9
It was almost dark.
Ben got up from the wooden folding chair, walked over to the window that looked out on the funeral parlor's back lawn, and saw nothing in particular. It was quarter to seven, and evening's shadows were very long. The grass was still green despite the lateness of the year, and he supposed that the thoughtful mortician would endeavor to keep it so until snow covered it. A symbol of continuing life in the midst of the death of the year. He found the thought inordinately depressing and turned from the view.
'I wish I had a cigarette,' he said.
'They're killers,' Jimmy told him without turning around. He was watching a Sunday night wildlife program on Maury Green's small Sony. 'Actually, so do I. I quit when the surgeon general did his number on cigarettes ten years ago. Bad PR not to. But I always wake up grabbing for the pack on the night stand.'
'I thought you quit.'
'I keep it there for the same reason some alcoholics keep a bottle of scotch on the kitchen shelf. Will power, son.'
Ben looked at the clock: 6:47. Maury Green's Sunday paper said sundown would officially arrive at 7:02 EST.
Jimmy had handled everything quite neatly. Maury Green was a small man who had answered the door in an unbuttoned black vest and an open-collar white shirt. His sober, inquiring expression had changed to a broad smile of welcome.
'Shalom, Jimmy!' He cried. 'It's good to see you! Where you been keeping yourself?'
'Saving the world from the common cold,' Jimmy said, smiling, as Green wrung his hand. 'I want you to meet a very good friend of mine. Maury Green, Ben Mears.'
Ben's hand was enveloped in both of Maury's. His eyes glistened behind the black-rimmed glasses he wore. 'Shalom, also. Any friend of Jimmy's, and so on. Come on in, both of you. I could call Rachel - '
'Please don't,' Jimmy said. 'We've come to ask a favor. A rather large one.'
Green glanced more closely at Jimmy's face. "'A rather large one,"' he jeered softly. 'And why? What have you ever done for me, that my son should graduate third in his class from North-western? Anything, Jimmy.'
Jimmy blushed. 'I did what anyone would have done, Maury.'
'I'm not going to argue with you,' Green said. 'Ask. What is it that has you and Mr Mears so worried? Have you been in an accident?'
'No. Nothing like that.'
He had taken them into a small kitchenette behind the chapel, and as they talked, he brewed coffee in a battered old pot that sat on a hot plate.
'Has Norbert come after Mrs Glick yet?' Jimmy asked.
'No, and not a sign of him,' Maury said, putting sugar and cream on the table. 'That one will come by at eleven tonight and wonder why I'm not here to let him in.' He sighed. 'Poor lady. Such tragedy in one family. And she looks so sweet, Jimmy. That old poop Reardon brought her in. She was your patient?'
'No,' Jimmy said. 'But Ben and I . . . we'd like to sit up with her this evening, Maury. Right downstairs.'
Green paused in the act of reaching for the coffeepot. 'Sit up with her? Examine her, you mean?'
'No' Jimmy said steadily. 'Just sit up with her.'
He looked at them closely. 'No, I see you're not. Why would you want to do that?'
'I can't tell you that, Maury.'
'Oh.' He poured the coffee, sat down with them, and sipped. 'Not too strong. Very nice. Has she got something? Something infectious?'
Jimmy and Ben exchanged a glance.
'Not in the accepted sense of the word,' Jimmy said finally.
'You'd like me to keep my mouth shut about this, eh?'
'Yes.'
'And if Norbert comes?'
'I can handle Norbert,' Jimmy said. 'I'll tell him Reardon asked me to check her for infectious encephalitis. He'll never check.'
Green nodded. 'Norbert doesn't know enough to check his watch, unless someone asks him.'
'Is it okay, Maury?'
'Sure, sure. I thought you said a big favor.'
'It's bigger than you think, maybe.'
'When I finish my coffee, I'll go home and see what horror Rachel has produced for my Sunday dinner. Here is the key. Lock up when you go, Jimmy.'
Jimmy tucked it away in his pocket. 'I will. Thanks again, Maury.'
'Anything. Just do me one favor in return.'
'Sure. What?'
'If she says anything, write it down for posterity.' He began to chuckle, saw the identical look on their faces, and stopped.
10
It was five to seven. Ben felt tension begin to seep into his body.
'Might as well stop staring at the clock,' Jimmy said.
'You can't make it go any faster by looking at it.'
Ben started guiltily.
'I doubt very much that vampires - if they exist at all - rise at almanac sunset,' Jimmy said. 'It's never full dark.' Nonetheless he got up and shut off the TV, catching a wood duck in mid-squawk.
Silence descended on the room like a blanket. They were in Green's workroom, and the body of Marjorie Glick was on a stainless-steel table equipped with gutters and foot stirrups that could be raised or depressed. It reminded Ben of the tables in hospital delivery rooms.
Jimmy had turned back the sheet that covered her body when they entered and had made a brief examination. Mrs Glick was wearing a burgundy-colored quilted house coat and knitted slippers. There was a Band-Aid on her left shin, perhaps covering a shaving nick. Ben looked away from it, but his eyes were drawn back again and again.
'What do you think?' Ben had asked.
'I'm not going to commit myself when another three hours will probably decide one way or the other. But her condition is strikingly similar to that of Mike Ryerson - no surface lividity, no sign of rigor or incipient rigor.' And he had pulled the sheet back and would say no more.
It was 7:02.
Jimmy suddenly said, 'Where's your cross?'
Ben started. 'Cross? Jesus, I don't have one!'
'You were never a Boy Scout,' Jimmy said, and opened his bag. 'I, however, always come prepared.'
He brought out two tongue depressors, stripped off the protective cellophane, and bound them together at right angles with a twist of Red Cross tape.
'Bless it,' he said to Ben.
'What? I can't . . . I don't know how.'
'Then make it up,' Jimmy said, and his pleasant face suddenly appeared strained. 'You're the writer; you'll have to be the metaphysician. For Christ's sake, hurry. I think something is going to happen. Can't you feel it?'
And Ben could. Something seemed to be gathering in the slow purple twilight, unseen as yet, but heavy and electric. His mouth had gone dry, and he had to wet his lips before he could speak.
'In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.' Then he added, as an afterthought: 'In the name of the Virgin Mary, too. Bless this cross and . . . and . . . '
Words rose to his lips with sudden, eerie surety.
'The Lord is my shepherd,' he spoke, and the words fell into the shadowy room as stones would have fallen into a deep lake, sinking out of sight without a ripple. 'I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.'
Jimmy's voice joined his own, chanting.
'He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil - '
It seemed hard to breathe properly. Ben found that his whole body had crawled into goose flesh, and the short hairs on the nape of his neck had begun to prickle, as if they were rising into hackles.
'Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall - '
The sheet covering Marjorie Glick's body had begun to tremble. A hand fell out below the sheet and the fingers began to dance jaggedly on the air, twisting and turning.
'My Christ, am I seeing this?' Jimmy whispered. His face had gone pale and his freckles stood out like spatters on a windowpane.
' - follow me all the days of my life,' Ben finished. 'Jimmy, look at the cross.'
The cross was glowing. The light spilled over his hand in an elvish flood.
A slow, choked voice spoke in the stillness, as grating as shards of broken crockery: 'Danny?'
Ben felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. The form under the sheet was sitting up. Shadows in the darkening room moved and slithered.
'Danny, where are you, darling?'
The sheet fell from her face and crumpled in her lap.
The face of Marjorie Glick was a pallid, moonlike circle in the semidark, punched only by the black holes of her eyes. She saw them, and her mouth juddered open in an awful, cheated snarl. The fading glow of daylight flashed against her teeth.
She swung her legs over the side of the table; one of the slippers fell off and lay unheeded.
'Sit right there!' Jimmy told her. 'Don't try to move.' Her answer was a snarl, a dark silver sound, doglike. She slid off the table, staggered, and walked toward them. Ben caught himself looking into those punched eyes and wrenched his gaze away. There were black galaxies shot with red in there. You could see yourself, drowning and liking it.
'Don't look in her face,' he told Jimmy.
They were retreating from her without thought, allowing her to force them toward the narrow hall which led to the stairs.
'Try the cross, Ben.'
He had almost forgotten he had it. Now he held it up, and the cross seemed to flash with brilliance. He had to squint against it. Mrs Glick made a hissing, dismayed noise and threw her hands up in front of her face. Her features seemed to draw together, twitching and writhing like a nest of snakes. She tottered a step backward.
'That's got her!' Jimmy yelled.
Ben advanced on her, holding the cross out before him. She hooked one hand into a claw and made a swipe at it. Ben dipped it below her hand and then thrust it at her. An ululating scream came from her throat.
For Ben, the rest took on the maroon tones of night?mare. Although worse horrors were to come, the dreams of the following days and nights were always of driving Marjorie Glick back toward that mortician's table, where the sheet that had covered her Jay crumpled beside one knitted slipper.
She retreated unwillingly, her eyes alternating between the hateful cross and an area on Ben's neck to the right of the chin. The sounds that were wrenched out of her were inhuman gibberings and hissings and glottals, and there was something so blindly reluctant in her withdrawal that she began to seem like some giant, lumbering insect. Ben thought: If I didn't have this cross out front, she would rip my throat open with her nails and gulp down the blood that spurted out of the jugular and carotid like a man just out of the desert and dying of thirst. She would bathe in it.
Jimmy had cut away from his side, and was circling her to the left. She didn't see him. Her eyes were fixed only on Ben, dark and filled with hatred . . . filled with fear.
Jimmy circled the mortician's table, and when she backed around it, he threw both arms around her neck with a convulsive yell.
She gave a high, whistling cry and twisted in his grip. Ben saw Jimmy's nails pull away a flap of her skin at the shoulder, and nothing welled out - the cut was like a lipless mouth. And then, incredibly, she threw him across the room. Jimmy crashed into the corner, knocking Maury Green's portable TV off its stand.
She was on him in a flash, moving in a bunched, scrab?bling run that was nearly spiderlike. Ben caught a shadow?s crawled glimpse of her falling on top of him, ripping at his collar, and then the sideward predatory lunge of her head, the yawning of her jaws, as she battened on him.
Jimmy Cody screamed - the high, despairing scream of the utterly damned.
Ben threw himself at her, stumbling and nearly falling over the shattered television on the floor. He could hear her harsh breathing, like the rattle of straw, and below that, the revolting sound of smacking, champing lips.
He grabbed her by the collar of her house coat and yanked her upward, forgetting the cross momentarily. Her head came around with frightening swiftness. Her eyes were dilated and glittering, her lips and chin slicked with blood that was black in this near-total darkness.
Her breath in his face was foul beyond measure, the breath of tombs. As if in slow motion, he could see her tongue lick across her teeth.
He brought the cross up just as she jerked him forward into her embrace, her strength making him feel like some?thing made of rags. The rounded point of the tongue depressor that formed the cross's downstroke struck her under the chin - and then continued upward with no fleshy resistance. Ben's eyes were stunned by a flash of not-light that happened not before his eyes but seemingly behind them. There was the hot and porcine smell of burning flesh. Her scream this time was full-throated and agonized. He sensed rather than saw her throw herself backward, stumble over the television, and fall on the floor, one white arm thrown outward to break her fall. She was up again with wolflike agility, her eyes narroked in pain, yet still filled with her insane hunger. The flesh of her lower jaw was smoking and black. She was snarling at him.
'Come on, you bitch,' he panted. 'Come on, come on.'
He held the cross out before him again, and backed her into the corner at the far left of the room. When he got her there, he was going to jam the cross through her forehead.
But even as her back pressed the narrowing walls, she uttered a high, squealing giggle that made him wince. It was like the sound of a fork being dragged across a por?celain sink.
'Even now one laughs! Even now your circle is smaller!'
And before his eyes her body seemed to elongate and become translucent. For a moment he thought she was still there, laughing at him, and then the white glow of the street lamp outside was shining on bare wall, and there was only a fleeting sensation on his nerve endings, which seemed to be reporting that she had seeped into the very pores of the wall, like smoke.
She was gone.
And Jimmy was screaming.
11
He flicked on the overhead bar of fluorescents and turned to look at Jimmy, but Jimmy was already on his feet, holding his hands to the side of his neck. The fingers were sparkling scarlet.
'She bit me!' Jimmy howled. 'Oh God-Jesus, she bit me!'
Ben went to him, tried to take him in his arms, and Jimmy pus ' hed him away. His eyes rolled madly in their sockets.
'Don't touch me. I'm unclean.' 'Jimmy
'Give me my bag. Jesus, Ben, I can feel it in there. I can feel it working in me. For Christ's sake, give me my bag!'
It was in the corner. Ben got it, and Jimmy snatched it. He went to the mortician's table and set the bag on it. His face was death pale, shining with sweat. The blood pulsed remorselessly from the torn gash in the side of his neck. He sat down on the table and opened the bag and swept through it, his breath coming in whining gasps through his open mouth.
'She bit me,' he muttered into the bag. 'Her mouth . . . oh God, her dirty filthy mouth . . .'
He pulled a bottle of disinfectant out of the bag and sent the cap spinning across the tiled floor. He leaned back, supporting himself on one arm, and upended the bottle over his throat, and it splashed the wound, his slacks, the table. Blood washed away in threads. His eyes closed and he screamed once, then again. The bottle never wavered.
'Jimmy, what can I - '
'In a minute,' Jimmy muttered. 'Wait. It's better, I think. Wait, just wait -'
He tossed the bottle away and it shattered on the floor. The wound, washed clean of the tainted blood, was clearly visible. Ben saw there was not one but two puncture wounds not far from the jugular, one of them horribly mangled.
Jimmy bad pulled an ampoule and a hypo from the bag. He stripped the protective covering from the needle and jibbed it through the ampoule. His hands were shaking so badly he had to make two thrusts at it. He filled the needle and held it out to Ben.
'Tetanus,' he said. 'Give it to me. Here.' He held his arm out, rotated to expose the armpit.
'Jimmy, that'll knock you out.'
'No. No, it won't. Do it.'