14
4:00 P.M.
Ben Mears pushed away from his desk, the afternoon's writing done. He had forgone his walk in the park so he could go to dinner at the Nortons' that night with a clear conscience, and had written for most of the day without a break.
He stood up and stretched, listening to the bones in his spine crackle. His torso was wet with sweat. He went to the cupboard at the head of the bed, pulled out a fresh towel, and went down to the bathroom to shower before everyone else got home from work and clogged the place.
He hung the towel over his shoulder, turned back to the door, and then went to the window, where something had caught his eye. Nothing in town; it was drowsing away the late afternoon under a sky that peculiar shade of deep blue that graces New England on fine late summer days.
He could look across the two-story buildings on Jointner Avenue, could see their flat, asphalted roofs, and across the park where the children now home from school lazed or biked or squabbled, and out to the northwest section of town where Brock Street disappeared behind the shoulder of that first wooded hlll. His eyes traveled nat?urally up to the break in the woods where the Burns Road and the Brooks Road intersected in a T - and on up to where the Marsten House sat overlooking the town.
From here it was a perfect miniature, diminished to the size of a child's doll house. And he liked it that way. From here the Marsten House was a size that could be coped with. You could hold up your hand and blot it out with your palm.
There was a car in the driveway
He stood with the towel over his shoulder, looking out at it, not moving, feeling a crawl of terror in his belly that he did not try to analyze. Two of the fallen shutters had been replaced, too, giving the house a secretive, blind look that it had not possessed before.
His lips moved silently, as if forming words no one - ?even himself - could understand.
15
5:00 P.M.
Matthew Burke left the high school carrying his briefcase in his left hand and crossed the empty parking lot to where his old Chevy Biscayne sat, still on last year's snow tires.
He was sixty-three, two years from mandatory retire?ment, and still carrying a full load of English classes and extracurricular activities. Fall's activity was the school play, and he had just finished readings for a three-act farce called Charley's Problem. He had gotten the usual glut of utter impossibles, perhaps a dozen usable warm bodies who would at least memorize their lines (and then deliver them in a deathly, trembling monotone), and three kids who showed flair. He would cast them on Friday and begin blocking next week. They would pull together between then and October 30, which was the play date. It was Matt's theory that a high school play should be like a bowl of Campbell's Alphabet Soup: tasteless but not actively offensive. The relatives would come and love it. The theater critic from the Cumberland Ledger would come and go into polysyllabic ecstasies, as he was paid to do over any local play. The female lead (Ruthie Crockett this year, probably) would fall in love with some other cast member and quite possibly lose her virginity after the cast party. And then he would pick up the threads of the Debate Club.
At sixty-three, Matt Burke still enjoyed teaching. He was a lousy disciplinarian, thus forfeiting any chance he might once have had to step up to administration (he was a little too dreamy-eyed to ever serve effectively as an assistant principal), but his lack of discipline had never held him back. He had read the sonnets of Shakespeare in cold, pipe-clanking classrooms full of flying airplanes and spitballs, had sat down upon tacks and thrown them away absently as he told the class to turn to page 467 in their grammars, had opened drawers to get composition paper only to discover crickets, frogs, and once a seven?-foot black snake.
He had ranged across the length and breadth of the English language like a solitary and oddly complacent Ancient Mariner: Steinbeck period one, Chaucer period two, the topic sentence period three, and the function of the gerund just before lunch. His fingers were permanently yellowed with chalk dust rather than nicotine, but it was still the residue of an addicting substance.
Children did not revere or love him; he was not a Mr Chips languishing away in a rustic corner of America and waiting for Ross Hunter to discover him, but many of his students did come to respect him, and a few )earned from him that dedication, however eccentric or humble, can be a noteworthy thing. He liked his work.
Now he got into his car, pumped the accelerator too much and flooded it, waited, and started it again. He tuned the radio to a Portland rock 'n' roll station and jacked the volume almost to the speaker's distortion point. He thought rock 'n' roll was fine music. He backed out of his parking slot, stalled, and started the car up again.
He had a small house out on the Taggart Stream Road, and had very few callers. He had never been married, had no family except for a brother in Texas who worked for an oil company and never wrote. He did not really miss the attachments. He was a solitary man, but solitude had in no way twisted him.
He paused at the blinking light at the intersection of Jointner Avenue and Brock Street, then turned toward home. The shadows were long now, and the daylight had taken on a curiously beautiful warmth - flat and golden, like something from a French Impressionist painting. He glanced over to his left, saw the Marsten House, and glanced again.
'The shutters,' he said aloud, against the driving beat from the radio. 'Those shutters are back up.'
He glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that there was a car parked in the driveway. He had been teaching in 'salem's Lot since 1952, and he had never seen a car parked in that driveway.
'Is someone living up there?' he asked no one in particu?lar, and drove on.
16
6:00 P.M.
Susan's father, Bill Norton, the Lot's first selectman, was surprised to find that he liked Ben Mears - liked him quite a lot. Bill was a big, tough man with black hair, built like a truck, and not fat even after fifty, He had left high school for the Navy in the eleventh grade with his father's permission, and he had clawed his way up from there, picking up his diploma at the age of twenty-four on a high school equivalency test taken almost as an afterthought. He was not a blind, bullish anti-intellectual as some plain workingmen become when they are denied the level of learning that they may have been capable of, either through fate or their own doing, but he had no patience with 'art farts', as he termed some of the doe-eyed, long?haired boys Susan had brought home from school. He didn't mind their hair or their dress. What bothered him was that none of them seemed serious-minded. He didn't share his wife's liking for Floyd Tibbits, the boy that Susie had been going around with the most since she graduated, but he didn't actively dislike him, either. Floyd had a pretty good job at the executive level in the Falmouth Grant's, and Bill Norton considered him to be moderately serious-?minded. And he was a hometown boy. But so was this Mears, in a manner of speaking.
'Now, you leave him alone about that art fart business,' Susan said, rising at the sound of the doorbell. She was wearing a light green summer dress, her new casual hairdo pulled back and tied loosely with a hank of oversized green yarn.
Bill laughed. 'I got to call 'em as I see 'em, Susie darlin'. I won't embarrass you . . . never do, I?'
She gave him a pensive, nervous smile and went to open the door.
The man who came back in with her was lanky and agile-looking, with finely drawn features and a thick, almost greasy shock of black hair that looked freshly washed despite its natural oiliness. He was dressed in a way that impressed Bill favorably: plain blue jeans, very new, and a white shirt rolled to the elbows.
'Ben, this is my dad and mom - Bill and Ann Norton. Mom, Dad, Ben Mears.'
'Hello. Nice to meet you.'
He smiled at Mrs Norton with a touch of reserve and she said, 'Hello, Mr Mears. This is the first time we've seen a real live author up close. Susan has been awfully excited.'
'Don't worry; I don't quote from my own works.' He smiled again.
'H'lo,' Bill said, and heaved himself up out of his chair. He had worked himself up to the union position he now held on the Portland docks, and his grip was hard and strong. But Mears's hand did not crimp and jellyfish like that of your ordinary, garden-variety art fart, and Bill was pleased. He imposed his second testing criterion.
'Like a beer? Got some on ice out yonder.' He gestured toward the back patio, which he had built himself. Art farts invariably said no; most of them were potheads and couldn't waste their valuable consciousness juicing.
'Man, I'd love a beer,' Ben said, and the smile became a grin. 'Two or three, even.'
Bill's laughter boomed out. 'Okay, you're my man. Come on.'
At the sound of his laughter, an odd communication seemed to pass between the two women, who bore strong resemblance to each other. Ann Norton's brow contracted while Susan's smoothed out - a load of worry seemed to have been transferred across the room by telepathy.
Ben followed Bill out onto the veranda. An ice chest sat on a stool in the corner, stuffed with ring-tab cans of Pabst. Bill pulled a can out of the cooler and tossed it to Ben, who caught it one-hand but lightly, so it wouldn't fizz.
'Nice out here,' Ben said, looking toward the barbecue in the back yard. It was a low, businesslike construction of bricks, and a shimmer of heat hung over it.
'Built it myself,' Bill said. 'Better be nice.'
Ben drank deeply and then belched, another sign in his favor.
'Susie thinks you're quite the fella,' Norton said.
'She's a nice girl.'
'Good practical girl,' Norton added, and belched reflec?tively. 'She says you've written three books. Published em, too.'
'Yes, that's so.'
'They do well?'
'The first did,' Ben said, and said no more. Bill Norton nodded slightly, in approval of a man who had enough marbles to keep his dollars-and-cents business to himself.
'You like to lend a hand with some burgers and hot dogs?'
'Sure.'
'You got to cut the hot dogs to let the squidges out of 'em. You know about that?'
'Yeah.' He made diagonal slashes in the air with his right index finger, grinning slightly as he did so. The small slashes in natural-casing franks kept them from blistering.
'You came from this neck of the woods, all right,' Bill Norton said. 'Goddamn well told. Take that bag of briquettes over there and I'll get the meat. Bring your beer.'
'You couldn't part me from it.'
Bill hesitated on the verge of going in and cocked an eyebrow at Ben Mears. 'You a serious-minded fella?' he asked.
Ben smiled, a trifle grimly. 'That I am,' he said.
Bill nodded. 'That's good,' he said, and went inside.
Babs Griffen's prediction of rain was a million miles wrong, and the back yard dinner went well. A light breeze sprang up, combining with the eddies of hickory smoke from the barbecue to keep the worst of the late-season mosquitoes away. The women cleared away the paper plates and condiments, then came back to drink a beer each and laugh as Bill, an old hand at playing the tricky wind currents, trimmed Ben 21-6 at badminton. Ben de?clined a rematch with real regret, pointing at his watch.
'I got a book on the fire,' he said. 'I owe another six pages. If I get drunk, I won't even be able to read what I wrote tomorrow morning.'
Susan saw him to the front gate - he had walked up from town. Bill nodded to himself as he damped the fire. He had said he was serious-minded, and Bill was ready to take him at his word. He had not come with a big case on to impress anyone, but any man who worked after dinner was out to make his mark on somebody's tree, probably in big letters.
Ann Norton, however, never quite unthawed.
17
7.00 P.M.
Floyd Tibbits pulled into the crushed-stone parking lot at Dell's about ten minutes after Delbert Markey, owner and bartender, had turned on his new pink sign out front. The sign said DELL'S in letters three feet high, and the apostrophe was a highball glass.
Outside, the sunlight had been leached from the sky by gathering purple twilight, and soon ground mist would begin to form in the low-lying pockets of land. The night's regulars would begin to show up in another hour or so.
'Hi, Floyd,' Dell said, pulling a Michelob out of the cooler. 'Good day?'
'Fair,' Floyd said. 'That beer looks good.'
He was a tall man with a well-trimmed sandy beard, now dressed in double-knit slacks and a casual sports jacket - his Grant's working uniform. He was second in charge of credit, and liked his work in the absent kind of way that can cross the line into boredom almost overnight. He felt himself to be drifting, but the sensation was not actively unpleasant. And there was Suze - a fine girl. She was going to come around before much longer, and then he supposed he would have to make something of himself.
He dropped a dollar bill on the bar, poured beer down the side of his glass, downed it thirstily, and refilled. The bar's only other patron at present was a young fellow in phone-company coveralls - the Bryant kid, Floyd thought. He was drinking beer at a table and listening to a moody love song on the juke.
'So what's new in town?' Floyd asked, knowing the answer already. Nothing new, not really. Someone might have showed up drunk at the high school, but he couldn't think of anything else.
'Well, somebody killed your uncle's dog. That's new.'
Floyd paused with his glass halfway to his mouth. 'What?
Uncle Win's dog Doc?'
'That's right.'
'Hit him with a car?'
'Not so you'd notice. Mike Ryerson found him. He was out to Harmony Hill to mow the grass and Doc was hangin' off those spikes atop the cemetery gate. Ripped wide open.'
'Son of a bitch!' Floyd said, astounded.
Dell nodded gravely, pleased with the impression he had made. He knew something else that was a fairly hot item in town this evening - that Floyd's girl had been seen with that writer who was staying at Eva's. But let Floyd find that out for himself.
'Ryerson brung the co'pse in to Parkins Gillespie,' he told Floyd. 'He was of the mind that maybe the dog was dead and a bunch of kids hung it up for a joke.'
'Gillespie doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.'
'Maybe not. I'll tell you what I think.' Dell leaned forward on his thick forearms. 'I think it's kids, all right . . . hell, I know that. But it might be a smidge more serious than just a joke. Here, looka this.' He reached under the bar and slapped a newspaper down on it, turned to an inside page.
Floyd picked it up. The headline read SATAN WORSHIPERS DESECRATE FLA. CHURCH. He skimmed through it. Appar?ently a bunch of kids had broken into a Catholic Church in Clewiston, Florida, some time after midnight and had held some sort of unholy rites there. The altar had been desecrated, obscene words had been scrawled on the pews, the confessionals, and the holy font, and splatters of blood had been found on steps leading to the nave. Laboratory analysis had confirmed that although some of the blood was animal (goat's blood was suggested), most of it was human. The Clewiston police chief admitted there were no immediate leads.
Floyd put the paper down. 'Devil worshipers in the Lot? Come on, Dell. You've been into the cook's pot.'
'The kids are going crazy,' Dell said stubbornly. 'You see if that ain't it. Next thing you know, they'll be doing human sacrifices in Griffen's pasture. Want a refill on that?'
'No thanks,' Floyd said, sliding off his stool. 'I think I'll go out and see how Uncle Win's getting along. He loved that dog.'
'Give him my best,' Dell said, stowing his paper back under the bar - Exhibit A for later in the evening. 'Awful sorry to hear about it.'
Floyd paused halfway to the door and spoke, seemingly to the air. 'Hung him up on the spikes, did they? By Christ, I'd like to get hold of the kids who did that.'
'Devil worshipers,' Dell said. 'Wouldn't surprise me a bit. I don't know what's got into people these days.'
Floyd left. The Bryant kid put another dime in the juke, and Dick Curless began to sing 'Bury the Bottle with Me.'
18
7:30 P.M.
'You be home early,' Marjorie Glick said to her eldest son, Danny. 'School tomorrow. I want your brother in bed by quarter past nine.'
Danny shuffled his feet. 'I don't see why I have to take him at all.'
'You don't,' Marjorie said with dangerous pleasantness. 'You can always stay home.'
She turned back to the counter, where she was freshen?ing fish, and Ralphie stuck out his tongue. Danny made a fist and shook it, but his putrid little brother only smiled.
'We'll be back,' he muttered and turned to leave the kitchen, Ralphie in tow.
'By nine.'
'Okay, okay.'
In the living room Tony Glick was sitting in front of the TV with his feet up, watching the Red Sox and the Yankees. 'Where are you going, boys?'
'Over to see that new kid,' Danny said. 'Mark Petrie.' 'Yeah,' Ralphie said. 'We're gonna look at his electric trains.'
Danny cast a baleful eye on his brother, but their father noticed neither the pause nor the emphasis. Doug Griffen had just struck out. 'Be home early,' he said absently.
Outside, afterlight still lingered in the sky, although sunset had passed. As they crossed the back yard Danny said, 'I ought to beat the stuff out of you, punko.'
'I'll tell,' Ralphie said smugly. 'I'll tell why you really wanted to go.'
'You creep,' Danny said hopelessly.
At the back of the mowed yard, a beaten path led down the slope to the woods. The Glick house was on Brock Street, Mark Petrie's on South Jointner Avenue. The path was a short cut that saved considerable time if you were twelve and nine years old and willing to pick your way across the Crockett Brook stepping stones. Pine needles and twigs crackled under their feet. Somewhere in the woods, a whippoorwill sang, and crickets chirred all around them.
Danny had made the mistake of telling his brother that Mark Petrie had the entire set of Aurora plastic monsters - wolfman, mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, the mad doc?tor, and even the Chamber of Horrors. Their mother thought all that stuff was bad news, rotted your brains or something, and Danny's brother had immediately turned blackmailer. He was putrid, all right.
'You're putrid, you know that?' Danny said.
'I know,' Ralphie said proudly. 'What's putrid?'
'It's when you get green and squishy, like boogers.'
'Get bent,' Ralphie said. They were going down the bank of Crockett Brook, which gurgled leisurely over its gravel bed, holding a faint pearliness on its surface. Two miles east it joined Taggart Stream, which in turn joined the Royal River.
Danny started across the stepping stones, squinting in the gathering gloom to see his footing.
'I'm gonna pushya!' Ralphie cried gleefully behind him. 'Look out, Danny, I'm gonna pushya!'
'You push me and I'll push you in the quicksand, ring?meat,' Danny said.
They reached the other bank. 'There ain't no quicksand around here, Ralphie scoffed, moving closer to his brother nevertheless.
'Yeah?' Danny said ominously. 'A kid got killed in the? quicksand just a few years ago. I heard those old dudes that hang around the store talkin' about it.'
'Really?' Ralphie asked. His eyes were wide.
'Yeah,' Danny said. 'He went down screamin' and hol?lerin' and his mouth filled up with quicksand and that was it. Raaaacccccchhhh.'
'C'mon,' Ralphie said uneasily. It was close to full dark now, and the woods were full of moving shadows. 'Let's get out of here.'
They started up the other bank, slipping a little in the pine needles. The boy Danny had heard discussed in the store was a ten-year-old named Jerry Kingfield. He might have gone down in the quicksand screaming and hollering, but if he had, no one had heard him. He had simply disappeared in the Marshes six years ago while fishing. Some people thought quicksand, others held that a sex preevert had killed him. There were preeverts everywhere.
'They say his ghost still haunts these woods,' Danny said solemnly, neglecting to tell his little brother that the Marshes were three miles south.
'Don't, Danny,' Ralphie said uneasily. 'Not . . . not in the dark.'
The woods creaked secretively around them. The whip?poorwill had ceased his cry. A branch snapped somewhere behind them, almost stealthily. The daylight was nearly gone from the sky.
'Every now and then,' Danny went on eerily, 'when some ringmeat little kid comes out after dark, it comes flapping out of the trees, the face all putrid and covered with quicksand - '
'Danny, come on.'
His little brother's voice held real pleading, and Danny stopped. He had almost scared himself. The trees were dark, bulking presences all around them, moving slowly in the night breeze, rubbing together, creaking in their joints.
Another branch snapped off to their left.
Danny suddenly wished they had gone by the road.
Another branch snapped.
'Danny, I'm scared,' Ralphie whispered.
'Don't be stupid,' Danny said. 'Come on.'
They started to walk again. Their feet crackled in the pine needles. Danny told himself that he didn't hear any branches snapping. He didn't hear anything except them. Blood thudded in his temples. His hands were cold. Count steps, he told himself. We'll be at Jointner Avenue in two hundred steps. And when we come back we'll go by the road, so ringmeat won't be scared. In just a minute we'll see the streetlights and feel stupid but it will be good to feel stupid so count steps. One . . . two . . . three . . .
Ralphie shrieked.
'I see it! I see the ghost! I SEE IT!'
Terror like hot iron leaped into Danny's chest. Wires seemed to have run up his legs. He would have turned and run, but Ralphie was clutching him.
'Where?' he whispered, forgetting that he had invented the ghost. 'Where?' He peered into the woods, half afraid of what he might see, and saw only blackness.
'It's gone now - but I saw him . . . it. Eyes. I saw eyes. Oh, Danneee - ' He was blubbering.
'There ain't no ghosts, you fool. Come on.'
Danny held his brother's hand and they began to walk His legs felt as if they were made up of ten thousand pencil erasers. His knees were trembling. Ralphie was crowding against him, almost forcing him off the path.
'It's watchin' us,' Ralphie whispered.
'Listen, I'm not gonna - '
'No, Danny. Really. Can't you feel it?'
Danny stopped. And in the way of children, he did feel something and knew they were no longer alone. A great bush had fallen over the woods; but it was a malefic hush. Shadows, urged by the wind, twisted languorously around them.