“What should I do?” he asked the screen.

“Say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Ben said, his voice sounding strange and heavy in the enclosed space.

“Now tell me your sins.”

“All of them?” Ben asked, appalled.

“Try to be representative,” Callahan said, his voice dry. “I know we have something to do before dark.”

Thinking hard and trying to keep the Ten Commandments before him as a kind of sorting screen, Ben began. It didn’t become easier as he went along. There was no sense of catharsis—only the dull embarrassment that went with telling a stranger the mean secrets of his life. Yet he could see how this ritual could become compulsive: as bitterly compelling as strained rubbing alcohol for the chronic drinker or the pictures behind the loose board in the bathroom for an adolescent boy. There was something medieval about it, something accursed—a ritual act of regurgitation. He found himself remembering a scene from the Bergman picture The Seventh Seal, where a crowd of ragged penitents proceeds through a town stricken with the black plague. The penitents were scourging themselves with birch branches, making themselves bleed. The hatefulness of baring himself this way (and perversely, he would not allow himself to lie, although he could have done so quite convincingly) made the day’s purpose real in the final sense, and he could almost see the word “vampire” printed on the black screen of his mind, not in scare movie-poster print, but in small, economical letters that were made to be a woodcut or scratched on a scroll. He felt helpless in the grip of this alien ritual, out of joint with his time. The confessional might have been a direct pipeline to the days when werewolves and incubi and witches were an accepted part of the outer darkness and the church the only beacon of light. For the first time in his life he felt the slow, terrible beat and swell of the ages and saw his life as a dim and glimmering spark in an edifice which, if seen clearly, might drive all men mad. Matt had not told them of Father Callahan’s conception of his church as a Force, but Ben would have understood that now. He could feel the Force in this fetid little box, beating in on him, leaving him naked and contemptible. He felt it as no Catholic, raised to confession since earliest childhood, could have.

When he stepped out, the fresh air from the open doors struck him thankfully. He wiped at his neck with the palm of his hand and it came away sweaty.

Callahan stepped out. “You’re not done yet,” he said.

Wordlessly, Ben stepped back inside, but did not kneel. Callahan gave him an act of contrition—ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.

“I don’t know that one,” Ben said.

“I’ll give you a card with the prayer written on it,” the voice on the other side of the screen said. “You can say them to yourself while we ride over to Cumberland.”

Ben hesitated a moment. “Matt was right, you know. When he said it was going to be harder than we thought. We’re going to sweat blood before this is over.”

“Yes?” Callahan said—polite or just dubious? Ben couldn’t tell. He looked down and saw he was still holding the Junior Mints box. He had crushed it to a shapeless pulp with the convulsive squeezing of his right hand.

TEN

It was nearing one o’clock when they all got in Jimmy Cody’s large Buick and set off. None of them spoke. Father Donald Callahan was wearing his full gown, a surplice, and a white stole bordered with purple. He had given them each a small tube of water from the Holy Font, and had blessed them each with the sign of the cross. He held a small silver pyx on his lap which contained several pieces of the Host.

They stopped at Jimmy’s Cumberland office first, and Jimmy left the motor idling while he went inside. When he came out, he was wearing a baggy sport coat that concealed the bulge of McCaslin’s revolver and carrying an ordinary Craftsman hammer in his right hand.

Ben looked at it with some fascination and saw from the tail of his eye that Mark and Callahan were also staring. The hammer had a blue steel head and a perforated rubber handgrip.

“Ugly, isn’t it?” Jimmy remarked.

Ben thought of using that hammer on Susan, using it to ram a stake between her breasts, and felt his stomach flip over slowly, like an airplane doing a slow roll.

“Yes,” he said, and moistened his lips. “It’s ugly, all right.”

They drove to the Cumberland Stop and Shop. Ben and Jimmy went into the supermarket and picked up all the garlic that was displayed along the vegetable counter—twelve boxes of the whitish-gray bulbs. The checkout girl raised her eyebrows and said, “Glad I ain’t going on a long ride with you boys t’night.”

Going out, Ben said idly, “I wonder what the basis of garlic’s effectiveness against them is? Something in the Bible, or an ancient curse, or—”

“I suspect it’s an allergy,” Jimmy said.

“Allergy?”

Callahan caught the last of it and asked for a repetition as they drove toward the Northern Belle Flower Shop.

“Oh yes, I agree with Dr Cody,” he said. “Probably is an allergy…if it works as a deterrent at all. Remember, that’s not proved yet.”

“That’s a funny idea for a priest,” Mark said.

“Why? If I must accept the existence of vampires (and it seems I must, at least for the time being), must I also accept them as creatures beyond the bounds of all natural laws? Some, certainly. Folklore says they can’t be seen in mirrors, that they can transform themselves into bats or wolves or birds—the so-called psychopompos—that they can narrow their bodies and slip through the tiniest cracks. Yet we know they see, and hear, and speak…and they most certainly taste. Perhaps they also know discomfort, pain—”

“And love?” Ben asked, looking straight ahead.

“No,” Jimmy answered. “I suspect that love is beyond them.” He pulled into a small parking lot beside an L-shaped flower shop with an attached greenhouse.

A small bell tinkled over the door when they went in, and the heavy aroma of flowers struck them. Ben felt sickened by the cloying heaviness of their mixed perfumes, and was reminded of funeral parlors.

“Hi there.” A tall man in a canvas apron came toward them, holding an earthen flowerpot in one hand.

Ben had only started to explain what they wanted when the man in the apron shook his head and interrupted.

“You’re late, I’m afraid. A man came in last Friday and bought every rose I had in stock—red, white, and yellow. I’ll have no more until Wednesday at least. If you’d care to order—”

“What did this man look like?”

“Very striking,” the proprietor said, putting his pot down. “Tall, totally bald. Piercing eyes. Smoked foreign cigarettes, by the smell. He had to take the flowers out in three armloads. He put them in the back of a very old car, a Dodge, I think—”

“Packard,” Ben said. “A black Packard.”

“You know him, then.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“He paid cash. Very unusual, considering the size of the order. But perhaps if you get in touch with him, he would sell you—”

“Perhaps,” Ben said.

In the car again, they talked it over.

“There’s a shop in Falmouth—” Father Callahan began doubtfully.

“No!” Ben said. “No!” And the raw edge of hysteria in his voice made them all look around. “And when we got to Falmouth and found that Straker had been there, too? What then? Portland? Kittery? Boston?Don’t you realize what’s happening? He’s foreseen us! He’s leading us by the nose!”

“Ben, be reasonable,” Jimmy said. “Don’t you think we ought to at least—”

“Don’t you remember what Matt said? ‘You mustn’t go into this feeling that because he can’t rise in the daytime he can’t harm you.’ Look at your watch, Jimmy.”

Jimmy did. “Two-fifteen,” he said slowly, and looked up at the sky as if doubting the truth on the dial. But it was true; now the shadows were going the other way.