Song of Susannah - Stephen King [138]
True though he knew this to be, part of him wanted to open the box. Lusted to. Nor was he the only one; as he watched, Jake knelt before the safe like a worshipper at an altar. Callahan reached to stop him from lifting the bag out with an arm that seemed incredibly heavy.
It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t, a voice whispered in his mind. It was sleep-inducing, that voice, and incredibly persuasive. Nonetheless, Callahan kept reaching. He grasped Jake’s collar with fingers from which all feeling seemed to have departed.
“No,” he said. “Don’t.” His voice sounded draggy, dispirited, depressed. When he pulled Jake to one side, the boy seemed to go as if in slow motion, or underwater. The room now seemed lit by the sick yellow light that sometimes falls over a landscape before a ruinous storm. As Callahan fell onto his own knees before the open safe (he seemed to descend through the air for at least a full minute before touching down), he heard the voice of Black Thirteen, louder than ever. It was telling him to kill the boy, to open the boy’s throat and give the ball a refreshing drink of his warm life’s blood. Then Callahan himself would be allowed to leap from the room’s window.
All the way down to Forty-sixth Street you will praise me, Black Thirteen assured him in a voice both sane and lucid.
“Do it,” Jake sighed. “Oh yes, do it, who gives a damn.”
“Ake!” Oy barked from the doorway. “Ake!” They both ignored him.
As Callahan reached for the bag, he found himself remembering his final encounter with Barlow, the king vampire—the Type One, in Callahan’s own parlance—who had come to the little town of ’Salem’s Lot. Found himself remembering how he’d confronted Barlow in Mark Petrie’s house, with Mark’s parents lying lifeless on the floor at the vampire’s feet, their skulls crushed and their oh-so-rational brains turned to jelly.
While you fall, I’ll let you whisper the name of my king, Black Thirteen whispered. The Crimson King.
As Callahan watched his hands grasp the bag—whatever had been there before, NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MID-WORLD LANES was now printed on the side—he thought of how his crucifix had first glared with some otherworldly light, driving Barlow back…and then had begun to darken again.
“Open it!” Jake said eagerly. “Open it, I want to see it!”
Oy was barking steadily now. Down the hall someone yelled “Shut that dog up!” and was likewise ignored.
Callahan slipped the ghostwood box from the bag—the box that had spent such a blessedly quiet time hidden beneath the pulpit of his church in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Now he would open it. Now he would observe Black Thirteen in all its repellent glory.
And then die. Gratefully.
* * *
Ten
Sad to see a man’s faith fail, the vampire Kurt Barlow had said, and then he’d plucked Don Callahan’s dark and useless cross from his hand. Why had he been able to do that? Because—behold the paradox, consider the riddle—Father Callahan had failed to throw the cross away himself. Because he had failed to accept that the cross was nothing but one symbol of a far greater power, one that ran like a river beneath the universe, perhaps beneath a thousand universes—
I need no symbol, Callahan thought; and then: Is that why God let me live? Was He giving me a second chance to learn that?
It was possible, he thought as his hands settled on the lid of the box. Second chances were one of God’s specialties.
“Folks, you got to shut your dog up. ” The querulous voice of a hotel maid, but very distant. Then it said: “Madre de Dios, why’s it so dark in here? What’s that…what’s that…n…n…”
Perhaps she was trying to say noise. If so, she never finished. Even Oy now seemed resigned to the spell of the humming, singing ball, for he gave up his protests (and his post at the door) to come trotting into the room. Callahan supposed the beast wanted to be at Jake’s side when the end came.
The Pere struggled to still his suicidal hands. The thing in the box raised