FIVE
Barlow’s hands are strong, implacable. As Callahan is drawn forward, he suddenly understands what is going to happen. Not death. Death would be a mercy compared to this.
No, please no, he tries to say, but nothing comes out of his mouth but one small, whipped moan.
“Now, priest,” the vampire whispers.
Callahan’s mouth is pressed against the reeking flesh of the vampire’s cold throat. There is no anomie, no social dysfunction, no ethical or racial ramifications. Only the stink of death and one vein, open and pulsing with Barlow’s dead, infected blood. No sense of existential loss, no postmodern grief for the death of the American value system, not even the religio-psychological guilt of Western man. Only the effort to hold his breath forever, or twist his head away, or both. He cannot. He holds on for what seems like aeons, smearing the blood across his cheeks and forehead and chin like war paint. To no avail. In the end he does what all alcoholics must do once the booze has taken them by the ears: he drinks.
Strike three. You’re out.
SIX
“The boy got away. There was that much. And Barlow let me go. Killing me wouldn’t have been any fun, would it? No, the fun was in letting me live.
“I wandered for an hour or more, through a town that was less and less there. There aren’t many Type One vampires, and that’s a blessing because a Type One can cause one hell of a lot of mayhem in an extremely short period of time. The town was already half-infected, but I was too blind—too shocked—to realize it. And none of the new vampires approached me. Barlow had set his mark on me as surely as God set his mark on Cain before sending him off to dwell in the land of Nod. His watch and his warrant, as you’d say, Roland.
“There was a drinking fountain in the alley beside Spencer’s Drugs, the sort of thing no Public Health Office would have sanctioned a few years later, but back then there was one or two in every small town. I washed Barlow’s blood off my face and neck there. Tried to wash it out of my hair, too. And then I went to St. Andrews, my church. I’d made up my mind to pray for a second chance. Not to the God of the theologians who believe that everything holy and unholy ultimately comes from inside us, but to the old God. The one who proclaimed to Moses that he should not suffer a witch to live and gave unto his own son the power to raise from the dead. A second chance is all I wanted. My life for that.
“By the time I got to St. Andrews, I was almost running. There were three doors going inside. I reached for the middle one. Somewhere a car backfired, and someone laughed. I remember those sounds very clearly. It’s as if they mark the border of my life as a priest of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.”
“What happened to you, sugar?” Susannah asked.
“The door rejected me,” Callahan said. “It had an iron handle, and when I touched it, fire came out of it like a reverse stroke of lightning. It knocked me all the way down the steps and onto the cement path. It did this.” He raised his scarred right hand.
“And that?” Eddie asked, and pointed to his forehead.
“No,” Callahan said. “That came later. I picked myself up. Walked some more. Wound up at Spencer’s again. Only this time I went in. Bought a bandage for my hand. And then, while I was paying, I saw the sign. Ride The Big Grey Dog.”
“He means Greyhound, sugar,” Susannah told Roland. “It’s a nationwide bus company.”
Roland nodded and twirled a finger in his go-on gesture.
“Miss Coogan told me the next bus went to New York, so I bought a ticket on that one. If she’d told me it went to Jacksonville or Nome or Hot Burgoo, South Dakota, I would have gone to one of those places. All I wanted to do was get out of that town. I didn’t care that people were dying and worse than dying, some of them my friends, some of them my parishioners. I just wanted to get out. Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” Roland said with no hesitation. “Very well.”
Callahan looked into his face, and what he saw there seemed to reassure him a little. When he continued, he seemed calmer.
“Loretta Coogan was one of the town spinsters. I must have frightened her, because she said I’d have to wait for the bus outside. I went out. Eventually the bus came. I got on and gave the driver my ticket. He took his half and gave me my half. I sat down. The bus started to roll. We went under the flashing yellow blinker at the middle of town, and that was the first mile. The first mile on the road that took me here. Later on—maybe four-thirty in the morning, still dark outside—the bus stopped in”
SEVEN
“Hartford,” the bus driver says. “This is Hartford, Mac. We got a twenty-minute rest stop. Do you want to go in and get a sandwich or something?”
Callahan fumbles his wallet out of his pocket with his bandaged hand and almost drops it. The taste of death is in his mouth, a moronic, mealy taste like a spoiled apple. He needs something to take away that taste, and if nothing will take it away something to change it, and if nothing will change it at least something to cover it up, the way you might cover up an ugly gouge in a wood floor with a piece of cheap carpet.
He holds out a twenty to the bus driver and says, “Can you get me a bottle?”
“Mister, the rules—”
“And keep the change, of course. A pint would be fine.”
“I don’t need nobody cutting up on my bus. We’ll be in New York in two hours. You can get anything you want once we’re there.” The bus driver tries to smile. “It’s Fun City, you know.”
Callahan—he’s no longer Father Callahan, the flash of fire from the doorhandle answered that question, at least—adds a ten to the twenty. Now he’s holding out thirty dollars. Again he tells the driver a pint would be fine, and he doesn’t expect any change. This time the driver, not an idiot, takes the money. “But don’t you go cutting up on me,” he repeats. “I don’t need nobody cutting up on my bus.”
Callahan nods. No cutting up, that’s a big ten-four. The driver goes into the combination grocery store–liquor store–short-order restaurant that exists here on the rim of Hartford, on the rim of morning, under yellow hi-intensity lights. There are secret highways in America, highways in hiding. This place stands at one of the entrance ramps leading into that network of darkside roads, and Callahan senses it. It’s in the way the Dixie cups and crumpled cigarette packs blow across the tarmac in the pre-dawn wind. It whispers from the sign on the gas pumps, the one that says PAY FOR GAS IN ADVANCE AFTER SUNDOWN. It’s in the teenage boy across the street, sitting on a porch stoop at four-thirty in the morning with his head in his arms, a silent essay in pain. The secret highways are out close, and they whisper to him. “Come on, buddy,” they say. “Here is where you can forget everything, even the name they tied on you when you were nothing but a naked, blatting baby still smeared with your mother’s blood. They tied a name to you like a can to a dog’s tail, didn’t they? But you don’t need to drag it around here. Come. Come on.” But he goes nowhere. He’s waiting for the bus driver, and pretty soon the bus driver comes back, and he’s got a pint of Old Log Cabin in a brown paper sack. This is a brand Callahan knows well, a pint of the stuff probably goes for two dollars and a quarter out here in the boonies, which means the bus driver has just earned himself a twenty-eight-dollar tip, give or take. Not bad. But it’s the American way, isn’t it? Give a lot to get a little. And if the Log Cabin will take that terrible taste out of his mouth—much worse than the throbbing in his burned hand—it will be worth every penny of the thirty bucks. Hell, it would be worth a C-note.
“No cutting up,” the driver says. “I’ll put you out right in the middle of the Cross Bronx Expressway if you start cutting up. I swear to God I will.”
By the time the Greyhound pulls into the Port Authority, Don Callahan is drunk. But he doesn’t cut up; he simply sits quietly until it’s time to get off and join the flow of six o’clock humanity under the cold fluorescent lights: the junkies, the cabbies, the shoeshine boys, the girls who’ll blow you for ten dollars, the boys dressed up as girls who’ll blow you for five dollars, the cops twirling their nightsticks, the dope dealers carrying their transistor radios, the blue-collar guys who are just coming in from New Jersey. Callahan joins them, drunk but quiet; the nightstick-twirling cops do not give him so much as a second glance. The Port Authority air smells of cigarette smoke and joysticks and exhaust. The docked buses rumble. Everyone here looks cut loose. Under the cold white fluorescents, they all look dead.
No, he thinks, walking under a sign reading TO STREET. Not dead, that’s wrong. Undead.
EIGHT
“Man,” Eddie said. “You been to the wars, haven’t you? Greek, Roman, and Vietnam.”
When the Old Fella began, Eddie had been hoping he’d gallop through his story so they could go into the church and look at whatever was stashed there. He hadn’t expected to be touched, let alone shaken, but he had been. Callahan knew stuff Eddie thought no one else could possibly know: the sadness of Dixie cups rolling across the pavement, the rusty hopelessness of that sign on the gas pumps, the look of the human eye in the hour before dawn.
Most of all about how sometimes you had to have it.
“The wars? I don’t know,” Callahan said. Then he sighed and nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. I spent that first day in movie theaters and that first night in Washington Square Park. I saw that the other homeless people covered themselves up with newspapers, so that’s what I did. And here’s an example of how life—the quality of life and the texture of life—seemed to have changed for me, beginning on the day of Danny Glick’s burial. You won’t understand right away, but bear with me.” He looked at Eddie and smiled. “And don’t worry, son, I’m not going to talk the day away. Or even the morning.”
“You go on and tell it any old way it does ya fine,” Eddie said.
Callahan burst out laughing. “Say thankya! Aye, say thankya big! What I was going to tell you is that I’d covered my top half with the Daily News and the headline said HITLER BROTHERS STRIKE IN QUEENS.”
“Oh my God, the Hitler Brothers,” Eddie said. “I remember them. Couple of morons. They beat up . . . what? Jews? Blacks?”
“Both,” Callahan said. “And carved swastikas on their foreheads. They didn’t have a chance to finish mine. Which is good, because what they had in mind after the cutting was a lot more than a simple beating. And that was years later, when I came back to New York.”
“Swastika,” Roland said. “The sigul on the plane we found near River Crossing? The one with David Quick inside it?”
“Uh-huh,” Eddie said, and drew one in the grass with the toe of his boot. The grass sprang up almost immediately, but not before Roland saw that yes, the mark on Callahan’s forehead could have been meant to be one of those. If it had been finished.
“On that day in late October of 1975,” Callahan said, “the Hitler Brothers were just a headline I slept under. I spent most of that second day in New York walking around and fighting the urge to score a bottle. There was part of me that wanted to fight instead of drink. To try and atone. At the same time, I could feel Barlow’s blood working into me, getting in deeper and deeper. The world smelled different, and not better. Things looked different, and not better. And the taste of him came creeping back into my mouth, a taste like dead fish or rotten wine.
“I had no hope of salvation. Never think it. But atonement isn’t about salvation, anyway. Not about heaven. It’s about clearing your conscience here on earth. And you can’t do it drunk. I didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic, not even then, but I did wonder if he’d turned me into a vampire. If the sun would start to burn my skin, and I’d start looking at ladies’ necks.” He shrugged, laughed. “Or maybe gentlemen’s. You know what they say about the priesthood; we’re just a bunch of closet queers running around and shaking the cross in people’s faces.”
“But you weren’t a vampire,” Eddie said.
“Not even a Type Three. Nothing but unclean. On the outside of everything. Cast away. Always smelling his stink and always seeing the world the way things like him must see it, in shades of gray and red. Red was the only bright color I was allowed to see for years. Everything else was just a whisper.
“I guess I was looking for a Manpower office—you know, the day-labor company? I was still pretty rugged in those days, and of course I was a lot younger, as well.
“I didn’t find Manpower. What I did find was a place called Home. This was on First Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, not far from the U.N.”
Roland, Eddie, and Susannah exchanged a look. Whatever Home was, it had existed only two blocks from the vacant lot. Only it wouldn’t have been vacant back then, Eddie thought. Not back in 1975. In ’75 it would still have been Tom and Jerry’s Artistic Deli, Party Platters Our Specialty. He suddenly wished Jake were here. Eddie thought that by now the kid would have been jumping up and down with excitement.
“What kind of shop was Home?” Roland asked.
“Not a shop at all. A shelter. A wet shelter. I can’t say for sure that it was the only one in Manhattan, but I bet it was one of the very few. I didn’t know much about shelters then—just a little bit from my first parish—but as time went by, I learned a great deal. I saw the system from both sides. There were times when I was the guy who ladled out the soup at six P.M. and passed out the blankets at nine; at other times I was the guy who drank the soup and slept under the blankets. After a head-check for lice, of course.
“There are shelters that won’t let you in if they smell booze on your breath. And there are ones where they’ll let you in if you claim you’re at least two hours downstream from your last drink. There are places—a few—that’ll let you in pissyassed drunk, as long as they can search you at the door and get rid of all your hooch. Once that’s taken care of, they put you in a special locked room with the rest of the low-bottom guys. You can’t slip out to get another drink if you change your mind, and you can’t scare the folks who are less soaked than you are if you get the dt’s and start seeing bugs come out of the walls. No women allowed in the lockup; they’re too apt to get raped. It’s just one of the reasons more homeless women die in the streets than homeless men. That’s what Lupe used to say.”
“Lupe?” Eddie asked.
“I’ll get to him, but for now, suffice it to say that he was the architect of Home’s alcohol policy. At Home, they kept the booze in lockup, not the drunks. You could get a shot if you needed one, and if you promised to be quiet. Plus a sedative chaser. This isn’t recommended medical procedure—I’m not even sure it was legal, since neither Lupe nor Rowan Magruder were doctors—but it seemed to work. I came in sober on a busy night, and Lupe put me to work. I worked free for the first couple of days, and then Rowan called me into his office, which was roughly the size of a broom closet. He asked me if I was an alcoholic. I said no. He asked me if I was wanted by the police. I said no. He asked if I was on the run from anything. I said yes, from myself. He asked me if I wanted to work, and I started to cry. He took that as a yes.
“I spent the next nine months—until June of 1976—working at Home. I made the beds, I cooked in the kitchen, I went on fund-raising calls with Lupe or sometimes Rowan, I took drunks to AA meetings in the Home van, I gave shots of booze to guys that were shaking too badly to hold the glasses themselves. I took over the books because I was better at it than Magruder or Lupe or any of the other guys who worked there. Those weren’t the happiest days of my life, I’d never go that far, and the taste of Barlow’s blood never left my mouth, but they were days of grace. I didn’t think a lot. I just kept my head down and did whatever I was asked to do. I started to heal.
“Sometime during that winter, I realized that I’d started to change. It was as if I’d developed a kind of sixth sense. Sometimes I heard chiming bells. Horrible, yet at the same time sweet. Sometimes, when I was on the street, things would start to look dark even if the sun was shining. I can remember looking down to see if my shadow was still there. I’d be positive it wouldn’t be, but it always was.”
Roland’s ka-tet exchanged a glance.
“Sometimes there was an olfactory element to these fugues. It was a bitter smell, like strong onions all mixed with hot metal. I began to suspect that I had developed a form of epilepsy.”
“Did you see a doctor?” Susannah asked.
“I did not. I was afraid of what else he might find. A brain tumor seemed most likely. What I did was keep my head down and keep working. And then one night I went to a movie in Times Square. It was a revival of two Clint Eastwood Westerns. What they used to call Spaghetti Westerns?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said.
“I started hearing the bells. The chimes. And smelling that smell, stronger than ever. All this was coming from in front of me, and to the left. I looked there and saw two men, one rather elderly, the other younger. They were easy enough to pick out, because the place was three-quarters empty. The younger man leaned close to the older man. The older man never took his eyes off the screen, but he put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders. If I’d seen that on any other night, I would have been pretty positive what was going on, but not that night. I watched. And I started to see a kind of dark blue light, first just around the younger man, then around both of them. It was like no other light I’d ever seen. It was like the darkness I felt sometimes on the street, when the chimes started to play in my head. Like the smell. You knew those things weren’t there, and yet they were. And I understood. I didn’t accept it—that came later—but I understood. The younger man was a vampire.”
He stopped, thinking about how to tell his tale. How to lay it out.
“I believe there are at least three types of vampires at work in our world. I call them Types One, Two, and Three. Type Ones are rare. Barlow was a Type One. They live very long lives, and may spend extended periods—fifty years, a hundred, maybe two hundred—in deep hibernation. When they’re active, they’re capable of making new vampires, what we call the undead. These undead are Type Twos. They are also capable of making new vampires, but they aren’t cunning.” He looked at Eddie and Susannah. “Have you seen Night of the Living Dead?”
Susannah shook her head. Eddie nodded.
“The undead in that movie were zombies, utterly brain-dead. Type Two vampires are more intelligent than that, but not much. They can’t go out during the daylight hours. If they try, they are blinded, badly burned, or killed. Although I can’t say for sure, I believe their life-spans are usually short. Not because the change from living and human to undead and vampire shortens life, but because the existences of Type Two vampires are extremely perilous.
“In most cases—this is what I believe, not what I know—Type Two vampires create other Type Two vampires, in a relatively small area. By this phase of the disease—and it is a disease—the Type One vampire, the king vampire, has usually moved on. In ’Salem’s Lot, they actually killed the son of a bitch, one of what might have been only a dozen in the entire world.
“In other cases, Type Twos create Type Threes. Type Threes are like mosquitoes. They can’t create more vampires, but they can feed. And feed. And feed.”
“Do they catch AIDS?” Eddie asked. “I mean, you know what that is, right?”
“I know, although I never heard the term until the spring of 1983, when I was working at the Lighthouse Shelter in Detroit and my time in America had grown short. Of course we’d known for almost ten years that there was something. Some of the literature called it GRID—Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. In 1982 there started to be newspaper articles about a new disease called ‘Gay Cancer,’ and speculations that it might be catching. On the street some of the men called it Fucksore Disease, after the blemishes it left. I don’t believe that vampires die of it, or even get sick from it. But they can have it. And they can pass it on. Oh, yes. And I have reason to think that.” Callahan’s lips quivered, then firmed.
“When this vampire-demon made you drink his blood, he gave you the ability to see these things,” Roland said.
“Yes.”
“All of them, or just the Threes? The little ones?”
“The little ones,” Callahan mused, then voiced a brief and humorless laugh. “Yes. I like that. In any case, Threes are all I’ve ever seen, at least since leaving Jerusalem’s Lot. But of course Type Ones like Barlow are very rare, and Type Twos don’t last long. Their very hunger undoes them. They’re always ravenous. Type Threes, however, can go out in daylight. And they take their principal sustenance from food, just as we do.”
“What did you do that night?” Susannah asked. “In the theater?”
“Nothing,” Callahan said. “My whole time in New York—my first time in New York—I did nothing until April. I wasn’t sure, you see. I mean, my heart was sure, but my head refused to go along. And all the time, there was interference from the most simple thing of all: I was a dry alcoholic. An alcoholic is also a vampire, and that part of me was getting thirstier and thirstier, while the rest of me was trying to deny my essential nature. So I told myself I’d seen a couple of homosexuals canoodling in the movies, nothing more than that. As for the rest of it—the chimes, the smell, the dark-blue light around the young one—I convinced myself it was epilepsy, or a holdover from what Barlow had done to me, or both. And of course about Barlow I was right. His blood was awake inside me. It saw.”
“It was more than that,” Roland said.
Callahan turned to him.
“You went todash, Pere. Something was calling you from this world. The thing in your church, I suspect, although it would not have been in your church when you first knew of it.”
“No,” Callahan said. He was regarding Roland with wary respect. “It was not. How do you know? Tell me, I beg.”
Roland did not. “Go on,” he said. “What happened to you next?”
“Lupe happened next,” Callahan said.