'Salem's Lot(123)

'Yes, that's so,' Parkins said meditatively.

'Think we ought to go up there and have a look?' Nolly spoke with a marked lack of his usual enthusiasm. He had been a lawman for five years and was still entranced with his own position.

'No,' Parkins said, 'I believe we'll just leave her alone.' He took his watch out of his vest and clicked up the scrolled silver cover like a trainman checking an express. Just 3:41. He checked his watch against the clock on the town hall and then tucked it back into place.

'How'd all that co-me out with Floyd Tibbits and the little McDougall baby?' Nolly asked.

'Dunno.'

'Oh,' Nolly said, momentarily nonplussed. Parkins was always taciturn. but this was a new high for him. He looked through the glasses again: no change.

'Town seems quiet today,' Nolly volunteered.

'Yes,' Parkins said. He looked across Jointner Avenue and the park with his faded blue eyes. Both the avenue and the park were deserted. They had been deserted most of the day. There was a remarkable lack of mothers strolling babies or idlers around the War Memorial.

'Funny things been happening,' Nolly ventured.

'Yes,' Parkins said, considering.

As a last gasp, Nolly fell back on the one bit of conver?sational bait that Parkins had never failed to rise to: the weather. 'Clouding up,' he said. 'Be rain by tonight.'

Parkins studied the sky. There were mackerel scales directly overhead and a building bar of clouds to the southwest. 'Yes,' he said, and threw the stub of his ciga?rette away.

'Park, you feelin' all right?'

Parkins Gillespie considered it.

'Nope,' he said.

'Well, what in hell's the matter.

'I believe,' Gillespie said, 'that I'm scared shitless.'

'What?' Nolly floundered. 'Of what?'

'Dunno,' Parkins said, and took his binoculars back. He began to scan the Marsten House again while Nolly stood speechless beside him.

15

Beyond the table where the letter had been propped the cellar made an L-turn, and they were now in what once had been a wine cellar. Hubert Marsten must have been a bootlegger indeed, Ben thought. There were small and medium casks covered with dust and cobwebs. One wall was covered with a crisscrossed wine rack, and ancient magnums still peered forth from some of the diamond?-shaped pigeonholes. Some of them had exploded, and where sparkling burgundy had once waited for some dis?cerning palate, the spider now made his home. Others had undoubtedly turned to vinegar; that sharp odor drifted in the air, mingled with that of slow corruption.

'No,' Ben said, speaking quietly, as a man speaks a fact. 'I can't.'

'You must,' Father Callahan said. 'I'm not telling you it will be easy, or for the best. Only that you must.'

'I can't!' Ben cried, and this time the words echoed in the cellar.

In the center, on a raised dais and spotlighted by Jimmy's flashlight, Susan Norton lay still. She was covered from shoulders to feet in a drift of simple white linen, and when they reached her, none of them had been able to speak. Wonder had swallowed words.

In life she had been a cheerfully pretty girl who had missed the turn to beauty somewhere (perhaps by inches), not through any lack in her features but - just possibly ?because her life had been so calm and unremarkable. But now she had achieved beauty. Dark beauty.

Death had not put its mark on her. Her face was blushed with color, and her lips, innocent of make-up, were a deep and glowing red. Her forehead was pale but flawless, the skin like cream. Her eyes were closed, and the dark lashes lay sootily against her cheeks. One hand was curled at her side, and the other was thrown lightly across her waist. Yet the total impression was not of angelic loveliness but a cold, disconnected beauty. Something in her face - not stated but hinted at - made Jimmy think of the young Saigon girls, some not yet thirteen, who would kneel before soldiers in the alleys behind the bars, not for the first time or the hundredth. Yet with those girls, the corruption hadn't been evil but only a knowledge of the world that had come too soon. The change in Susan's face was quite different - but he could not have said just how.

Now Callahan stepped forward and pressed his fingers against the springiness of her left breast. 'Here,' he said. 'The heart.'

'No,' Ben repeated. 'I can't.'

'Be her lover,' Father Callahan said softly. 'Better, be her husband. You won't hurt her, Ben. You'll free her. The only one hurt will be you.'

Ben looked at him dumbly. Mark had taken the stake from Jimmy's black bag and held it out wordlessly. Ben took it in a hand that seemed to stretch out for miles.

If I don't think about it when I do it, then maybe  -

?But it would be impossible not to think about it. And suddenly a line came to him from Dracula, that amusing bit of fiction that no longer amused him in the slightest. It was Van Heising's speech to Arthur Holmwood when Arthur had been faced with this same dreadful task: We must go through bitter waters before we reach the sweet.

Could there be sweetness for any of them, ever again?

'Take it away!' he groaned. 'Don't make me do this - '

No answer.

He felt a cold, sick sweat spring out on his brow, his cheeks, his forearms. The stake that had been a simple baseball bat four hours before seemed infused with eerie heaviness, as if invisible yet titanic lines of force had converged on it.