recurs to me whenever I think of that night. Of Barlow taking hold of my shoulders."
"What?" Eddie asked.
"Be careful what you pray for," Callahan said. "Because you just might get it."
"You got your drink," Roland said.
"Oh yes," Callahan said. "I got my drink."
Barlow's hands are strong, implacable. As Callahan is drawn forward, he suddenly understands what is
going to happen. Not death. Death would be a mercy compared to this.
No, please no, he tries to say, but nothing comes out of his mouth but one small, whipped moan.
"Now, priest," the vampire whispers.
Callahan's mouth is pressed against the reeking flesh of the vampires cold throat. There is no anomie, no
social dysfunction, no ethical or racial ramifications. Only the stink of death and one vein, open and pulsing
with Barlow's dead, infected blood. No sense of existential bss, no postmodern grief for the death of the
American value system, not even the religio-psychological guilt of Western man. Only the effort to hold his
breath forever, or twist his head away, or both. He cannot. He holds on for what seems like aeons, smearing
the blood across his cheeks and forehead and chin like warpaint. To no avail. In the end he does what all
alcoholics must do once the booze has taken them by the ears: he drinks.
Strike three. You're out.
SIX
"The boy got away. There was that much. And Barlow let me go. Killing me wouldn't have been any fun,
would it? No, the fun was in letting me live.
"I wandered for an hour or more, through a town that was less and less there. There aren't many Type One
vampires, and that's a blessing because a Type One can cause one hell of a lot of mayhem in an extremely
short period of time. The town was already half-infected, but I was too blind—too shocked—to realize it.
And none of the new vampires approached me. Barlow had set his mark on me as surely as God set his mark
on Cain before sending him off to dwell in the land of Nod. His watch and his warrant, as you'd say, Roland.
"There was a drinking fountain in the alley beside Spencer's Drugs, the sort of thing no Public Health Office
would have sanctioned a few years later, but back then there was one or two in every small town. I washed
Barlow's blood off my face and neck there. Tried to wash it out of my hair, too. And then I went to St.
Andrews, my church. I'd made up my mind to pray for a second chance. Not to the God of the theologians
who believe that everything holy and unholy ultimately comes from inside us, but to the old God. The one
who proclaimed to Moses that he should not suffer a witch to live and gave unto his own son the power to
raise from the dead. A second chance is all I wanted. My life for that.
"By the time I got to St. Andrews, I was almost running.
There were three doors going inside. I reached for the middle one. Somewhere a car backfired, and someone
laughed. I remember those sounds very clearly. It's as if they mark the border of my life as a priest of the
Holy Roman Catholic Church."
"What happened to you, sugar?" Susannah asked.
"The door rejected me," Callahan said. "It had an iron handle, and when I touched it, fire came out of it like a
reverse stroke of lightning. It knocked me all the way down the steps and onto the cement path. It did this."
He raised his scarred right hand.
"And that?" Eddie asked, and pointed to his forehead.
"No," Callahan said. "That came later. I picked myself up. Walked some more. Wound up at Spencer's again.
Only this time I went in. Bought a bandage for my hand. And then, while I was paying, I saw the sign. Ride
The Big Gray Dog."
"He means Greyhound, sugar," Susannah told Roland. "It's a nationwide bus company."
Roland nodded and twirled a finger in his go-on gesture.
"Miss Coogan told me the next bus went to New York, so I bought a ticket on that one. If she'd told me it
went to Jacksonville or Nome or Hot Burgoo, South Dakota, I would have gone to one of those places. All I
wanted to do was get out of that town. I didn't care that people were dying and worse than dying, some of
them my friends, some of them my parishioners. I just wanted to get out Can you understand that?"
"Yes," Roland said with no hesitation. "Very well."
Callahan looked into his face, and what he saw there seemed to reassure him a little. When he continued, he
seemed calmer.
"Loretta Coogan was one of the town spinsters. I must have frightened her, because she said I'd have to wait
for the bus outside. I went out. Eventually the bus came. I got on and gave the driver my ticket. He took his
half and gave me my half. I sat down. The bus started to roll. We went under the flashing yellow blinker at
the middle of town, and that was the first mile. The first mile on the road that took me here. Later on—maybe
four-thirty in the morning, still dark outside—the bus stopped in"
SEVEN
"Hartford," the bus driver says. "This is Hartford, Mac. We got a twenty-minute rest stop. Do you want to go
in and get a sandwich or something?"
Callahan fumbles his wallet out of his pocket with his bandaged hand and almost drops it. The taste of death
is in his mouth, a moronic, mealy taste like a spoiled apple. He needs something to take away that taste, and
if nothing will take it away something to change it, and if nothing will change it at least something to cover it
up, the way you might cover up an ugly gouge in a wood floor with a piece of cheap carpet.
He holds out a twenty to the bus driver and says, "Can you get me a bottle?"
"Mister, the rules— "
"And keep the change, of course. A pint would be fine."
"I don't need nobody cutting up cm my bus. We'll be in New York in two hours. You can get anything you
want once we're there." The bus driver tries to smile. "It's Fun City, you know."
Callahan—he's no longer Father Callahan, the flash of fire from the doorhandle answered that question, at
least—adds a ten to the twenty. Now he's holding out thirty dollars. Again he tells the driver a pint would be
fine, and he doesn't expect any change. This time the driver, not an idiot, takes the money. "But don't you go
cutting up on me, " he repeats. "I don't need nobody cutting up on my bus. "
Callahan nods. No cutting up, that's a big ten-four. The driver goes into the combination grocery store-liquor
store—short-order restaurant that exists here on the rim of Hartford, on the rim of morning, under yellow hi-
intensity lights. There are secret highways in America, highways in hiding. This place stands at one of the
entrance ramps leading into that network of darkside roads, and Callahan senses it. It's in the way the Dixie
cups and crumpled cigarette packs blow across the tarmac in the pre-dawn wind. It whispers from the sign
on the gas pumps, the one that says pay for gas in advance after sundown. It's in the teenage boy across the
street, sitting on a porch stoop at four-thirty in the morning with his head in his arms, a silent essay in pain.
The secret highways are out close, and they whisper to him. "Come on, buddy, " they say. "Here is where you
can forget everything, even the name they tied on you when you were nothing but a naked, blatting baby still
smeared with your mother's blood. They tied a name to you like a can to a dog's tail, didn't they ? But you
don't need to drag it around here. Come. Come on. "But he goes nowhere. He's waiting for the bus driver,
and pretty soon the bus driver comes back, and he's got a pint of Old Log Cabin in a brown paper sack. This
is a brand Callahan knows well, a pint of the stuff probably goes for two dollars and a quarter out here in
the boonies, which means the bus driver has just earned himself a twenty-eight-dollar tip, give or take. Not
bad. But it's the American way, isn't it? Give a lot to get a little. And if the Log Cabin will take that terrible
taste out of his mouth—much worse than the throbbing in his burned hand—it will be worth every penny of
the thirty bucks. Hell, it would be worth a C-note.
"No cutting up, " the driver says. "I'll put you out right in the middle of the Cross Bronx Expressway if you
start cutting up. I swear to God I will"
By the time the Greyhound pulls into the Port Authority, Don Callahan is drunk. But he doesn't cut up; he
simply sits quietly until it's time to get off and join the flow of six o'clock humanity under the cold fluorescent
lights: the junkies, the cabbies, the shoeshine boys, the girls who'll blow you for ten dollars, the boys dressed
up as girls who'll blow you for five dollars, the cops twirling their nightsticks, the dope dealers carrying their
transistor radios, the blue-collar guys who are just coming in from New Jersey. Callahan joins them, drunk
but quiet; the nightstick-twirling cops do not give him so much as a second glance. The Port Authority air
smells of cigarette smoke and joysticks and exhaust. The docked buses rumble. Everyone here looks cut
loose. Under the cold white fluorescents, they all look dead.
No, he thinks, walking under a sign reading to STREET. Not dead, that's wrong. Unndead.
EIGHT
"Man," Eddie said. "You been to the wars, haven't you? Greek, Roman, and Vietnam."
When the Old Fella began, Eddie had been hoping he'd gallop through his story so they could go into the
church and look at whatever was stashed there. He hadn't expected to be touched, let alone shaken, but he
had been. Callahan knew stuff Eddie thought no one else could possibly know: the sadness of Dixie cups
rolling across the pavement, the rusty hopelessness of that sign on the gas pumps, the look of the human eye
in the hour before dawn.
Most of all about how sometimes you had to have it.
"The wars? I don't know," Callahan said. Then he sighed and nodded. "Yes, I suppose so. I spent that first day
in movie theaters and that first night in Washington Square Park. I saw that the other homeless people
covered themselves up with newspapers, so that's what I did. And here's an example of how life—the quality
of life and the texture of life—seemed to have changed for me, beginning on the day of Danny Glick's burial.
You won't understand right away, but bear with me." He looked at Eddie and smiled. "And don't worry, son,
I'm not going to talk the day away. Or even the morning."
"You go on and tell it any old way it does ya fine," Eddie said.
Callahan burst out laughing. "Say thankya! Aye, say thankya big! What I was going to tell you is that I'd
covered my top half with the Daily News and the headline said HITLER BROTHERS STRIKE IN
QUEENS."
"Oh my God, the Hitler Brothers," Eddie said. "I remember them. Couple of morons. They beat up… what?
Jews? Blacks?"
"Both," Callahan said. "And carved swastikas on their foreheads. They didn't have a chance to finish mine.
Which is good, because what they had in mind after the cutting was a lot more than a simple beating. And
that was years later, when I came back to New York."
"Swastika," Roland said. "The sigul on the plane we found near River Crossing? The one with David Quick
inside it?"
"Uh-huh," Eddie said, and drew one in the grass with the toe of his boot. The grass sprang up almost
immediately, but not before Roland saw that yes, the mark on Callahan's forehead could have been meant to
be one of those. If it had been finished.
"On that day in late October of 1975," Callahan said, "the Hitler Brothers were just a headline I slept under. I
spent most of that second day in New York walking around and fighting the urge to score a bottle. There was
part of me that wanted to fight instead of drink. To try and atone. At the same time, I could feel Barlow's
blood working into me, getting in deeper and deeper. The world smelled different, and not better. Things
looked different, and not better. And the taste of him came creeping back into my mouth, a taste like dead fish
or rotten wine.
"I had no hope of salvation. Never think it. But atonement isn't about salvation, anyway. Not about heaven.
It's about clearing your conscience here on earth. And you can't do it drunk. I didn't think of myself as an
alcoholic, not even then, but I did wonder if he'd turned me into a vampire. If the sun would start to burn my
skin, and I'd start looking at ladies' necks." He shrugged, laughed. "Or maybe gentlemen's. You know what
they say about the priesthood; we're just a bunch of closet queers running around and shaking the cross in
people's faces."
"But you weren't a vampire," Eddie said.
"Not even a Type Three. Nothing but unclean. On the outside of everything. Cast away. Always smelling his
stink and always seeing the world the way things like him must see it, in shades of gray and red. Red was the
only bright color I was allowed to see for years. Everything else was just a whisper.
"I guess I was looking for a ManPower office—you know, the day-labor company? I was still pretty rugged
in those days, and of course I was a lot younger, as well.
"I didn't find ManPower. What I did find was a place called Home. This was on First Avenue and Forty-
seventh Street, not far from the U.N."
Roland, Eddie, and Susannah exchanged a look. Whatever Home was, it had existed only two blocks from
the vacant lot. Only it wouldn't have been vacant back then, Eddie thought. Not back in 1975. In '75 it would
still have been Tom and Jerry's Artistic Deli, Party Platters Our Specialty. He suddenly wished Jake were
here. Eddie thought that by now the kid would have been jumping up and down with excitement.
