Текст книги "Salem's Lot"
Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
THREE
There was no play practice Thursday night, and Matt drove over to Dell’s around nine o’clock for two or three beers. If that damn snip Jimmy Cody wouldn’t prescribe for his insomnia, he would prescribe for himself.
Dell’s was sparsely populated on nights when no band played. Matt saw only three people he knew: Weasel Craig, nursing a beer alone in the corner; Floyd Tibbits, with thunderclouds on his brow (he had spoken to Susan three times this week, twice on the phone and once in person, in the Norton living room, and none of the conversations had gone well); and Mike Ryerson, who was sitting in one of the far booths against the wall.
Matt walked over to the bar, where Dell Markey was polishing glasses and watching “Ironside” on a portable TV.
“Hi, Matt. How’s it going?”
“Fair. Slow night.”
Dell shrugged. “Yeah. They got a couple of motorcycle pictures over to the drive-in in Gates. I can’t compete with that. Glass or pitcher?”
“Make it a pitcher.”
Dell drew it, cut the foam off, and added another two inches. Matt paid, and after a moment’s hesitation, walked over to Mike’s booth. Mike had filtered through one of Matt’s English classes, like almost all the young people in the Lot, and Matt had enjoyed him. He had done above-average work with an average intelligence because he worked hard and had asked over and over about things he didn’t understand until he got them. In addition to that, he had a clear, free-running sense of humor and a pleasant streak of individualism that made him a class favorite.
“Hi, Mike,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”
Mike Ryerson looked up and Matt felt shock hit him like a live wire. His first reaction: Drugs. Heavy drugs.
“Sure, Mr Burke. Sit down.” His voice was listless. His complexion was a horrid, pasty white, darkening to deep shadows under his eyes. The eyes themselves seemed overlarge and hectic. His hands moved slowly across the table in the tavern’s semigloom like ghosts. A glass of beer stood untouched before him.
“How are you doing, Mike?” Matt poured himself a glass of beer, controlling his hands, which wanted to shake.
His life had always been one of sweet evenness, a graph with modulate highs and lows (and even those had sunk to foothills since the death of his mother thirteen years before), and one of the things that disturbed it was the miserable ends some of his students came to. Billy Royko dying in a Vietnam helicopter crash two months before the cease-fire; Sally Greer, one of the brightest and most vivacious girls he had ever had, killed by her drunken boyfriend when she told him she wanted to break up; Gary Coleman, who had gone blind due to some mysterious optic nerve degeneration; Buddy Mayberry’s brother Doug, the only good kid in that whole half-bright clan, drowning at Old Orchard Beach; and drugs, the little death. Not all of them who waded into the waters of Lethe found it necessary to take a bath in it, but there were enough—kids who had made dreams their protein.
“Doing?” Mike said slowly. “I don’t know, Mr Burke. Not so good.”
“What kind of shit are you on, Mike?” Matt asked gently.
Mike looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“Dope,” Matt said. “Bennies? Reds? Coke? Or is it—”
“I’m not on dope,” Mike said. “I guess I’m sick.”
“Is that the truth?”
“I never did no heavy dope in my life,” Mike said, and the words seemed to be costing him a dreadful effort. “Just grass, and I ain’t had any of that for four months. I’m sick…been sick since Monday, I think it was. I fell asleep out at Harmony Hill Sunday night, see. Never even woke up until Monday morning.” He shook his head slowly. “I felt crappy. I’ve felt crappy ever since. Worse every day, it seems like.” He sighed, and the whistle of air seemed to shake his frame like a dead leaf on a November maple.
Matt leaned forward, concerned. “This happened after Danny Glick’s funeral?”
“Yeah.” Mike looked at him again. “I came back to finish up after everybody went home but that fucking—excuse me, Mr Burke—that Royal Snow never showed up. I waited for him a long time, and that’s when I must have started to get sick, because everything after that is…oh, it hurts my head. It’s hard to think.”
“What do you remember, Mike?”
“Remember?” Mike looked into the golden depths of his beer glass and watched the bubbles detaching themselves from the sides and floating to the surface to release their gas.
“I remember singing,” he said. “The sweetest singing I ever heard. And a feeling like…like drowning. Only it was nice. Except for the eyes. The eyes.”
He clutched his elbows and shuddered.
“Whose eyes?” Matt asked, leaning forward.
“They were red. Oh, scary eyes.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t remember. No eyes. I dreamed it all.” He pushed it away from himself. Matt could almost see him do it. “I don’t remember anything else about Sunday night. I woke up Monday morning on the ground, and at first I couldn’t even get up I was so tired. But I finally did. The sun was coming up and I was afraid I’d get a sunburn. So I went down in the woods by the brook. Tired me out. Oh, awful tired. So I went back to sleep. Slept till…oh, four or five o’clock.” He offered a papery little chuckle. “I was all covered with leaves when I woke up. I felt a little better, though. I got up and went back to my truck.” He passed a slow hand over his face. “I must have finished up with the little Glick boy Sunday night, though. Funny. I don’t even remember.”
“Finished up?”
“Grave was all filled in, Royal or no Royal. Sods tamped in and all. A good job. Don’t remember doing it. Must have been really sick.”
“Where did you spend Monday night?”
“At my place. Where else?”
“How did you feel Tuesday morning?”
“I never woke up Tuesday morning. Slept through the whole day. Never woke up until Tuesday night.”
“How did you feel then?”
“Terrible. Legs like rubber. I tried to go get a drink of water and almost fell down. I had to go into the kitchen holding on to things. Weak as a kitten.” He frowned. “I had a can of stew for my dinner—you know, that Dinty Moore stuff—but I couldn’t eat it. Seemed like just looking at it made me feel sick to my stomach. Like when you’ve got an awful hangover and someone shows you food.”
“You didn’t eat anything?”
“I tried, but I threw it up. But I felt a little better. I went out and walked around for a while. Then I went back to bed.” His fingers traced old beer rings on the table. “I got scared before I went to bed. Just like a little kid afraid of the Allamagoosalum. I went around and made sure all the windows were locked. And I went to sleep with all the lights on.”
“And yesterday morning?”
“Hmmm? No…never got up until nine o’clock last night.” He offered the papery little chuckle again. “I remember thinking if it kept up I’d be sleeping the clock right around. And that’s what you do when you’re dead.”
Matt regarded him somberly. Floyd Tibbits got up and put a quarter in the juke and began to punch up songs.
“Funny,” Mike said. “My bedroom window was open when I got up. I must have done it myself. I had a dream…someone was at the window and I got up…got up to let him in. Like you’d get up to let in an old friend who was cold or…or hungry.”
“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.
FOUR
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.
FIVE
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 laughing.
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 Bram 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 bogeyman 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 rooftop 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, running water. He had none of the holy things. He was a nonpracticing Methodist, and privately thought that John Groggins was the asshole 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 accents of sleep:
“Yes. Come in.”
Matt’s breath stopped, then whistled out in a 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?
Stealthily, the sound of the hasp on the guest room window being turned back. Then the grind of wood against wood as the window was forced up.
He could go downstairs. Run, get the Bible from the dresser in the dining room. Run back up, jerk open the door to the guest room, hold the Bible high: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I command you to be gone—
But who was in there?
Call me in the night if you want anything.
But I can’t, Mike. I’m an old man. I’m afraid.
Night invaded his brain and made it a circus of terrifying images which danced in and out of the shadows. Clown-white faces, huge eyes, sharp teeth, forms that slipped from the shadows with long white hands that reached for…for…
A shuddering groan escaped him, and he put his hands over his face.
I can’t. I am afraid.
He could not have risen even if the brass knob on his own door had begun to turn. He was paralyzed with fear and wished crazily that he had never gone out to Dell’s that night.
I am afraid.
And in the awful heavy silence of the house, as he sat impotently on his bed with his face in his hands, he heard the high, sweet, evil laugh of a child—
–and then the sucking sounds.
Part Two
The Emperor of Ice Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered three fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
W
ALLACE
S
TEVENS
This column has
A hole. Can you see
The Queen of the Dead?
G
EORGE
S
EFERIS
Chapter Eight
Ben (
III
)
The knocking must have been going on for a long time, because it seemed to echo far down the avenues of sleep as he slowly struggled up to wakefulness. It was dark outside, but when he turned to grasp the clock and bring it to his face, he knocked it onto the floor. He felt disoriented and frightened.
“Who is it?” he called out.
“It’s Eva, Mr Mears. There’s a phone call for you.”
He got up, pulled on his pants, and opened the door bare-chested. Eva Miller was in a white terry-cloth robe, and her face was full of the slow vulnerability of a person still two-fifths asleep. They looked at each other nakedly, and he was thinking: Who’s sick? Who’s died?
“Long-distance?”
“No, it’s Matthew Burke.”
The knowledge did not relieve him as it should have done. “What time is it?”
“Just after four. Mr Burke sounds very upset.”
Ben went downstairs and picked the phone up. “This is Ben, Matt.”
Matt was breathing rapidly into the phone, the sound of his respiration coming in harsh little blurts. “Can you come, Ben? Right now?”
“Yes, all right. What’s the matter? Are you sick?”
“Not on the phone. Just come.”
“Ten minutes.”
“Ben?”
“Yes.”
“Have you got a crucifix? A St Christopher’s medallion? Anything like that?”
“Hell no. I’m—was—a Baptist.”
“All right. Come fast.”
Ben hung up and went back upstairs quickly. Eva was standing with one hand on the newel post, her face filled with worry and indecision—on one hand wanting to know, on the other, not wanting to mix in the tenant’s business.
“Is Mr Burke sick, Mr Mears?”
“He says not. He just asked me…say, you aren’t Catholic?”
“My husband was.”
“Do you have a crucifix or a rosary or a St Christopher’s medallion?”
“Well…my husband’s crucifix is in the bedroom…I could…”
“Yes, would you?”
She went up the hall, her furry slippers scuffing at the faded strip of carpet. Ben went into his room, pulled on yesterday’s shirt, and slipped his bare feet into a pair of loafers. When he came out again, Eva was standing by his door, holding the crucifix. It caught the light and threw back dim silver.
“Thank you,” he said, taking it.
“Did Mr Burke ask you for this?”
“Yes, he did.”
She was frowning, more awake now. “He’s not Catholic. I don’t believe he goes to church.”
“He didn’t explain to me.”
“Oh.” She nodded in a charade of understanding and gave him the crucifix. “Please be careful of it. It has great value for me.”
“I understand that. I will.”
“I hope Mr Burke is all right. He’s a fine man.”
He went downstairs and out onto the porch. He could not hold the crucifix and dig for his car keys at the same time, and instead of simply transferring it from his right hand to his left, he slipped it over his neck. The silver slipped comfortably against his shirt, and getting into the car he was hardly aware that he felt comforted.
TWO
Every window on the lower floor of Matt’s house was lit up, and when Ben’s headlights splashed across the front as he turned into the driveway, Matt opened the door and waited for him.
He came up the walk ready for almost anything, but Matt’s face was still a shock. It was deadly pale, and the mouth was trembling. His eyes were wide, and they didn’t seem to blink.
“Let’s go in the kitchen,” he said.
Ben came in, and as he stepped inside, the hall light caught the cross lying against his chest.
“You brought one.”
“It belongs to Eva Miller. What’s the matter?”
Matt repeated: “In the kitchen.” As they passed the stairs leading to the second floor, he glanced upward and seemed to flinch away at the same time.
The kitchen table where they had eaten spaghetti was bare now except for three items, two of them peculiar: a cup of coffee, an old-fashioned clasp Bible, and a .38 revolver.
“Now, what’s up, Matt? You look awful.”
“And maybe I dreamed the whole thing, but thank God you’re here.” He had picked up the revolver and was turning it over restively in his hands.
“Tell me. And stop playing with that thing. Is it loaded?”
Matt put the pistol down and ran a hand through his hair. “Yes, it’s loaded. Although I don’t think it would do any good…unless I used it on myself.” He laughed, a jagged, unhealthy sound like grinding glass.
“Stop that.”
The harshness in his voice broke the queer, fixed look in his eyes. He shook his head, not like a man propounding a negative, but the way some animals will shake themselves coming out of cold water.
“There’s a dead man upstairs,” he said.
“Who?”
“Mike Ryerson. He works for the town. He’s a groundskeeper.”
“Are you sure he’s dead?”
“I am in my guts, even though I haven’t looked in on him. I haven’t dared. Because, in another way, he may not be dead at all.”
“Matt, you’re not talking good sense.”
“Don’t you think I know that? I’m talking nonsense and I’m thinking madness. But there was no one to call but you. In all of ’salem’s Lot, you’re the only person that might…might…” He shook his head and began again. “We talked about Danny Glick.”
“Yes.”
“And how he might have died of pernicious anemia…what our grandfathers would have called ‘just wasting away.’”
“Yes.”
“Mike buried him. And Mike found Win Purinton’s dog impaled on the Harmony Hill Cemetery gates. I met Mike Ryerson in Dell’s last night, and—”
THREE
“—and I couldn’t go in,” he finished. “Couldn’t. I sat on my bed for nearly four hours. Then I crept downstairs like a thief and called you. What do you think?”
Ben had taken the crucifix off; now he poked at the glimmering heap of fine-link chain with a reflective finger. It was almost five o’clock and the eastern sky was rose with dawn. The fluorescent bar overhead had gone pallid.
“I think we’d better go up to your guest room and look. That’s all, I think, right now.”
“The whole thing seems like a madman’s nightmare now, with the light coming in the window.” He laughed shakily. “I hope it is. I hope Mike is sleeping like a baby.”
“Well, let’s go see.”
Matt firmed his lips with an effort. “Okay.” He dropped his eyes to the table and then looked at Ben questioningly.
“Sure,” Ben said, and slipped the crucifix over Matt’s neck.
“It actually does make me feel better.” He laughed self-consciously. “Do you suppose they’ll let me wear it when they cart me off to Augusta?”
Ben said, “Do you want the gun?”
“No, I guess not. I’d stick it in the top of my pants and blow my balls off.”
They went upstairs, Ben in the lead. There was a short hall at the top, running both ways. At one end, the door to Matt’s bedroom stood open, a pale sheaf of lamplight spilling out onto the orange runner.
“Down at the other end,” Matt said.
Ben walked down the hall and stood in front of the guest room door. He did not believe the monstrosity Matt had implied, but nonetheless he found himself engulfed by a wave of the blackest fright he had ever known.
You open the door and he’s hanging from the beam, the face swelled and puffed and black, and then the eyes open and they’re bulging in the sockets but they’re SEEING you and they’re glad you came—
The memory rose up in almost total sensory reference, and for the moment of its totality he was paralyzed. He could even smell the plaster and the wild odor of nesting animals. It seemed to him that the plain varnished wood door of Matt Burke’s guest room stood between him and all the secrets of hell.
Then he twisted the knob and pushed the door inward. Matt was at his shoulder, and he was holding Eva’s crucifix tightly.
The guest room window faced directly east, and the top arc of the sun had just cleared the horizon. The first pellucid rays shone directly through the window, isolating a few golden motes as it fell in a shaft to the white linen sheet that was pulled up to Mike Ryerson’s chest.
Ben looked at Matt and nodded. “He’s all right,” he whispered. “Sleeping.”
Matt said tonelessly, “The window’s open. It was closed and locked. I made sure of it.”
Ben’s eyes centered on the upper hem of the flawlessly laundered sheet that covered Mike. There was a single small drop of blood on it, dried to maroon.
“I don’t think he’s breathing,” Matt said.
Ben took two steps forward and then stopped. “Mike? Mike Ryerson. Wake up, Mike!”
No response. Mike’s lashes lay cleanly against his cheeks. His hair was tousled loosely across his brow, and Ben thought that in the first delicate light he was more than handsome; he was as beautiful as the profile of a Greek statue. Light color bloomed in his cheeks, and his body held none of the deathly pallor Matt had mentioned—only healthy skin tones.
“Of course he’s breathing,” he said a trifle impatiently. “Just fast asleep. Mike—” He stretched out a hand and shook Ryerson slightly. Mike’s left arm, which had been crossed loosely on his chest, fell limply over the side of the bed and the knuckles rapped on the floor, like a request for entry.
Matt stepped forward and picked up the limp arm. He pressed his index finger over the wrist. “No pulse.”
He started to drop it, remembered the grisly knocking noise the knuckles had made, and put the arm across Ryerson’s chest. It started to fall anyway, and he put it back more firmly with a grimace.
Ben couldn’t believe it. He was sleeping, had to be. The good color, the obvious suppleness of the muscles, the lips half parted as if to draw breath…unreality washed over him. He placed his wrist against Ryerson’s shoulder and found the skin cool.
He moistened his finger and held it in front of those half-open lips. Nothing. Not a feather of breath.
He and Matt looked at each other.
“The marks on the neck?” Matt asked.
Ben took Ryerson’s jaw in his hands and turned it gently until the exposed cheek lay against the pillow. The movement dislodged the left arm, and the knuckles rapped the floor again.
There were no marks on Mike Ryerson’s neck.
FOUR
They were at the kitchen table again. It was 5:35 am. They could hear the lowing of the Griffen cows as they were let into their east pasturage down the hill and beyond the belt of shrubbery and underbrush that screened Taggart Stream from view.
“According to folklore, the marks disappear,” Matt said suddenly. “When the victim dies, the marks disappear.”
“I know that,” Ben said. He remembered it both from Stoker’s Draculaand from the Hammer films starring Christopher Lee.
“We have to put an ash stake through his heart.”
“You better think again,” Ben said, and sipped his coffee. “That would be damned hard to explain to a coroner’s jury. You’d go to jail for desecrating a corpse at the very least. More likely to the funny farm.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?” Matt asked quietly.
With no discernible hesitation, Ben said, “No.”
“Do you believe me about the marks?”
“I don’t know. I guess I have to. Why would you lie to me? I can’t see any gain for you in a lie. I suppose you’d lie if you had killed him.”
“Perhaps I did, then,” Matt said, watching him.
“There are three things going against it. First, what’s your motive? Pardon me, Matt, but you’re just too old for the classic ones like jealousy and money to fit very well. Second, what was your method? If it was poison, he must have gone very easily. He certainly looks peaceful enough. And that eliminates most of the common poisons right there.”
“What’s your third reason?”
“No murderer in his right mind would invent a story like yours to cover up murder. It would be insane.”
“We keep coming back to my mental health,” Matt said. He sighed. “I knew we would.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Ben said, accenting the first word slightly. “You seem rational enough.”
“But you’re not a doctor, are you?” Matt asked. “And crazy people are sometimes able to counterfeit sanity remarkably well.”
Ben agreed. “So where does that put us?”
“Back to square one.”
“No. Neither one of us can afford that, because there’s a dead man upstairs and pretty soon he’s going to have to be explained. The constable is going to want to know what happened, and so is the medical examiner, and so is the county sheriff. Matt, could it be that Mike Ryerson was just sick with some virus all week and happened to drop dead in your house?”
For the first time since they had come back down, Matt showed signs of agitation. “Ben, I told you what he said! I saw the marks on his neck! And I heard him invite someone into my house! Then I heard…God, I heard that laugh!” His eyes had taken on that peculiar blank look again.
“All right,” Ben said. He got up and went to the window, trying to set his thoughts in order. They didn’t go well. As he had told Susan, things seemed to have a way of getting out of hand.
He was looking toward the Marsten House.
“Matt, do you know what’s going to happen to you if you even let out a whisper of what you’ve told me?”
Matt didn’t answer.
“People are going to start tapping their foreheads behind your back when you go by in the street. Little kids are going to get out their Halloween wax teeth when they see you coming and jump out and yell Boo!when you walk by their hedge. Somebody will invent a rhyme like One, two, three, four, I’m gonna suck your blood some more. The high school kids will pick it up and you’ll hear it in the halls when you pass. Your colleagues will begin looking at you strangely. There’s apt to be anonymous phone calls from people purporting to be Danny Glick or Mike Ryerson. They’ll turn your life into a nightmare. They’ll hound you out of town in six months.”
“They wouldn’t. They know me.”
Ben turned from the window. “Who do they know? A funny old duck who lives alone out on Taggart Stream Road. Just the fact that you’re not married is apt to make them believe you’ve got a screw loose anyway. And what backup can I give you? I saw the body but nothing else. Even if I had, they would just say I was an outsider. They would even get around to telling each other we were a couple of queers and this was the way we got our kicks.”
Matt was looking at him with slowly dawning horror.
“One word, Matt. That’s all it will take to finish you in ’salem’s Lot.”
“So there’s nothing to be done.”
“Yes, there is. You have a certain theory about who—or what—killed Mike Ryerson. The theory is relatively simple to prove or disprove, I think. I’m in a hell of a fix. I can’t believe you’re crazy, but I can’t believe that Danny Glick came back from the dead and sucked Mike Ryerson’s blood for a whole week before killing him, either. But I’m going to put the idea to the test. And you’ve got to help.”
“How?”
“Call your doctor, Cody is his name? Then call Parkins Gillespie. Let the machinery take over. Tell your story just as though you’d never heard a thing in the night. You went into Dell’s and sat down with Mike. He said he’d been feeling sick since last Sunday. You invited him home with you. You went in to check him around three-thirty this morning, couldn’t wake him, and called me.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s it. When you speak to Cody, don’t even say he’s dead.”
“Not dead—”
“Christ, how do we know he is?” Ben exploded. “You took his pulse and couldn’t find it; I tried to find his breath and couldn’t do it. If I thought someone was going to shove me into my grave on that basis, I’d damn well pack a lunch. Especially if I looked as lifelike as he does.”
“That bothers you as much as it does me, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it bothers me,” Ben admitted. “He looks like a goddamn waxwork.”
“All right,” Matt said. “You’re talking sense…as much as anyone can in a business like this. I guess I sounded nuts, at that.”
Ben started to deprecate, but Matt waved it off. “But suppose…just hypothetically…that my first suspicion is right? Would you want even the remotest possibility in the back of your mind? The possibility that Mike might…come back?”
“As I said, that theory is easy enough to prove or disprove. And it isn’t what bothers me about all this.”
“What is?”
“Just a minute. First things first. Proving or disproving it ought to be no more than an exercise in logic—ruling out possibilities. First possibility: Mike died of some disease—a virus or something. How do you confirm that or rule it out?”
