a girl who refused to go walking with him. He later burned down their house. But that is not the part of his, uh, career that I'm interested in.'

'I guessed not, from the trend of your reading matter.'

He picked a magazine off the coverlet which showed an incredibly endowed young woman in a skintight costume who was sucking the blood of a young man. The young man's expression seemed to be an uneasy combination of extreme terror and extreme lust. The name of the magazine - and of the young woman, apparently - was Vampirella. Callahan put it down, more intrigued than ever.

'Kurtin attacked and killed over a dozen women,' Callahan said. 'Mutilated many more with a hammer. If it was their time of the month, he drank their discharge.' Matt Burke nodded again. 'What's not so generally known,' he said, 'is that he also mutilated animals. At the height of his obsession, he ripped the heads from the bodies of two swans in Düsseldorf's central park and drank the blood which gushed from their necks.'

'Has all this to do with why you wanted to see me?' Callahan asked. 'Mrs Curless told me you said it was a matter of some importance.'

'Yes, it does and it is.'

'What might it be, then? If you've meant to intrigue me, you've certainly succeeded.'

Matt looked at him calmly. 'A good friend of mine, Ben Mears, was to have gotten in touch with you today. Your housekeeper said he had not.'

'That's so. I've seen no one since two o'clock this after?noon.'

'I have been unable to reach him. He left the hospital in the company of my doctor, James Cody. I have also been unable to reach him. I have likewise been unable to reach Susan Norton, Ben's lady friend. She went out early this afternoon, promising her parents she would be in by five. They are worried.'

Callahan sat forward at this. He had a passing acquaint?ance with Bill Norton, who had once come to see him about a problem that had to do with some Catholic co-workers. 'You suspect something?'