Salem's Lot

Ben steeled himself and started back, kicking the rats out of the way, spraying them when he had to. They squeaked and chittered and bit. One ran up inside the cuff of his pants and bit his ankle through the sock. He kicked it loose violently and it flew through the air, twisting and still biting, now at nothingness.

“Keep them away from me,” he said to Mark, and slipped the rubber envelope off the blade. It glittered wickedly even in the dim light. Without thinking, he held the ax head up to the height of his forehead, offering it to something he could not see. “Be my strength,” he said, and there was nothing corny to the words, and also nothing prayerlike or petitioning or fainting. The words came out as a simple command, and to Mark, the rats seemed to shrink back for a moment, as if in horror.

The ax blade glimmered with a tracery of that eldritch fairy-light that Ben had seen before at Green’s Mortuary and in the cellar beneath the Marsten House. At the same time, power seemed to streak down the wooden handle to where his hands clasped it. He stood holding it for a moment, looking at the blade, and a sense of curious sureness gripped him, the feeling of a man who has bet on a fighter who has his opponent staggering and clinching in the third round. For the first time in two weeks, he felt he was no longer groping through fogs of belief and unbelief, sparring with a partner whose body was too insubstantial to sustain blows.

Power, humming up his arms like volts.

The blade glowed brighter.

“Do it,” Mark said. “Quick! Please!” He dropped his empty flit gun to the floor and the glass barrel shattered. He took Ben’s and began to spray again.

Ben Mears spread his feet, slung the ax back, and brought it down in a flashing arc that left an afterimage on the eye, like a time exposure. The blade bit wood with a booming, portentous sound and sunk to the haft. Splinters flew.

The rest of this section reads almost identical to the published novel.

In this section, the last of the deleted scenes of the published novel, they stake Barlow. In the original manuscript, they take Sarlinov’s coffin outside and let the sun do the work:

They let it go together, and Sarlinov’s coffin settled to the wet autumn earth. They looked at each other over it.

“Now?” Mark said. He walked around, and they stood side by side, in front of the coffin’s locks and seals.

“Yes,” Ben said.

They bent together, and the locks split as they touched them, making a sound like thin, snapping clapboards. They lifted.

Sarlinov was a young man now, his hair black and vibrant and lustrous, flowing over the satin pillow at the head of his narrow apartment. His skin glowed with life; the cheeks were as ruddy as wine. His teeth curved over his full lips, white with streaks of strong yellow, like ivory.

“He—” Mark began, and never finished.

The light struck him.

The eyes flew open, the lids rising like frightened window shades, and the chest hitched and air was suddenly pulled in with a terrible, windy inhalation that was nearly a scream. The mouth opened, revealing all the teeth and the tongue writhing among them like a red animal caught in a cage of snakes.

The shriek that erupted with the ebb of breath was awful, piercing, never to be forgotten—nailed to the brain in a sonic pattern of hellishness. The body writhed in the coffin like a stabbed fish. The teeth champed at the lips, the hands reached up blindly to hide the light, clawed the skin into bloody chevrons.

Then, dissolution.

It came in the space of two seconds, too fast to ever be fully believed in the daylight of later years, yet slow enough to recur again and again in nightmares, with awful stop-motion slowness.

The skin yellowed, coarsened, blistered, cracked like old sheets of canvas. The eyes faded, filmed white, fell in. The hair went white and fell like a drift of feathers. The body inside the dark suit shriveled and fell inward. The mouth widened gapingly as the lips drew back and drew back, meeting the nose and disappearing into an oral ring of jutting teeth. The fingernails blackened and fell off, and then there were only bones, still dressed with rings, clicking and clenching like castanets. Dust puffed through the fibers of the linen shirt. The bald and wrinkled head became a skull; the pants, with nothing to fill them out, fell away to broomsticks. For a moment a hideously animated scarecrow writhed before them. The fleshless skull whipped from side to side; the nude jawbone opened in a soundless scream that had no vocal cords to power it. The skeletal fingers rose and clicked in a marionette dance of repulsion.

Smells struck their noses and then vanished in tight little puffs: gas, putrescence, a moldy library smell, dust, then nothing. The twisting, protesting finger bones shredded and flaked away like pencils. The empty eye sockets widened in a fleshless expression of surprise and horror, met, and were no more. The skull caved in like an ancient Ming vase. The clothes settled flat and became as neutral as dirty laundry.

And still there was no end to its tenacious hold on the world; even the dust billowed and writhed in tiny dust devils within the coffin. And then, suddenly, they felt the passage of something between them which buffeted them like a strong wind, making them stagger backward. The limbs of the elm were suddenly whipped to a groaning frenzy by a wind from nowhere, a wind that departed as quickly as it had come. It was over. All that remained were the dark clothes and a ring of moldering teeth.

Afterword

I first read Draculawhen I was nine or ten—around 1957, this would have been. I can’t remember why I wanted to read it, something some kid at school had said, or perhaps some vampire movie on John Zacherley’s Shock Theater, but I did, and my mother brought it home from the Stratford Public Library and passed it over without comment. My brother, David, and I were both precocious readers, and our mother encouraged us greatly by forbidding us only a little. Quite often she would hand us a book one of us had requested, adding “That’s trash” in a tone which suggested she knew that the news wouldn’t stop us; might, on the contrary, actually encourage us. Besides, she knew that trash has its place.

To Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, The Blackboard Junglewas trash; The Bat, by Mary Roberts Rinehart, was trash; The Amboy Dukes, by Irving Shulman, was serioustrash. None of these books were forbidden to us, however. A very few others were. These our mother described as “bad trash,” and Draculawasn’t one of them. The only three in that category I can remember for sure were Peyton Place, Kings Row, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I had read all of these by the age of thirteen and enjoyed them all…but none of them could match Bram Stoker’s novel of old horrors colliding with modern technology and investigative techniques. That one was in a class by itself.

I remember that Stratford Library book clearly and with great affection. It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader’s spilled after-di

“You might not like it,” my mother said. “It looks like nothing but letters to me.”

Draculawas my first encounter with the epistolary novel as well as one of my earlier forays into adult fiction, and turned out to be comprised not just of letters but of diary entries, newspaper cuttings, and Dr Seward’s exotic “phonograph diary,” kept on wax cylinders. And after the original strangeness of reading such a patchwork wore off, I loved the form. There was a kind of justified snoopiness to it which exerted tremendous appeal. I loved the story, too. There were plenty of frightening sections—Jonathan Harker’s growing realization that he has been imprisoned in the Count’s castle, the bloody staking of Lucy Westenra in her tomb, the burning of Mina Murray Harker’s forehead with the holy wafer—but what I responded to most strongly (I was only nine or ten, remember) was the intrepid band of adventurers which takes off in blind, brave pursuit of Count Dracula, hounding him first out of England, then back to Europe, and finally to his native Transylvania, where the issue is resolved at sunset. When I discovered J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ringstrilogy ten years later, I thought, “Shit, this is just a slightly su