'Salem's Lot(56)

'Well . . . gettin' late and all . . . you really ought to go now, Mister  - ?'

'But it's so pleasant, speaking with you,' the old party said, and for the first time he turned his full face to Dud and looked in his eyes. The eyes were wide-set, and still rimmed with the dump's sullen fire. There was no way you could look away from them, although it wasn't polite to stare. 'You don't mind if we converse a bit longer, do you?'

'No, I guess not,' Dud said, and his voice sounded far away. Those eyes seemed to be expanding, growing, until they were like dark pits ringed with fire, pits you could fall into and drown in.

'Thank you,' he said. 'Tell me . . . does the hump on your back discommode you in your job?'

'No,' Dud said, still feeling far away. He thought faintly: I be buggered if he ain't hypnotizin' me. Just like that fella at Topsham Fair . . . what was his name? Mr Mephisto. He'd put you to steep and make you do all kinds of comical things - act like a chicken or run around like a dog or tell what happened at the birthday party you had when you were six. He hypnotized ole Reggie Sawyer and Gawd didn't we laugh. . . .

'Does it perhaps inconvenience you in other ways?'

'No . . . well . . . ' He looked into the eyes, fascinated.

'Come, come,' the old party's voice cajoled gently. 'We are friends, are we not? Speak to me, tell me.'

'Well . . . girls . . . you know, girls . . . '

'Of course,' the old party said soothingly 'The girls laugh at you, do they not? They have no knowing of your manhood. Of your strength.'

'That's right,' Dud whispered. 'They laugh. She laughs.'

'Who is this she?'

'Ruthie Crockett. She . . . she . . . ' The thought flew away. He let it. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered except this peace. This cool and complete peace.

'She makes the jokes perhaps? Snickers behind her hand? Nudges her friends when you pass?'

'Yes . . . '

'But you want her,' the voice insisted. 'Is it not so?'

'Oh yes . . . '

'You shall have her. I am sure of it.' There was something . . . pleasant about this. Far away he seemed to hear sweet voices singing foul words. Silver chimes . . . white faces . . . Ruthie Crockett's voice. He could almost see her, hands cupping her titties, making them bulge into the V of her cardigan sweater in ripe white half-globes, whispering: Kiss them, Dud . . . bite them . . . suck them. . . .

It was like drowning. Drowning in the old man's red?-rimmed eyes.

As the stranger came closer, Dud understood everything and welcomed it, and when the pain came, it was as sweet as silver, as green as still water at dark fathoms.

9

His hand was unsteady and instead of gripping the bottle the fingers knocked it off the desk and to the carpet with a heavy thump, where it lay gurgling good scotch into the green nap.

'Shit!' said Father Donald Callahan, and reached down to pick it up before all was lost. There was, in fact, not much to lose. He set what was left on the desk again (well back from the edge) and wandered into the kitchen to look for a rag under the sink and a bottle of cleaning fluid. It would never do to let Mrs Curless find a patch of spilled scotch by the leg of his study desk. Her kind, pitying looks were too hard to take on the long, grainy mornings when you were feeling a little low  -

Hung over, you mean.

Yes, hung over, very good. Let's have a little truth around here, by all means. Know the truth and it will set you free. Bully for the truth.

He found a bottle of something called E-Vap, which was not too far from the sound of violent regurgitation ('E-Vap!' croaked the old drunk, simultaneously crapping himself and blowing lunch), and took it back to the study. He was not weaving at all. Hardly at all. Watch this, Ossifer, I'm going to walk right up this white line to the stop light.

Callahan was an imposing fifty-three. His hair was sil?very, his eyes a direct blue (now threaded with tiny snaps of red) surrounded by Irish laugh wrinkles, his mouth firm, his slightly cleft chin firmer still. Some mornings, looking at himself in the mirror, he thought that when he reached sixty he would throw over the priesthood, go to Holly?wood, and get a job playing Spencer Tracy.

'Father Flanagan, where are you when we need you?' be muttered, and hunkered down by the stain. He squinted, read the instructions on the label of the bottle, and poured two capfuls of E-Vap onto the stain. The patch immediately turned white and began to bubble. Callahan viewed this with some alarm, and consulted the label again.

'For really tough stains,' he read aloud in the rich, rolling voice that had made him so welcome in this Parish after the long, denture-clicking peregrinations of poor old Father Hume, 'allow to set for seven to ten minutes.'

He went over to the study window, which fronted on Elm Street and St Andrew's on the far side.

Well, well, he thought. Here I am, Sunday night and drunk again.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

If you went slow and if you continued to work (on his long, solitary evenings, Father Callahan worked on his Notes. He had been working on the Notes for nearly seven years, supposedly for a book on the Catholic Church in New England, but he suspected now and then that the book would never be written. In point of fact, the Notes and his drinking problem had begun at the same time. Genesis I: I - 'In the beginning there was scotch, and Father Callahan said, Let there be Notes.'), you were hardly aware of the slow growth of drunkenness. You could educate your hand not to be aware of the bottle's lessening weight.