'Salem's Lot(111)

'But - '

'Let me tell you a story. I won't vouch for its truth, but I will vouch for my own belief that it is true. It concerns a good friend of mine, Father Raymond Bissonette, who has been ministering to a parish in Cornwall for some Years now - along the so-called Tin Coast. Do you know of it?'

'Through reading, yes.'

'Some five years ago he wrote me that he had been called to an out-of-the-way corner of his parish to conduct a funeral service for a girl who had just "pined away". The girl's coffin was filled with wild roses, which struck Ray as unusual. What he found downright grotesque was the fact that her mouth had been propped open with a stick and then filled with garlic and wild thyme.'

'But those are - '

'Traditional protections against the rising of the Undead, yes. Folk remedies. When Ray inquired, he was told quite matter-of-factly by the girl's father that she had been killed by an incubus. You know the meaning?'

'A sexual vampire.'

'The girl had been betrothed to a young man named Bannock, who had a large strawberry-colored birthmark on the side of his neck. He was struck and killed by a car on his way home from work two weeks before the wedding. Two years later, the girl became engaged to another man. She broke it off quite suddenly during the week before the banns were to be cried for the second time. She told her parents and friends that John Bannock had been coming to her in the night and she had been unfaithful with him. Her present lover, according to Ray, was more distressed by the thought that she might have become mentally unbal?anced than by the possibility of demon visitation. Nonethe?less, she wasted away, died, and was buried in the old ways of the church.

'All of that did not occasion Ray's letter. What did was an occurrence some two months after the girl's burial. While he was on an early morning walk, Ray spied a young man standing by the girl's grave - a young man with a strawberry-colored birthmark on his neck. Nor is that the end of the story. He had gotten a Polaroid camera from his parents the Christmas before and had amused himself by snapping various views of the Cornish countryside. I have some of them in a picture album at the rectory - they're quite good. The camera was around his neck that morning, and he took several snaps of the young man. When he showed them around the village, the reaction was quite amazing. One old lady fell down in a faint, and the dead girl's mother began to pray in the street.

'But when Ray got up the next morning, the young man's figure had completely faded out of the pictures, and all that was left were several views of the local churchyard.'

'And you believe that?' Matt asked.

'Oh yes. And I suspect most people would. The ordinary fellow isn't half so leery of the supernatural as the fiction writers like to make out. Most writers who deal in that particular subject, as a matter of fact, are more hardheaded about spirits and demons and boogies than your ordinary man in the street. Lovecraft was an atheist. Edgar Allen Poe was sort of a half-assed transcendentalist. And Hawthorne was only conventionally religious.'

'You're amazingly conversant on the subject,' Matt said.

The priest shrugged. 'I had a boy's interest in the occult and the outré,' he said, 'and as I grew older, my calling to the priesthood enhanced rather than retarded it.' He sighed deeply. 'But lately I've begun to ask myself some rather hard questions about the nature of evil in the world.' With a twisted smile he added, 'It's spoiled a lot of the fun.'

'Then . . . would you investigate a few things for me? And would you be averse to taking along some holy water and a bit of the Host?'

'You're treading on uneasy theological ground now, Callahan said with genuine gravity.

'Why?'

'I'm not going to say no, not at this point,' Callahan said. 'And I ought to tell you that if you'd gotten a younger priest, he probably would have said yes almost at once, with few if any qualms at all.' He smiled bitterly. 'They view the trappings of the church as symbolic rather than practical - like a shaman's headdress and medicine stick. This young priest might decide you were crazy, but if shaking a little holy water around would case your craziness, fine and dandy. I can't do that. If I should proceed to make your investigations in a neat Harris tweed with nothing under my arm but a copy of Sybil Leek's The Sensuous Exorcist or whatever, that would be between you and me. But if I go with the Host . . . then I go as an agent of the Holy Catholic Church, prepared to execute what I would consider the most spiritual rites of my office. Then I go as Christ's representative on earth.' He was now looking at Matt seriously, solemnly. 'I may be a poor excuse for a priest - at times I've thought so - a bit jaded, a bit cynical, and just lately suffering a crisis of . . . what? faith? identity? . . . but I still believe enough in the awe?some, mystical, and apotheotic power of the church which. stands behind me to tremble a bit at the thought of accept?ing your request lightly. The church is more than a bundle of ideals, as these younger fellows seem to believe. It's more than a spiritual Boy Scout troop. The church is a Force . . . and one does not set a Force in motion lightly.' He frowned severely at Matt. 'Do you understand that? Your understanding is vitally important.'

'I understand.'

'You see, the over-all concept of evil in the Catholic Church has undergone a radical change in this century. Do you know what caused it?'