Salem's Lot

“Get Ben!” the brown, writhing thing that had been James Cody, M.D., screamed. “Run! Run! R—”

He swayed, threw out his arms, and fell backward into the stairwell with a final, despairing scream.

The rats that had been coming for Mark paused and looked around, sitting up on their haunches and looking down, their paws held out in front of them—as if in applause.

Mark hesitated just a moment, swaying, unable to look away.

The thing that had fallen at the foot of the stairs twisted, writhed, screamed, tried to rise again, fell back, was dreadfully silent.

He could hear cloth being ripped and torn.

The rats began scurrying up toward him, their bodies plump and horribly well-fed. Not dump rats any longer. Graveyard rats.

When the first one reached him, he kicked out, smashing its head, sending it flying. Then he turned, walked up the two steps to the kitchen, and closed the door firmly.

In this scene, Ben and Mark have to chase away the rats before getting Barlow; flit guns and jugs of holy water help them.

They walked slowly through the hissing rain toward the porch. Rats carpeted the steps. They squeaked and thumped on the boards. A line of them were perched up on the red porch railings, like spectators at a racetrack.

“Be gone in the name of God,” Ben said conversationally, and pumped the handle of the flit gun. A thin spray, nearly invisible in the rain, clouded toward the rats on the steps. The effect was immediate and amazing. The rats squealed and writhed and scampered upward, some of them twisting and biting at their own flanks, as if suddenly infested with hungry fleas.

“It works,” he said. “Go back and get one stake and the hammer.”

Mark ran back to the car. Ben started up the porch steps. After two more squirts, all the rats broke ranks and fled. Some jumped over the railing and were gone; most streamed back inside.

Mark ran up the steps to where Ben stood. He had unbuttoned his shirt and tucked the stake and the hammer inside, against his skin. His face was pallid, and a hectic blotch of red stood out on each cheek like a fever-sign.

The kitchen was overrun with them. They crawled across Eva Miller’s neat red-and-white checked oilcloth with their tails dragging; sat upon the shelves, hissing and squeaking; scampered across the burners of the big electric stove. The sink was full of them, a writhing, twisting mass.

“They’re—” Ben began, and a rat leaped onto his head, twisting and biting. He staggered, and all the rats surged forward eagerly.

Mark screamed and pumped his flit-gun at Ben’s head. The aerosolsized drops of water were cool and soothing; the rat fell, twisting, to the floor and ran off, squealing.

“I’m so scared,” Mark said, shuddering.

“You better be. Where’s that flashlight?”

“At the…bottom of the cellar stairs. I dropped it when Jimmy…”

“Okay.” They stood at the mouth of the cellar. A steady, eager rustling noise came up from the darkness below, and a tenebrous squeaking and squealing, as if from the throat of a catacomb.

“Oh Ben, do we have to?” the boy groaned.

Ben said: “Did Christ have to walk to Calvary?”

They started down.

Ben thought: I’m going to my death. The thought came easily and naturally, and there was no regret in it. Any fine emotion such as regret was buried beneath a vast white glacier of fear. He had felt like this once before, when he and a friend had split a tab of acid. You entered a strange jungle world where you suddenly found you did not want to go; a jungle inhabited by exotic beasts. You were no longer in control of you, not for a while. The colors and sounds and images formed whether you wanted them to or not. Filled with an alien presence, you were driven on wings of fear, higher and higher, willy-nilly, never knowing when the overwhelming question might be presented to you for half-mad inspection.

Let be be the finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.Who said that? Matt? When? Matt was dead. Wallace Stevens was dead. Susan was dead. Miranda was dead. I wouldn’t look at that, if I were you. The driver of the truck that had squashed Miranda’s head to a bloody pumpkin had said that. Perhaps he was dead, too. And he might be dead soon himself. And the might part of it seemed very weak indeed. Again he thought: I’m going to my death.

They reached the bottom, and the rats closed in. They stood back to back, working the flit guns. The rats drew back, then broke in confusion. Ben saw the flashlight and picked it up. The glass lens had cracked, but the bulb was intact. He turned it on and flashed it around. It caught the pool table first, mummified in plastic, and then a dark, huddled shape lying on the concrete floor in a puddle of something that might have been oil.

“Stay here,” he said, and walked carefully over and flashed a light down on what remained of Jimmy Cody after a thousand rats had finished with him.

I wouldn’t look at that, if I were you.

“Oh, Jimmy,” he tried to say, and the words broke open and bled in his throat.

There was a neatly folded stack of living room drapes on a corner shelf. He took one of them and threw it over Jimmy’s body. Dark flowers blossomed on it.

The rats were creeping in again. He sprayed them wildly, ru

“Don’t do that!” Mark called, frightened. “Half of it’s gone already!”

Ben stopped, trembling. He flashed the light around; nothing. He shone it under the pool table. Bare. No room behind the furnace.

“Where is he?” he muttered.

Shelves, preserves smashed on the floor, a Welsh dresser against the far wall—

He swung the flashlight back and focused on it.

The rats had retreated to their thickest concentration there; they crawled over it and around it in profusion, their small buckshot eyes casting back the light with a reddish sheen.

“That wasn’t here before,” he said. “Let’s move it.”

They walked across to it, and this time it took both of them spraying before the rats split their ranks and moved away in two wings. Yet they would not go far, although several of them had gone into twisting, snarling convulsions from the spray that had fallen on them. The stairs leading up to the kitchen were blocked, Ben saw with cold horror; choked with rats. If the flit guns ran dry—

They couldn’t push it and still hold on to their hand-sprayers. “Hell with that,” Ben said. “Let’s tip it over.”

They both grabbed the back with one hand.

“Now,” Ben grunted, and they threw their shoulders into it. The Welsh dresser went over with a bonelike rattle and crash as Eva Miller’s long-ago wedding china shattered inside. The rats hurried forward, squeaking, and they drove them back again.

There was a small door, chest-high, set into the wall where the Welsh dresser had been. A new Yale padlock secured the hasp.

“Give me the hammer,” Ben said, and Mark handed it over. His eyes were rolling and jerking in an effort to follow the steady encroachment of the rats.

Two hard swings at the lock convinced him that it wasn’t going to give. “Jesus,” he muttered softly. Frustration welled up bitterly in his throat. He held up the flit gun and looked at it. Three-quarters empty. There were two nearly-full cans of holy water out in Jimmy Cody’s car, but it could have been a million miles away. To be balked like this—

No. He would bite through the wood with his teeth, if he had to.

He shone the flashlight around, and its beam fell on a neat Peg-Board hung with tools to the right of the stairs. Hung on two steel pegs was an ax with a rubber cover masking its blade.

He started across to it, and the rats closed in.

“For the love of Jesus!” he cried at them, and it seemed they flinched. He made it to the Peg-Board, took the ax down, and turned back. The rats had closed the path behind him, a solid sea of them. Mark stood backed up against the door to the root cellar, the flit gun held tightly in both hands.