'Salem's Lot(145)

He lifted his tearless face to Ben's.

'He told me to look around for a flashlight because the cellar light switch was broken, just like at the Marsten House. So I started to look around. I . . . I noticed that all the knives in the rack over the sink were gone, but I didn't think anything of it. So in a way I killed him. I did it. It's my fault, all my fault, all my - '

Ben shook him: two brisk snaps. 'Stop it, Mark. Stop it!

Mark put his hands to his mouth, as if to catch the hysterical babble before it could flow out. His eyes stared hugely at Ben over his hands.

At last he went on: 'I found a flashlight in the hall dresser, see. And that was when Jimmy fell, and he started to scream. He - I would have fallen, too, but he warned me. The last thing he said was Look out, Mark.'

'What was it?' Ben demanded.

'Barlow and the others just took the stairs away,' Mark said in a dead, listless voice. 'Sawed the stairs off after the second one going down. They left a little more of the railing so it looked like . . . looked like . . .' He shook his head. 'In the dark, Jimmy just thought they were there. You see?'

'Yes,' Ben said. He saw. It made him feel sick. 'And the knives?'

'Set all around on the floor underneath,' Mark whis?pered. 'They pounded the blades through these thin ply?wood squares and then knocked off the handles so they would sit flat with the blades pointing . . . pointing.'

'Oh,' Ben said helplessly. 'Oh, Christ.' He reached down and took Mark by the shoulders. 'Are you sure he's dead, Mark?'

'Yes. He . . . he was stuck in half a dozen places. The blood . . . '

Ben looked at his watch. It was ten minutes of five. Again he had that feeling of being crowded, of running out of time.

'What are we going to do now?' Mark asked remotely.

'Go into town. Talk to Matt on the phone and then talk to Parkins Gillespie. We'll finish Barlow before dark. We've got to.'

Mark smiled a small, morbid smile. 'Jimmy said that, too. He said we were going to stop his clock. But he keeps beating us. Better guys than us must have tried, too.'

Ben looked down at the boy and got ready to do some?thing nasty.

'You sound scared,' he said.

'I am scared,' Mark said, not rising to it. 'Aren't you?'

'I'm scared,' Ben said, 'but I'm mad, too. I lost a girl I liked one hell of a lot. I loved her, I guess. We both lost Jimmy. You lost your mother and father. They're lying in your living room under a dust cover from your sofa.' He pushed himself to a final brutality. 'Want to go back and look?'

Mark winced away from him, his face horrified and hurting.

'I want you with me,' Ben said more softly He felt a germ of self-disgust in his stomach. He sounded like a football coach before the big game. 'I don't care who's tried to stop him before. I don't care if Attila the Run played him and lost. I'm going to have my shot. I want you with me. I need you.' And that was the truth, pure and naked.

'Okay,' Mark said. He looked down into his lap, and his hands found each other and entwined in distraught pantomime.

'Dig your feet in,' Ben said.

Mark looked at him hopelessly. I'm trying,' he said.

44

Sonny's Exxon station on outer Jointner Avenue was open and Sonny James (who exploited his country-music name?sake with a huge color poster in the window beside a pyramid of oil cans) came out to wait on them himself. He was a small, gnome-like man whose receding hair was lawn-mowered into a perpetual crew cut that showed his pink scalp.

'Hey there, Mr Mears, howya doin'? Where your Citrowan?'

'Laid up, Sonny. Where's Pete?' Pete Cook was Sonny's part-time help, and lived in town. Sonny did not.

'Never showed up today. Don't matter. Things been slow, anyway. Town seems downright dead.'

Ben felt dark, hysterical laughter in his belly. It threatened to boil out of his mouth in a great and rancid wave.

'Want to fill it up?' he managed. 'Want to use your phone.'

'Sure. Hi, kid. No school today?'

I'm on a field trip with Mr Mears,' Mark said. 'I had a bloody nose.'

'I guess to God you did. My brother used to get 'em. They're a sign of high blood pressure, boy. You want to watch out.' He strolled to the back of Jimmy's car and took off the gas cap

Ben went inside and dialed the pay phone beside the rack of New England road maps.

'Cumberland Hospital, which department?'

'I'd like to speak with Mr Burke, please. Room 402.

There was an uncharacteristic hesitation, and Ben was about to ask if the room had been changed when the voice said: 'Who is this, please?'

'Benjaman Mears.' The possibility of Matt's death sud?denly loomed up in his mind like a long shadow. Could that be? Surely not - that would be too much. 'Is he all right?'

'Are you a relative?'

'No, a close friend. He isn't - '

'Mr Burke died at 3:07 this afternoon, Mr Mears. If you'd like to hold for just a minute, I'll see if Dr Cody has come in yet. Perhaps he could . . . '

The voice went on but Ben had ceased hearing it, although the receiver was still glued to his ear. The realiz?ation of how much he had been depending on Matt to get them through the rest of this nightmare afternoon crashed home with sickening weight. Matt was dead. Congestive heart failure. Natural causes. It was as if God Himself had turned His face away from them.