Salem's Lot

The local police car was pulled up by the Municipal Building and Parkins Gillespie, also in a slicker, was standing beside it. He did not wave, but watched them go by with hooded eyes.

The downtown streets were empty—not unusual in itself; it was a small town, and it was raining—but many shades were drawn, giving the town a brooding, secret look.

“They’ve been at it, all right,” Ben said.

Later, they enter the Petrie house and encounter the remains of Callahan.

“Good dear Christ,” Jimmy whispered. His arms turned to water; the bats went crashing over the floor like swollen pick-up sticks.

Ben only stared, frozen.

The bodies of Mr and Mrs Petrie lay where they had fallen, undisturbed. But Sarlinov had vented his full fury on Callahan, who had branded him and then cheated him at the moment of his victory.

His headless corpse was nailed to the dining room door, in a hideous parody of the crucifixion.

Ben closed his eyes, tried to swallow, and found nothing to swallow on. His mouth was like glass. Think of it as a cut of meat at the delicatessen, he told himself sickly. Think of it as—

He dropped his own armload and ran for the sink.

Faintly, he heard Jimmy cry out in a choked voice: “What kind of a man is he?”

Ben raised himself on trembling arms and ran water into the sink. As if from a great distance, he heard his voice say: “Not a man at all.”

The truth of it finally struck home to both of them, with a great and iron weight, like the slamming of a huge door.

When Jimmy and Mark begin working on taking care of the vampires, they manage more than pulling Roy McDougall out into the sun, as this section shows:

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 into the rain without a word. Jimmy took his black bag, and Mark brought several of the freshly sharpened stakes and a hammer with a two-pound head from the trunk. Jimmy mounted the rickety steps and tried the bell. It didn’t work, and so he knocked instead. The pounding roused no one, either in the McDougall trailer or in the neighboring one twenty yards down—although there was a car in that yard, also.

Jimmy tried the storm door, and it was locked. “Give me that hammer,” he said.

Mark handed it over, and Jimmy smashed the glass to the right of the knob, whacking it out with two solid blows. He reached through and unsnapped the catch. The inside door was unlocked. They went in.

The smell was definable instantly—a dead giveaway. Jimmy felt his nostrils cringe against it, to try (unsuccessfully) 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, of deadness. A wet, putrefied smell. Jimmy found himself suddenly 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 snow had uncovered. In one of these (an Orange Crush bottle) he saw a small, decayed field mouse which had been attracted by the sweetness, perhaps, 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.

They went through the place methodically—kitchen, dining nook, living room, each bedroom. 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 the back and saw the small door that swung inward set into the trailer’s rudimentary foundation. It was fastened with a padlock. Jimmy knocked it off with five hard blows from the hammer, and when he pushed open the half-trap, the smell hit them in a wave of corruption.

“There they are,” Mark said.

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

Family scene, he thought crazily. Norman Rockwell, where are you? Unreality washed over him. The baby, he thought. How am I supposed to do this to a little baby? Matt would do it. I’m not Matt. I’m a doctor. I’m supposed to be a healer, not a… You are healing. You’re giving them back their souls so they can leave whatever awful place they’re in.

“I’m smaller,” Mark said. “I’ll go in.”

He dropped to his knees and wriggled through the half-trap.

“Get the…the little one first,” Jimmy heard himself saying. “Let’s get that over with.”

Mark grabbed Randy McDougall’s ankles and pulled him out.

He was naked and dirty, his small body scratched and the knees lacerated to the point of horror. God knows where the fever in his body had caused him to crawl on them. As soon as the daylight struck his body, his eyelids fluttered and he began to writhe.

Mark gave him a last convulsive jerk out of the half-trap and then stood away, his face a writhing mask of revulsion and grim vengeance.

The baby writhed on the drifts of wet leaves like a fish hooked and pulled up on the bank. Tiny mewling noises escaped its throat as the light burned it. Inside the crawl space, his mother stirred and moaned and made an inarticulate cry. Her feet and hands were twitching, Jimmy saw, as if an electric current had been passed through them.

Randy screamed, lips peeling back over baby teeth that had suddenly developed into puppy fangs, sharp enough to rip skin.

“Hold him,” he said to Mark.

Mark hesitated for a moment. The thought of touching the thing they had dragged out of the darkness showed on his face. Then he dropped to his knees and pi

Jimmy had taken his stethoscope, and now he put the earpieces in place, and he applied the pick-up to that twisting chest. Randy’s small head lashed from side to side, gnashing at the air. His eyelids twitched with the roll of the eyes in their sockets.

No heartbeat.

“In the name of God,” Jimmy said, and brought the stake down with both hands in a hard, sweeping curve.

It was very quick.

The body jerked upward, the eyelids flew open, and then the body settled back tiredly and was still. Only a dead little boy remained in front of them…but one that had been dead for a week, and unembalmed. The body swelled in front of them, and suddenly a ghastly, noxious burp escaped the mouth, and they both turned away from it. The cheeks sagged, and the eyes fell inward.

Mark gave a horrified little cry and turned away, but Jimmy felt comforted. He had seen this: it was a normal (although accelerated) process—decay. Nature reclaiming her component parts. Full circle. Something inside him loosened, and he could believe that, even if they were not doing God’s work, that they were doing nature’s.

“Are you all right?” he asked Mark. “Can you keep going?”

“Yes.” He turned and looked at Jimmy with wan, horrified eyes. “It’s not like the movies, is it?”

“No.”

He glanced down at the small corpse. It had caught up with itself, and was finished. The blood which had gushed from around the stake had clotted, then powdered. The entry wound itself looked shriveled and old. He touched the stake and it wiggled easily, with none of the tension he would have found in, say, the handle of a knife planted in a new corpse. The tissues had relaxed like old rubber bands.

He looked at Mark and said: “Poor kid. He’s not pretty, but this is the way he should be. This is right.”

Mark nodded. “Yes. I know that. It’s only hard for a minute.” He looked at the other two, in their pitiful mock-grave. “How are we going to handle them? If they thrash, I can’t hold them.”