'Salem's Lot(129)

'You'll scream,' Barlow whispered, and his lips had twisted into a grimace of animal hate. 'You'll scream until your throat bursts!'

'Stop that!' Callahan cried.

Chapter Fourteen THE LOT (IV) 3

'And should I?' The hate was wiped from his face. A darkly charming smile shone forth in its place. 'Should I reprieve the boy, save him for another night?'

'Yes!'

Softly, almost purring, Barlow said, 'Then will you throw away your cross and face me on even terms - black against white? Your faith against my own?'

'Yes,' Callahan said, but a trifle less firmly.

'Then do it!' Those full lips became pursed, anticipatory. The high forehead gleamed in the weird fairy light that filled the room.

'And trust you to let him go? I would be wiser to put a rattlesnake in my shirt and trust it not to bite me.'

'But I trust you . . . look!'

He let Mark go and stood back, both hands in the air, empty.

Mark stood still, unbelieving for a moment, and then ran to his parents without a backward look at Barlow.

'Run, Mark!' Callahan cried. 'Run!'

Mark looked up at him, his eyes huge and dark. 'I think they're dead - '

'R UN!'

Mark got slowly to his feet. He turned around and looked at Barlow.

'Soon, little brother,' Barlow said, almost benignly. 'Very soon now you and I will - '

Mark spit in his face.

Barlow's breath stopped. His brow darkened with a depth of fury that made his previous expressions seem like what they might well have been: mere play-acting. For a moment Callahan saw a madness in his eyes blacker than the soul of murder.

'You spit on me,' Barlow whispered. His body was trembling, nearly rocking with his rage. He took a shudder?ing step forward like some awful blind man.

'Get back!' Callahan screamed, and thrust the cross forward. Barlow cried out and threw his hands in front of his face. The cross flared with preternatural, dazzling brilliance, and it was at that moment that Callahan might have banished him if he had dared to press forward.

'I'm going to kill you,' Mark said.

He was gone, like a dark eddy of water.

Barlow seemed to grow taller. His hair, swept back from his brow in the European manner, seemed to float around his skull. He was wearing a dark suit and a wine-colored tie, impeccably knotted, and to Callahan he seemed part and parcel of the darkness that surrounded him. His eyes glared out of their sockets like sly and sullen embers.

'Then fulfill your part of the bargain, shaman.'

'I'm a priest!' Callahan flung at him.

Barlow made a small, mocking bow. 'Priest,' he said, and the word sounded like a dead haddock in his mouth.

Callahan stood indecisive. Why throw it down? Drive him off, settle for a draw tonight, and tomorrow  -

But a deeper part of his mind warned. To deny the vampire's challenge was to risk possibilities far graver than any he had considered. If he dared not throw the cross aside, it would be as much as admitting . . . admitting . . . what? If only things weren't going so fast, if one only had time to think, to reason it out  -

The cross's glow was dying.

He looked at it, eyes widening. Fear leaped into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. His head jerked up and he stared at Barlow. He was walking toward him across the kitchen and his smile was wide, almost voluptuous.

'Stay back,' Callahan said hoarsely, retreating a step. 'I command it, in the name of God.'

Barlow laughed at him.

The glow in the cross was only a thin and guttering light in a cruciform shape. The shadows had crept across the vampire's face again, masking his features in strangely barbaric lines and triangles under the sharp cheekbones.

Callahan took another step backward, and his bu**ocks bumped the kitchen table, which was set against the wall.

'Nowhere left to go,' Barlow murmured sadly. His dark eyes bubbled with infernal mirth. 'Sad to see a man's faith fail. Ah, well . . .'

The cross trembled in Callahan's hand and suddenly the last of its light vanished. It was only a piece of plaster that his mother had bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper's price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough power to smash down walls and shatter stone, was gone. The muscles remembered the thrumming but could not duplicate it.

Barlow reached from the darkness and plucked the cross from his fingers. Callahan cried out miserably, the cry that had vibrated in the soul - but never the throat - of that long-ago child who had been left alone each night with Mr Flip peering out of the closet at him from between the shutters of sleep. And the next sound would haunt him for the rest of his life: two dry snaps as Barlow broke the arms of the cross, and a meaningless thump as he threw it on the floor.

'God damn you!' he cried out.

'It's too late for such melodrama,' Barlow said from the darkness. His voice was almost sorrowful. 'There is no need of it. You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross . . . the bread and wine . . . the confessional . . . only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night. In a way, I hoped it might be so. It has been long since I have met an opponent of any real worth. The boy makes ten of you, false priest.'