Salem's Lot Page 10

  TWENTY

  11:59 PM

  The day trembled on the edge of extinction. The houses slept in darkness. Downtown, night lights in the hardware store and the Foreman Funeral Home and the Excellent Cafe threw mild electric light onto the pavement. Some lay awake--George Boyer, who had just gotten home from the three-to-eleven shift at the Gates Mill, Win Purinton, sitting and playing solitaire and unable to sleep for thinking of his Doc, whose passing had affected him much more deeply than that of his wife--but most slept the sleep of the just and the hard-working.

  In Harmony Hill Cemetery a dark figure stood meditatively inside the gate, waiting for the turn of time. When he spoke, the voice was soft and cultured.

  "O my father, favor me now. Lord of Flies, favor me now. Now I bring you spoiled meat and reeking flesh. I have made sacrifice for your favor. With my left hand I bring it. Make a sign for me on this ground, consecrated in your name. I wait for a sign to begin your work."

  The voice died away. A wind had sprung up, gentle, bringing with it the sigh and whisper of leafy branches and grasses and a whiff of carrion from the dump up the road.

  There was no sound but that brought on the breeze. The figure stood silent and thoughtful for a time. Then it stooped and stood with the figure of a child in his arms.

  "I bring you this."

  It became unspeakable.

  Chapter Four

  Danny Glick and Others

  Danny and Ralphie Glick had gone out to see Mark Petrie with orders to be in by nine, and when they hadn't come home by ten past, Marjorie Glick called the Petrie house. No, Mrs Petrie said, the boys weren't there. Hadn't been there. Maybe your husband had better talk to Henry. Mrs Glick handed the phone to her husband, feeling the lightness of fear in her belly.

  The men talked it over. Yes, the boys had gone by the woods path. No, the little brook was very shallow at this time of year, especially after the fine weather. No more than ankle-deep. Henry suggested that he start from his end of the path with a high-powered flashlight and Mr Glick start from his. Perhaps the boys had found a woodchuck burrow or were smoking cigarettes or something. Tony agreed and thanked Mr Petrie for his trouble. Mr Petrie said it was no trouble at all. Tony hung up and comforted his wife a little; she was frightened. He had mentally decided that neither of the boys was going to be able to sit down for a week when he found them.

  But before he had even left the yard, Danny stumbled out from the trees and collapsed beside the backyard barbecue. He was dazed and slow-spoken, responding to questions ploddingly and not always sensibly. There was grass in his cuffs and a few autumn leaves in his hair.

  He told his father that he and Ralphie had gone down the path through the woods, had crossed Crockett Brook by the stepping-stones, and had gotten up the other bank with no trouble. Then Ralphie began to talk about a ghost in the woods (Danny neglected to mention he had put this idea in his brother's head). Ralphie said he could see a face. Danny began to be frightened. He didn't believe in ghosts or in any kid stuff like the bogeyman, but he did think he had heard something in the dark.

  What did they do then?

  Danny thought they had started to walk again, holding hands. He wasn't sure. Ralphie had been whimpering about the ghost. Danny told him not to cry, because soon they would be able to see the streetlights of Jointner Avenue. It was only two hundred steps, maybe less. Then something bad had happened.

  What? What was the bad thing?

  Danny didn't know.

  They argued with him, grew excited, expostulated. Danny only shook his head slowly and uncomprehendingly. Yes, he knew he should remember, but he couldn't. Honestly, he couldn't. No, he didn't remember falling over anything. Just...everything was dark. Very dark. And the next thing he remembered was lying on the path by himself. Ralphie was gone.

  Parkins Gillespie said there was no point in sending men into the woods that night. Too many deadfalls. Probably the boy had just wandered off the path. He and Nolly Gardener and Tony Glick and Henry Petrie went up and down the path and along the shoulders of both South Jointner and Brock streets, hailing with battery-powered bullhorns.

  Early the next morning, both the Cumberland and the state police began a coordinated search of the wood lot. When they found nothing, the search was widened. They beat the bushes for four days, and Mr and Mrs Glick wandered through the woods and fields, picking their way around the deadfalls left by the ancient fire, calling their son's name with endless and wrenching hope.

  When there was no result, Taggart Stream and the Royal River were dragged. No result.

  On the morning of the fifth day, Marjorie Glick woke her husband at 4:00 AM, terrified and hysterical. Danny had collapsed in the upstairs hallway, apparently on his way to the bathroom. An ambulance bore him away to Central Maine General Hospital. The preliminary diagnosis was severe and delayed emotional shock.

  The doctor in charge, a man named Gorby, took Mr Glick aside.

  "Has your boy ever been subject to asthma attacks?"

  Mr Glick, blinking rapidly, shook his head. He had aged ten years in less than a week.

  "Any history of rheumatic fever?"

  "Danny? No...not Danny."

  "Has he had a TB skin patch during the last year?"

  "TB? My boy got TB?"

  "Mr Glick, we're only trying to find out--"

  "Marge! Margie, come down here!"

  Marjorie Glick got up and walked slowly down the corridor. Her face was pale, her hair absently combed. She looked like a woman in the grip of a deep migraine headache.

  "Did Danny have a TB skin patch at school this year?"

  "Yes," she said dully. "When he started school. No reaction."

  Gorby asked, "Does he cough in the night?"

  "No."

  "Complain of aches in the chest or joints?"

  "No."

  "Painful urination?"

  "No."

  "Any abnormal bleeding? Bloody noses or bloody stool or even an abnormal number of scrapes and bruises?"

  "No."

  Gorby smiled and nodded. "We'd like to keep him for tests, if we may."

  "Sure," Tony said. "Sure. I got Blue Cross."

  "His reactions are very slow," the doctor said. "We're going to do some X-rays, a marrow test, a white count--"

  Marjorie Glick's eyes had slowly been widening. "Has Danny got leukemia?" she whispered.

  "Mrs Glick, that's hardly--"

  But she had fainted.

  TWO

  Ben Mears was one of the 'salem's Lot volunteers who beat the bushes for Ralphie Glick, and he got nothing for his pains other than pants cuffs full of cockleburs and an aggravated case of hay fever brought on by late summer goldenrod.

  On the third day of the search he came into the kitchen of Eva's ready to eat a can of ravioli and then fall into bed for a nap before writing. He found Susan Norton bustling around the kitchen stove and preparing some kind of hamburger casserole. The men just home from work were sitting around the table, pretending to talk, and ogling her--she was wearing a faded check shirt tied at the midriff and cutoff corduroy shorts. Eva Miller was ironing in a private alcove off the kitchen.

  "Hey, what are you doing here?" he asked.

  "Cooking you something decent before you fall away to a shadow," she said, and Eva snorted laughter from behind the angle of the wall. Ben felt his ears burn.

  "Cooks real good, she does," Weasel said. "I can tell. I been watchin'."

  "If you was watchin' any more, your eyes woulda fell outta their sockets," Grover Verrill said, and cackled.

  Susan covered the casserole, put it in the oven, and they went out on the back porch to wait for it. The sun was going down red and inflamed.

  "Any luck?"

  "No. Nothing." He pulled a battered pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and lit one.

  "You smell like you took a bath in Old Woodsman's," she said.

  "Fat lot of good it did." He held out his arm and showed her a number of puff
ed insect bites and half-healed scratches. "Son of a bitching mosquitoes and goddamn pricker bushes."

  "What do you think happened to him, Ben?"

  "God knows." He exhaled smoke. "Maybe somebody crept up behind the older brother, coshed him with a sock full of sand or something, and abducted the kid."

  "Do you think he's dead?"

  Ben looked at her to see if she wanted an honest answer or merely a hopeful one. He took her hand and locked his fingers through hers. "Yes," he said briefly. "I think the kid is dead. No conclusive proof yet, but I think so."

  She shook her head slowly. "I hope you're wrong. My mom and some of the other ladies have been in to sit with Mrs Glick. She's out of her mind and so is her husband. And the other boy just wanders around like a ghost."

  "Um," Ben said. He was looking up at the Marsten House, not really listening. The shutters were closed; they would open up later on. After dark. The shutters would open after dark. He felt a morbid chill at the thought and its nearly incantatory quality.

  "...night?"

  "Hmm? Sorry." He looked around at her.

  "I said, my dad would like you to come over tomorrow night. Can you?"

  "Will you be there?"

  "Sure, I will," she said, and looked at him.

  "All right. Good." He wanted to look at her--she was lovely in the sunset light--but his eyes were drawn toward the Marsten House as if by a magnet.

  "It draws you, doesn't it?" she said, and the reading of his thought, right down to the metaphor, was nearly uncanny.

  "Yes. It does."

  "Ben, what's this new book about?"

  "Not yet," he said. "Give it time. I'll tell you as soon as I can. It's...got to work itself out."

  She wanted to say I love you at that precise moment, say it with the ease and lack of self-consciousness with which the thought had risen to the surface of her mind, but she bit the words off behind her lips. She did not want to say it while he was looking...looking up there.

  She got up. "I'll check the casserole."

  When she left him, he was smoking and looking up at the Marsten House.

  THREE

  Lawrence Crockett was sitting in his office on the morning of the twenty-second, pretending to read his Monday correspondence and keeping an eye on his secretary's jahoobies, when the telephone rang. He had been thinking about his business career in 'salem's Lot, about that small, twinkling car in the Marsten House driveway, and about deals with the devil.

  Even before the deal with Straker had been consummated (that's some word, all right, he thought, and his eyes crawled over the front of his secretary's blouse), Lawrence Crockett was, without doubt, the richest man in 'salem's Lot and one of the richest in Cumberland County, although there was nothing about his office or his person to indicate it. The office was old, dusty, and lighted by two fly-specked yellow globes. The desk was an ancient rolltop, littered with papers, pens, and correspondence. A glue pot stood on one side of it and on the other was a square glass paperweight that showed pictures of his family on its different faces. Poised perilously on top of a stack of ledgers was a glass fish bowl filled with matches, and a sign on the front said, "For Our Matchless Friends." Except for three fireproof steel filing cabinets and the secretary's desk in a small enclosure, the office was barren.

  There were, however, pictures.

  Snapshots and photos were everywhere--tacked, stapled, or taped to every available surface. Some were new Polaroid prints, others were colored Kodak shots taken a few years back, still more were curled and yellowing black-and-whites, some going back fifteen years. Beneath each was a typed caption: Fine Country Living! Six Rms. or Hilltop Location! Taggart Stream Road, $32,000--Cheap! or Fit for a Squire! Ten-Rm. Farmhouse, Burns Road. It looked like a dismal, fly-by-night operation and so it had been until 1957, when Larry Crockett, who was regarded by the better element in Jerusalem's Lot as only one step above shiftless, had decided that trailers were the wave of the future. In those dim dead days, most people thought of trailers as those cute silvery things you hooked on the back of your car when you wanted to go to Yellowstone National Park and take pictures of your wife and kids standing in front of Old Faithful. In those dim dead days, hardly anyone--even the trailer manufacturers themselves--foresaw a day when the cute silvery things would be replaced by campers, which hooked right over the bed of your Chevy pickup or which could come complete and motorized in themselves.

  Larry, however, had not needed to know these things. A bush-league visionary at best, he had simply gone down to the town office (in those days he was not a selectman; in those days he couldn't have gotten elected dogcatcher) and looked up the Jerusalem's Lot zoning laws. They were tremendously satisfactory. Peering between the lines, he could see thousands of dollars. The law said you could not maintain a public dumping ground, or have more than three junked cars in your yard unless you also had a junk yard permit, or have a chemical toilet--a fancy and not very accurate term for outhouse--unless it was approved by the Town Health Officer. And that was it.

  Larry had mortgaged himself to the hilt, had borrowed more, and had bought three trailers. Not cute little silvery things but long, plush, thyroidal monsters with plastic wood paneling and Formica bathrooms. He bought one-acre plots for each in the Bend, where land was cheap, had set them on cheap foundations, and had gone to work selling them. He had done so in three months, overcoming some initial resistance from people who were dubious about living in a home that resembled a Pullman car, and his profit had been close to ten thousand dollars. The wave of the future had arrived in 'salem's Lot, and Larry Crockett had been right up there shooting the curl.

  On the day R.T. Straker had walked into his office, Crockett had been worth nearly two million dollars. He had done this as a result of land speculation in a great many neighboring towns (but not in the Lot; you don't shit where you eat was Lawrence Crockett's motto), based on the conviction that the mobile-home industry was going to grow like a mad bastard. It did, and my God how the money rolled in.

  In 1965 Larry Crockett became the silent partner of a contractor named Romeo Poulin, who was building a supermarket plaza in Auburn. Poulin was a veteran corner-cutter, and with his on-the-job know-how and Larry's way with figures, they made $750,000 apiece and only had to report a third of that to Uncle. It was all extremely satisfactory, and if the supermarket roof had a bad case of the leaks, well, that was life.

  In 1966-68 Larry bought controlling interests in three Maine mobile-home businesses, going through any number of fancy ownership shuffles to throw the tax people off. To Romeo Poulin he described this process as going into the tunnel of love with girl A, screwing girl B in the car behind you, and ending up holding hands with girl A on the other side. He ended up buying mobile homes from himself, and these incestuous businesses were so healthy they were almost frightening.

  Deals with the devil, all right, Larry thought, shuffling his papers. When you deal with him, notes come due in brimstone.

  The people who bought trailers were lower-middle-class blue-or white-collar workers, people who could not raise a down payment on a more conventional house, or older people looking for ways to stretch their social security. The idea of a brand-new six-room house was something to conjure with for these people. For the elderly, there was another advantage, something that others missed but Larry, always astute, had noticed: Trailers were all on one level and there were no stairs to climb.

  Financing was easy, too. A $500 down payment was usually enough to do business on. And in the bad old barracuda-financing days of the sixties, the fact that the other $9,500 was financed at 24 percent rarely struck these house-hungry people as a pitfall.

  And my God! how the money rolled in.

  Crockett himself had changed very little, even after playing "Let's Make a Deal" with the unsettling Mr Straker. No fag decorator came to redo his office. He still got by with the cheap electric fan instead of air conditioning. He wore the same shiny-seat suits or glaring sports jacket co
mbinations. He smoked the same cheap cigars and still dropped by Dell's on Saturday night to have a few beers and shoot some bumper pool with the boys. He had kept his hand in hometown real estate, which had borne two fruits: First, it had gotten him elected selectman, and second, it wrote off nicely on his income tax return, because each year's visible operation was one rung below the breakeven point. Besides the Marsten House, he was and had been the selling agent for perhaps three dozen other decrepit manses in the area. There were some good deals of course. But Larry didn't push them. The money was, after all, rolling in.

  Too much money, maybe. It was possible, he supposed, to outsmart yourself. To go into the tunnel of love with girl A, screw girl B, come out holding hands with girl A, only to have both of them beat the living shit out of you. Straker had said he would be in touch and that had been fourteen months ago. Now what if--

  That was when the telephone rang.

  FOUR

  "Mr Crockett," the familiar, accentless voice said.

  "Straker, isn't it?"

  "Indeed."

  "I was just thinkin' about you. Maybe I'm psychic."

  "How very amusing, Mr Crockett. I need a service, please."

  "I thought you might."

  "You will procure a truck, please. A big one. A rental truck, perhaps. Have it at the Portland docks tonight at seven sharp. Custom House Wharf. Two movers will be sufficient, I think."

  "Okay." Larry drew a pad over by his right hand and scrawled: H. Peters, R. Snow. Henry's U-Haul. 6 at latest. He did not stop to consider how imperative it seemed to follow Straker's orders to the letter.

  "There are a dozen boxes to be picked up. All save one go to the shop. The other is an extremely valuable sideboard--a Hepplewhite. Your movers will know it by its size. It is to be taken to the house. You understand?"

  "Yeah."

  "Have them put it down cellar. Your men can enter through the outside bulkhead below the kitchen windows. You understand?"

  "Yeah. Now, this sideboard--"

  "One other service, please. You will procure five stout Yale padlocks. You are familiar with the brand Yale?"

  "Everybody is. What--"

  "Your movers will lock the shop's back door when they leave. At the house, they will leave the keys to all five locks on the basement table. When they leave the house, they will padlock the bulkhead door, the front and back doors, and the shed-garage. You understand?"