Текст книги "Salem's Lot"

The Deserted Village

I heard a voice, crying from the deep:

Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.

O

LD ROCK ’N’ ROLL SONG

And travelers now within that valley

Through the red-litten windows see

Vast forms that move fantastically

To a discordant melody;

While, like a rapid ghastly river,

Through the pale door,

A hideous throng rush out forever

And laugh—but smile no more.

E

DGAR

A

LLAN

P

OE

Tell you now that the whole town is empty.

B

OB

D

YLAN

The Lot (

From the “Old Farmer’s Almanac”:

Sunset on Sunday, October 5, 1975, at 7:02 pm, sunrise on Monday, October 6, 1975, at 6:49 am. The period of darkness on Jerusalem’s Lot during that particular rotation of the Earth, thirteen days after the vernal equinox, lasted eleven hours and forty-seven minutes. The moon was new. The day’s verse from the Old Farmer was: “See less sun, harvest’s nigh done.”

From the Portland Weather Station:

High temperature for the period of darkness was 62°, reported at 7:05 pm. Low temperature was 47°, reported at 4:06 am. Scattered clouds, precipitation zero. Winds from the northwest at five to ten miles per hour.

From the Cumberland County police blotter:

Nothing.

TWO

No one pronounced Jerusalem’s Lot dead on the morning of October 6; no one knew it was. Like the bodies of previous days, it retained every semblance of life.

Ruthie Crockett, who had lain pale and ill in bed all weekend, was gone on Monday morning. The disappearance went unreported. Her mother was down cellar, lying behind her shelves of preserves with a canvas tarpaulin pulled over her body, and Larry Crockett, who woke up very late indeed, simply assumed that his daughter had gotten herself off to school. He decided not to go into the office that day. He felt weak and washed out and lightheaded. Flu, or something. The light hurt his eyes. He got up and pulled down the shades, yelping once when the sunlight fell directly on his arm. He would have to replace that window some day when he felt better. Defective window glass was no joke. You could come home on a sunshiny day, find your house burning away six licks to the minute, and those insurance pricks in the home office called it spontaneous combustion and wouldn’t pay up. When he felt better was time enough. He thought about a cup of coffee and felt sick to his stomach. He wondered vaguely where his wife was, and then the subject slipped out of his mind. He went back to bed, fingering a funny little shaving nick just under his chin, pulled the sheet over his wan cheek, and went back to sleep.

His daughter, meanwhile, slept in enameled darkness within an abandoned freezer close to Dud Rogers—in the night world of her new existence, she found his advances among the heaped mounds of garbage very acceptable.

Loretta Starcher, the town librarian, had also disappeared, although there was no one in her disconnected spinster’s life to remark it. She now resided on the dark and musty third floor of the Jerusalem’s Lot Public Library. The third floor was always kept locked (she had the only key, always worn on a chain around her neck) except when some special supplicant could convince her that he was strong enough, intelligent enough, and moralenough to receive a special dispensation.

Now she rested there herself, a first edition of a different kind, as mint as when she had first entered the world. Her binding, so to speak, had never even been cracked.

The disappearance of Virgil Rathbun also went unnoticed. Franklin Boddin woke up at nine o’clock in their shack, noticed vaguely that Virgil’s pallet was empty, thought nothing of it, and started to get out of bed and see if there was a beer. He fell back, all rubber legs and reeling head.

Christ, he thought, drifting into sleep again. What was we into last night? Sterno?

And beneath the shack, in the cool of twenty seasons’ fallen leaves and among a galaxy of rusted beer cans popped down through the gaping floorboards in the front room, Virgil lay waiting for night. In the dark clay of his brain there were perhaps visions of a liquid more fiery than the finest scotch, more quenching than the finest wine.

Eva Miller missed Weasel Craig at breakfast but thought little of it. She was too busy directing the flow to and from the stove as her tenants rustled up their breakfasts and then stumbled forth to look another work week in the eye. Then she was too busy putting things to rights and washing the plates of that damned Grover Verrill and that no good Mickey Sylvester, both of whom had been consistently ignoring the “Please wash up your dishes” sign taped over the sink for years.

But as the silence crept back into the day and the frantic bulge of breakfast work merged into the steady routine of things to be done, she missed him again. Monday was garbage-collection day on Railroad Street, and Weasel always took the big green bags of rubbish out to the curb for Royal Snow to pick up in his dilapidated old International Harvester truck. Today the green bags were still out on the back steps.

She went to his room and knocked gently. “Ed?”

There was no response. On another day she would have assumed his drunkenness and simply have put the bags out herself, her lips slightly more compressed than usual. But this morning a faint thread of disquiet wormed into her, and she turned the doorknob and poked her head in. “Ed?” she called softly.

The room was empty. The window by the head of the bed was open, the curtains fluttering randomly in and out with the vagaries of the light breeze. The bed was wrinkled and she made it without thinking, her hands doing their own work. Stepping over to the other side, her right loafer crunched in something. She looked down and saw Weasel’s horn-backed mirror, shattered on the floor. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands, frowning. It had been his mother’s, and he had once turned down an antique dealer’s offer of ten dollars for it. And that had been after he started drinking.

She got the dustpan from the hall closet and brushed up the glass with slow, thoughtful gestures. She knew Weasel had been sober when he went to bed the night before, and there was no place he could buy beer after nine o’clock, unless he had hitched a ride out to Dell’s or into Cumberland.

She dumped the fragments of broken mirror into Weasel’s wastebasket, seeing herself reflected over and over for a brief second. She looked into the wastebasket but saw no empty bottle there. Secret drinking was really not Ed Craig’s style, anyway.

Well. He’ll turn up.

But going downstairs, the disquiet remained. Without consciously admitting it to herself she knew that her feelings for Weasel went a bit deeper than friendly concern.

“Ma’am?”

She started from her thoughts and regarded the stranger in her kitchen. The stranger was a little boy, neatly dressed in corduroy pants and a clean blue T-shirt. Looks like he fell off his bike. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite pin him down. From one of the new families out on Jointner Avenue, most likely.

“Does Mr Ben Mears live here?”

Eva began to ask why he wasn’t in school, then didn’t. His expression was very serious, even grave. There were blue hollows under his eyes.

“He’s sleeping.”

“May I wait?”

Homer McCaslin had gone directly from Green’s Mortuary to the Norton home on Brock Street. It was eleven o’clock by the time he got there. Mrs Norton was in tears, and while Bill Norton seemed calm enough, he was chain-smoking and his face looked drawn.

McCaslin agreed to put the girl’s description on the wire. Yes, he would call as soon as he heard something. Yes, he would check the hospitals in the area, it was part of the routine (so was the morgue). He privately thought the girl might have gone off in a tiff. The mother admitted they had quarreled and that the girl had been talking of moving out.

Nonetheless, he cruised some of the back roads, one ear comfortably cocked to the crackle of static coming from the radio slung under the dash. At a few minutes past midnight, coming up the Brooks Road toward town, the spotlight he had trained on the soft shoulder of the road glinted off metal—a car parked in the woods.

He stopped, backed up, got out. The car was parked partway up an old disused wood-road. Chevy Vega, light brown, two years old. He pulled his heavy chained notebook out of his back pocket, paged past the interview with Ben and Jimmy, and trained his light on the license number Mrs Norton had given him. It matched. The girl’s car, all right. That made things more serious. He laid his hand on the hood. Cool. It had been parked for a while.

“Sheriff?”

A light, carefree voice, like tinkling bells. Why had his hand dropped to the butt of his gun?

He turned and saw the Norton girl, looking incredibly beautiful, walking toward him hand in hand with a stranger—a young man with black hair unfashionably combed straight back from his forehead. McCaslin shone the flashlight at his face and had the oddest impression that the light was shining right through it without illuminating it in the slightest. And although they were walking, they left no tracks in the soft dirt. He felt fear and warning kindle in his nerves, his hand tightened on his revolver…and then loosened. He clicked off his flashlight and waited passively.

“Sheriff,” she said, and now her voice was low, caressing.

“How good of you to come,” the stranger said.

They fell on him.

Now his patrol car was parked far out on the rutted and brambled dead end of the Deep Cut Road, with hardly a twinkle of chrome showing through the heavy strands of juniper, bracken, and Lolly-come-see-me. McCaslin was curled up in the trunk. The radio called him at regular intervals unheeded.

Later that same morning Susan paid a short visit to her mother but did little damage; like a leech that had fed well on a slow swimmer, she was satisfied. Still, she had been invited in and now she could come and go as she pleased. There would be a new hunger tonight…every night.

Charles Griffen had wakened his wife at a little after five on that Monday morning, his face long and chiseled into sardonic lines by his anger. Outside, the cows were bawling unmilked with full udders. He summed up the work of the night in six words:

“Those damned boys have run off.”

But they had not. Danny Glick had found and battened upon Jack Griffen and Jack had gone to his brother Hal’s room and had finally ended his worries of school and books and unyielding fathers forever. Now both of them lay in the center of a huge pile of loose hay in the upper mow, with chaff in their hair and sweet motes of pollen dancing in the dark and tideless channels of their noses. An occasional mouse scampered across their faces.

Now the light had spilled across the land, and all evil things slept. It was to be a beautiful autumn day, crisp and clear and filled with sunshine. By and large the town (not knowing it was dead) would go off to their jobs with no inkling of the night’s work. According to the Old Farmer, sunset Monday night would come at 7:00 pm sharp.

The days shortened, moving toward Halloween, and beyond that, winter.

THREE

When Ben came downstairs at quarter to nine, Eva Miller said from the sink, “There’s someone waiting to see you on the porch.”

He nodded and went out the back door, still in his slippers, expecting to see either Susan or Sheriff McCaslin. But the visitor was a small, economical boy sitting on the top step of the porch and looking out over the town, which was coming slowly to its Monday morning vitality.

“Hello?” Ben said, and the boy turned around quickly.

They looked at each other for no great space of time, but for Ben the moment seemed to undergo a queer stretching, and a feeling of unreality swept him. The boy reminded him physically of the boy he himself had been, but it was more than that. He seemed to feel a weight settle onto his neck, as if in a curious way he sensed the more-than-chance coming together of their lives. It made him think of the day he had met Susan in the park, and how their light, get-acquainted conversation had seemed queerly heavy and fraught with intimations of the future.

Perhaps the boy felt something similar, for his eyes widened slightly and his hand found the porch railing, as if for support.

“You’re Mr Mears,” the boy said, not questioning.

“Yes. You have the advantage, I’m afraid.”

“My name is Mark Petrie,” the boy said. “I have some bad news for you.”

And I bet he does, too, Ben thought dismally, and tried to tighten his mind against whatever it might be—but when it came, it was a total, shocking surprise.

“Susan Norton is one of them,” the boy said. “Barlow got her at the house. But I killed Straker. At least, I think I did.”

Ben tried to speak and couldn’t. His throat was locked.

The boy nodded, taking charge effortlessly. “Maybe we could go for a ride in your car and talk. I don’t want anyone to see me around. I’m playing hooky and I’m already in dutch with my folks.”

Ben said something—he didn’t know what. After the motorcycle accident that had killed Miranda, he had picked himself up off the pavement shaken but unhurt (except for a small scratch across the back of his left hand, mustn’t forget that, Purple Hearts had been awarded for less) and the truck driver had walked over to him, casting two shadows in the glow of the streetlight and the headlamps of the truck—he was a big, balding man with a pen in the breast pocket of his white shirt, and stamped in gold letters on the barrel of the pen he could read “Frank’s Mobil Sta” and the rest was hidden by the pocket, but Ben had guessed shrewdly that the final letters were “tion,” elementary, my dear Watson, elementary. The truck driver had said something to Ben, he didn’t remember what, and then he took Ben’s arm gently, trying to lead him away. He saw one of Miranda’s flat-heeled shoes lying near the large rear wheels of the moving van and had shaken the trucker off and started toward it and the trucker had taken two steps after him and said, I wouldn’t do that, buddy. And Ben had looked up at him dumbly, unhurt except for the small scratch across the back of his left hand, wanting to tell the trucker that five minutes ago this hadn’t happened, wanting to tell the trucker that in some parallel world he and Miranda had taken a left at the corner one block back and were riding into an entirely different future. A crowd was gathering, coming out of a liquor store on one corner and a small milk-and-sandwich bar on the other. And he had begun to feel then what he was feeling now: the complex and awful mental and physical interaction that is the beginning of acceptance, and the only counterpart to that feeling is rape. The stomach seems to drop. The lips become numb. A thin foam forms on the roof of the mouth. There is a ringing noise in the ears. The skin on the testicles seems to crawl and tighten. The mind goes through a turning away, a hiding of its face, as from a light too brilliant to bear. He had shaken off the well-meaning truck driver’s hands a second time and had walked over to the shoe. He picked it up. He turned it over. He placed his hand inside it, and the insole was still warm from her foot. Carrying it, he had gone two steps further and had seen her sprawled legs under the truck’s front wheels, clad in the yellow Wranglers she had pulled on with such careless and laughing ease back at the apartment. It was impossible to believe that the girl who had pulled on those slacks was dead, yet the acceptance was there, in his belly, his mouth, his balls. He had groaned aloud, and that was when the tabloid photographer had snapped his picture for Mabel’s paper. One shoe off, one shoe on. People looking at her bare foot as if they had never seen one before. He had taken two steps away and leaned over and—

“I’m going to be sick,” he said.

“That’s all right.”

Ben stepped behind his Citroën and doubled over, holding on to the door handle. He closed his eyes, feeling darkness wash over him, and in the darkness Susan’s face appeared, smiling at him and looking at him with those lovely deep eyes. He opened his eyes again. It occurred to him that the kid might be lying, or mixed up, or an out-and-out psycho. Yet the thought brought him no hope. The kid was not set up like that. He turned back and looked into the kid’s face and read concern there—nothing else.

“Come on,” he said.

The boy got in the car and they drove off. Eva Miller watched them go from the kitchen window, her brow creased. Something bad was happening. She felt it, was filled with it, the same way she had been filled with an obscure and cloudy dread on the day her husband died.

She got up and dialed Loretta Starcher. The phone rang over and over without answer until she put it back in the cradle. Where could she be? Certainly not at the library. It was closed Mondays.

She sat, looking pensively at the telephone. She felt that some great disaster was in the wind—perhaps something as terrible as the fire of ’51.

At last she picked up the phone again and called Mabel Werts, who was filled with the gossip of the hour and eager for more. The town hadn’t known such a weekend in years.

FOUR

Ben drove aimlessly and without direction as Mark told his story. He told it well, beginning with the night Danny Glick had come to his window and ending with his nocturnal visitor early this morning.

“Are you sure it was Susan?” he asked.

Mark Petrie nodded.

Ben pulled an abrupt U-turn and accelerated back up Jointner Avenue.

“Where are you going? To the—”

“Not there. Not yet.”

FIVE

“Wait. Stop.”

Ben pulled over and they got out together. They had been driving slowly down the Brooks Road, at the bottom of Marsten’s Hill. The wood-road where Homer McCaslin had spotted Susan’s Vega. They had both caught the glint of sun on metal. They walked up the disused road together, not speaking. There were deep and dusty wheel ruts, and the grass grew high between them. A bird twitted somewhere.

They found the car shortly.

Ben hesitated, then halted. He felt sick to his stomach again. The sweat on his arms was cold.

“Go look,” he said.

Mark went down to the car and leaned in the driver’s side window. “Keys are in it,” he called back.

Ben began to walk toward the car and his foot kicked something. He looked down and saw a .38 revolver lying in the dust. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. It looked very much like a police issue revolver.

“Whose gun?” Mark asked, walking toward him. He had Susan’s keys in his hand.

“I don’t know.” He checked the safety to be sure it was on, and then put the gun in his pocket.

Mark offered him the keys and Ben took them and walked toward the Vega, feeling like a man in a dream. His hands were shaking and he had to poke twice before he could get the right key into the trunk slot. He twisted it and pulled the back deck up without allowing himself to think.

They looked in together. The trunk held a spare tire, a jack, and nothing else. Ben felt his breath come out in a rush.

“Now?” Mark asked.

Ben didn’t answer for a moment. When he felt that his voice would be under control, he said, “We’re going to see a friend of mine named Matt Burke, who is in the hospital. He’s been researching vampires.”

The urgency in the boy’s gaze remained. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” Ben said, and hearing the word on the air seemed to confirm it and give it weight. It was beyond recall. “Yes, I believe you.”

“Mr Burke is from the high school, isn’t he? Does he know about this?”

“Yes. So does his doctor.”

“Dr Cody?”

“Yes.”

They were both looking at the car as they spoke, as if it were a relic of some dark, lost race which they had discovered in these sunny woods to the west of town. The trunk gaped open like a mouth, and as Ben slammed it shut, the dull thud of its latching echoed in his heart.

“And after we talk,” he said, “we’re going up to the Marsten House and get the son of a bitch who did this.”

Mark looked at him without moving. “It may not be as easy as you think. She will be there, too. She’s hisnow.”

“He’s going to wish he never saw ’salem’s Lot,” he said softly. “Come on.”

SIX

They arrived at the hospital at nine-thirty, and Jimmy Cody was in Matt’s room. He looked at Ben, unsmiling, and then his eyes flicked to Mark Petrie with curiosity.

“I’ve got some bad news for you, Ben. Sue Norton has disappeared.”

“She’s a vampire,” Ben said flatly, and Matt grunted from his bed.

“Are you sure of that?” Jimmy asked sharply.

Ben cocked his thumb at Mark Petrie and introduced him. “Mark here had a little visit from Danny Glick on Saturday night. He can tell you the rest.”