As he was halfway through dressing, the doctor-a whey-faced young man with wispy blond hair-appeared. "Mr. Buddenbaum, what are you doing?" he asked.
"I would have thought that perfectly obvious," Owen replied.
"You can't leave."
"On the contrary. I can't stay. I have work to do."
"I'm amazed you're even standing," the doctor said. "I insist you get back into bed." He crossed to Owen, who raised his arms. "Leave me be," he said. "If you want to make yourself useful, call me a cab."
"If you attempt to leave," the doctor said, "I will not be responsible for the consequences." "Fine by me," Owen replied. "Now will you please leave me to dress in peace?" unusually large number of cemeteries. St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery lay two miles outside the city limits on the ulino road, but the other three, the Pioneer Cemetery (the mallest and most historically significant), the Potter emetery (named for the family who had buried more people in the region than any other), and the plain old Everville Cemetery, were all within the bounds of the city. It was to the Potter Cemetery, which lay on Lambroll Drive, close to the Old Post Office building, that Dolan took Erwin.
He chatted in his lively fashion as they went, mostly about how much the city had changed in the last few years. None of it was for the better, in his opinion. So many of the things that had been part of Everville's history-the family businesses, the older buildings, even the streetlamps-were being uprooted or destroyed.
"I didn't think much about that kind of thin when I was 9 breathing," Dolan remarked. "You don't, do you? You get on with your life as best you can. Hope the taxman doesn't come after you; hope you can still get it up on Saturday night; hope your hair doesn't fall out too quickly.
You don't have time to think about the past, until you're part of it. And then-"
"Then?"
"Then you realize what's gone is gone forever, and that's a damn shame if it was something worth keeping." He pointed over at the Post Office building, which had been left to fall into dereliction since a larger and more centralized facility had opened in Salem. "I mean look at that," he said. "That could have been preserved, right? Turned into something for the community."
"What community?" said Erwin. "There isn't one. There's just a few thousand people who happen to live next door to one another, and hate the sight of each other eighty percent of the time. Believe me, I saw a lot of that in my business. People suing each other 'cause a fence was in the wrong place, or a tree had been cut down. Nice neighbors, you'd say, looking at them: regular folks with good hearts. But let me tell you, if the law allowed it, they'd murder each other at the drop of a hat."
This last remark was out of his mouth before he realized quite what he'd said. "I was just trying to protect the children," Dolan muttered.
"I wasn't talking about you," Erwin replied. "What you did--"
"was wrong. I know that. We made a terrible error, and I'll regret it forever. But we did it because we thought we had to."
"And how did your precious community treat you when they realized you'd screwed up? Like pariahs, right?" The other man said nothing. "So much for the community," Erwin said.
they did not speak again until they reached the gates of Potter's Cemetery, when Dolan said, "Do you know who Hubert Nordhoff is?"
"Didn't his family own the mill?"
"A lot more than the mill. He was a great man hereabouts, for fifty years."
"So what about him?"
"He holds court on the last Friday of every month."
"Here?" Erwin said, peering through the ironwork gate into the cemetery. There was a thin veil of clouds covering the moon, but it was light enough to see the graves laid out ahead. Here and there a carved angel or an um marked the resting place of a family with money to waste, but most of the tombs were simple stones.
"Yes, here," said Erwin, and led him inside.
There was an ancient, moss-covered oak at the far end of the cemetery, and there, under its titanic branches, was an assembly of six men and a woman. Some lounged on stones; one-a fellow who looked sickly even for a dead soul-sitting on the lowest of the branches. And standing close to the trunk of the tree, presently addressing the group, was a man in his seventies, his dress, his spectacles, and his somewhat formal manner suggesting he had lived and died in a earlier age. Erwin did not need Dolan whispering in his ear to know that this was the aforementioned Hubert Nordhoff. He was presently in full and rhetorical flight.
"Are we unloved? My friends, we are. Are we forgotten? By all but a few, I'm afraid so. And do we care? My friends, do we care?" He let his sharp blue gaze rest on every one of his congregation before he answered, "Oh my Lord, ves. to the bottom of our broken hearts, we care." He stopped here, looking past his audience towards Dolan and Erwin. He inclined his head.
"Mr. Dolan," he said. "Mr. Nordhoff." Dolan turned towards Erwin.
"This is the guy I was telling you about earlier. His name's-"
"Toothaker," Erwin said, determined not to enter this circle as Dolan's catch, but as a free-willed individual. "Erwin Toothaker."
"We're pleased to see you, Mr. Toothaker," the old man said, "I'm Hubert Nordhoff. And this... " he took Erwin round the group, introducing them all. Three of the names were familiar to Erwin. they were the members of families still prominent in Everville (one was a Gilholly; another the father of a former mayor). The others were new to him, though it was apparent by their postmortem finery that none had been disenfranchised in life. Like Hubert, these were men who'd had some significant place in the community. There was only one surprise: that the single female in this group was not a woman at all, but one Cornelius Floyd, who had apparently been delivered into the afterlife in rather dowdy drag, and seemed quite happy with his lot. His features were too broad and his jaw too square to be called feminine, but he effected a light, breathy tone when telling Erwin that though his name was indeed Comelius, everybody called him Connie.
With the introductions over, Hubert got down to business. "We heard what happened to you," he said. "You were murdered, we understand, in your own house."
"Yes, that's right."
"We're of course appalled." There were suitably sympathetic murmurs all around the circle. "But I regret to say not terribly surprised. This is increasingly the way of the world."
"It wasn't a normal murder," Erwin pointed out, "if any murder's normal." "Dolan mentioned something about vampires," Gilholly the Elder said.
"His word, not mine," Erwin pointed out. "I got the life sucked out of me, but there was none of that neck-biting nonsense."
"Did you know the killer?" asked a portly fellow called Dickerson, who was presently recumbent on the top of a tomb. "Not exactly." "Meaning?" "I met him down by Unger's Creek. His name was Fletcher. I think he fancies himself some kind of messiah."
"That's all we need," said the scrawny guy in the tree. "What do we do about this, Nordhoff7" Gilholly wanted to know.
"There's nothing we can do," Erwin said.
"Don't be defeatist," Nordhoff snapped. "We have responsibilities."
"It's true," said Connie. "If we don't act, who will?"