'Salem's Lot(146)

Just Mark and I now.

Susan, Jimmy, Father Callahan, Matt. All gone.

Panic seized him and he grappled with it silently. He put the receiver back into its cradle without thinking about it, guillotining a question half-asked.

He walked back outside. It was ten after five. In the west the clouds were breaking up.

'Comes to just three dollars even,' Sonny told him brightly. 'That's Doc Cody's car, ain't it? I see them MD plates and it always makes me think of this movie I seen, this story about a bunch of crooks and one of them would always steal cars with MD plates because - '

Ben gave him three one-dollar bills. 'I've got to split, Sonny. Sorry. I've got trouble.'

Sonny's face crinkled up. 'Gee, I'm sorry to hear that, Mr Mears. Bad news from your editor?'

'I guess you could say that.' He got behind the wheel, shut the door, pulled out, and left Sonny looking after him in his yellow foulweather slicker.

'Matt's dead, isn't he?' Mark asked, watching him.

'Yes. Heart attack. How did you know?'

'Your face. I saw your face.'

It was 5:15.

45

Parkins Gillespie was standing on the small covered porch of the Municipal Building, smoking a Pall Mall and looking out at the western sky. He turned his attention to Ben Mears and Mark Petrie reluctantly. His face looked sad and old, like the glasses of water they bring you in cheap diners.

'How are You, Constable?' Ben asked.

'Tolerable,' Parkins allowed. He considered a hangnail on the leathery arc of skin that bordered his thumbnail, 'Seen you truckin' back and forth. Looked like the kid was drivin' up from Railroad Street by hisself this last time. That so?'

'Yes,' Mark said.

'Almost got clipped, Fella goin' the other way missed you by a whore's hair.'

'Constable,' Ben said, 'we want to tell you what's been happening around here.'  

Parkins Gillespie spat out the stub of his cigarette with?out raising his hands from the rail of the small covered porch. Without looking at either of them, he said calmly, 'I don't want to hear it.'

They looked at him dumbfounded.

'Nolly didn't show up today,' Parkins said, still in that calm, conversational voice. 'Somehow don't think he will. He called in late last night and said he'd seen Homer McCaslin's car out on the Deep Cut Road - I think it was the Deep Cut he said. He never called back in.' Slowly, sadly, like a man under water, he dipped into his shirt pocket and reached another Pall Mall out of it. He rolled it reflectively between his thumb and finger. 'These f**king things are going to be the death of me,' he said.

Ben tried again. 'The man who took the Marsten House, Gillespie. His name is Barlow. He's in the basement of Eva Miller's boardinghouse right now.'

'That so?' Parkins said with no particular surprise, 'Vam?pire, ain't he? Just like in all the comic books they used to put out twenty years ago.'

Ben said nothing. He felt more and more like a man lost in a great and grinding nightmare where clockwork ran on and on endlessly, unseen, but just below the surface of things.

'I'm leavin' town,' Parkins said. 'Got my stuff all packed up in the back of the car. I left my gun and the bubble and my badge in on the shelf. I'm done with lawin'. Goin' t'see my sister in Kittery, I am. Figure that's far enough to be safe.'

Ben heard himself say remotely, 'You gutless creep. You cowardly piece of shit. This town is still alive and you're running out on it.'

'It ain't alive,' Parkins said, lighting his smoke with a wooden kitchen match. 'That's why he came here. It's dead, like him. Has been for twenty years or more. Whole country's goin' the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin's in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin' popcorn and cheerin 'em on.' He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the broken rays of the westering sun, like a dream village. 'They prob'ly like bein' vampires. But not me; Nolly'd be in after me tonight. I'm goin'.'

Ben looked at him helplessly.

'You two fellas want to get in that car and hit it out of here,' Parkins said. 'This town will go on without us . . . for a while. Then it won't matter.'

Yes, Ben thought. Why don't we do that? Mark spoke the reason for both of them. 'Because he's bad, mister. He's really bad. That's all.'

'Is that so?' Parkins said. He nodded and puffed his Pall Mall. 'Well, okay.' He looked up toward the Consolidated High School. 'Piss-poor attendance today, from the Lot, anyway. Buses runnin' late, kids out sick, office phonin' houses and not gettin' any answer. The attendance officer called me, and I soothed him some. He's a funny little bald-headed fella who thinks he knows what he's doing. Well, the teachers are there, anyway. They come from out of town, mostly. They can teach each other.'

Thinking of Matt, Ben said, 'Not all of them are from out of town.'

'It don't matter,' Parkins said. His eyes dropped to the stakes in Ben's belt. 'You going to try to do that fella up with one of those?'

'Yes.'