Salem's Lot Page 5

  Jackson Hersey picked up a Saturday Evening Post, began to flip through it, and did a double take. A dollar bill had been taped neatly to each page.

  Norris Varney discovered how lucky Larry had been when he went around to the back door. The murder weapon had been lashed to a chair with its barrel pointing directly at the front door, aimed chest-high. The gun was cocked, and a string attached to the trigger ran down the hall to the doorknob.

  ("Gun was loaded, too," Audrey would say at this point. "One tug and Larry McLeod would have gone straight up to the pearly gates.")

  There were other, less lethal booby traps. A forty-pound bundle of newspapers had been rigged over the dining room door. One of the stair risers leading to the second floor had been hinged and could have cost someone a broken ankle. It quickly became apparent that Hubie Marsten had been something more than Soft; he had been a full-fledged Loony.

  They found him in the bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall, dangling from a rafter.

  (Susan and her girlfriends had tortured themselves deliciously with the stories they had gleaned from their elders; Amy Rawcliffe had a log playhouse in her backyard and they would lock themselves in and sit in the dark, scaring each other about the Marsten House, which gained its proper noun status for all time even before Hitler invaded Poland, and repeating their elders' stories with as many grisly embellishments as their minds could conceive. Even now, eighteen years later, she found that just thinking of the Marsten House had acted on her like a wizard's spell, conjuring up the painfully clear images of little girls crouched inside Amy's playhouse, holding hands, and Amy saying with impressive eeriness: "His face was all swole up and his tongue turned black and popped out and there was flies crawling on it. My momma tole Mrs Werts.")

  "...place."

  "What? I'm sorry." She came back to the present with an almost physical wrench. Ben was pulling off the turnpike and onto the 'salem's Lot exit ramp.

  "I said, it was a spooky old place."

  "Tell me about when you went in."

  He laughed humorlessly and flicked up his high beams. The two-lane blacktop ran straight ahead through an alley of pine and spruce, deserted. "It started as kid's stuff. Maybe that's all it ever was. Remember, this was in 1951, and little kids had to think up something to take the place of sniffing airplane glue out of paper bags, which hadn't been invented yet. I used to play pretty much with the Bend kids, and most of them have probably moved away by now...do they still call south 'salem's Lot the Bend?"

  "Yes."

  "I messed around with Davie Barclay, Charles James--only all the kids used to call him Sonny--Harold Rauberson, Floyd Tibbits--"

  "Floyd?" she asked, startled.

  "Yes, do you know him?"

  "I've dated him," she said, and afraid her voice sounded strange, hurried on: "Sonny James is still around, too. He runs the gas station on Jointner Avenue. Harold Rauberson is dead. Leukemia."

  "They were all older than I, by a year or two. They had a club. Exclusive, you know. Only Bloody Pirates with at least three references need apply." He had meant it to be light, but there was a jag of old bitterness buried in the words. "But I was persistent. The one thing in the world I wanted was to be a Bloody Pirate...that summer, at least.

  "They finally weakened and told me I could come in if I passed the initiation, which Davie thought up on the spot. We were all going up to the Marsten House, and I was supposed to go in and bring something out. As booty." He chuckled but his mouth had gone dry.

  "What happened?"

  "I got in through a window. The house was still full of junk, even after twelve years. They must have taken the newspapers during the war, but they just left the rest of it. There was a table in the front hall with one of those snow globes on it--do you know what I mean? There's a little house inside, and when you shake it, there's snow. I put it in my pocket, but I didn't leave. I really wanted to prove myself. So I went upstairs to where he hung himself."

  "Oh my God," she said.

  "Reach in the glove box and get me a cigarette, would you? I'm trying to quit, but I need one for this."

  She got him one and he punched the dashboard lighter.

  "The house smelled. You wouldn't believe how it smelled. Mildew and upholstery rot and a kind of rancid smell like butter that had gone over. And living things--rats or woodchucks or whatever else that had been nesting in the walls or hibernating in the cellar. A yellow, wet smell.

  "I crept up the stairs, a little kid nine years old, scared shitless. The house was creaking and settling around me and I could hear things scuttling away from me on the other side of the plaster. I kept thinking I heard footsteps behind me. I was afraid to turn around because I might see Hubie Marsten shambling after me with a hangman's noose in one hand and his face all black."

  He was gripping the steering wheel very hard. The levity had gone out of his voice. The intensity of his remembering frightened her a little. His face, in the glow of the instrument panel, was set in the long lines of a man who was traveling a hated country he could not completely leave.

  "At the top of the stairs I got all my courage and ran down the hall to that room. My idea was to run in, grab something from there, too, and then get the hell out of there. The door at the end of the hall was closed. I could see it getting closer and closer and I could see that the hinges had settled and the bottom edge was resting on the doorjamb. I could see the doorknob, silvery and a little tarnished in the place where palms had gripped it. When I pulled on it, the bottom edge of the door gave a scream against the wood like a woman in pain. If I had been straight, I think I would have turned around and gotten the hell out right then. But I was pumped full of adrenaline, and I grabbed it in both hands and pulled for all I was worth. It flew open. And there was Hubie, hanging from the beam with his body silhouetted against the light from the window."

  "Oh, Ben, don't--" she said nervously.

  "No, I'm telling you the truth," he insisted. "The truth of what a nine-year-old boy saw and what the man remembers twenty-four years later, anyway. Hubie was hanging there, and his face wasn't black at all. It was green. The eyes were puffed shut. His hands were livid...ghastly. And then he opened his eyes."

  Ben took a huge drag on his cigarette and pitched it out his window into the dark.

  "I let out a scream that probably could have been heard for two miles. And then I ran. I fell halfway downstairs, got up, and ran out the front door and straight down the road. The kids were waiting for me about half a mile down. That's when I noticed I still had the glass snow globe in my hand. And I've still got it."

  "You don't really think you saw Hubert Marsten, do you, Ben?" Far up ahead she could see the yellow blinking light that signaled the center of town and was glad for it.

  After a long pause, he said, "I don't know." He said it with difficulty and reluctance, as if he would have rather said no and closed the subject thereby. "Probably I was so keyed up that I hallucinated the whole thing. On the other hand, there may be some truth in that idea that houses absorb the emotions that are spent in them, that they hold a kind of...dry charge. Perhaps the right personality, that of an imaginative boy, for instance, could act as a catalyst on that dry charge, and cause it to produce an active manifestation of...of something. I'm not talking about ghosts, precisely. I'm talking about a kind of psychic television in three dimensions. Perhaps even something alive. A monster, if you like."

  She took one of his cigarettes and lit it.

  "Anyway, I slept with the light on in my bedroom for weeks after, and I've dreamed about opening that door off and on for the rest of my life. Whenever I'm in stress, the dream comes."

  "That's terrible."

  "No, it's not," he said. "Not very, anyway. We all have our bad dreams." He gestured with a thumb at the silent, sleeping houses they were passing on Jointner Avenue. "Sometimes I wonder that the very boards of those houses don't cry out with the awful things that happen in dreams." He paused. "Come on down to Eva's and s
it on the porch for a while, if you like. I can't invite you in--rules of the house--but I've got a couple of Cokes in the icebox and some Bacardi in my room, if you'd like a nightcap."

  "I'd like one very much."

  He turned onto Railroad Street, popped off the headlights, and turned into the small dirt parking lot which served the rooming house. The back porch was painted white with red trim, and the three wicker chairs lined up on it looked toward the Royal River. The river itself was a dazzling dream. There was a late summer moon caught in the trees on the river's far bank, three-quarters full, and it had painted a silver path across the water. With the town silent, she could hear the faint foaming sound as water spilled down the sluiceways of the dam.

  "Sit down. I'll be back."

  He went in, closing the screen door softly behind him, and she sat down in one of the rockers.

  She liked him in spite of his strangeness. She was not a believer in love at first sight, although she did believe that instant lust (going under the more innocent name of infatuation) occurred frequently. And yet he wasn't a man that would ordinarily encourage midnight entries in a locked diary; he was too thin for his height, a little pale. His face was introspective and bookish, and his eyes rarely gave away the train of his thoughts. All this topped with a heavy pelt of black hair that looked as if it had been raked with the fingers rather than brushed.

  And that story--

  Neither Conway's Daughter nor Air Dance hinted at such a morbid turn of mind. The former was about a minister's daughter who runs away, joins the counterculture, and takes a long, rambling journey across the country by thumb. The latter was the story of Frank Buzzey, an escaped convict who begins a new life as a car mechanic in another state, and his eventual recapture. Both of them were bright, energetic books, and Hubie Marsten's dangling shadow, mirrored in the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, did not seem to lie over either of them.

  As if by the very suggestion, she found her eyes dragged away from the river and up to the left of the porch, where the last hill before town blotted out the stars.

  "Here," he said. "I hope these'll be all right--"

  "Look at the Marsten House," she said.

  He did. There was a light on up there.

  SEVEN

  The drinks were gone and midnight passed; the moon was nearly out of sight. They had made some light conversation, and then she said into a pause:

  "I like you, Ben. Very much."

  "I like you, too. And I'm surprised...no, I don't mean it that way. Do you remember that stupid crack I made in the park? This all seems too fortuitous."

  "I want to see you again, if you want to see me."

  "I do."

  "But go slow. Remember, I'm just a small-town girl."

  He smiled. "It seems so Hollywood. But Hollywood good. Am I supposed to kiss you now?"

  "Yes," she said seriously, "I think that comes next."

  He was sitting in the rocker next to her, and without stopping its slow movement forth and back, he leaned over and pressed his mouth on hers, with no attempt to draw her tongue or to touch her. His lips were firm with the pressure of his square teeth, and there was a faint taste-odor of rum and tobacco.

  She began to rock also, and the movement made the kiss into something new. It waxed and waned, light and then firm. She thought: He's tasting me. The thought wakened a secret, clean excitement in her, and she broke the kiss before it could take her further.

  "Wow," he said.

  "Would you like to come to dinner at my house tomorrow night?" she asked. "My folks would love to meet you, I bet." In the pleasure and serenity of this moment, she could throw that sop to her mother.

  "Home cooking?"

  "The homiest."

  "I'd love it. I've been living on TV dinners since I moved in."

  "Six o'clock? We eat early in Sticksville."

  "Sure. Fine. And speaking of home, I better get you there. Come on."

  They didn't speak on the ride back until she could see the night-light twinkling on top of the hill, the one her mother always left on when she was out.

  "I wonder who's up there tonight?" she asked, looking toward the Marsten House.

  "The new owner, probably," he said noncommittally.

  "It didn't look like electricity, that light," she mused. "Too yellow, too faint. Kerosene lamp, maybe."

  "They probably haven't had a chance to have the power turned on yet."

  "Maybe. But almost anyone with a little foresight would call up the power company before they moved in."

  He didn't reply. They had come to her driveway.

  "Ben," she said suddenly, "is your new book about the Marsten House?"

  He laughed and kissed the tip of her nose. "It's late."

  She smiled at him. "I don't mean to snoop."

  "It's all right. But maybe another time...in daylight."

  "Okay."

  "You better get in, girly. Six tomorrow?"

  She looked at her watch. "Six today."

  "Night, Susan."

  "Night."

  She got out and ran lightly up the path to the side door, then turned and waved as he drove away. Before she went in, she added sour cream to the milkman's order. With baked potatoes, that would add a little class to supper.

  She paused a minute longer before going in, looking up at the Marsten House.

  EIGHT

  In his small, boxlike room he undressed with the light off and crawled into bed naked. She was a nice girl, the first nice one since Miranda had died. He hoped he wasn't trying to turn her into a new Miranda; that would be painful for him and horribly unfair to her.

  He lay down and let himself drift. Shortly before sleep took him, he hooked himself up on one elbow, looked past the square shadow of his typewriter and the thin sheaf of manuscript beside it, and out the window. He had asked Eva Miller specifically for this room after looking at several, because it faced the Marsten House directly.

  The lights up there were still on.

  That night he had the old dream for the first time since he had come to Jerusalem's Lot, and it had not come with such vividness since those terrible maroon days following Miranda's death in the motorcycle accident. The run up the hallway, the horrible scream of the door as he pulled it open, the dangling figure suddenly opening its hideous puffed eyes, himself turning to the door in the slow, sludgy panic of dreams--

  And finding it locked.

  Chapter Three

  The Lot (I)

  The town is not slow to wake--chores won't wait. Even while the edge of the sun lies below the horizon and darkness is on the land, activity has begun.

  TWO

  4:00 AM

  The Griffen boys--Hal, eighteen, and Jack, fourteen--and the two hired hands had begun the milking. The barn was a marvel of cleanliness, whitewashed and gleaming. Down the center, between the spotless runways which fronted the stalls on both sides, a cement drinking trough ran. Hal turned on the water at the far end by flicking a switch and opening a valve. The electric pump that pulled water up from one of the two artesian wells that served the place hummed into smooth operation. He was a sullen boy, not bright, and especially irked on this day. He and his father had had it out the night before. Hal wanted to quit school. He hated school. He hated its boredom, its insistence that you sit still for great fifty-minute chunks of time, and he hated all his subjects with the exceptions of Woodshop and Graphic Arts. English was maddening, history was stupid, business math was incomprehensible. And none of it mattered, that was the hell of it. Cows didn't care if you said ain't or mixed your tenses, they didn't care who was the Commander in Chief of the goddamn Army of the Potomac during the goddamn Civil War, and as for math, his own for chrissakes father couldn't add two-fifths and one half if it meant the firing squad. That's why he had an accountant. And look at that guy! College-educated and still working for a dummy like his old man. His father had told him many times that book learning wasn't the secret of running a successful business (and dairy
farming was a business like any other); knowing people was the secret of that. His father was a great one to sling all that bullshit about the wonders of education, him and his sixth-grade education. He never read anything but Reader's Digest and the farm was making $16,000 a year. Know people. Be able to shake their hands and ask after their wives by name. Well, Hal knew people. There were two kinds: those you could push around and those you couldn't. The former outnumbered the latter ten to one.

  Unfortunately, his father was a one.

  He looked over his shoulder at Jack, who was forking hay slowly and dreamily into the first four stalls from a broken bale. There was the bookworm, Daddy's pet. The miserable little shit.

  "Come on!" he shouted. "Fork that hay!"

  He opened the storage lockers and pulled out the first of their four milking machines. He trundled it down the aisle, frowning fiercely over the glittering stainless-steel top.

  School. Fucking for chrissakes school.

  The next nine months stretched ahead of him like an endless tomb.

  THREE

  4:30 AM

  The fruits of yesterday's late milking had been processed and were now on their way back to the Lot, this time in cartons rather than galvanized steel milk cans, under the colorful label of Slewfoot Hill Dairy. Charles Griffen's father had marketed his own milk, but that was no longer practical. The conglomerates had eaten up the last of the independents.

  The Slewfoot Hill milkman in west Salem was Irwin Purinton, and he began his run along Brock Street (which was known in the country as the Brock Road or That Christless Washboard). Later he would cover the center of town and then work back out of town along the Brooks Road.

  Win had turned sixty-one in August, and for the first time his coming retirement seemed real and possible. His wife, a hateful old bitch named Elsie, had died in the fall of 1973 (predeceasing him was the one considerate thing she had done in twenty-seven years of marriage), and when his retirement finally came he was going to pack up his dog, a half-cocker mongrel named Doc, and move down to Pemaquid Point. He planned to sleep until nine o'clock every day and never look at another sunrise.

  He pulled over in front of the Norton house, and filled his carry rack with their order: orange juice, two quarts of milk, a dozen eggs. Climbing out of the cab, his knee gave a twinge, but only a faint one. It was going to be a fine day.