Salem’s Lot (47 page)

38

They stood in the rain, I trembling, looking at each other. ‘Next door?’ Mark asked.

‘Yes. They’d be the logical ones for the McDougalls to attack first.’

They went across, and this time their nostrils picked up the telltale odor of rot in the dooryard. The name below the doorbell was Evans. Jimmy nodded. David Evans and family. He worked as a mechanic in the auto department of Sears in Gates Falls. He had treated him a couple of years ago, for a cyst or something.

This time the bell worked, but there was no response. They found Mrs Evans in bed. The two children were in a bunk bed in a single bedroom, dressed in identical pajamas that featured characters from the Pooh stories. It took longer to find Dave Evans. He had hidden himself away in the unfinished storage space over the small garage.

Jimmy marked a check inside a circle on the front door and the garage door. ‘We’re doing good,’ he said. ‘Two for two.’

Mark said diffidently, ‘Could you hold on a minute or two? I’d like to wash my hands.’

‘Sure,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’d like that, too. The Evanses won’t mind if we use their bathroom.’

They went inside, and Jimmy sat down in one of the living room chairs and closed his eyes. Soon he heard Mark running water in the bathroom.

On the darkened screen of his eyes he saw the mortician’s table, saw the sheet covering Marjorie Glick’s body start to tremble, saw her hand fall out and begin its delicate toe dance on the air- He opened his eyes.

This trailer was in nicer condition than the McDougalls’, neater, taken care of. He had never met Mrs Evans, but it seemed she must have taken pride in her home. There was a neat pile of the dead children’s toys in a small storage room, a room that had probably been called the laundry room in the mobile home dealer’s original brochure. Poor kids, he hoped they’d enjoyed the toys while there had still been bright days and sunshine to enjoy them in. There was a tricycle, several large plastic trucks and a play gas station, one of those caterpillars on wheels (there must have been some dandy fights over that), a toy pool table.

He started to look away and then looked back, startled.

Blue chalk.

Three shaded lights in a row.

Men walking around the green table under the bright lights, cueing up, brushing the grains of blue chalk off their fingertips -

‘Mark!’ he shouted, sitting bolt upright in the chair.
‘Mark!’
And Mark came running with his shirt off, to see what the matter was.

39

An old student of Matt’s (class of ‘64, A’s in literature, C’s in composition) had dropped by to see him around two-thirty, had commented on the stacks of arcane literature, and had asked Matt if he was studying for a degree in the occult. Matt couldn’t remember if his name was Herbert or Harold.

Matt, who had been reading a book called
Strange Disappearances
when Herbert-or-Harold walked in, welcomed the interruption. He was waiting for the phone to ring even now, although he knew the others could not safely enter the Brock Street School until after three o’clock. He was desperate to know what had happened to Father Callahan. And the day seemed to be passing with alarming rapidity-he had always heard that time passed slowly in the hospital. He felt slow and foggy, an old man at last.

He began telling Herbert-or-Harold about the town of Momson, Vermont, whose history he had just been reading. He bad found it particularly interesting because he thought the story, if true, might be a precursor of the Lot’s fate.

‘Everyone disappeared,’ he told Herbert-or-Harold, who was listening with polite but not very well masked boredom. ‘Just a small town in the upcountry of northern Vermont, accessible by Interstate Route 2 and Vermont Route 19. Population of 312 in the census of 1920. In August of 1923 a woman in New York got worried because her sister hadn’t written her for two months. She and her husband took a ride out there, and they were the first to break the story to the newspapers, although I don’t doubt that the locals in the surrounding area had known about the disappearance for some time. The sister and her husband were gone, all right, and so was everyone else in Momson. The houses and the barns were all standing, and in one place supper had been put on the table. The case was rather sensational at the time. I don’t believe that I would care to stay there overnight. The author of this book claims the people in the neighboring townships tell some odd stories… ha’ants and goblins and all that. Several of the outlying barns have hex signs and large crosses painted on them, even to this day. Look, here’s a photograph of the general store and ethyl station and feed-and-grain store-what served in Momson as downtown. What do you suppose ever happened there?’

Herbert-or-Harold looked at the picture politely. Just a little town with a few stores and a few houses. Some of them were falling down, probably from the weight of snow in the winter. Could be any town in the country. Driving through most of them, you wouldn’t know if anyone was alive after eight o’clock when they rolled up the sidewalks. The old man had certainly gone dotty in his old age. Herbert-or-Harold thought about an old aunt of his who had become convinced in the last two years of her life that her daughter had killed her pet parakeet and was feeding it to her in the meat loaf. Old people got funny ideas.

‘Very interesting,’ he said, looking up. ‘But I don’t think… Mr Burke? Mr Burke, is something wrong? Are you… nurse! Hey,
nurse!
’

Matt’s eyes had grown very fixed. One hand gripped the top sheet of the bed. The other was pressed against his chest. His face had gone pallid, and a pulse beat in the center of his forehead.

Too soon
, he thought.
No, too soon -

Pain, smashing into him in waves, driving him down into darkness. Dimly he thought:
Watch that last step, it’s a killer.

Then, falling.

Herbert-or-Harold ran out of the room, knocking over his chair and spilling a pile of books. The nurse was already coming, nearly running herself.

‘It’s Mr Burke,’ Herbert-or-Harold told her. He was still holding the book, with his index finger inserted at the picture of Momson, Vermont.

The nurse nodded curtly and entered the room. Matt was lying with his head half off the bed, his eyes closed.

‘Is he-?’ Herbert-or-Harold asked timidly. It was a complete question.

‘Yes, I think so,’ the nurse answered, at the same time pushing the button that would summon the ECV unit. ‘You’ll have to leave now.’

She was calm again now that all was known, and had time to regret her lunch, left half-eaten.

40

‘But there’s no pool hall in the Lot,’ Mark said. ‘The closest one is over in Gates Falls. Would he go there?’

‘No,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t. But some people have pool tables or billiard tables in their houses.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

‘There’s something else,’ Jimmy said. ‘I can almost get it.’

He leaned back, closed his eyes, and put his hands over them. There was something else, and in his mind he associated it with plastic. Why plastic? There were plastic toys and plastic utensils for picnics and plastic drop covers to put over your boat when winter came -

And suddenly a picture of a pool table draped in a large plastic dust cover formed in his mind, complete with sound track, a voiceover that was saying,
I really ought to sell it before the felt gets mildew or something-Ed Craig says it might mildew-but it was Ralph’s…

He opened his eyes. ‘I know where he is,’ he said. ‘I know where Barlow is. He’s in the basement of Eva Miller’s boardinghouse.’ And it was true; he knew it was. It felt incontrovertibly right in his mind.

Mark’s eyes flashed brilliantly. ‘Let’s go get him.’

‘Wait.’

He went to the phone, found Eva’s number in the book, and dialed it swiftly. It rang with no answer. Ten rings, eleven, a dozen. He put it back in its cradle, frightened. There had been at least ten roomers at Eva’s, many of them old men, retired. There was always someone around. Always before this.

He looked at his watch. It was quarter after three and time was racing, racing.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

‘What about Ben?’

Jimmy said grimly, ‘We can’t call. The line’s out at your house. If we go straight to Eva’s, there’ll be plenty of daylight left if we’re wrong. If we’re right, we’ll come back and get Ben and stop his fucking clock.’

‘Let me put my shirt on again,’ Mark said, and ran down the hall to the bathroom.

41

Ben’s Citroën was still sitting in Eva’s parking lot, now plastered with wet leaves from the elms that shaded the square of gravel. The wind had picked up but the rain had stopped. The sign that said ‘Eva’s Rooms’ swung and squeaked in the gray afternoon. The house had an eerie silence about it, a waiting quality, and Jimmy made a mental connection and was chilled by it. It was just like the Marsten House. He wondered if anyone had ever committed suicide here. Eva would know, but he didn’t think Eva would be talking… not anymore.

‘It would be perfect,’ he said aloud. ‘Take up residence in the local boardinghouse and then surround yourself with your children,’

‘Are you sure we shouldn’t get Ben?’

‘Later. Come on.’

They got out of the car and walked toward the porch.

The wind pulled at their clothes, riffled their hair. All the shades were drawn, and the house seemed to brood over them.

‘Can you smell it?’ Jimmy asked.

‘Yes. Thicker than ever.’

‘Are you up to this?’

‘Yes,’ Mark said firmly. ‘Are you.

‘I hope to Christ I am,’ Jimmy said.

They went up the porch steps and Jimmy tried the door. It was unlocked. When they stepped into Eva Miller’s compulsively neat big kitchen, the odor smote them both, like an open garbage pit-yet dry, as with the smoke of years.

Jimmy remembered his conversation with Eva-it had been almost four years ago, just after he had begun practicing. Eva had come in for a check-up. His father had had her for a patient for years, and when Jimmy took his place, even running things out of the same Cumberland office, she had come to him without embarrassment. They had spoken of Ralph, dead twelve years even then, and she had told him that Ralph’s ghost was still in the house every now and then she would turn up something new and temporarily forgotten in the attic or a bureau drawer. And of course there was the pool table in the basement. She said that she really ought to get rid of it; it was just taking up space she could use for something else. But it had been Ralph’s and she just couldn’t bring herself to take out an ad in the paper or call up the local radio ‘Yankee Trader’ program.

Now they walked across the kitchen to the cellar door and Jimmy opened it. The stench was thick, powering. He thumbed the light switch but got no response. He would have broken that, of course.

‘Look around,’ he told Mark. ‘She’s got to have a flashlight, or candles.’

Mark began nosing around, pulling open drawers and looking into them. He noticed that the knife rack over the sink was empty, but thought nothing of it at the time. His heart was thudding with painful slowness, like a muffled drum. He recognized the fact that he was now on the far, ragged edges of his endurance, at the outer limits. His mind did not seem to be thinking, but only reacting. He kept seeing movement at the corners of his eyes and jerking his head around to look, seeing nothing. A war veteran might have recognized the symptoms which signaled the onset of battle fatigue.

He went out into the hall and looked through the dresser there. In the third drawer he found a long fourcell flashlight. He took it back to the kitchen. ‘Here it is, J-’

There was a rattling noise, followed by a heavy thump. The cellar door stood open.

And the screams began.

42

When Mark stepped back into the kitchen of Eva’s Rooms, it was twenty minutes of five. His eyes were hollow, and his T-shirt was smeared with blood. His eyes were stunned and slow.

Suddenly he shrieked.

The sound came roaring out of his belly, up the dark passage of his throat, and through his distended jaws. He shrieked until he felt some of the madness begin to leave his brain. He shrieked until his throat cracked and an awful pain lodged in his vocal cords like a sliver of bone. And even when he had externalized all the fear, the horror, the rage, the disappointment that he could, that awful pressure remained, coming up out of the cellar in waves-the knowledge of Barlow’s presence somewhere down there-and now it was close to dark.

He went outside onto the porch and breathed great gasps of the windy air. Ben. He had to get Ben. But an odd sort of lethargy seemed to have wrapped his legs in lead. What was the use? Barlow was going to win. They had been crazy to go against him. And now Jimmy had paid the full price, as well as Susan and the Father.

The steel in him came up.
No. No. No.

He went down the porch steps on trembling legs and got into Jimmy’s Buick. The keys hung in the ignition.

Get Ben. Try once more.

His legs were too short to reach the pedals. He pulled the seat up and twisted the key. The engine roared. He put the gearshift lever in drive and put his foot on the gas. The car leaped forward. He slammed his foot down on the power brake and was thrown painfully into the steering wheel. The horn honked.

I can’t drive it!

And he seemed to hear his father saying in his logical, pedantic voice: You must be careful when you learn to drive, Mark. Driving is the only means of transportation that is not fully regulated by federal law. As a result, all the operators are amateurs. Many of these amateurs are suicidal. Therefore, you must be
extremely
careful. You use the gas pedal like there was an egg between it and your foot. When you’re driving a car with an automatic transmission, like ours, the left foot is not used at all. Only the right is used; first brake and then gas.

He let his foot off the brake and the car crawled forward down the driveway. It bumped over the curb and he brought it to a jerky stop. The windshield had fogged up. He rubbed it with his arm and only smeared it more.

‘Screw it,’ he muttered.

He started up jerkily and performed a wide, drunken U-turn, driving over the far curb in the process, and set off for his house. He had to crane his neck to see over the steering wheel. He fumbled out with his right hand and turned on the radio and played it loud. He was crying.