'Salem's Lot

10

It was nine o'clock and the Saturday night movie was coming on the hospital TV bolted to the wall when the phone beside Ben's bed rang. It was Susan, and her voice was barely under control.

'Ben, Floyd Tibbits is dead. He died in his cell some time last night. Dr Cody says acute anemia - but I went with Floyd! He had high blood pressure. That's why the Army wouldn't take him!'

'Slow down,' Ben said, sitting up.

'There's more. A family named McDougall out in the Bend. A little ten months baby died out there. They took Mrs McDougall away in restraints.'

'Have you heard how the baby died?'

'My mother said Mrs Evans came over when she heard Sandra McDougall screaming, and Mrs Evans called old Dr Plowman. Plowman didn't say anything, but Mrs Evans told my mother that she couldn't see a thing wrong with the baby . . . except it was dead.'

'And both Matt and I, the crackpots, just happen to be out of town and out of action,' Ben said, more to himself than to Susan. 'Almost as if it were planned.'

'There's more.'

'What?'

'Carl Foreman is missing. And so is the body of Mike Ryerson.'

'I think that's it,' he heard himself saying. 'That has to be it. I'm getting out of here tomorrow.'

'Will they let you go so soon?'

'They aren't going to have anything to say about it.' He spoke the words absently; his mind had already moved on to another subject. 'Have you got a crucifix?'

'Me?' She sounded startled and a little amused. 'Gosh, no.'

'I'm not joking with you, Susan - I was never more serious. Is there anyplace where you can get one at this hour?'

'Well, there's Marie Boddin. I could walk - '

'No. Stay off the streets. Stay in the house. Make one yourself, even if it only means gluing two sticks together. Leave it by your bed.'

'Ben, I still don't believe this. A maniac, maybe, some?one who thinks he's a vampire, but - '

'Believe what you want, but make the cross.'

'But - '

'Will you do it? Even if it only means humoring me?'

Reluctantly: 'Yes, Ben.'

'Can you come to the hospital tomorrow around nine?'

'Yes.'

'Okay. We'll go upstairs and fill in Matt together. Then you and I are going to talk to Dr James Cody.'

She said, 'He's going to think you're crazy, Ben. Don't you know that?'

'I suppose I do. But it all seems more real after dark, doesn't it?'

'Yes,' she said softly. 'God, yes.'

For no reason at all he thought of Miranda and Miranda's dying: the motorcycle hitting the wet patch, going into a skid, the sound of her scream, his own brute panic, and the side of the truck growing and growing as they approached it broadside.

'Susan?'

'Yes.'

'Take good care of yourself. Please.'

After she hung up, he put the phone back in the cradle and stared at the TV, barely seeing the Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedy that had begun to unreel up there. He felt naked, exposed. He had no cross himself. His eyes strayed to the windows, which showed only blackness. The old, childlike terror of the dark began to creep over him and he looked at the television where Doris Day was giving a shaggy dog a bubble bath and was afraid.

11

The county morgue in Portland is a cold and antiseptic room done entirely in green tile. The floors and walls are a uniform medium green, and the ceiling is a lighter green. The walls are lined with square doors which look like large bus-terminal coin lockers. Long parallel fluorescent tubes shed a chilly neutral light over all of this. The decor is hardly inspired, but none of the clientele have ever been known to complain.

At quarter to ten on this Saturday night, two attendants were wheeling in the sheet-covered body of a young homo?sexual who had been shot in a downtown bar. It was the first stiff they had received that night; the highway fatals usually came in between 1:00 and 3:00 A.M.

Buddy Bascomb was in the middle of a Frenchman joke that had to do with vaginal deodorant spray when he broke off in midsentence and stared down the line of locker doors M-Z. Two of them were standing open.

He and Bob Greenberg left the new arrival and hurried down quickly. Buddy glanced at the tag on the first door he came to while Bob went down to the next.

TIBBITS, FLOYD MARTIN

Sex: M

Admitted: 10/4/75

Autops. sched.: 10/5/75

Signator: J. M. Cody, MD

He yanked the handle set inside the door, and the slab rolled out on silent casters.

Empty.

'Hey!' Greenberg yelled up to him. 'This f**king thing is empty. Whose idea of a joke - '

'I was on the desk all the time,' Buddy said. 'No one went by me. I'd swear to it. It must have happened on Carty's shift. What's the name on that one?'

'McDougall, Randall Fratus. What does this abbrevi?ation inf. mean?'

'Infant,' Buddy said dully. 'Jesus Christ, I think we're in trouble.'

12

Something had awakened him.

He lay still in the ticking dark, looking at the ceiling.

A noise. Some noise. But the house was silent.

There it was again. Scratching.

Mark Petrie turned over in bed and looked through the window and Danny Glick was staring in at him through the glass, his skin grave-pale, his eyes reddish and feral.

Some dark substance was smeared about his lips and chin, and when he saw Mark looking at him, he smiled and showed teeth grown hideously long and sharp.

'Let me in,' the voice whispered, and Mark was not sure if the words had crossed dark air or were only in his mind.

He became aware that he was frightened - his body had known before his mind. He had never been so frightened, not even when he got tired swimming back from the float at Popham Beach and thought he was going to drown. His mind, still that of a child in a thousand ways, made an accurate judgment of his position in seconds. He was in peril of more than his life.

'Let me in, Mark. I want to play with you.'

There was nothing for that hideous entity outside the window to hold onto; his room was on the second floor and there was no ledge. Yet somehow it hung suspended in space . . . or perhaps it was clinging to the outside shingles like some dark insect.

'Mark . . . I finally came, Mark. Please . . . '

Of course. You have to invite them inside. He knew that from his monster magazines, the ones his mother was afraid might damage or warp him in some way.

He got out of bed and almost fell down. It was only then that he realized fright was too mild a word for this. Even terror did not express what he felt. The pallid face outside the window tried to smile, but it had lain in darkness too long to remember precisely how. What Mark saw was a twitching grimace - a bloody mask tragedy.

Yet if you looked in the eyes, it wasn't so bad. If you looked in the eyes, you weren't so afraid anymore and you saw that all you had to do was open the window and say, 'C'mon in, Danny,' and then you wouldn't be afraid at all because you'd be at one with Danny and all of them and at one with him. You'd be  -

No! That's how they get you!

He dragged his eyes away, and it took all of his will power to do it.

'Mark, let me in! I command it! He commands it!'

Mark began to walk toward the window again. There was no help for it. There was no possible way to deny that voice. As he drew closer to the glass, the evil little boy's face on the other side began to twitch and grimace with eagerness. Fingernails, black with earth, scratched across the windowpane.

Think of something. Quick! Quick!

'The rain,' he whispered hoarsely. 'The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In vain he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.'

Danny Glick hissed at him.

'Mark! Open the window!'  

'Betty Bitter bought some butter - '

'The window, Mark, he commands it!'

' - but, says Betty, this butter's bitter.'

He was weakening. That whispering voice was seeing through his barricade, and the command was imperative. Mark's eyes fell on his desk, littered with his model mon?sters, now so bland and foolish  -

His eyes fixed abruptly on part of the display and widened slightly.

The plastic ghoul was walking through a plastic grave?yard and one of the monuments was in the shape of a cross.

With no pause for thought or consideration (both would have come to an adult - his father, for instance - and both would have undone him), Mark swept up the cross, curled it into a tight fist, and said loudly: 'Come on in, then.'

The face became suffused with an expression of vulpine triumph. The window slid up and Danny stepped in and took two paces forward. The exhalation from that opening mouth was fetid, beyond description: a smell of charnel pits. Cold, fish-white hands descended on Mark's shoulders. The head cocked, doglike, the upper lip curled away from those shining canines.

Mark brought the plastic cross around in a vicious swipe and laid it against Danny Glick's cheek.

His scream was horrible, unearthly . . . and silent. It echoed only in the corridors of his brain and the chambers of his soul. The smile of triumph on the Glick-thing's mouth became a yawning grimace of agony. Smoke spurted from the pallid flesh, and for just a moment, before the creature twisted away and half dived, half fell out the window, Mark felt the flesh yield like smoke.

And then it was over, as if it had never happened.

But for a moment the cross shone with a fierce light, as if an inner wire had been ignited. Then it dwindled away, leaving only a blue after-image in front of his eyes.

Through the grating in the floor, he heard the distinctive Click of the lamp in his parents' bedroom and his father's voice: 'What in hell was that?'

13

His bedroom door opened two minutes later, but that was' still time enough to set things to rights.

'Son?' Henry Petrie asked softly. 'Are you awake?'

'I guess so,' Mark answered sleepily.

'Did you have a bad dream?'

'I . . . think so. I don't remember.

'You called out in your sleep - '

'Sorry.'

'No, don't be sorry.' He hesitated and then earlier memories of his son, a small child in a blue blanket?suit that had been much more trouble but infinitely more explicable: 'Do you want a drink of water?'

'No thanks, Dad.'

Henry Petrie surveyed the room briefly, unable to under?stand the trembling feeling of dread he had wakened with, and which lingered still - a feeling of disaster averted by cold inches. Yes, everything seemed all right. The window was shut. Nothing was knocked over.

'Mark, is anything wrong?'

'No, Dad.'

'Well . . . g'night, then.'

'Night.' The door shut softly and his father's slippered feet descended the stairs. Mark let himself go limp with relief and delayed reaction. An adult might have had hysterics at this point, and a slightly younger or older child might also have done. But Mark felt the terror slip from him in almost imperceptible degrees, and the sensation reminded him of letting the wind dry you after you had been swimming on a cool day. And as the terror left, drowsiness began to come in its place.

Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting - not for the first time - on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job I the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

In some shorter, simpler mental shorthand, these thoughts passed through his brain. The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child's rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys.

Chapter Eleven BEN (IV)

1

It was ten past nine on Sunday morning - a bright, sun?washed Sunday morning - and Ben was beginning to get seriously worried about Susan when the phone by his bed rang. He snatched it up.

'Where are you?'

'Relax. I'm upstairs with Matt Burke. Who requests the pleasure of your company as soon as you're able.'

'Why didn't you come - '

'I looked in on you earlier. You were sleeping like a lamb.'

'They give you knockout stuff in the night so they can steal different organs for mysterious billionaire patients,' he said. 'How's Matt?'

'Come up and see for yourself,' she said, and before she could do more than hang up, he was getting into his robe.

2

Matt looked much better, rejuvenated, almost. Susan was sitting by his bed in a bright blue dress, and Matt raised a hand in salute when Ben walked in. 'Drag up a rock.'

Ben pulled over one of the hideously uncomfortable hospital chairs and sat down. 'How you feeling?'

'A lot better. Weak, but better. They took the IV out of my arm last night and gave me a poached egg for breakfast this morning. Gag. Previews of the old folks home.'

Ben kissed Susan lightly and saw a strained kind of composure on her face, as if everything was being held together by fine wire.

'Is there anything new since you called last night?'

'Nothing I've heard. But I left the house around seven and the Lot wakes up a little later on Sunday.'

Ben shifted his gaze to Matt. 'Are you up to talking this thing over?'

'Yes, I think so, ' he said, and shifted slightly. The gold cross Ben had hung around his neck flashed prominently. 'By the way, thank you for this. It's a great comfort, even though I bought it on the remaindered shelf at Woolworth's Friday afternoon.'

'What's your condition?'

"'Stabilized" is the fulsome term young Dr Cody used when he examined me late yesterday afternoon. According to the EKG he took, it was strictly a minor-league heart attack . . . no clot formation.' He harrumphed. 'Should hope for his sake it wasn't. Coming just a week after the check-up he gave me, I'd sue his sheepskin off the wall for breach of promise.' He broke off and looked levelly at Ben. 'He said he'd seen such cases brought on by massive shock. I kept my lip zipped. Did I do right?'

'Just right. But things have developed. Susan and I are going to see Cody today and spill everything. If he doesn't sign the committal papers on me right away, we'll send him to you.'

'I'll give him an earful,' Matt said balefully. 'Snot-nosed little son of a bitch won't let me have my pipe '

'Has Susan told you what's been happening in Jerusa?lem's Lot since Friday night?'

'No. She said she wanted to wait until we were all together.'

'Before she does, will you tell me exactly what happened at your house?'

Matt's face darkened, and for a moment the mask of convalescence fluttered. Ben glimpsed the old man he had seen sleeping the day before.

'If you're not up to it - '

'No, of course I am. I must be, if half of what I suspect is true.' He smiled bitterly. 'I've always considered myself a bit of a free thinker, not easily shocked. But it's amazing how hard the mind can try to block out something it doesn't like or finds threatening. Like the magic slates we had as boys. If you didn't like what you had drawn, you had only to pull the top sheet up and it would disappear.'

'But the line stayed on the black stuff underneath for?ever,' Susan said.

'Yes.' He smiled at her. 'A lovely metaphor for the interaction of the conscious and unconscious mind. A pity Freud was stuck with onions. But we wander.' He looked at Ben. 'You've heard this once from Susan?'

'Yes, but - '

'Of course. I only wanted to be sure I could dispense with the background.'

He told the story in a nearly flat, inflectionless voice, pausing only when a nurse entered on whisper-soft crepe soles to ask him if he would like a glass of ginger ate. Matt told her it would be wonderful to have a ginger ale, and he sucked on the flexible straw at intervals as he finished. Ben noticed that when he got to the part about Mike going out the window backward, the ice cubes clinked slightly in the glass as he held it. Yet his voice did not waver; it retained the same even, slightly inflected tones that he undoubtedly used in his classes. Ben thought, not for the first time, that he was an admirable man.

There was a brief pause when he had finished, and Matt broke it himself.

'And so,' he said. 'You who have seen nothing with your own eyes, what think you of this hearsay?'

'We talked that over for quite a while yesterday,' Susan said. 'I'll let Ben tell you.'

A little shy, Ben advanced each of the reasonable expla?nations and then knocked it down. When he mentioned the screen that fastened on the outside, the soft ground, the lack of ladder feet impressions, Matt applauded.

'Bravo! A sleuth!'

Matt looked at Susan. 'And you, Miss Norton, who used to write such well-organized themes with paragraphs like building blocks and topic sentences for mortar? What do you think?'

She looked down at her hands, which were folding a pleat of her dress, and then back up at him. 'Ben lectured me on the linguistic meanings of can't yesterday, so I won't use that word. But it's very difficult for me to believe that vampires are stalking 'salem's Lot, Mr Burke.'