“Where there are no witches or incubi or vampires,” Matt said, “but only child-beating, incest, and the rape of the environment.”

“Yes.”

Matt said deliberately, “And you hate it, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Callahan said quietly. “I think it’s an abomination. It’s the Catholic Church’s way of saying that God isn’t dead, only a little senile. And I guess that’s my answer, isn’t it? What do you want me to do?”

Matt told him.

Callahan thought it over and said, “You realize it flies in the face of everything I just told you?”

“On the contrary, I think it’s your chance to put your church— yourchurch—to the test.”

Callahan took a deep breath. “Very well, I agree. On one condition.”

“What would that be?”

“That all of us who go on this little expedition first go to the shop this Mr Straker is managing. That Mr Mears, as spokesman, should speak to him frankly about all of this. That we all have a chance to observe his reactions. And finally, that he should have his chance to laugh in our faces.”

Matt was frowning. “It would be warning him.”

Callahan shook his head. “I believe the warning would be of no avail if the three of us—Mr Mears, Dr Cody, and myself—still agreed that we should move ahead regardless.”

“All right,” Matt said. “I agree, contingent on the approval of Ben and Jimmy Cody.”

“Fine.” Callahan sighed. “Will it hurt you if I tell you that I hope this is all in your mind? That I hope this man Straker does laugh in our faces, and with good reason?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“I do hope it. I have agreed to more than you know. It frightens me.”

“I am frightened, too,” Matt said softly.

THREE

But walking back to St Andrew’s, he did not feel frightened at all. He felt exhilarated, renewed. For the first time in years he was sober and did not crave a drink.

He went into the rectory, picked up the telephone, and dialed Eva Miller’s boardinghouse. “Hello? Mrs Miller? May I speak with Mr Mears?…He’s not. Yes, I see…. No, no message. I’ll call tomorrow. Yes, good-by.”

He hung up and went to the window.

Was Mears out there someplace, drinking beer on a country road, or could it be that everything the old schoolteacher had told him was true?

If so…if so…

He could not stay in the house. He went out on the back porch, breathing in the brisk, steely air of October, and looked into the moving darkness. Perhaps it wasn’t all Freud after all. Perhaps a large part of it had to do with the invention of the electric light, which had killed the shadows in men’s minds much more effectively than a stake through a vampire’s heart—and less messily, too.

The evil still went on, but now it went on in the hard, soulless glare of parking-lot fluorescents, of neon tubing, of hundred-watt bulbs by the billions. Generals planned strategic air strikes beneath the no-nonsense glow of alternating current, and it was all out of control, like a kid’s soapbox racer going downhill with no brakes: I was following my orders. Yes, that was true, patently true. We were all soldiers, simply following what was written on our walking papers. But where were the orders coming from, ultimately? Take me to your leader. But where is his office? I was just following orders. The people elected me. But who elected the people?

Something flapped overhead and Callahan looked up, startled out of his confused revery. A bird? A bat? Gone. Didn’t matter.

He listened for the town and heard nothing but the whine of telephone wires.

The night the kudzu gets your fields, you sleep like the dead.

Who wrote that? Dickey?

No sound; no light but the fluorescent in front of the church where Fred Astaire had never danced and the faint waxing and waning of the yellow warning light at the crossroads of Brock Street and Jointner Avenue. No baby cried.

The night the kudzu gets your fields, you sleep like—

The exultation had faded away like a bad echo of pride. Terror struck him around the heart like a blow. Not terror for his life or his honor or that his housekeeper might find out about his drinking. It was a terror he had never dreamed of, not even in the tortured days of his adolescence.

The terror he felt was for his immortal soul.

Part Three

I heard a voice, crying from the deep:

Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.

O

LD ROCK ’N’ ROLL SONG

And travelers now within that valley

Through the red-litten windows see

Vast forms that move fantastically

To a discordant melody;

While, like a rapid ghastly river,

Through the pale door,

A hideous throng rush out forever

And laugh—but smile no more.

E

DGAR

A

LLAN

P

OE

Tell you now that the whole town is empty.

B

OB

D

YLAN

Chapter Fourteen

From the “Old Farmer’s Almanac”:

Sunset on Sunday, October 5, 1975, at 7:02 pm, sunrise on Monday, October 6, 1975, at 6:49 am. The period of darkness on Jerusalem’s Lot during that particular rotation of the Earth, thirteen days after the vernal equinox, lasted eleven hours and forty-seven minutes. The moon was new. The day’s verse from the Old Farmer was: “See less sun, harvest’s nigh done.”

From the Portland Weather Station:

High temperature for the period of darkness was 62°, reported at 7:05 pm. Low temperature was 47°, reported at 4:06 am. Scattered clouds, precipitation zero. Winds from the northwest at five to ten miles per hour.

From the Cumberland County police blotter:

Nothing.

TWO

No one pronounced Jerusalem’s Lot dead on the morning of October 6; no one knew it was. Like the bodies of previous days, it retained every semblance of life.

Ruthie Crockett, who had lain pale and ill in bed all weekend, was gone on Monday morning. The disappearance went unreported. Her mother was down cellar, lying behind her shelves of preserves with a canvas tarpaulin pulled over her body, and Larry Crockett, who woke up very late indeed, simply assumed that his daughter had gotten herself off to school. He decided not to go into the office that day. He felt weak and washed out and lightheaded. Flu, or something. The light hurt his eyes. He got up and pulled down the shades, yelping once when the sunlight fell directly on his arm. He would have to replace that window some day when he felt better. Defective window glass was no joke. You could come home on a sunshiny day, find your house burning away six licks to the minute, and those insurance pricks in the home office called it spontaneous combustion and wouldn’t pay up. When he felt better was time enough. He thought about a cup of coffee and felt sick to his stomach. He wondered vaguely where his wife was, and then the subject slipped out of his mind. He went back to bed, fingering a funny little shaving nick just under his chin, pulled the sheet over his wan cheek, and went back to sleep.

His daughter, meanwhile, slept in enameled darkness within an abandoned freezer close to Dud Rogers—in the night world of her new existence, she found his advances among the heaped mounds of garbage very acceptable.

Loretta Starcher, the town librarian, had also disappeared, although there was no one in her disconnected spinster’s life to remark it. She now resided on the dark and musty third floor of the Jerusalem’s Lot Public Library. The third floor was always kept locked (she had the only key, always worn on a chain around her neck) except when some special supplicant could convince her that he was strong enough, intelligent enough, and moralenough to receive a special dispensation.