Salem's Lot

Now he was on his way out to the Burns Road in his pickup truck, which was loaded down with clippers, a battery-driven hedge-trimmer, a box of flag stands, a crowbar for lifting gravestones that might have fallen over, a ten-gallon gas can, and two Briggs & Stratton lawn mowers.

He would mow the grass at Harmony Hill this morning, and do any maintenance on the stones and the rock wall that was necessary, and this afternoon he would cross town to the Schoolyard Hill Cemetery, where schoolteachers sometimes came to do rubbings, on account of an extinct colony of Shakers who had once buried their dead there. But he liked Harmony Hill best of all three. It was not as old as the Schoolyard Hill boneyard, but it was pleasant and shady. He hoped that someday he could be buried there himself—in a hundred years or so.

He was twenty-seven, and had gone through three years of college in the course of a rather checkered career. He hoped to go back someday and finish up. He was good-looking in an open, pleasant way, and he had no trouble co

Humming, he turned off onto the Burns Road and shifted to second going up the hill. Dry dust spumed out behind him. Through the choked summer greenery on both sides of the road he could see the skeletal, leafless trunks of the trees that had burned in the big fire of ’51, like old and moldering bones. There were deadfalls back in there, he knew, where a man could break his leg if he wasn’t careful. Even after twenty-five years, the scar of that great burning was there. Well, that was just it. In the midst of life, we are in death.

The cemetery was at the crest of the hill, and Mike turned in the drive, ready to get out and unlock the gate…and then braked the truck to a shuddering stop.

The body of a dog hung head-down from the wrought-iron gate, and the ground beneath was muddy with its blood.

Mike got out of the truck and hurried over to it. He pulled his work gloves out of his back pockets and lifted the dog’s head with one hand. It came up with horrible, boneless ease, and he was staring into the blank, glazed eyes of Win Purinton’s mongrel cocker, Doc. The dog had been hung on one of the gate’s high spikes like a slab of beef on a meat hook. Flies, slow with the coolness of early morning, were already crawling sluggishly over the body.

Mike struggled and yanked and finally pulled it off, feeling sick to his stomach at the wet sounds that accompanied his efforts. Graveyard vandalism was an old story to him, especially around Halloween, but that was still a month and a half away and he had never seen anything like this. Usually they contented themselves with knocking over a few gravestones, scrawling a few obscenities, or hanging a paper skeleton from the gate. But if this slaughter was the work of kids, then they were real bastards. Win was going to be heartbroken.

He debated taking the dog directly back to town and showing it to Parkins Gillespie, and decided it wouldn’t gain anything. He could take poor old Doc back to town when he went in to eat his lunch—not that he was going to have much appetite today.

He unlocked the gate and looked at his gloves, which were smeared with blood. The iron bars of the gate would have to be scrubbed, and it looked like he wouldn’t be getting over to Schoolyard Hill this afternoon after all. He drove inside and parked, no longer humming. The zest had gone out of the day.

SEVEN

8:00 AM

The lumbering yellow school buses were making their appointed rounds, picking up the children who stood out by their mailboxes, holding their lunch buckets and skylarking. Charlie Rhodes was driving one of these buses, and his pickup route covered the Taggart Stream Road in east ’salem and the upper half of Jointner Avenue.

The kids who rode Charlie’s bus were the best behaved in town—in the entire school district, for that matter. There was no yelling or horseplay or pulling pigtails on Bus 6. They goddamn well sat still and minded their ma

He knew what they thought of him, and he had a good idea of what they called him behind his back. But that was all right. He was not going to have a lot of foolishness and shit-slinging on his bus. Let them save that for their spineless teachers.

The principal at Stanley Street had had the nerve to ask him if he hadn’t acted “impulsively” when he put the Durham boy off three days’ ru

He glanced into the wide overhead mirror and saw Mary Kate Griegson passing a note to her little chum Brent Te

He pulled over, switching on his Stop flashers. Mary Kate and Brent looked up, dismayed.

“Got a lot to talk about?” he asked into the mirror. “Good. You better get started.”

He threw open the folding doors and waited for them to get the hell off his bus.

EIGHT

9:00 AM

Weasel Craig rolled out of bed—literally. The sunshine coming in his second-floor window was blinding. His head thumped queasily. Upstairs that writer fella was already pecking away. Christ, a man would have to be nuttier than a squirrel to tap-tap-tap away like that, day in and day out.

He got up and went over to the calendar in his skivvies to see if this was the day he picked up his unemployment. No. This was Wednesday.

His hangover wasn’t as bad as it had been on occasion. He had been out at Dell’s until it closed at one, but he had only had two dollars and hadn’t been able to cadge many beers after that was gone. Losing my touch, he thought, and scrubbed the side of his face with one hand.

He pulled on the thermal undershirt that he wore winter and summer, pulled on his green work pants, and then opened his closet and got breakfast—a bottle of warm beer for up here and a box of government-donated-commodities oatmeal for downstairs. He hated oatmeal, but he had promised the widow he would help her turn that rug, and she would probably have some other chores lined up.

He didn’t mind—not really—but it was a comedown from the days when he had shared Eva Miller’s bed. Her husband had died in a sawmill accident in 1959, and it was kind of fu

What had happened to him was sort of fu