Salem's Lot

48

Ben thought quite easily: I’m going to my death.

The thought came naturally, and there was no fear or regret in it. Inward-turning emotions were lost under the overwhelming atmosphere of evil that hung over this place. As he slipped and scraped his way down the board Mark had set up to get out of the cellar, all he felt was an unnatural glacial calm. He saw that his hands were glowing, as if wreathed in ghost gloves. It did not surprise him.

Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. Who had said that? Matt? Matt was dead. Susan was dead. Miranda was dead. Wallace Stevens was dead, too. I wouldn’t look at that, if I were you. But he had looked. That’s what you looked like when it was over. Like something smashed and broken that had been filled with different-colored fluids. It wasn’t so bad. Not so bad as his death. Jimmy had been carrying McCaslin’s pistol; it would still be in his coat pocket. He would take it, and if sunset came before they could get to Barlow… first the boy, and then himself. Not good, but better than his death.

He dropped to the cellar floor and then helped Mark down. The boy’s eyes flashed to the dark, curled thing on the floor and then skipped away.

‘I can’t look at that,’ he said huskily.

‘That’s all right.’

Mark turned away and Ben knelt down. He swept away a number of the lethal plywood squares, the knife blades thrust through them glittering like dragon’s teeth. Gently, then, he turned Jimmy over.

I wouldn’t look at that, if I were you.

‘Oh, Jimmy,’ he tried to say, and the words broke open and bled in his throat. He cradled Jimmy in the curve of his left arm and pulled Barlow’s blades out of him with his right hand. There were six of them, and Jimmy had bled a great deal.

There was a neatly folded stack of living room drapes on a corner shelf. He took them over to Jimmy and spread them over his body after he had the gun and the flashlight and the hammer.

He stood up and tried the flashlight. The plastic lens cover had cracked, but the bulb still worked. He flashed it around. Nothing. He shone it under the pool table. Bare. Nothing behind the furnace. Racks of preserves, and a pegboard hung with tools. The amputated stairs, pushed over in the far corner so they would be out of sight from the kitchen. They looked like a scaffold leading nowhere.

‘Where is he?’ Ben muttered. He glanced at his watch, and the hands stood at 6:23. When was sunset? He couldn’t remember. Surely no later than 6:55. That gave them a bare half hour.

‘Where is he?’ he cried out. ‘I can feel him, but where is he?’

"There!’ Mark cried, pointing with one glowing hand. ‘What’s that?’

Ben centered the light on it. A Welsh dresser. ‘It’s not big enough,’ he said to Mark. ‘And it’s flush against the wall.’

‘Let’s look behind it.’

Ben shrugged. They crossed the room to the Welsh dresser and each took a side. He felt a trickle of building excitement. Surely the odor or aura or atmosphere or whatever you wanted to call it was thicker here, more offensive?

Ben glanced up at the open kitchen door. The light was dimmer now. The gold was fading out of it.

‘It’s too heavy for me,’ Mark panted.

‘Never mind,’ Ben said. ‘We’re going to tip it over. Get your best hold.’

Mark bent over it, his shoulder against the wood. His eyes looked fiercely out of his glowing face. ‘Okay.’

They threw their combined weight against it and the Welsh dresser went over with a bonelike crash as Eva Miller’s long-ago wedding china shattered inside.

‘I knew it!’ Mark cried triumphantly.

There was a small door, chest-high, set into the wall where the Welsh dresser had been. A new Yale padlock secured the hasp.

Two hard swings of the hammer convinced him that the lock wasn’t going to give. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered softly. Frustration welled up bitterly in his throat. To be balked like this at the end, balked by a five-dollar padlock -

No. He would bite through the wood with his teeth if he had to.

He shone the flashlight around, and its beam fell on the neatly hung too] board to the right of the stairs. Hung on two of its steel pegs was an ax with a rubber cover masking its blade.

He ran across, snatched it off the pegboard, and pulled the rubber cover from the blade. He took one of the ampoules from his pocket and dropped it. The holy water ran out on the floor, beginning to glow immediately. He got another one, twisted the small cap off, and doused the blade of the ax. It began to glimmer with eldritch fairylight. And when he set his hands on the wooden haft, the grip felt incredibly good, incredibly right. Power seemed to have welded his flesh into its present grip. He stood holding it for a moment, looking at the shining blade, and some curious impulse made him touch it to his forehead. A hard sense of sureness clasped him, a feeling of inevitable rightness, of whiteness. For the first time in weeks he felt he was no longer groping through fogs of belief and unbelief, sparring with a partner whose body was too insubstantial to sustain blows.

Power, humming up his arms like volts.

The blade glowed brighter.

‘Do it!’ Mark pleaded. ‘Quick! Please!’

Ben Mears spread his feet, slung the ax back, and brought it down in a gleaming arc that left an after-image on the eye. The blade bit wood with a booming, portentous sound and sunk to the haft. Splinters flew.

He pulled it out, the wood screaming against the steel. He brought it down again… again… again. He could feel the muscles of his back and arms flexing and meshing, moving with a sureness and a studied heat that they had never known before. Each blow sent chips and splinters flying like shrapnel. On the fifth blow the blade crashed through to emptiness and he began hacking the hole wider with a speed that approached frenzy.

Mark stared at him, amazed. The cold blue fire had crept down the ax handle and spread up his arms until he seemed to be working in a column of fire. His head was twisted to one side, the muscles of his neck corded with strain, one eye open and glaring, the other squeezed shut. The back of his shirt had split between the straining wings of his shoulder blades, and the muscles writhed beneath the skin like ropes. He was a man taken over, possessed, and Mark saw without knowing (or having to know) that the possession was not in the least Christian; the good was more elemental, less refined. It was ore, like something coughed up out of the ground in naked chunks. There was nothing finished about it. It was Force; it was Power, it was whatever moved the greatest wheels of the universe.

The door to Eva Miller’s root cellar could not stand before it. The ax began to move at a nearly blinding speed; it became a ripple, a descending arc, a rainbow from over Ben’s shoulder to the splintered wood of the final door.

He dealt it a final blow and slung the ax away. He held his hands up before his eyes. They blazed.

He held them out to Mark, and the boy flinched. ‘I love you,’ Ben said.

They clasped hands.