Salem's Lot - Stephen King [161]
And I will best you. How? you say. Does not Callahan bear the symbol of White? Does not Callahan move in the day as well as the night? Are there not charms and potions, both Christian and pagan, which my so-good friend Matthew Burke has informed me and my compatriots of? Yes, yes, and yes. But I have lived longer than you. I am crafty. I am not the serpent, but the father of serpents.
Still, you say, this is not enough. And it is not. In the end, ‘Father’ Callahan, you will undo yourself. Your faith in the White is weak and soft. Your talk of love is presumption. Only when you speak of the bottle are you informed.
My good, good friends-Mr Mears; Mr Cody; Master Petrie; Father Callahan-enjoy your stay. The Médoc is excellent, procured for me especially by the late owner of this house, whose personal company I was never able to enjoy. Please be my guests if you still have a taste for wine after you have finished the work at hand. We will meet again, in person, and I shall convey my felicitations to each of you at that time in a more personal way.
Until then, adieu.
BARLOW.
Trembling, Ben let the letter fall to the table. He looked at the others. Mark stood with his hands clenched into fists, his mouth frozen in the twist of someone who has bitten something rotten; Jimmy, his oddly boyish face drawn and pale; Father Donald Callahan, his eyes alight, his mouth drawn down in a trembling bow.
And one by one, they looked up at him. ‘Come on,’ he said.
They went around the corner together.
14
Parkins Gillespie was standing on the front step of the brick Municipal Building, looking through his high-powered Zeiss binoculars when Nolly Gardener drove up in the town’s police car and got out, hitching up his belt and picking out his seat at the same time.
‘What’s up, Park?’ he asked, walking up the steps.
Parkins gave him the glasses wordlessly and flicked one callused thumb at the Marsten House.
Nolly looked. He saw that old Packard, and parked in front of it, a new tan Buick. The gain on the binoculars wasn’t quite high enough to pick off the plate number. He lowered his glasses. ‘That’s Doc Cody’s car, ain’t it?’
‘Yes, I believe it is.’ Parkins inserted a Pall Mall between his lips and scratched a kitchen match on the brick wall behind him.
‘I never seen a car up there except that Packard.’
‘Yes, that’s so,’ Parkins said meditatively.
‘Think we ought to go up there and have a look?’ Nolly spoke with a marked lack of his usual enthusiasm. He had been a lawman for five years and was still entranced with his own position.
‘No,’ Parkins said, ‘I believe we’ll just leave her alone.’ He took his watch out of his vest and clicked up the scrolled silver cover like a trainman checking an express. Just 3:41. He checked his watch against the clock on the town hall and then tucked it back into place.
‘How’d all that co-me out with Floyd Tibbits and the little McDougall baby?’ Nolly asked.
‘Dunno.’
‘Oh,’ Nolly said, momentarily nonplussed. Parkins was always taciturn but this was a new high for him. He looked through the glasses again: no change.
‘Town seems quiet today,’ Nolly volunteered.
‘Yes,’ Parkins said. He looked across Jointner Avenue and the park with his faded blue eyes. Both the avenue and the park were deserted. They had been deserted most of the day. There was a remarkable lack of mothers strolling babies or idlers around the War Memorial.
‘Funny things been happening,’ Nolly ventured.
‘Yes,’ Parkins said, considering.
As a last gasp, Nolly fell back on the one bit of conversational bait that Parkins had never failed to rise to: the weather. ‘Clouding up,’ he said. ‘Be rain