“No.”

“The church is desperately ashamed of the whole episode—they use it as a case in point whenever someone in its body shows a sign of jumping to conclusions—of proceeding on the basis of two hundred years’ study rather than five hundred.”

 

In the scene when Ben, Mark, Cody and Callahan come into the Marsten House cellar, they are greeted with a tape recording of Barlow’s voice, rather than the handwritten note that is in the finished novel.

When the priest opened the door, Mark felt the rank, rotten odor assail his nostrils again—but that, also, was different. Not so strong. Less…less malevolent.

The priest started down the stairs, and his cross did not glow as theirs had done the day before. Still, it took all his willpower to continue down after them into that pit of horror.

Jimmy had produced a flashlight from his bag and clicked it on. The beam illuminated again the old table, the dusty, monolithic coal furnace with its many projecting pipes like tentacles, the overturned crate. Yet there was no squirming tide of rats, no ominous sensation of moving to meet a dark force of illimitable power and cold hate. And somehow that frightened him more than anything else, although he could not have told why.

“Around the corner,” he said, his voice flat and dead in the enclosed space.

Holding the crucifix high, Callahan advanced. And now, at last, the crucifix he held aloft began to glow belatedly. As he turned the corner, he thundered: “In the name of God the Father—” His words clogged suddenly in his throat, and a huge, monstrous chuckle smote their ears.

Mark screamed: “It’s him, it’s him!”

“A recording!” Callahan shouted. “Some kind of tape! I felt a wire across my chest—”

“Hello, my young friends!” the voice boomed. It was gentle, mocking, jeering. “How lovely of you to have dropped in.”

Ben darted forward, ignoring the coldness which rose in him at that reptilian voice. He swept his hands in the empty air, found a length of something very like piano wire, and followed it on a diagonal from the corner.

“I am never averse to company—it has always been one of my great joys,” the voice continued, booming hollowly in the dark and rank smelling cellar. “Had you come in the evening, I should have welcomed you in person…however, since I suspected you might come in daylight, I thought it might be best to be out.” The chuckle again, booming and racketing, heart-freezing. It struck a familiar cord in Jimmy Cody, and he isolated it. As a young boy, crouching in front of a very large Zenith radio in his father’s house, he had heard a chuckle much like that echo from the vocal cords of the Shadow.

Ben found the tape recorder, sitting on a high shelf to the left of the wine cellar’s entrance. It was a modern Wollensak reel-to-reel, the piano wire tightly snubbed around the spring-loaded PLAY/RECORD button.

“I have left you a token of my appreciation,” the voice continued, becoming soft and caressing. “Someone very near and dear to one of you is now in the place where I occupied my days until yesterday…you are there, aren’t you, Mr Mears?”

Ben jumped and regarded the tape recorder as if it were a snake that had just bitten him.

“I do not need her,” the voice said with frightening indifference. “I have left her for you to—how is the idiom?—to warm up for the main event. To whet your appetite, if you like. Let us see how well you like the appetizer to the main course you contemplate.”

“Turn it off!” Jimmy cried.

“No!” Ben shouted. “He may say something about—”

“—want to say something special to one of you,” the voice continued, and it had become silky with menace. “Young Master Petrie.”

Mark stiffened.

“Master Petrie, in some way unknown to me, you have robbed me of the most faithful and resourceful servant I have ever known—and that covers a long, long period of time. How dare you?” the voice asked, rage creeping in. “Did you sneak up behind him and push him? You cowardly little whelp, how dare you?”

Mark bared his teeth unconsciously at the voice. His hands had doubled up into fists.

“I am going to enjoy dealing with you,” the voice continued, still rising. “Your parents first, I think. Tonight…or tomorrow night…or the next. And then you. But you shall enter my church as a choirboy castratum. I take the blood not from your neck, but from your very manhood: the testicles. I send you into the outer darknesses of my service unshod, eh? Eh?” The voice pealed off into laughter, but even to Father Callahan’s ear, frozen with wonder and fear, the laughter sounded false, brassy with rage…and uncertainty. What a turn it must have given him to rise on Sunday evening and find his right arm had been cut off!

“Father Callahan?” the voice asked teasingly, and he jumped as Ben had a moment earlier. “Are you there? Pardonez-moi, I cannot see you. Have they persuaded you to come? Perhaps so. I have observed you at some length since I arrived in Momson…much as a good chess player will study the games of his opposition, eh? The Catholic Church is not yet the oldest of my adversaries, no! I was old even when itwas young, this claque which you and your fellows venerate so for its antiquity. This simpering club of bread-eaters and wine-drinkers who venerate the sheep-savior. Yet I do not underestimate. I am wise in the ways of goodness as well as evil. I am not jaded. Even now I love the game as well as the prize, so I do not underestimate.

“So how do I see you? Better, perhaps, than you see yourself. Braver. How is your word? Courage? No. Spanish is machismo. Much-man. More than courage. Thinking, also. Coolness. When coupled with white magic, that is much. These others… fut, I spit on them. When I am ready, I will take them one by one and break them. It is only you I fear, coupled to your Church. How is this, that I feel fear? It is also machismo. You yourself fear, even now when it is not me but only my voice in this box, is it not so?”

Yes, Callahan thought. Yes, yes. I know fear. So much that it seems like the first ever in my life.

“It is wise to fear one’s opponent,” the bodiless voice comforted him. “This is how we live in the world.

“Yet I will best you,” the voice added, almost as an afterthought. “How? you say. Do I not bear the symbol of White? Can I not move in the day as well as the night? Are there not charms and potions, both Christian and pagan, which my so-good friend Matthew Burke has informed me of? Yes, yes, and yes. But I have lived longer than you. I am crafty. I am not the serpent, but the father of serpents.

“Still, you say, this is not enough. And it is not. In the end, it is your own wretched faith that will undo you. It is weak…soft…rotten. It is no longer a defense against the evils that are in your world, if it ever was. You yourself, acolyte and preserver of the flame, doubt the worth of the flame that you guard. You preach of love and there is no love. I spit on love!” He cried it, his voice rising in a sudden and wrenching flight that held notes of madness. “Love, the talisman of White! What is it? Words and pressings of flesh and barnyard copulation! The rest is mere presumption! It has failed!” And now that voice, as resourceful as a cathedral organ, had taken on accents of triumph, and it was impossible to tell if they were real or counterfeit.

“Always you assume good is greater than evil, but it is not so. Goodness, dear Father Callahan, requires the act of faith. Evil requires only that one wait. It is loose in the world, as omnipresent as the wind. You know that, but you do not know of good. And when the moment comes, it will be check to the king… and black wins all!”

The voice rose to a scream that made them all flinch, and then the voice was silent. The tape spooled on vacantly for a sheaf of moments, and then another voice spoke—Susan’s voice. The cool, clear accents were the same, complete to the faint Maine accent of slurred r’s. Yet for all that, it was a travesty, a husk, a bad imitation, a talking doll speaking in Susan’s voice.