Salem's Lot - Stephen King [144]
‘Yes, it does and it is.’
‘What might it be, then? If you’ve meant to intrigue me, you’ve certainly succeeded.’
Matt looked at him calmly. ‘A good friend of mine, Ben Mears, was to have gotten in touch with you today. Your housekeeper said he had not.’
‘That’s so. I’ve seen no one since two o’clock this afternoon.’
‘I have been unable to reach him. He left the hospital in the company of my doctor, James Cody. I have also been unable to reach him. I have likewise been unable to reach Susan Norton, Ben’s lady friend. She went out early this afternoon, promising her parents she would be in by five. They are worried.’
Callahan sat forward at this. He had a passing acquaintance with Bill Norton, who had once come to see him about a problem that had to do with some Catholic co-workers. ‘You suspect something?’
‘Let me ask you a question,’ Matt said. ‘Take it very seriously and think it over before you answer. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary in town just lately?’
Callahan’s original impression, now almost a certainty, was that this man was proceeding very carefully indeed, not wanting to frighten him off by whatever was on his mind. Something sufficiently outrageous was suggested by the litter of books.
‘Vampires in ‘salem’s Lot?’ he asked.
He was thinking that the deep depression which followed grave illness could sometimes be avoided if the person afflicted had a deep enough investment in life: artists, musicians, a carpenter whose thoughts centered on some half-completed building. The interest could just as well be linked to some harmless (or not so harmless) psychosis, perhaps incipient before the illness.
He had spoken at some length with an elderly man named Horris from Schoolyard Hill who had been in the Maine Medical Center with advanced cancer of the lower intestine. In spite of pain which must have been excruciating, be had discoursed with Callahan in great and lucid detail concerning the creatures from Uranus who were infiltrating every walk of American life. ‘One day the fella who fills your gas tank down at Sonny’s Amoco is just Joe Blow from Falmouth,’ this bright-eyed, talking skeleton told him, ‘and the next day it’s a Uranian who just 0 like Joe Blow. He even has Joe Blow’s memories and speech patterns, you see. Because Uranians eat alpha waves… smack, smack, smack!’ According to Horris, he did not have cancer at all, but an advanced case of laser poisoning. The Uranians, alarmed at his knowledge of their machinations, had decided to put him out of the way. Horris accepted this, and was prepared to go down fighting. Callahan made no effort to disabuse him. Leave that to well-meaning but thickheaded relatives. Callahan’s experience was that psychosis, like a good knock of Cutty Sark, could be extremely beneficial.
So now he simply folded his hands and waited for Matt to continue.
Matt said, ‘It’s difficult to proceed as it is. It’s going to be more difficult still if you think I’m suffering from sickbed dementia.’
Startled by hearing his thoughts expressed just as he had finished thinking them, Callahan kept his poker face only with difficulty - although the emotion that would have come through would not have been disquiet but admiration.
‘On the contrary, you seem extremely lucid,’ he said.
Matt sighed. ‘Lucidity doesn’t presuppose sanity-as you well know.’ He shifted in bed, redistributing the books that lay around him. ‘If there is a God, He must be making me do penance for a life of careful academicism - of refusing to plant an intellectual foot on any ground until it had been footnoted in triplicate. Now for the second time in one day, I’m compelled to make the wildest declarations without a shred of proof to back them up. All I can say in defense of my own sanity is that my statements can be either proved or disproved without too much difficulty, and hope that you will take me seriously enough to make the test before it’s too late.’ He chuckled. ‘Before it’s too late. Sounds straight out of the thirties’ pulp magazines, doesn’t it?’
‘Life