but not priest. His twisted right hand went to the scar on his forehead and rubbed at it. At last he said: " 'Twas
the drink. That's what I believe now. Not God, not devils, not predestination, not the company of saints.
'Twas the drink." He paused, thinking, then smiled at them. Roland remembered Nort, the weed-eater in Tull
who had been brought back from the dead by the man in black. Nort had smiled like that. "But if God made
the world, then God made the drink. And that is also His will."
Ka, Roland thought.
Callahan sat quiet, rubbing the scarred crucifix on his forehead, gathering his thoughts. And then he began to
tell his story.
Contents -Prev / Next
Chapter III: The Priest's Tale (New York)
ONE
It was the drink, that was what he came to believe when he finally stopped it and clarity came. Not God, not
Satan, not some deep psychosexual battle between his blessed mither and his blessed Da'. Just the drink. And
was it surprising that whiskey should have taken him by the ears? He was Irish, he was a priest, one more
strike and you're out.
From seminary in Boston he'd gone to a city parish in Lowell, Massachusetts. His parishioners had loved him
(he wouldn't refer to them as his flock, flocks were what you called seagulls on their way to the town dump),
but after seven years in Lowell, Callahan had grown uneasy. When talking to Bishop Dugan in the Diocese
office, he had used all the correct buzzwords of the time to express this unease: anomie, urban malaise, an
increasing lack of empathy, a sense of disconnection from the life of the spirit. He'd had a nip in the
bathroom before his appointment (followed by a couple of Wintergreen Life Savers, no fool he), and had
been particularly eloquent that day. Eloquence does not always proceed from belief, but often proceeds from
the bottle. And he was no liar. He had believed what he was saying that day in Dugan's study. Every word. As
he believed in Freud, the future of the Mass spoken in English, the nobility of Lyndon Johnson's War on
Poverty, and the idiocy of his widening war in Vietnam: waist-deep in the Wide Muddy, and the big fool said
to push on, as the old folk-tune had it. He believed in large part because those ideas (if they were ideas and
not just cocktail-party chatter) had been currently trading high on the intellectual Big Board. Social
Conscience is up two and a third, Hearth and Home down a quarter but still your basic blue-chip stock. Later
it all became simpler. Later he came to understand that he wasn't drinking too much because he was
spiritually unsettled but spiritually unsettled because he was drinking too much. You wanted to protest, to say
that couldn't be it, or not just that, it was too simple. But it was that, just that. God's voice is still and small,
the voice of a sparrow in a cyclone, so said the prophet Isaiah, and we all say thankya. It's hard to hear a
small voice clearly if you're shitass drunk most of the time. Callahan left America for Roland's world before
the computer revolution spawned the acronym GIGO—garbage in, garbage out—but in plenty of time to hear
someone at an AA meeting observe that if you put an asshole on a plane in San Francisco and flew him to the
east coast, the same asshole got off in Boston. Usually with four or five drinks under his belt. But that was
later. In 1964 he had believed what he believed, and plenty of people had been anxious to help him find his
way. From Lowell he had gone to Spofford, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton. There he stayed for five years, and
then he began to feel restless again. Consequently, he began to talk the talk again. The kind the Diocesan
Office listened to. The kind that got you moved on down the line. Anomie. Spiritual disconnection (this time
from his suburban parishioners). Yes, they liked him (and he liked them), but something still seemed to be
wrong. And there was something wrong, mostly in the quiet bar on the corner (where everybody also liked
him) and in the liquor cabinet in the rectory living room. Beyond small doses, alcohol is a toxin, and
Callahan was poisoning himself on a nightly basis. It was the poison in his system, not the state of the world
or that of his own soul, which was bringing him down. Had it always been that obvious? Later (at another AA
meeting) he'd heard a guy refer to alcoholism and addiction as the elephant in the living room: how could
you miss it? Callahan hadn't told him, he'd still been in the first ninety days of sobriety at that point and that
meant he was supposed to just sit there and be quiet ("Take the cotton out of your ears and stick it in your
mouth," the old-timers advised, and we all say thankya), but he could have told him, yes indeed. You could
miss the elephant if it was a magic elephant, if it had the power—like The Shadow—to cloud men's minds.
To actually make you believe that your problems were spiritual and mental but absolutely not boozical. Good
Christ, just the alcohol-related loss of the REM sleep was enough to screw you up righteously, but somehow
you never thought of that while you were active. Booze turned your thought-processes into something akin to
that circus routine where all the clowns come piling out of the little car. When you looked back in sobriety,
the things you'd said and done made you wince ("I'd sit in a bar solving all the problems of the world, then
not be able to find my car in the parking lot," one fellow at a meeting remembered, and we all say thankya).
The things you thought were even worse. How could you spend the morning puking and the afternoon
believing you were having a spiritual crisis? Yet he had. And his superiors had, possibly because more than a
few of them were having their own problems with the magic elephant. Callahan began thinking that a smaller
church, a rural parish, would put him back in touch with God and himself. And so, in the spring of 1969, he
found himself in New England again. Northern New England, this time. He had set up shop—bag and
baggage, crucifix and chasuble—in the pleasant little town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine. There he had finally
met real evil. Looked it in the face.
And flinched.
TWO
"A writer came to me," he said. "A man named Ben Mears."
"I think I read one of his books," Eddie said. "Air Dance, it was called. About a man who gets hung for the
murder his brother committed?"
Callahan nodded. "That's the one. There was also a teacher named Matthew Burke, and they both believed
there was a vampire at work in 'Salem's Lot, the kind who makes other vampires."
"Is there any other kind?" Eddie asked, remembering about a hundred movies at the Majestic and maybe a
thousand comic books purchased at (and sometimes stolen from) Dahlie's.
"There is, and we'll get there, but never mind that now. Most of all, there was a boy who believed. He was
about the same age as your Jake. They didn't convince me—not at first—but they were convinced, and it was
hard to stand against their belief. Also, something-was going on in The Lot, that much was certain. People
were disappearing. There was an atmosphere of terror in the town. Impossible to describe it now, sitting here
in the sun, but it was there. I had to officiate at the funeral of another boy. His name was Daniel Glick. I
doubt he was this vampire's first victim in The Lot, and he certainly wasn't the last, but he was the first one
who turned up dead. On the day of Danny Glick's burial, my life changed, somehow. And I'm not talking
about the quart of whiskey a day anymore, either. Something changed in my head. I felt it. Like a switch
turning. And although I haven't had a drink in years, that switch is still turned."
Susannah thought: That's when you went todash, Father Callahan.
Eddie thought: That's when you went nineteen, pal. Or maybe it's ninety-nine. Or maybe it's both, somehow.
Roland simply listened. His mind was clear of reflection, a perfect receiving machine.
"The writer, Mears, had fallen in love with a town girl named Susan Norton. The vampire took her. I believe
he did it partly because he could, and partly to punish Mears for daring to form a group—a ka-tet—that
would try to hunt him. We went to the place the vampire had bought, an old wreck called the Marsten House.
The thing staying there went by the name of Barlow."
Callahan sat, considering, looking through them and back to those old days. At last he resumed.
"Barlow was gone, but he'd left the woman. And a letter. It was addressed to all of us, but was directed
principally to me. The moment I saw her lying there in the cellar of the Marsten House I understood it was all
true. The doctor with us listened to her chest and took her blood pressure, though, just to be sure. No
heartbeat. Blood pressure zero. But when Ben pounded the stake into her, she came alive. The blood flowed.
She screamed, over and over. Her hands… I remembered the shadows of her hands on the wall…"
Eddie's hand gripped Susannah's. They listened in a horrified suspension that was neither belief nor disbelief.
This wasn't a talking train powered by malfunctioning computer circuits, nor men and women who had
reverted to savagery. This was something akin to the unseen demon that had come to the place where they
had drawn Jake. Or the doorkeeper in Dutch Hill.
"What did he say to you in his note, this Barlow?" Roland asked.
"That my faith was weak and I would undo myself. He was right, of course. By then the only thing I really
believed in was Bushmill's. I just didn't know it. He did, though. Booze is also a vampire, and maybe it takes
one to know one.
"The boy who was with us became convinced that this prince of vampires meant to kill his parents next, or
turn them. For revenge. The boy had been taken prisoner, you see, but he escaped and killed the vampire's
half-human accomplice, a man named Straker."
Roland nodded, thinking this boy sounded more and more like Jake. "What was his name?"
"Mark Petrie. I went with him to his house, and with all the considerable power my church affords: the cross,
the stole, the holy water, and of course the Bible. But I had come to think of these things as symbols, and that
was my Achilles' heel. Barlow was there. He had Petrie's parents. And then he had the boy. I held up my
cross. It glowed. It hurt him. He screamed." Callahan smiled, recalling that scream of agony. The look of it
chilled Eddie's heart. "I told him that if he hurt Mark, I'd destroy him, and at that moment I could have done
it. He knew it, too. His response was that before I did, he'd rip the child's throat out. And he could have done
it."
"Mexican standoff," Eddie murmured, remembering a day by the Western Sea when he had faced Roland in a
strikingly similar situation. "Mexican standoff, baby."
"What happened?" Susannah asked.
Callahan's smile faded. He was rubbing his scarred right hand the way the gunslinger had rubbed his hip,
without seeming to realize it. "The vampire made a proposal. He would let the boy go if I'd put down the
crucifix I held. We'd face each other unarmed. His faith against mine. I agreed. God help me, I agreed. The
boy"
THREE
The boy is gone, like an eddy of dark water.
Barlow seems to grow taller. His hair, swept back from his brow in the European manner, seems to float
around his skull. He's wearing a dark suit and a bright red tie, impeccably knotted, and to Callahan he seems
part of the darkness that surrounds him. Mark Petrie's parents lie dead at his feet, their skulls crushed.
"Fulfill your part of the bargain, shaman."
But why should he? Why not drive him off, settle for a draw this night ? Or kill him outright ? Something is
wrong with the idea, terribly wrong, but he cannot pick out just what it is. Nor will any of the buzzwords that
have helped him in previous moments of crisis be of any help to him here. This isn't anomie, lack of empathy,
or the existential grief of the twentieth century; this is a vampire. And—
And his cross, which had been glowing fiercely, is growing dark.
Fear leaps into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. Barlow is walking toward him across the Petrie
kitchen, and Callahan can see the things fangs very clearly because Barlow is smiling. It is a winner's smile.
Callahan takes a step backward. Then two. Then his buttocks strike the edge of the table, and the table
pushes back against the wall, and then there is nowhere left to go.
"Sad to see a man's faith fail, " says Barlow, and reaches out.
Why should he not reach out? The cross Callahan is holding up is now dark. Now it's nothing but a piece of
plaster, a cheap piece of rick-rack his mother bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper's
price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough spiritual voltage to smash down walls and shatter
stone, is gone.
Barlow plucks it from his fingers. Callahan cries out miserably, the cry of a child who suddenly realizes the
bogeyman has been real all along, waiting patiently in the closet for its chance. And now comes a sound that
will haunt him for the rest of his life, from New York and the secret highways of America to the AA meetings
in Topeka where he finally sobered up to the final stop in Detroit to his life here, in Calla Bryn Sturgis. He
will remember that sound when his forehead is scarred and he fully expects to be killed. He will remember it
when he is killed. The sound is two dry snaps as Barlow breaks the arms of the cross, and the meaningless
thump as he throws what remains on the floor. And he'll also remember the cosmically ludicrous thought
which came, even as Barlow reached for him: God, I need a drink.
FOUR
The Pere looked at Roland, Eddie, and Susannah with the eyes of one who is remembering the absolute worst
moment of his life. "You hear all sorts of sayings and slogans in Alcoholics Anonymous. There's one that
