Through the grating in the floor, he heard the distinctive click of the lamp in his parents’ bedroom and his father’s voice: “What in hell was that?”

THIRTEEN

His bedroom door opened two minutes later, but that was still time enough to set things to rights.

“Son?” Henry Petrie asked softly. “Are you awake?”

“I guess so,” Mark answered sleepily.

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“I…think so. I don’t remember.”

“You called out in your sleep.”

“Sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry.” He hesitated and then spoke from earlier memories of his son, a small child in a blue blanket-suit that had been much more trouble but infinitely more explicable: “Do you want a drink of water?”

“No thanks, Dad.”

Henry Petrie surveyed the room briefly, unable to understand the trembling feeling of dread he had wakened with, and which lingered still—a feeling of disaster averted by cold inches. Yes, everything seemed all right. The window was shut. Nothing was knocked over.

“Mark, is anything wrong?”

“No, Dad.”

“Well…g’night, then.”

“Night.”

The door shut softly and his father’s slippered feet descended the stairs. Mark let himself go limp with relief and delayed reaction. An adult might have had hysterics at this point, as a slightly younger or older child might also have done. But Mark felt the terror slip from him in almost imperceptible degrees, and the sensation reminded him of letting the wind dry you after you had been swimming on a cool day. And as the terror left, drowsiness began to come in its place.

Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting—not for the first time—on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can’t get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

In some shorter, simpler mental shorthand, these thoughts passed through his brain. The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child’s rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys.

Chapter Eleven

It was ten past nine on Sunday morning—a bright, sun-washed Sunday morning—and Ben was beginning to get seriously worried about Susan when the phone by his bed rang. He snatched it up.

“Where are you?”

“Relax. I’m upstairs with Matt Burke. Who requests the pleasure of your company as soon as you’re able.”

“Why didn’t you come—”

“I looked in on you earlier. You were sleeping like a lamb.”

“They give you knockout stuff in the night so they can steal different organs for mysterious billionaire patients,” he said. “How’s Matt?”

“Come up and see for yourself,” she said, and before she could do more than hang up, he was getting into his robe.

TWO

Matt looked much better, rejuvenated, almost. Susan was sitting by his bed in a bright blue dress, and Matt raised a hand in salute when Ben walked in. “Drag up a rock.”

Ben pulled over one of the hideously uncomfortable hospital chairs and sat down. “How you feeling?”

“A lot better. Weak, but better. They took the I.V. out of my arm last night and gave me a poached egg for breakfast this morning. Gag. Previews of the old folks home.”

Ben kissed Susan lightly and saw a strained kind of composure on her face, as if everything was being held together by fine wire.

“Is there anything new since you called last night?”

“Nothing I’ve heard. But I left the house around seven and the Lot wakes up a little later on Sunday.”

Ben shifted his gaze to Matt. “Are you up to talking this thing over?”

“Yes, I think so,” he said, and shifted slightly. The gold cross Ben had hung around his neck flashed prominently. “By the way, thank you for this. It’s a great comfort, even though I bought it on the remaindered shelf at Woolworth’s Friday afternoon.”

“What’s your condition?”

“‘Stabilized’ is the fulsome term young Dr Cody used when he examined me late yesterday afternoon. According to the EKG he took, it was strictly a minor-league heart attack…no clot formation.” He harrumphed. “Should hope for his sake it wasn’t. Coming just a week after the checkup he gave me, I’d sue his sheepskin off the wall for breach of promise.” He broke off and looked levelly at Ben. “He said he’d seen such cases brought on by massive shock. I kept my lip zipped. Did I do right?”

“Just right. But things have developed. Susan and I are going to see Cody today and spill everything. If he doesn’t sign the committal papers on me right away, we’ll send him to you.”

“I’ll give him an earful,” Matt said balefully. “Snot-nosed little son of a bitch won’t let me have my pipe.”

“Has Susan told you what’s been happening in Jerusalem’s Lot since Friday night?”

“No. She said she wanted to wait until we were all together.”

“Before she does, will you tell me exactly what happened at your house?”

Matt’s face darkened, and for a moment the mask of convalescence fluttered. Ben glimpsed the old man he had seen sleeping the day before.

“If you’re not up to it—”

“No, of course I am. I must be, if half of what I suspect is true.” He smiled bitterly. “I’ve always considered myself a bit of a free thinker, not easily shocked. But it’s amazing how hard the mind can try to block out something it doesn’t like or finds threatening. Like the magic slates we had as boys. If you didn’t like what you had drawn, you had only to pull the top sheet up and it would disappear.”

“But the line stayed on the black stuff underneath forever,” Susan said.

“Yes.” He smiled at her. “A lovely metaphor for the interaction of the conscious and unconscious mind. A pity Freud was stuck with onions. But we wander.” He looked at Ben. “You’ve heard this once from Susan?”

“Yes, but—”

“Of course. I only wanted to be sure I could dispense with the background.”

He told the story in a nearly flat, inflectionless voice, pausing only when a nurse entered on whisper-soft crepe soles to ask him if he would like a glass of ginger ale. Matt told her it would be wonderful to have a ginger ale, and he sucked on the flexible straw at intervals as he finished. Ben noticed that when he got to the part about Mike going out the window backward, the ice cubes clinked slightly in the glass as he held it. Yet his voice did not waver; it retained the same even, slightly inflected tones that he undoubtedly used in his classes. Ben thought, not for the first time, that he was an admirable man.

There was a brief pause when he had finished, and Matt broke it himself.

“And so,” he said. “You who have seen nothing with your own eyes, what think you of this hearsay?”

“We talked that over for quite a while yesterday,” Susan said. “I’ll let Ben tell you.”

A little shy, Ben advanced each of the reasonable explanations and then knocked it down. When he mentioned the screen that fastened on the outside, the soft ground, the lack of ladder feet impressions, Matt applauded.