My father-in-law is now retired, but when he was working for Maine’s Department of Human Services, he had a very cool sign in his office. It said ONCE I HAD NO CHILDREN AND EIGHT IDEAS. NOW I HAVE EIGHT CHILDREN AND NO IDEAS. I like that because once I had no published novels and roughly two hundred ideas about the art and craft of writing fiction (two hundred and fifty on a good day). Now I have just about fifty published novels to my credit and only one surviving idea about fiction; a writing seminar as taught by yours truly would probably last about fifteen minutes.

One of the ideas I had in those good old days was that it would be perfectly possible to combine the overlord-vampire myth from Bram Stoker’s Draculawith the naturalistic fiction of Frank Norris and the EC horror comics I’d loved as a child…and come out with a great American novel. I was twenty-three, remember, so cut me a break. I had a teaching certificate upon which the ink had hardly dried, I had published eight short stories and I had a perfectly insane amount of confidence in my own ability, not to mention a totally ridiculous sense of my own importance. I also had a wife with a typewriter who liked my stories—and those last two things, which I took for granted then, turned out to be the most important things of all.

Did I really think I could combine Draculaand Tales from the Cryptand come out with Moby-Dick? I did. I really did. I even planned a section at the front called “Extracta,” where I would include notes, clippings, and epigrams about vampires, as Melville does about whales at the front of his book. Was I daunted by the fact that Moby-Dickonly sold about twelve copies in Melville’s lifetime? Not I; one of my ideas was that a novelist takes the long view, the loftyview, and that does not include the price of eggs. (My wife would not have agreed, and I doubt if Mrs. Melville would have, either.)

In any case, I liked the idea of my vampire novel serving as a balance for Stoker’s, which has to go down in history as the most optimisticscary novel of all time. Count Dracula, simultaneously feared and worshipped in his dark little European fiefdom of Transylvania, makes the fatal mistake of taking his act and putting it on the road. In London he meets men and women of scienceand reason,by God—Abraham Van Helsing, who knows about blood transfusions; John Seward, who keeps his diary on wax phonograph cylinders; Mina Harker, who keeps hers in shorthand and later serves as secretary to the Fearless Vampire Hunters.

Stoker was clearly fascinated by modern inventions and innovations, and the underlying thesis of his novel is clear: in a confrontation between a foreign child of the Dark Powers and a group of fine, upstanding Britishers equipped with all mod cons, the powers of darkness don’t stand a chance. Dracula is hounded from Carfax, his British estate, back to Transylvania, and finally staked at sunset. The vampire-hunters pay a price for their victory—that is Stoker’s genius—but that they will come out on top is never in much doubt.

When I sat down to write my version of the story in 1972—a version whose life-force was drawn more from the nervously jokey Jewish-American mythos of William Gaines and Al Feldstein than from Romanian folk-tales—I saw a different world, one where all of the gadgets Stoker must have regarded with such hopeful wonder had begun to seem sinister and downright dangerous. Mine was the world that had begun to choke on its own effluent, that had hooked itself through the bag on diminishing energy resources, and had to deal not only with nuclear weapons but nuclear proliferation (big-time terrorism was, thankfully, at that time still over the horizon). I saw myself and my society at the other end of the technological rainbow, and set out to write a book that would reflect that glum idea. One where, in short, the vampire would end up eating the fearless vampire-hunters for lunch. (Which he, as a vampire, would eat at midnight, of course.)

I was about three hundred pages into this book—then titled Second Coming—when Carriewas published, and my first idea about novel-writing went west. It would be years before I would hear Alfred Bester’s axiom “The book is the boss,” but I didn’t need to; I learned it for myself writing the novel that eventually became ’Salem’s Lot.Of course, the writer canimpose control; it’s just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however…that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

Given my dim view of small New England towns (I had grown up in one and knew what they were like), I had no doubt my version of Count Dracula would emerge completely triumphant over the puny representatives of the rational world arrayed against him. What I didn’t count on was that my characters weren’t content to remainpuny representatives. Instead they came alive and began to do things—sometimes smart things, sometimes foolishly brave things—on their own. More of Stoker’s characters are around at the finish of Draculathan at the end of ’Salem’s Lot,and yet this is—against its young author’s will—a surprisingly optimistic book. I’m glad. I still see all the nicks and dings on its fenders, all the scars on its hide that were inflicted by the inexperience of a craftsman new at his trade, but I still find many passages of power here. And a few of grace.

Doubleday had published my first novel, and had an option on my second. I had completed this one and another, what I thought of as a “serious” novel, called Roadwork.I showed them both to my then-editor, Bill Thompson. He liked them both. We had a lunch at which nothing was decided, then started to walk back to Doubleday. At the corner of Park Avenue and 54th Street—something like that—we were stopped by a DON’T WALK light. I finally pulled the pin and asked Bill which one he thought we should publish.

He said, “ Roadworkwould probably get more serious attention, but Second Comingis Peyton Placewith vampires. It’s a great read and it could be a bestseller. There’s only one problem.”

“What’s that?” I asked, as DON’T WALK changed to WALK and people started to move around us.

Bill stepped off the curb. In New York you don’t waste the WALK, even when decisions of moment are being made, and this—I might have sensed it even then—was one that would affect the rest of my life. “You’ll be typed as a horror writer,” he said.

I was so relieved I laughed. “I don’t care what they call me as long as the checks don’t bounce,” I said. “Let’s publish Second Coming.” And that was what we did, although the name was first changed to Jerusalem’s Lot(because my wife, Tabby, said that Second Comingsounded like a sex manual) and then to ’Salem’s Lot(because the Doubleday brass said Jerusalem’s Lotsounded like a religious book). I was indeed typed as a horror writer, a tag I have never confirmed or denied, simply because I think it’s irrelevant to what I do. It does, however, give bookstores a handy place to shelve my books.

Since then I have let go of all but one of my ideas about fiction-writing. It’s the one I came to first (around age seven, as I recall), and the one I’ll probably hold onto until the end: it’s good to tell a story, and even better when people actually want to listen. I think ’Salem’s Lot,for all its flaws, is one of the good ones. One of the scary ones. If you’ve never heard it before, let me tell it to you now. And if you have, let me tell it to you again. So turn off the television—in fact, why don’t you turn off all the lights except for the one over your favorite chair?—and we’ll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them, because while I was working on this book, I believed in them myself.

Center Lovell, Maine

June 15, 2005

Author’s Note

No one writes a long novel alone, and I would like to take a moment of your time to thank some of the people who helped with this one: G. Everett McCutcheon, of Hampden Academy, for his practical suggestions and encouragement; Dr John Pearson, of Old Town, Maine, medical examiner of Penobscot County and member in good standing of that most excellent medical specialty, general practice; Father Renald Hallee, of St John’s Catholic Church in Bangor, Maine. And of course my wife, whose criticism is as tough and unflinching as ever.

Although the towns surrounding ’salem’s Lot are very real, ’salem’s Lot itself exists wholly in the author’s imagination, and any resemblance between the people who live there and people who live in the real world is coincidental and unintended.

S.K.

Prologue

Old friend, what are you looking for?

After those many years abroad you come

With images you tended

Under foreign skies

Far away from your own land.

EORGE

EFERIS

ONE

Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.

They crossed the country on a rambling southwest line in an old Citroën sedan, keeping mostly to secondary roads, traveling in fits and starts. They stopped in three places along the way before reaching their final destination: first in Rhode Island, where the tall man with the black hair worked in a textile mill; then in Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked for three months on a tractor assembly line; and finally in a small California town near the Mexican border, where he pumped gas and worked at repairing small foreign cars with an amount of success that was, to him, surprising and gratifying.

Wherever they stopped, he got a Maine newspaper called the Portland Press-Heraldand watched it for items concerning a small southern Maine town named Jerusalem’s Lot and the surrounding area. There were such items from time to time.

He wrote an outline of a novel in motel rooms before they hit Central Falls, Rhode Island, and mailed it to his agent. He had been a mildly successful novelist a million years before, in a time when the darkness had not come over his life. The agent took the outline to his last publisher, who expressed polite interest but no inclination to part with any advance money. “Please” and “thank you,” he told the boy as he tore the agent’s letter up, were still free. He said it without too much bitterness and set about the book anyway.

The boy did not speak much. His face retained a perpetual pinched look, and his eyes were dark—as if they always scanned some bleak inner horizon. In the diners and gas stations where they stopped along the way, he was polite and nothing more. He didn’t seem to want the tall man out of his sight, and the boy seemed nervous even when the man left him to use the bathroom. He refused to talk about the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, although the tall man tried to raise the topic from time to time, and he would not look at the Portland newspapers the man sometimes deliberately left around.

When the book was written, they were living in a beach cottage off the highway, and they both swam in the Pacific a great deal. It was warmer than the Atlantic, and friendlier. It held no memories. The boy began to get very brown.

Although they were living well enough to eat three square meals a day and keep a solid roof over their heads, the man had begun to feel depressed and doubtful about the life they were living. He was tutoring the boy, and he did not seem to be losing anything in the way of education (the boy was bright and easy about books, as the tall man had been himself), but he didn’t think that blotting ’salem’s Lot out was doing the boy any good. Sometimes at night he screamed in his sleep and thrashed the blankets onto the floor.

A letter came from New York. The tall man’s agent said that Random House was offering $12,000 in advance, and a book club sale was almost certain. Was it okay?

It was.

The man quit his job at the gas station, and he and the boy crossed the border.

TWO

Los Zapatos, which means “the shoes” (a name that secretly pleased the man to no end), was a small village not far from the ocean. It was fairly free of tourists. There was no good road, no ocean view (you had to go five miles further west to get that), and no historical points of interest. Also, the local cantina was infested with cockroaches and the only whore was a fifty-year-old grandmother.

With the States behind them, an almost unearthly quiet dropped over their lives. Few planes went overhead, there were no turnpikes, and no one owned a power lawn mower (or cared to have one) for a hundred miles. They had a radio, but even that was noise without meaning; the news broadcasts were all in Spanish, which the boy began to pick up but which remained—and always would—gibberish to the man. All the music seemed to consist of opera. At night they sometimes got a pop music station from Monterey made frantic with the accents of Wolfman Jack, but it faded in and out. The only motor within hearing distance was a quaint old Rototiller owned by a local farmer. When the wind was right, its irregular burping noise would come to their ears faintly, like an uneasy spirit. They drew their water from the well by hand.

Once or twice a month (not always together) they attended mass at the small church in town. Neither of them understood the ceremony, but they went all the same. The man found himself sometimes drowsing in the suffocating heat to the steady, familiar rhythms and the voices which gave them tongue. One Sunday the boy came out onto the rickety back porch where the man had begun work on a new novel and told him hesitantly that he had spoken to the priest about being taken into the church. The man nodded and asked him if he had enough Spanish to take instruction. The boy said he didn’t think it would be a problem.

The man made a forty-mile trip once a week to get the Portland, Maine, paper, which was always at least a week old and was sometimes yellowed with dog urine. Two weeks after the boy had told him of his intentions, he found a featured story about ’salem’s Lot and a Vermont town called Momson. The tall man’s name was mentioned in the course of the story.

He left the paper around with no particular hope that the boy would pick it up. The article made him uneasy for a number of reasons. It was not over in ’salem’s Lot yet, it seemed.

The boy came to him a day later with the paper in his hand, folded open to expose the headline: “Ghost Town in Maine?”

“I’m scared,” he said.

“I am, too,” the tall man answered.

THREE

GHOST TOWN IN MAINE?

By John Lewis

Press-HeraldFeatures Editor

JERUSALEM’S LOT—Jerusalem’s Lot is a small town east of Cumberland and twenty miles north of Portland. It is not the first town in American history to just dry up and blow away, and will probably not be the last, but it is one of the strangest. Ghost towns are common in the American Southwest, where communities grew up almost overnight around rich gold and silver lodes and then disappeared almost as rapidly when the veins of ore played out, leaving empty stores and hotels and saloons to rot emptily in desert silence.

In New England the only counterpart to the mysterious emptying of Jerusalem’s Lot, or ’salem’s Lot as the natives often refer to it, seems to be a small town in Vermont called Momson. During the summer of 1923, Momson apparently just dried up and blew away, and all 312 residents went with it. The houses and few small business buildings in the town’s center still stand, but since that summer fifty-two years ago, they have been uninhabited. In some cases the furnishings had been removed, but in most the houses were still furnished, as if in the middle of daily life some great wind had blown all the people away. In one house the table had been set for the evening meal, complete with a centerpiece of long-wilted flowers. In another the covers had been turned down neatly in an upstairs bedroom as if for sleep. In the local mercantile store, a rotted bolt of cotton cloth was found on the counter and a price of $1.22 rung up on the cash register. Investigators found almost $50.00 in the cash drawer, untouched.

People in the area like to entertain tourists with the story and to hint that the town is haunted—that, they say, is why it has remained empty ever since. A more likely reason is that Momson is located in a forgotten corner of the state, far from any main road. There is nothing there that could not be duplicated in a hundred other towns—except, of course, the Mary Celeste–like mystery of its sudden emptiness.

Much the same could be said for Jerusalem’s Lot.

In the census of 1970, ’salem’s Lot claimed 1,319 inhabitants—a gain of exactly 67 souls in the ten years since the previous census. It is a sprawling, comfortable township, familiarly called the Lot by its previous inhabitants, where little of any note ever took place. The only thing the oldsters who regularly gathered in the park and around the stove in Crossen’s Agricultural Market had to talk about was the Fire of ’51, when a carelessly tossed match started one of the largest forest fires in the state’s history.

If a man wanted to spin out his retirement in a small country town where everyone minded his own business and the big event of any given week was apt to be the Ladies’ Auxiliary Bake-off, then the Lot would have been a good choice. Demographically, the census of 1970 showed a pattern familiar both to rural sociologists and to the longtime residents of any small Maine town: a lot of old folks, quite a few poor folks, and a lot of young folks who leave the area with their diplomas under their arms, never to return again.

But a little over a year ago, something began to happen in Jerusalem’s Lot that was not usual. People began to drop out of sight. The larger proportion of these, naturally, haven’t disappeared in the real sense of the word at all. The Lot’s former constable, Parkins Gillespie, is living with his sister in Kittery. Charles James, owner of a gas station across from the drugstore, is now running a repair shop in neighboring Cumberland. Pauline Dickens has moved to Los Angeles, and Rhoda Curless is working with the St Matthew’s Mission in Portland. The list of “un-disappearances” could go on and on.

What is mystifying about these found people is their unanimous unwillingness—or inability—to talk about Jerusalem’s Lot and what, if anything, might have happened there. Parkins Gillespie simply looked at this reporter, lit a cigarette, and said, “I just decided to leave.” Charles James claims he was forced to leave because his business dried up with the town. Pauline Dickens, who worked as a waitress in the Excellent Café for years, never answered this reporter’s letter of inquiry. And Mrs Curless refuses to speak of ’salem’s Lot at all.

Some of the missing can be accounted for by educated guesswork and a little research. Lawrence Crockett, a local real estate agent who has disappeared with his wife and daughter, has left a number of questionable business ventures and land deals behind him, including one piece of Portland land speculation where the Portland Mall and Shopping Center is now under construction. The Royce McDougalls, also among the missing, had lost their infant son earlier in the year and there was little to hold them in town. They might be anywhere. Others fit into the same category. According to State Police Chief Peter McFee, “We’ve got tracers out on a great many people from Jerusalem’s Lot—but that isn’t the only Maine town where people have dropped out of sight. Royce McDougall, for instance, left owing money to one bank and two finance companies…in my judgment, he was just a fly-by-nighter who decided to get out from under. Someday this year or next, he’ll use one of those credit cards he’s got in his wallet and the repossession men will land on him with both feet. In America missing persons are as natural as cherry pie. We’re living in an automobile-oriented society. People pick up stakes and move on every two or three years. Sometimes they forget to leave a forwarding address. Especially the deadbeats.”

Yet for all the hardheaded practicality of Captain McFee’s words, there are unanswered questions in Jerusalem’s Lot. Henry Petrie and his wife and son are gone, and Mr Petrie, a Prudential Insurance Company executive, could hardly be called a deadbeat. The local mortician, the local librarian, and the local beautician are also in the dead-letter file. The list is of a disquieting length.

In the surrounding towns the whispering campaign that is the beginning of legend has already begun. ’Salem’s Lot is reputed to be haunted. Sometimes colored lights are reported hovering over the Central Maine Power lines that bisect the township, and if you suggest that the inhabitants of the Lot have been carried off by UFOs, no one will laugh. There has been some talk of a “dark coven” of young people who were practicing the black mass in town and, perhaps, brought the wrath of God Himself on the namesake of the Holy Land’s holiest city. Others, of a less supernatural bent, remember the young men who “disappeared” in the Houston, Texas, area some three years ago only to be discovered in grisly mass graves.

An actual visit to ’salem’s Lot makes such talk seem less wild. There is not one business left open. The last one to go under was Spencer’s Sundries and Pharmacy, which closed its doors in January. Crossen’s Agricultural Store, the hardware store, Barlow and Straker’s Furniture Shop, the Excellent Café, and even the Municipal Building are all boarded up. The new grammar school is empty, and so is the tri-town consolidated high school, built in the Lot in 1967. The school furnishings and the books have been moved to make-do facilities in Cumberland pending a referendum vote in the other towns of the school district, but it seems that no children from ’salem’s Lot will be in attendance when a new school year begins. There are no children; only abandoned shops and stores, deserted houses, overgrown lawns, deserted streets, and back roads.

Some of the other people that the state police would like to locate or at least hear from include John Groggins, pastor of the Jerusalem’s Lot Methodist Church; Father Donald Callahan, parish priest of St Andrew’s; Mabel Werts, a local widow who was prominent in ’salem’s Lot church and social functions; Lester and Harriet Durham, a local couple who both worked at Gates Mill and Weaving; Eva Miller, who ran a local boardinghouse….

FOUR

Two months after the newspaper article, the boy was taken into the church. He made his first confession—and confessed everything.

FIVE

The village priest was an old man with white hair and a face seamed into a net of wrinkles. His eyes peered out of his sun-beaten face with surprising life and avidity. They were blue eyes, very Irish. When the tall man arrived at his house, he was sitting on the porch and drinking tea. A man in a city suit stood beside him. The man’s hair was parted in the middle and greased in a manner that reminded the tall man of photograph portraits from the 1890s.

The man said stiffly, “I am Jesús de la rey Muñoz. Father Gracon has asked me to interpret, as he has no English. Father Gracon has done my family a great service which I may not mention. My lips are likewise sealed in the matter he wishes to discuss. Is it agreeable to you?”

“Yes.” He shook Muñoz’s hand and then Gracon’s. Gracon replied in Spanish and smiled. He had only five teeth left in his jaw, but the smile was sunny and glad.

“He asks, Would you like a cup of tea? It is green tea. Very cooling.”

“That would be lovely.”

When the amenities had passed among them, the priest said, “The boy is not your son.”

“No.”

“He made a strange confession. In fact, I have never heard a stranger confession in all my days of the priesthood.”

“That does not surprise me.”

“He wept,” Father Gracon said, sipping his tea. “It was a deep and terrible weeping. It came from the cellar of his soul. Must I ask the question this confession raises in my heart?”

“No,” the tall man said evenly. “You don’t. He is telling the truth.”

Gracon was nodding even before Muñoz translated, and his face had grown grave. He leaned forward with his hands clasped between his knees and spoke for a long time. Muñoz listened intently, his face carefully expressionless. When the priest finished, Muñoz said:

“He says there are strange things in the world. Forty years ago a peasant from El Graniones brought him a lizard that screamed as though it were a woman. He has seen a man with stigmata, the marks of Our Lord’s passion, and this man bled from his hands and feet on Good Friday. He says this is an awful thing, a dark thing. It is serious for you and the boy. Particularly for the boy. It is eating him up. He says…”

Gracon spoke again, briefly.

“He asks if you understand what you have done in this New Jerusalem.”

“Jerusalem’s Lot,” the tall man said. “Yes. I understand.”

Gracon spoke again.

“He asks what you intend to do about it.”

The tall man shook his head very slowly. “I don’t know.”

Gracon spoke again.

“He says he will pray for you.”

SIX

A week later he awoke sweating from a nightmare and called out the boy’s name.

“I’m going back,” he said.

The boy paled beneath his tan.

“Can you come with me?” the man asked.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes. God, yes.”

The boy began to weep, and the tall man held him.

SEVEN

Still, there was no sleep for him. Faces lurked in the shadows, swirling up at him like faces obscured in snow, and when the wind blew an overhanging tree limb against the roof, he jumped.

Jerusalem’s Lot.

He closed his eyes and put his arm across them and it all began to come back. He could almost see the glass paperweight, the kind that will make a tiny blizzard when you shake it.

’Salem’s Lot…

Part One

The Marsten House

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

HIRLEY

ACKSON

The Haunting of Hill House

Chapter One

Ben (

I
)

By the time he had passed Portland going north on the turnpike, Ben Mears had begun to feel a not unpleasurable tingle of excitement in his belly. It was September 5, 1975, and summer was enjoying her final grand fling. The trees were bursting with green, the sky was a high, soft blue, and just over the Falmouth town line he saw two boys walking a road parallel to the expressway with fishing rods settled on their shoulders like carbines.

He switched to the travel lane, slowed to the minimum turnpike speed, and began to look for anything that would jog his memory. There was nothing at first, and he tried to caution himself against almost sure disappointment. You were nine then. That’s twenty-five years of water under the bridge. Places change. Like people.

In those days the four-lane 295 hadn’t existed. If you wanted to go to Portland from the Lot, you went out Route 12 to Falmouth and then got on Number 1. Time had marched on.

Stop that shit.

But it was hard to stop. It was hard to stop when—

A big BSA cycle with jacked handlebars suddenly roared past him in the passing lane, a kid in a T-shirt driving, a girl in a red cloth jacket and huge mirror-lensed sunglasses riding pillion behind him. They cut in a little too quickly and he overreacted, jamming on his brakes and laying both hands on the horn. The BSA sped up, belching blue smoke from its exhaust, and the girl jabbed her middle finger back at him.

He resumed speed, wishing for a cigarette. His hands were trembling slightly. The BSA was almost out of sight now, moving fast. The kids. The goddamned kids. Memories tried to crowd in on him, memories of a more recent vintage. He pushed them away. He hadn’t been on a motorcycle in two years. He planned never to ride on one again.

A flash of red caught his eye off to the left, and when he glanced that way, he felt a burst of pleasure and recognition. A large red barn stood on a hill far across a rising field of timothy and clover, a barn with a cupola painted white—even at this distance he could see the sun gleam on the weather vane atop that cupola. It had been there then and was still here now. It looked exactly the same. Maybe it was going to be all right after all. Then the trees blotted it out.

As the turnpike entered Cumberland, more and more things began to seem familiar. He passed over the Royal River, where they had fished for steelies and pickerel as boys. Past a brief, flickering view of Cumberland Village through the trees. In the distance the Cumberland water tower with its huge slogan painted across the side: “Keep Maine Green.” Aunt Cindy had always said someone should print “Bring Money” underneath that.

His original sense of excitement grew and he began to speed up, watching for the sign. It came twinkling up out of the distance in reflectorized green five miles later:

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