'Salem's Lot(112)

'I imagine it was Freud.'

'Very good. The Catholic Church began to cope with a new concept as it marched into the twentieth century: evil with a small "e". With a devil that was not a red-horned monster complete with spiked tall and cloven hooves, or a serpent crawling through the garden - although that is a remarkably apt psychological image. The devil, according to the Gospel According to Freud, would be a gigantic composite id, the subconscious of all of us.'

'Surely a more stupendous concept than red-tailed boog?ies or demons with such sensitive noses that they can be banished with one good fart from a constipated church?man,' Matt said.

'Stupendous, of course. But impersonal. Merciless. Un?touchable. Banishing Freud's devil is as impossible as Shylock's bargain to extract a pound of flesh without spilling a drop of blood. The Catholic Church has been forced to reinterpret its whole approach to evil - bombers over Cambodia, the war in Ireland and the Middle East, cop-killings and ghetto riots, the billion smaller evils loosed on the world each day like a plague of gnats. It is in the process of shedding its old medicine-man skin and re-emerging as a socially active, socially conscious body. The inner city rap-center ascendant over the confessional. Communion playing second fiddle to the civil rights move?ment and urban renewal. The church has been in the process of planting both feet in this world.'

'Where there are no witches or incubi or vampires,' Matt said, 'but only child-beating, incest, and the rape of the environment.'

'Yes.'

Matt said deliberately, 'And you hate it, don't you?'

'Yes,' Callahan said quietly. 'I think it's an abomination. It's the Catholic Church's way of saying that God isn't dead, only a little senile. And I guess that's my answer, isn't it? What do you want me to do?'

Matt told him.

Callahan thought it over and said, 'You realize it flies in the face of everything I just told you?'

'On the contrary, I think it's your chance to put your church - your church - to the test.'

Callahan took a deep breath. 'Very well, I agree. On one condition.'

'What would that be?

'That all of us who go on this little expedition first go to the shop this Mr Straker is managing. That Mr Mears, as spokesman, should speak to him frankly about all of this. That we all have a chance to observe his reactions. And finally, that he should have, his chance to laugh in our faces.'

Matt was frowning. 'It would be warning him.'

Callahan shook his head. 'I believe the warning would be of no avail if the three of us - Mr Mears, Dr Cody, and myself - still agreed that we should move ahead regardless.'     

'All right,' Matt said. 'I agree, contingent on the ap?proval of Ben and Jimmy Cody.'

'Fine.' Callahan sighed. 'Will it hurt you if I tell you that I hope this is all in your mind? That I hope this man Straker does laugh in our faces, and with good reason?'

'Not in the slightest.'

'I do hope it. I have agreed to more than you know. It frightens me.'

'I am frightened, too,' Matt said softly.

3

But walking back to St Andrew's, he did not feel frightened at all. He felt exhilarated, renewed. For the first time in years he was sober and did not crave a drink.

He went into the rectory, picked up the telephone, and dialed Eva Miller's boardinghouse. 'Hello? Mrs Miller? May I speak with Mr Mears? . . . He's not. Yes, I see . . . No, no message. I'll call tomorrow. Yes, good-by.' He hung up and went to the window.

Was Mears out there someplace, drinking beer on a country road, or could it be that everything the old school?teacher had told him was true?

If so . . . if so . . .

He could not stay in the house. He went out on the back porch, breathing in the brisk, steely air of October, and looked into the moving darkness. Perhaps it wasn't all Freud after all. Perhaps a large part of it had to do with the invention of the electric light, which had killed the shadows in men's minds much more effectively than a stake through a vampire's heart - and less messily, too.

The evil still went on, but now it went on in the hard, soulless glare of parking-lot fluorescents, of neon tubing, of hundred-watt bulbs by the billions. Generals planned strategic air strikes beneath the no-nonsense glow of alter?nating current, and it was all out of control, like a kid's soapbox racer going downhill with no brakes: I was follow?ing my orders. Yes, that was true, patently true. We were all soldiers, simply following what was written on our walking papers. But where were the orders coming from, ultimately? Take me to your leader. But where is his office? I was just following orders. The people elected me. But who elected the people?

Something flapped overhead and Callahan looked up, startled out of his confused revery. A bird? A bat? Gone. Didn't matter.

He listened for the town and heard nothing but the whine of telephone wires.

The night the kudzu gets your fields, you sleep like the dead.

Who wrote that? Dickey?

No sound; no light but the fluorescent in front of the church where Fred Astaire had never danced and the faint waxing and waning of the yellow warning light at the crossroads of Brock Street and Jointner Avenue. No baby cried.

The night the kudzu gets your fields, you sleep like -

?The exultation had faded away like a bad echo of pride. Terror struck him around the heart like a blow. Not terror for his life or his honor or that his housekeeper might find out about his drinking. It was a terror he had never dreamed of, not even in the tortured days of his ado?lescence.