'Salem's Lot(89)

'Mark, let me in! I command it! He commands it!'

Mark began to walk toward the window again. There was no help for it. There was no possible way to deny that voice. As he drew closer to the glass, the evil little boy's face on the other side began to twitch and grimace with eagerness. Fingernails, black with earth, scratched across the windowpane.

Think of something. Quick! Quick!

'The rain,' he whispered hoarsely. 'The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In vain he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.'

Danny Glick hissed at him.

'Mark! Open the window!'  

'Betty Bitter bought some butter - '

'The window, Mark, he commands it!'

' - but, says Betty, this butter's bitter.'

He was weakening. That whispering voice was seeing through his barricade, and the command was imperative. Mark's eyes fell on his desk, littered with his model mon?sters, now so bland and foolish  -

His eyes fixed abruptly on part of the display and widened slightly.

The plastic ghoul was walking through a plastic grave?yard and one of the monuments was in the shape of a cross.

With no pause for thought or consideration (both would have come to an adult - his father, for instance - and both would have undone him), Mark swept up the cross, curled it into a tight fist, and said loudly: 'Come on in, then.'

The face became suffused with an expression of vulpine triumph. The window slid up and Danny stepped in and took two paces forward. The exhalation from that opening mouth was fetid, beyond description: a smell of charnel pits. Cold, fish-white hands descended on Mark's shoulders. The head cocked, doglike, the upper lip curled away from those shining canines.

Mark brought the plastic cross around in a vicious swipe and laid it against Danny Glick's cheek.

His scream was horrible, unearthly . . . and silent. It echoed only in the corridors of his brain and the chambers of his soul. The smile of triumph on the Glick-thing's mouth became a yawning grimace of agony. Smoke spurted from the pallid flesh, and for just a moment, before the creature twisted away and half dived, half fell out the window, Mark felt the flesh yield like smoke.

And then it was over, as if it had never happened.

But for a moment the cross shone with a fierce light, as if an inner wire had been ignited. Then it dwindled away, leaving only a blue after-image in front of his eyes.

Through the grating in the floor, he heard the distinctive Click of the lamp in his parents' bedroom and his father's voice: 'What in hell was that?'

13

His bedroom door opened two minutes later, but that was' still time enough to set things to rights.

'Son?' Henry Petrie asked softly. 'Are you awake?'

'I guess so,' Mark answered sleepily.

'Did you have a bad dream?'

'I . . . think so. I don't remember.

'You called out in your sleep - '

'Sorry.'

'No, don't be sorry.' He hesitated and then earlier memories of his son, a small child in a blue blanket?suit that had been much more trouble but infinitely more explicable: 'Do you want a drink of water?'

'No thanks, Dad.'

Henry Petrie surveyed the room briefly, unable to under?stand the trembling feeling of dread he had wakened with, and which lingered still - a feeling of disaster averted by cold inches. Yes, everything seemed all right. The window was shut. Nothing was knocked over.

'Mark, is anything wrong?'

'No, Dad.'

'Well . . . g'night, then.'

'Night.' The door shut softly and his father's slippered feet descended the stairs. Mark let himself go limp with relief and delayed reaction. An adult might have had hysterics at this point, and a slightly younger or older child might also have done. But Mark felt the terror slip from him in almost imperceptible degrees, and the sensation reminded him of letting the wind dry you after you had been swimming on a cool day. And as the terror left, drowsiness began to come in its place.

Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting - not for the first time - on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job I the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

In some shorter, simpler mental shorthand, these thoughts passed through his brain. The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child's rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys.

Chapter Eleven BEN (IV)

1

It was ten past nine on Sunday morning - a bright, sun?washed Sunday morning - and Ben was beginning to get seriously worried about Susan when the phone by his bed rang. He snatched it up.