Salem’s Lot (46 page)

34

As they drew closer to the Lot, an almost palpable cloud of dread formed in Jimmy’s Buick, and conversation lagged. When Jimmy pulled off the turnpike at the large green reflectorized sign that read:

ROUTE 12 JERUSALEM ‘S LOT

CUMBERLAND CUMBERLAND CTR

Ben thought that this was the way he and Susan had come home after their first date-she had wanted to see something with a car chase in it.

‘It’s gone bad,’ Jimmy said. His boyish face looked pale and frightened and angry. ‘Christ, you can almost smell it.’

And you could, Ben thought, although the smell was mental rather than physical: a psychic whiff of tombs.

Route 12 was nearly deserted. On the way in they passed Win Purinton’s milk truck, parked off the road and deserted. The motor was idling, and Ben turned it off after looking in the back. Jimmy glanced at him inquiringly as he got back in. Ben shook his head. ‘He’s not there. The engine light was on, and it was almost out of gas. Been idling there for hours.’ Jimmy pounded his leg with a closed fist.

But as they entered town, Jimmy said in an almost absurdly relieved tone, ‘Look there. Crossen’s is open.’

It was. Milt was out front, fussing a plastic drop cover over his rack of newspapers, and Lester Silvius was standing next to him, dressed in a yellow slicker.

‘Don’t see the rest of the crew, though,’ Ben said.

Milt glanced up at them and waved, and Ben thought be saw lines of strain on both men’s faces. The ‘Closed’ sign was still posted inside the door of Foreman’s Mortuary. The hardware store was also closed, and Spencer’s was locked and dark. The diner was open, and after they had passed it, Jimmy pulled his Buick up to the curb in front of the new shop. Above the show window, simple goldfaced letters spelled out the name: ‘Barlow and Straker-Fine Furnishings.’ And taped to the door, as Callahan had said, a sign which had been hand-lettered in a fine script which they all recognized from the note they had seen the day before: ‘Closed until further notice.’

‘Why are you stopping here?’ Mark asked.

‘Just on the off-chance that he might be holing up inside,’ Jimmy said. ‘It’s so obvious he might figure we’d overlook it. And I think that sometimes customs men put an okay on boxes they’ve checked through. They write it on with chalk.’

They went around to the back, and while Ben and Mark hunched their shoulders against the rain, Jimmy poked one overcoated elbow through the glass in the back door until they could all climb inside.

The air was noxious and stale, the air of a room shut up for centuries rather than days. Ben poked his head out into the showroom, but there was no place to hide out there. Sparsely furnished, there was no sign that Straker had been replenishing his stock.

‘Come here!’ Jimmy called hoarsely, and Ben’s heart leaped into his throat.

Jimmy and Mark were standing by a long crate which Jimmy had partly pried open with the claw end of his hammer. Looking in, they could see one pale hand and a darksleeve.

Without thinking, Ben attacked the crate. Jimmy was fumbling at the far end with the hammer.

‘Ben,’ Jimmy said, ‘you’re going to cut your hands. You-’

He hadn’t heard. He snapped boards off the crate, regardless of nails and splinters. They had him, they had the slimy night-thing, and he would pound the stake into him as he had pounded it into Susan, he would-He snapped back another piece of the cheap wooden crating and looked into the dead, moon-pallid face of Mike Ryerson.

For a moment there was utter silence, and then they all let out their breath… it was as if a soft wind had coursed through the room.

‘What do we do now?’ Jimmy asked.

‘We better get out to Mark’s house first,’ Ben said. His voice was dull with disappointment. ‘We know where he is. We don’t even have a finished stake yet.’

They put the splintered strips of wood back helterskelter.

‘Better let me look at those hands, Jimmy said. ‘They’re bleeding.’

‘Later,’ Ben said. ‘Come on.’

They went back around the building, all of them wordlessly glad to be back in the open air, and Jimmy drove the Buick up Jointner Avenue and into the residential part of town, just outside the skimpy business district. They arrived at Mark’s house perhaps sooner than any of them would have liked.

Father Callahan’s old sedan was parked behind Henry Petrie’s sensible Pinto runabout in the circular Petrie driveway. At the sight of it, Mark sucked in his breath and looked away. All color had drained out of his face.

‘I can’t go in there,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll wait in the car.’

‘Nothing to be sorry for, Mark,’ Jimmy said.

He parked, turned off the ignition, and got out. Ben hesitated a minute, then put a hand on Mark’s shoulder. ‘Are you going to be all right?’

‘Sure.’ But he did not look all right. His chin was trembling and his eyes looked hollow. He suddenly turned to Ben and the hollowness was gone from the eyes and they were filled with simple pain, swimming with tears. ‘Cover them up, will you? If they’re dead, cover them up.’

‘Sure I will,’ Ben said.

‘It’s better this way,’ Mark said. ‘My father… he would have made a very successful vampire. Maybe as good as Barlow, in time. He… he was good at everything he tried. Maybe too good.’

‘Try not to think too much,’ Ben said, hating the lame sound of the words as they left his mouth. Mark looked up at him and smiled wanly.

‘The woodpile’s around in the back,’ Mark said. ‘You can go faster if you use my father’s lathe down in the basement.’

‘All right,’ Ben said. ‘Be easy, Mark. As easy as you can.’

But the boy was looking away now, swiping at his eyes with his arm.

He and Jimmy went up the back steps and inside.

35

‘Callahan’s not here,’ Jimmy said flatly. They had gone through the entire house.

Ben forced himself to say it. ‘Barlow must have gotten him.’

He looked at the broken cross in his hand. It had been around Callahan’s neck yesterday. It was the only trace of him they had found. It had been lying next to the bodies of the Petries, who were very dead indeed. Their heads had been crushed together with force enough to literally shatter the skulls. Ben remembered the unnatural strength Mrs Glick had displayed and felt sick.

‘Come on,’ he said to Jimmy. ‘We’ve got to cover them up. I promised.’

36

They took the dust cover from the couch in the living room and covered them with that. Ben tried not to look at or think about what they were doing, but it was impossible. When the job was done, one hand-the cultivated, lacquered nails revealed it to be June Petrie’s-protruded from under the gaily patterned dust cover, and he poked it underneath with his toe, grimacing in an effort to keep his stomach under control. The shapes of the bodies under the cover were undeniable and unmistakable, making him think of news photos from Vietnam - battlefield dead and soldiers carrying dreadful burdens in black rubber sacks that looked absurdly like golf bags.

They went downstairs, each with an armload of yellow ash stove lengths.

The cellar had been Henry Petrie’s domain, and it reflected his personality perfectly: Three high-intensity lights had been hung in a straight line over the work area, each shaded with a wide metal shell that allowed the light to fall with strong brilliance on the planer, the jigsaw, the bench saw, the lathe, the electric sander. Ben saw that he had been building a bird hotel, probably to place in the back yard next spring, and the blueprint he had been working from was neatly laid out and held at each corner with machined metal paperweights. He had been doing a competent but uninspired job, and now it would never be finished. The floor was neatly swept, but a pleasantly nostalgic odor of sawdust hung in the air.

‘This isn’t going to work at all,’ Jimmy said.

‘I know that,’ Ben said.

‘The woodpile,’ Jimmy snorted, and let the wood fall from his arms in a lumbering crash. The stove lengths rolled wildly on the floor like jackstraws. He uttered a high, hysterical laugh.

‘Jimmy-’

But his laugh cut across Ben’s attempt to speak like jags of piano wire. ‘We’re going to go out and end the scourge with a pile of wood from Henry Petrie’s back lot. How about some chair legs or baseball bats?’

‘Jimmy, what else can we do?’

Jimmy looked at him and got himself under control with a visible effort. ‘Some treasure hunt,’ he said. ‘Go forty paces into Charles Griffen’s north pasture and look under the large rock. Ha. Jesus. We can get out of town. We can do that.’

‘Do you want to quit? Is that what you want?’

‘No. But it isn’t going to be just today, Ben. It’s going to be weeks before we get them all, if we ever do. Can you stand that? Can you stand doing… doing what you did to Susan a thousand times? Pulling them out of their closets and their stinking little bolt holes screaming and struggling, only to pound a stake into their chest cavities and smash their hearts? Can you keep that up until November without going nuts?’

Ben thought about it and met a blank wall: utter incomprehension.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Well, what about the kid? Do you think he can take it? He’ll be ready for the fucking nut hatch. And Matt will be dead. I’ll guarantee you that. And what do we do when the state cops start nosing around to find out what in hell happened to ‘salem’s Lot? What do we tell them? "Pardon me while I stake this bloodsucker"? What about that, Ben?’

‘How the hell should I know? Who’s had a chance to stop and think this thing out?’

They realized simultaneously that they were standing nose to nose, yelling at each other. ‘Hey,’ Jimmy said. ‘Hey.’

Ben dropped his eyes. ‘I’m sorry-’

‘No, my fault. We’re under pressure… what Barlow would undoubtedly call an end game.’ He ran a hand through his carroty hair and looked around aimlessly. His eye suddenly lit on something beside Petrie’s blueprint and he picked it up. It was a black grease pencil.

‘Maybe this is the best way,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You stay here, Ben. Start turning out stakes. If we’re going to do this, it’s got to be scientific. You’re the production department. Mark and I will be research. We’ll go through the town, looking for them. We’ll find them, too, just the way we found Mike. I can mark the locations with this grease pencil. Then, tomorrow, the stakes.’

‘Won’t they see the marks and move?’

‘I don’t think so. Mrs Glick didn’t look as though she was connecting too well. I think they move more on instinct than real thought. They might wise up after a while, start hiding better, but I think at first it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.’

‘Why don’t I go?’

‘Because I know the town, and the town knows me-like they knew my father. The live ones in the Lot are hiding in their houses today. If you come knocking, they won’t answer. If I come, most of them will. I know some of the hiding places. I know where the winos shack up out in the Marshes and where the pulp roads go. You don’t. Can you run that lathe?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said.

Jimmy was right, of course. Yet the relief he felt at not having to go out and face
them
made him feel guilty.

‘Okay. Get going. It’s after noon now.’

Ben turned to the lathe, then paused. ‘If you want to wait a half hour, I can give you maybe half a dozen stakes to take with you.’

Jimmy paused a moment, then dropped his eyes. ‘Uh, I think tomorrow… tomorrow would be…’

‘Okay,’ Ben said. ‘Go on. Listen, why don’t you come back around three? Things ought to be quiet enough around that school by then so we can check it out.’

‘Good.’

Jimmy stepped away from Petrie’s shop area and started for the stairs. Something-a half thought or perhaps inspiration-made him turn. He saw Ben across the basement, working under the bright glare of those three lights, hung neatly in a row.

Something… and it was gone.

He walked back.

Ben shut off the lathe and looked at him. ‘Something else?’

‘Yeah,’ Jimmy said. ‘On the tip of my tongue. But it’s stuck there.’

Ben raised his eyebrows.

‘When I looked back from the stairs and saw you, something clicked. It’s gone now.’

‘Important?’

‘I don’t know.’ He shuffled his feet purposelessly, wanting it to come back. Something about the image Ben had made, standing under those work lights, bent over the lathe. No good. Thinking about it only made it seem more distant.

He went up the stairs, but paused once more to look back. The image was hauntingly familiar, but it wouldn’t come. He went through the kitchen and out to the car. The rain had faded to drizzle.

37

Roy McDougall’s car was standing in the driveway of the trailer lot on the Bend Road, and seeing it there on a weekday made Jimmy suspect the worst.

He and Mark got out, Jimmy carrying his black bag. They mounted the steps and Jimmy tried the bell. It didn’t work and so he knocked instead. The pounding roused no one in the McDougall trailer or in the neighboring one twenty yards down the road. There was a car in that driveway, too.

Jimmy tried the storm door and it was locked. ‘There’s a hammer in the back seat of the car,’ he said.

Mark got it, and Jimmy smashed the glass of the storm door beside the knob. He reached through and unsnapped the catch. The inside door was unlocked. They went in.

The smell was definable instantly, and Jimmy felt his nostrils cringe against it and try to shut it out. The smell was not as strong as it had been in the basement of the Marsten House, but it was just as basically offensive-the smell of rot and deadness. A wet, putrefied stink. Jimmy found himself remembering when, as boys, he and his buddies had gone out on their bikes during spring vacation to pick up the returnable beer and soft-drink bottles the retreating snows had uncovered. In one of those (an Orange Crush bottle) he saw a small, decayed field mouse which had been attracted by the sweetness and had then been unable to get out. He had gotten a whiff of it and had immediately turned away and thrown up. This smell was plangently like that-sickish sweet and decayed sour, mixed together and fermenting wildly. He felt his gorge rise.

‘They’re here,’ Mark said. ‘Somewhere.’

They went through the place methodically - kitchen, dining nook, living room, the two bedrooms. They opened closets as they went. Jimmy thought they had found something in the master bedroom closet, but it was only a heap of dirty clothes.

‘No cellar?’ Mark asked.

‘No, but there might be a crawl space.

They went around to the back and saw a small door that swung inward, set into the trailer’s cheap concrete foundation. It was fastened with an old padlock. Jimmy knocked it off with five hard blows of the hammer, and when he pushed the half-trap open, the smell hit them in a ripe wave.

‘There they are,’ Mark said.

Peering in, Jimmy could see three sets of feet, like corpses lined up on a battlefield. One set wore work boots, one wore knitted bedroom slippers, and the third set-tiny feet indeed-were bare.

Family scene, Jimmy thought crazily.
Reader’s Digest
, where are you when we need you? Unreality washed over him. The baby, he thought. How are we supposed to do that to a little baby?

He made a mark with the black grease pencil on the trap and picked up the broken padlock. ‘Let’s go next door,’ he said.

‘Wait,’ Mark said. ‘Let me pull one of them out.’

‘Pull…? Why?’

‘Maybe the daylight will kill them,’ Mark said. ‘Maybe we won’t have to do that with the stakes.’

Jimmy felt hope. ‘Yeah, okay. Which one?’

‘Not the baby,’ Mark said instantly. ‘The man. You catch one foot.’

‘All right,’ Jimmy said. His mouth had gone cotton-dry, and when he swallowed there was a click in his throat.

Mark wriggled in on his stomach, the dead leaves that had drifted in crackling under his weight. He seized one of Roy McDougall’s workboots and pulled. Jimmy squirmed in beside him, scraping his back on the low overhang, fighting claustrophobia. He got hold of the other boot and together they pulled him out into the lessening drizzle and white light.

What followed was almost unbearable. Roy McDougall began to writhe as soon as the light struck him full, like a man who has been disturbed in sleep. Steam and moisture came from his pores, and the skin underwent a slight sagging and yellowing. Eyeballs rolled behind the thin skin of his closed lids. His feet kicked slowly and dreamily in the wet leaves. His upper lip curled back, showing upper incisors like those of a large dog-a German shepherd or a collie. His arms thrashed slowly, the hands clenching and unclenching, and when one of them brushed Mark’s shirt, he jerked back with a disgusted cry.

Roy turned over and began to hunch slowly back into the crawl space, arms and knees and face digging grooves in the rain-softened humus. Jimmy noted that a hitching, Cheyne-Stokes type of respiration had begun as soon as the light struck the body; it stopped as soon as McDougall was wholly in shadow again. So did the moisture extrusion.

When he had reached his previous resting place, McDougall turned over and lay still.

‘Shut it,’ Mark said in a strangled voice. ‘Please shut it.’ Jimmy closed the trap and replaced the hammered lock as well as he could. The image of McDougall’s body, struggling in the wet, rotted leaves like a dazed snake, remained in his mind. He did not think there would ever be a time when it was not within hand’s reach of his memory-even if he lived to be a hundred.