'Salem's Lot(110)

'Let me ask you a question,' Matt said. 'Take it very seriously and think it over before you answer. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary in town just lately?'

Callahan's original impression, now almost a certainty, was that this man was proceeding very carefully indeed, not wanting to frighten him off by whatever was on his mind. Something sufficiently outrageous was suggested by the litter of books.

'Vampires in 'salem's Lot?' he asked.

He was thinking that the deep depression which followed grave illness could sometimes be avoided if the person afflicted had a deep enough investment in life: artists, musicians, a carpenter whose thoughts centered on some half-completed building. The interest could just as well be linked to some harmless (or not so harmless) psychosis, perhaps incipient before the illness.

He had spoken at some length with an elderly man named Horris from Schoolyard Hill who had been in the Maine Medical Center with advanced cancer of the lower intestine. In spite of pain which must have been excruciat?ing, be had discoursed with Callahan in great and lucid detail concerning the creatures from Uranus who were infiltrating every walk of American life. 'One day the fella who fills your gas tank down at Sonny's Amoco is just Joe Blow from Falmouth,' this bright-eyed, talking skeleton told him, 'and the next day it's a Uranian who just 0 like Joe Blow. He even has Joe Blow's memories and speech patterns, you see. Because Uranians eat alpha waves . . . smack, smack, smack!' According to Horris, he did not have cancer at all, but an advanced case of laser poisoning. The Uranians, alarmed at his knowledge of their machinations, had decided to put him out of the way. Horris accepted this, and was prepared to go down fighting. Callahan made no effort to disabuse him. Leave that to well-meaning but thickheaded relatives. Callahan's experi?ence was that psychosis, like a good knock of Cutty Sark, could be extremely beneficial.

So now he simply folded his hands and waited for Matt to continue.

Matt said, 'It's difficult to proceed as it is. It's going to be more difficult still if you think I'm suffering from sickbed dementia.'

Startled by hearing his thoughts expressed just as he had finished thinking them, Callahan kept his poker face only with difficulty - although the emotion that would have come through would not have been disquiet but admir?ation.

'On the contrary, you seem extremely lucid,' he said.

Matt sighed. 'Lucidity doesn't presuppose sanity - as you well know.' He shifted in bed, redistributing the books that lay around him. 'If there is a God, He must be making me do penance for a life of careful academicism - of refusing to plant an intellectual foot on any ground until it had been footnoted in triplicate. Now for the second time in one day, I'm compelled to make the wildest declarations without a shred of proof to back them up. All I can say in defense of my own sanity is that my statements can be either proved or disproved without too much difficulty, and hope that you will take me seriously enough to make the test before it's too late.' He chuckled. 'Before it's too late. Sounds straight out of the thirties' pulp magazines, doesn't it?'

'Life is full of melodrama,' Callahan remarked, reflect?ing that if it were so, he had seen precious little of it lately.

'Let me ask you again if you have noticed anything ?anything - out of the way or peculiar this weekend.'

'To do with vampires, or - '

'To do with anything.'

Callahan thought it over. 'The dump's closed,' he said finally. 'But the gate was broken off, so I drove in anyway.' He smiled. 'I rather enjoy taking my own garbage to the dump. It's so practical and humble that I can indulge my elitist fantasies of a poor but happy proletariat to the fullest. Dud Rogers wasn't around, either.'

'Anything else?'

'Well . . . the Crocketts weren't at mass this morning, and Mrs Crockett hardly ever misses.'

'More?'

'Poor Mrs Glick, of course - '

Matt got up on one elbow. 'Mrs Glick? What about her?'     

'She 's dead.

'Of what?'

'Pauline Dickens seemed to think it was a heart attack,'

Callahan said, but hesitatingly.

'Has anyone else died in the Lot today?' Ordinarily, it would have been a foolish question. Deaths in a small town like 'salem's Lot were generally spread apart, in spite of the higher proportion of elderly in the population.

'No,' Callahan said slowly. 'But the mortality rate has certainly been high lately, hasn't' it? Mike Ryerson . . . Floyd Tibbits . . . the McDougall baby . . .'

Matt nodded, looking tired. 'Passing strange,' he said. 'Yes. But things are reaching the point where they'll be able to cover up for each other. A few more nights and I'm afraid . . . afraid . . . '

'Let's stop beating around the bush,' Callahan said.

'All right. There's been rather too much of that already, hasn't there?'

He began to tell his story from beginning to end, weaving in Ben's and Susan's and Jimmy's additions as he went along, holding back nothing. By the time he had finished, the evening's horror had ended for Ben and Jimmy. Susan Norton's was just beginning.

2

When he had finished, Matt allowed a moment of silence and then said, 'So. Am I crazy?'

'You're determined that people will think you so, any?way,' Callahan said, 'in spite of the fact that you seem to have convinced Mr Mears and your own doctor. No, I don't think you're crazy. After all, I am in the business of dealing with the supernatural. If I may be allowed a small pun, it is my bread and wine.'