Hehad told her everything, and what she must do—and how she could be with her daughter when it was done, and with so many others…and with him. Despite Susan, it was himshe wanted to please, so hewould give her the thing she craved and needed: the touch; the penetration.

Her husband’s .38 was in her pocket.

She entered the lobby and looked toward the reception desk. If anyone tried to stop her, she would take care of them. Not by shooting, no. No shot must be fired until she was in Burke’s room. Hehad told her so. If they got to her and stopped her before she had done the job, hewould not come to her, to give her burning kisses in the night.

There was a young girl at the desk in a white cap and uniform, working a crossword in the soft glow of the lamp over her main console. An orderly was just going down the hall, his back to them.

The duty nurse looked up with a trained smile when she heard Ann’s footsteps, but it faded when she saw the hollow-eyed woman who was approaching her in nightclothes. Her eyes were blank yet oddly shiny, as if she were a wind-up toy someone had set in motion. A patient, perhaps, who had gone wandering.

“Ma’am, if you—”

Ann Norton drew the .38 from the pocket of her wrapper like some creaky gunslinger from beyond time. She pointed it at the duty nurse’s head and told her, “Turn around.”

The nurse’s mouth worked silently. She drew in breath with a convulsive heave.

“Don’t scream. I’ll kill you if you do.”

The air wheezed out. The nurse had gone very pale.

“Turn around now.”

The nurse got up slowly and turned around. Ann Norton reversed the .38 and prepared to bring the butt down on the nurse’s head with all the strength she had.

At that precise moment, her feet were kicked out from under her.

TWENTY-TWO

The gun went flying.

The woman in the ragged yellow dressing gown did not scream but began to make a high whining noise in her throat, almost keening. She scrambled after it like a crab, and the man who was behind her, looking bewildered and frightened, also darted after it. When he saw that she would get to it first, he kicked it across the lobby rug.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Hey, help!”

Ann Norton looked over her shoulder and hissed at him, her face pulled into a cheated scrawl of hate, and then scrambled after the gun again. The orderly had come back, on the run. He looked at the scene with blank amazement for a moment, and then picked up the gun that lay almost at his feet.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said. “This thing is load—”

She attacked him. Her hands, hooked into claws, pinwheeled across his face, dragging red stripes across the surprised orderly’s forehead and right cheek. He held the gun up out of her reach. Still keening, she clawed for it.

The bewildered man came up from behind and grabbed her. He would say later that it was like grabbing a bag of snakes. The body beneath the dressing gown was hot and repulsive, every muscle twitching and writhing.

As she struggled to get free, the orderly popped her one flush on the jaw. Her eyes rolled up to the whites and she collapsed.

The orderly and the bewildered man looked at each other.

The nurse at the reception desk was screaming. Her hands were clapped to her mouth, giving the screams a unique foghorn effect.

“What kind of a hospital do you people run here, anyhow?” the bewildered man asked.

“Christ if I know,” the orderly said. “What the hell happened?”

“I was just coming in to visit my sister. She had a baby. And this kid walks up to me and says a woman just went in with a gun. And—”

“What kid?”

The bewildered man who had come to visit his sister looked around. The lobby was filling with people, but all of them were above drinking age.

“I don’t see him now. But he was here. That gun loaded?”

“It sure is,” the orderly said.

“What kind of a hospital do you people run here, anyhow?” the bewildered man asked again.

TWENTY-THREE

They had seen two nurses run past the door toward the elevators and heard a vague shout down the stairwell. Ben glanced at Jimmy and Jimmy shrugged imperceptibly. Matt was dozing with his mouth open.

Ben closed the door and turned off the lights. Jimmy crouched by the foot of Matt’s bed, and when they heard footsteps hesitate outside the door, Ben stood beside it, ready. When it opened and a head poked through, he grabbed it in a half nelson and jammed the cross he held in the other hand into the face.

“Let me go!”

A hand reached up and beat futilely at his chest. A moment later the overhead light went on. Matt was sitting up in bed, blinking at Mark Petrie, who was struggling in Ben’s arms.

Jimmy came out of his crouch and ran across the room. He seemed almost ready to embrace the boy when he hesitated. “Lift your chin.”

Mark did, showing all three of them his unmarked neck.

Jimmy relaxed. “Boy, I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life. Where’s the Father?”

“Don’t know,” Mark said somberly. “Barlow caught me…killed my folks. They’re dead. My folks are dead. He beat their heads together. He killed my folks. Then he had me and he said to Father Callahan that he would let me go if Father Callahan would promise to throw away his cross. He promised. I ran. But before I ran, I spit on him. I spit on him and I’m going to kill him.”

He swayed in the doorway. There were bramble marks on his forehead and cheeks. He had run through the forest along the path where Danny Glick and his brother had come to grief so long before. His pants were wet to the knees from his flight through Taggart Stream. He had hitched a ride, but couldn’t remember who he had hitched it with. The radio had been playing, he remembered that.

Ben’s tongue was frozen. He did not know what to say.

“You poor boy,” Matt said softly. “You poor, brave boy.”

Mark’s face began to break up. His eyes closed and his mouth twisted and strained. “My muh-muh- mother—”

He staggered blindly and Ben caught him in his arms, enfolded him, rocked him as the tears came and raged against his shirt.

TWENTY-FOUR

Father Donald Callahan had no idea how long he walked in the dark. He stumbled back toward the downtown area along Jointner Avenue, never heeding his car, which he had left parked in the Petries’ driveway. Sometimes he wandered in the middle of the road, and sometimes he staggered along the sidewalk. Once a car bore down on him, its headlights great shining circles; its horn began to blare and it swerved at the last instant, tires screaming on the pavement. Once he fell in the ditch. As he approached the yellow blinking light, it began to rain.

There was no one on the streets to mark his passage; ’salem’s Lot had battened down for the night, even tighter than usual. The diner was empty, and in Spencer’s Miss Coogan was sitting by her cash register and reading a confession magazine off the rack in the frosty glow of the overhead fluorescents. Outside, under the lighted sign showing the blue dog in mid-flight, a red neon sign said:

BUS

They were afraid, he supposed. They had every reason to be. Some inner part of themselves had absorbed the danger, and tonight doors were locked in the Lot that had not been locked in years…if ever.

He was on the streets alone. And he alone had nothing to fear. It was funny. He laughed aloud, and the sound of it was like wild, lunatic sobbing. No vampire would touch him. Others, perhaps, but not him. The Master had marked him, and he would walk free until the Master claimed his own.

St Andrew’s loomed above him.

He hesitated, then walked up the path. He would pray. Pray all night, if necessary. Not to the new God, the God of ghettos and social conscience and free lunches, but the old God, who had proclaimed through Moses not to suffer a witch to live and who had given it unto his own son to raise from the dead. A second chance, God. All my life for penance. Only…a second chance.