'Salem's Lot(62)

'Who was it?'

'It was just a dream, Mr Burke.'

'But in the dream who was it?'

'I don't know. I was going to try and eat, but the thought of it made me want to puke.'

'What did you do?'

'I watched TV until Johnny Carson went off. I felt a lot better. Then I went to bed.'

'Did you lock the windows?'

'No.'

'And slept all day?'

'I woke up around sundown.'

'Weak?'

'I hope to tell.' He passed a hand over his face. I feel so low!' he cried out in a breaking voice. 'It's just the flu or something, isn't it, Mr Burke? I'm not really sick, am I?'

'I don't know,' Matt said.

'I thought a few beers would cheer me up, but I can't drink it. I took one sip and it like to gag me. The last week . . . it all seems like a bad dream. And I'm scared. I'm awful scared.' He put his thin hands to his face and Matt saw that he was crying.

'Mike?'

No response.

'Mike.' Gently, he pulled Mike's hands away from his face. 'I want you to come home with me tonight. I want you to sleep in my guest room. Will you do that?'

'All right. I don't care.' He wiped his sleeve across his eyes with lethargic slowness.  

'And tomorrow I want you to come see Dr Cody with me.'

'All right.'

'Come on. Let's go.'

He thought of calling Ben Mears and didn't.

4

When Matt knocked on the door, Mike Ryerson said, 'Come in.'

Matt came in with a pair of pajamas. 'These are going to be a little big - '

'That's all right, Mr Burke. I sleep in my skivvies.' He was standing in his shorts now, and Matt saw that his entire body was horribly pale. His ribs stood out in circular ridges.

'Turn your head, Mike. This way.'

Mike turned his head obediently.

'Mike, where did you get those marks?'

Mike's hand touched his throat below the angle of the jaw. 'I don't know.'

Matt stood restively. Then he went to the window. The catch was securely fastened, yet he rattled it back and forth with hands that were distraught. Beyond, the dark pressed against the glass heavily. 'Call me in the night if you want anything. Anything. Even if you have a bad dream. Will you do that, Mike?'

'Yes.'

'I mean it. Anything. I'm right down the hall.'

'I will.'

Hesitating, feeling there were other things he should do he went out.

5

He didn't sleep at all, and the only thing now that kept him from calling Ben Mears was knowing that everyone at Eva's would be in bed. The boardinghouse was filled with old men, and when the phone rang late at night, it meant that someone had died.

He lay restively, watching the luminous hands of his alarm clock move from eleven-thirty to twelve. The house was preternaturally silent - perhaps because his ears were consciously attuned to catch the slightest noise. The house was an old one and built solidly, and its settling groans had mostly ceased long before. There were no sounds but the clock and the faint passage of the wind outside. No cars passed on Taggart Stream Road late on week nights.

What you're thinking is madness.

But step by step he had been forced backward toward belief. Of course, being a literary man, it had been the first thing that had come to mind when Jimmy Cody had thumbnailed Danny Glick's case. He and Cody had laughed over it. Maybe this was his punishment for laugh?ing.

Scratches? Those marks weren't scratches. They were punctures.

One was taught that such things could not be; that things like Coleridge's 'Cristabel' or Brain Stoker's evil fairy tale were only the warp and woof of fantasy. Of course monsters existed; they were the men with their fingers on the thermonuclear triggers in six countries, the hijackers, the mass murderers, the child molesters. But not this. One knows better. The mark of the devil on a woman's breast is only a mole, the man who came back from the dead and stood at his wife's door dressed in the cerements of the grave was only suffering from locomotor ataxia, the bogey?man who gibbers and capers in the corner of a child's bedroom is only a heap of blankets. Some clergymen had proclaimed that even God, that venerable white warlock, was dead.

He was bled almost white.

No sound from up the hall. Matt thought: He is sleeping like the stones himself. Well, why not? Why had he invited Mike back to the house, if not for a good night's sleep, uninterrupted by . . . by bad dreams? He got out of bed and turned on the lamp and went to the window. From here one could just see the roof tree of the Marsten House, frosted in moonlight.

I'm frightened.

But it was worse than that; he was dead scared. His mind ran over the old protections for an unmentionable disease: garlic, holy wafer and water, crucifix, rose, run?ning water. He had none of the holy things. He was a nonpracticing Methodist, and privately thought that John Groggins was the ass**le of the Western world.

The only religious object in the house was  -

Softly yet clearly in the silent house the words came, spoken in Mike Ryerson's voice, spoken in the dead ac?cents of sleep:

'Yes. Come in.'

Matt's breath stopped, then whistled out in soundless scream. He felt faint with fear. His belly seemed to have turned to lead. His testicles had drawn up. What in God's name had been invited into his house?