Salem's Lot

“Come to me, Ben. Let me fuck you. Wait until dark and I’ll fuck you. Fuck-fuck-fuck. Father Callahan, too. Would you like a piece of it, Father? Let me slip my hand under that black robe and start to—”

Ben pulled the tape recorder off the shelf, barely aware that he was screaming. Something inside it popped and flared and the words ran down to a grotesquely deepening basso, and still he didn’t, couldn’t stop. He kicked it, sending one of the reels flying, unreeling tape. He chased it, kicked it again, chased it, kicked it again, chased it—

Hands on his shoulders, shaking him. “Ben, stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

He glanced up, dazed. Jimmy’s face in front of his, contorted. Weeping?

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice dull and distant in his own ears. “Sorry.”

He looked around. Mark, his fists still balled, his mouth frozen in the twist of someone who has bitten something rotten; Jimmy, his oddly boyish face streaked with sweat and tears; Father Donald Callahan, his face pallid and drawn into an agonized rictus. And they were all looking at him.

Later, when Barlow has Callahan cornered in the Petrie kitchen, the published novel takes a different turn; the original plays out below.

The cross’s glow was dying.

He looked at it, eyes widening. Fear leaped into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. His head jerked up and he stared at Sarlinov. He was coming forward, his smile wide, almost voluptuous.

“Stay back,” Callahan said hoarsely, retreating a step. “I command it, in the name of God.”

Sarlinov laughed at him.

The glow in the cross was only a thin and guttering light in a cruciform shape. The shadows had crept across the vampire’s face again, masking his features in strangely barbaric lines and triangles under the sharp cheekbones.

Callahan took another step backward, and his buttocks bumped the kitchen table, which was set against the wall.

“Nowhere left to go,” Sarlinov murmured sadly, but his dark eyes bubbled with infernal mirth. “Sad to see a man’s faith fail. Ah, well…”

The cross trembled in his hand and suddenly all its light was gone. It was only a piece of plaster that his mother had bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper’s price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough power, seemingly, to smash down walls and shatter stones, was gone. The muscles remembered the thrumming but could not duplicate it.

Sarlinov’s voice came out of the dark—Callahan shifted his eyes with frenzied futility to locate its position exactly and couldn’t. Sarlinov was toying with him now, playing cat-and-mouse.

Can he hear my heart beating? Callahan wondered. Like a rabbit, caught in a trap? I pray to God not.

“It is the malaise of you Americans,” Sarlinov’s voice said from a new place. “You believe in toothpastes and the spray for armpits and for wonderful pills, but you do not believe in Powers. Instead, you have grown rich on darkness, like a fat pig that has grown fat on garbage. It is ripe, swelled, ready to be bled.”

God, Callahan thought, I’m begging, pleading, for You to get me out of this. Not for myself but for…for…

Yet there was no intensity to his thoughts, none of the feeling of transmittingthat had come to him as a young man; no feeling that the words were going further than the cage of his skull.

Something clattered to the floor.

The cross.

“Ah, you’ve dropped it,” Sarlinov said, and now he was far to the right of where Callahan had expected him, nearly behind him. “But it doesn’t matter; you’ve forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross…or the flag…or the bread and wine…others…only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the flag cloth, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. Is it not so? If you had dropped it before, you should have beaten me yet another night. I rather suspected you would. In a way, I had hoped it might be so. It has been long since I met an opponent of any real worth.”

Another silence, dreadful. There was no sound of movement, none. The vampire was more silent than a cat in its deadly stalk.

Callahan suddenly began to grope on the table, ru

He remembered Matt saying, Some things are worse than death.

His fingertips read breadcrumbs like braille, slid over a plate, touched the rim of a coffee cup. Where was it? Where? For the love of God!

And as he touched it and his fingers closed around the wooden handle, Sarlinov spoke again, almost at his elbow.

“But there must be an end to talking now,” Sarlinov said with real regret. “There must be—”

“ In God’s name!” Callahan cried, and swung the knife in a great, rising arc.

Light suddenly streamed from the blade in bright effulgence. Sarlinov’s words were broken off into a jagged scream, and for one split second, Callahan could see the blazing knife-blade mirrored in each of his nighted eyes.

The blade grazed his forehead, and blood streamed forth in a welling stream.

“It’s too late, shaman!” Sarlinov snarled. “You pay a thousand times for your flawed belief, and for daring to cut me—”

And with no thought (he was, after all, a thinking man), Callahan plunged the knife into his own chest, not feeling it, seeing the impotent fury in the thing’s eyes—but it dared not come near.

He withdrew the blade, and plunged it in again, with all that remained of his flagging strength. As thought began to ebb, he realized that his faith—some of it—had come back and he might have cheated himself of victory in his final, instinctive effort to save his soul from the hell of the Undead; and that was the most serious denial of faith of all.

Then thought was gone and he fell forward on the haft of the knife and he closed his eyes and let himself go off to see what gods there were.

This scene occurs when Jimmy and Ben are driving back into Momson.

As they drew closer to Momson, an almost palpable cloud formed just above their heads, like the ones that used to form over the heads of Huey, Dewie, and Louie in the old Donald Duck comic books when they were angry. When Jimmy pulled off the turnpike at the large green reflectorized sign that read ROUTE 12 MOMSON CUMBERLAND CUMBERLAND CTR Ben reflected 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—and he had told her about the childhood experience that had finally gotten him pregnant with book. That book seemed very pale now.

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

And you could, 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, and he lifted his hand in a puzzled, bemused kind of wave. They passed a few fast-moving cars going the other way, obviously transients. The houses on outer Momson Avenue had a deserted, shut-up look.

As they entered town, Jimmy said in an almost absurdly relieved tone: “Look there. Crossen’s is open.”

It was. Milt was out front, gassing up a car with a New Hampshire license plate, and Grover Verrill was standing next to him, dressed in a yellow lobsterman’s slicker.

“Don’t see the rest of the crew, though,” Jimmy added.

Milt glanced up at them and waved, and Ben thought he saw lines of strain on both old men’s faces. The CLOSED sign was still posted inside the door of Foreman’s Mortuary. The hardware store was also closed. The diner was open, however; as they flashed by, Ben caught a glimpse of Pauline Dickens serving someone coffee. The rest of the place looked empty.