But as they entered town, Jimmy said in an almost absurdly relieved tone, “Look there. Crossen’s is open.”

It was. Milt was out front, fussing a plastic drop cover over his rack of newspapers, and Lester Silvius was standing next to him, dressed in a yellow slicker.

“Don’t see the rest of the crew, though,” Ben said.

Milt glanced up at them and waved, and Ben thought he saw lines of strain on both men’s faces. The “Closed” sign was still posted inside the door of Foreman’s Mortuary. The hardware store was also closed, and Spencer’s was locked and dark. The diner was open, and after they had passed it, Jimmy pulled his Buick up to the curb in front of the new shop. Above the show window, simple gold-faced letters spelled out the name: “Barlow and Straker—Fine Furnishings.” And taped to the door, as Callahan had said, a sign which had been hand-lettered in a fine script which they all recognized from the note they had seen the day before: “Closed until further notice.”

“Why are you stopping here?” Mark asked.

“Just on the off-chance that he might be holing up inside,” Jimmy said. “It’s so obvious he might figure we’d overlook it. And I think that sometimes customs men put an okay on boxes they’ve checked through. They write it on with chalk.”

They went around to the back, and while Ben and Mark hunched their shoulders against the rain, Jimmy poked one overcoated elbow through the glass in the back door until they could all climb inside.

The air was noxious and stale, the air of a room shut up for centuries rather than days. Ben poked his head out into the showroom, but there was no place to hide out there. Sparsely furnished, there was no sign that Straker had been replenishing his stock.

“Come here!” Jimmy called hoarsely, and Ben’s heart leaped into his throat.

Jimmy and Mark were standing by a long crate which Jimmy had partly pried open with the claw end of his hammer. Looking in, they could see one pale hand and a dark sleeve.

Without thinking, Ben attacked the crate. Jimmy was fumbling at the far end with the hammer.

“Ben,” Jimmy said, “you’re going to cut your hands. You—”

He hadn’t heard. He snapped boards off the crate, regardless of nails and splinters. They had him, they had the slimy night-thing, and he would pound the stake into him as he had pounded it into Susan, he would—

He snapped back another piece of the cheap wooden crating and looked into the dead, moon-pallid face of Mike Ryerson.

For a moment there was utter silence, and then they all let out their breath…it was as if a soft wind had coursed through the room.

“What do we do now?” Jimmy asked.

“We better get out to Mark’s house first,” Ben said. His voice was dull with disappointment. “We know where he is. We don’t even have a finished stake yet.”

They put the splintered strips of wood back helter-skelter.

“Better let me look at those hands,” Jimmy said. “They’re bleeding.”

“Later,” Ben said. “Come on.”

They went back around the building, all of them wordlessly glad to be back in the open air, and Jimmy drove the Buick up Jointner Avenue and into the residential part of town, just outside the skimpy business district. They arrived at Mark’s house perhaps sooner than any of them would have liked.

Father Callahan’s old sedan was parked behind Henry Petrie’s sensible Pinto runabout in the circular Petrie driveway. At the sight of it, Mark sucked in his breath and looked away. All color had drained out of his face.

“I can’t go in there,” he muttered. “I’m sorry. I’ll wait in the car.”

“Nothing to be sorry for, Mark,” Jimmy said.

He parked, turned off the ignition, and got out. Ben hesitated a minute, then put a hand on Mark’s shoulder. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Sure.” But he did not look all right. His chin was trembling and his eyes looked hollow. He suddenly turned to Ben and the hollowness was gone from the eyes and they were filled with simple pain, swimming with tears. “Cover them up, will you? If they’re dead, cover them up.”

“Sure I will,” Ben said.

“It’s better this way,” Mark said. “My father…he would have made a very successful vampire. Maybe as good as Barlow, in time. He…he was good at everything he tried. Maybe too good.”

“Try not to think too much,” Ben said, hating the lame sound of the words as they left his mouth. Mark looked up at him and smiled wanly.

“The woodpile’s around in the back,” Mark said. “You can go faster if you use my father’s lathe down in the basement.”

“All right,” Ben said. “Be easy, Mark. As easy as you can.”

But the boy was looking away now, swiping at his eyes with his arm.

He and Jimmy went up the back steps and inside.

THIRTY-FIVE

“Callahan’s not here,” Jimmy said flatly. They had gone through the entire house.

Ben forced himself to say it. “Barlow must have gotten him.”

He looked at the broken cross in his hand. It had been around Callahan’s neck yesterday. It was the only trace of him they had found. It had been lying next to the bodies of the Petries, who were very dead indeed. Their heads had been crushed together with force enough to literally shatter the skulls. Ben remembered the unnatural strength Mrs Glick had displayed and felt sick.

“Come on,” he said to Jimmy. “We’ve got to cover them up. I promised.”

THIRTY-SIX

They took the dustcover from the couch in the living room and covered them with that. Ben tried not to look at or think about what they were doing, but it was impossible. When the job was done, one hand—the cultivated, lacquered nails revealed it to be June Petrie’s—protruded from under the gaily patterned dustcover, and he poked it underneath with his toe, grimacing in an effort to keep his stomach under control. The shapes of the bodies under the cover were undeniable and unmistakable, making him think of news photos from Vietnam—battlefield dead and soldiers carrying dreadful burdens in black rubber sacks that looked absurdly like golf bags.

They went downstairs, each with an armload of yellow ash stove lengths.

The cellar had been Henry Petrie’s domain, and it reflected his personality perfectly: Three high-intensity lights had been hung in a straight line over the work area, each shaded with a wide metal shell that allowed the light to fall with strong brilliance on the planer, the jigsaw, the bench saw, the lathe, the electric sander. Ben saw that he had been building a bird hotel, probably to place in the backyard next spring, and the blueprint he had been working from was neatly laid out and held at each corner with machined metal paperweights. He had been doing a competent but uninspired job, and now it would never be finished. The floor was neatly swept, but a pleasantly nostalgic odor of sawdust hung in the air.

“This isn’t going to work at all,” Jimmy said.

“I know that,” Ben said.

“The woodpile,” Jimmy snorted, and let the wood fall from his arms in a lumbering crash. The stove lengths rolled wildly on the floor like jackstraws. He uttered a high, hysterical laugh.

“Jimmy—”

But his laugh cut across Ben’s attempt to speak like jags of piano wire. “We’re going to go out and end the scourge with a pile of wood from Henry Petrie’s back lot. How about some chair legs or baseball bats?”

“Jimmy, what else can we do?”

Jimmy looked at him and got himself under control with a visible effort. “Some treasure hunt,” he said. “Go forty paces into Charles Griffen’s north pasture and look under the large rock. Ha. Jesus. We can get out of town. We can do that.”

“Do you want to quit? Is that what you want?”

“No. But it isn’t going to be just today, Ben. It’s going to be weeks before we get them all, if we ever do. Can you stand that? Can you stand doing…doing what you did to Susan a thousand times? Pulling them out of their closets and their stinking little bolt holes screaming and struggling, only to pound a stake into their chest cavities and smash their hearts? Can you keep that up until November without going nuts?”