Salem's Lot

His little brother’s voice held real pleading, and Da

Another branch snapped off to their left.

Da

Another branch snapped.

“Da

“Don’t be stupid,” Da

They started to walk again. Their feet crackled in the pine needles. Da

Ralphie shrieked.

“I see it! I see the ghost! I SEE IT!”

Terror like hot iron leaped into Da

“Where?” he whispered, forgetting that he had invented the ghost. “Where?” He peered into the woods, half afraid of what he might see, and saw only blackness.

“It’s gone now—but I saw him…it. Eyes. I saw eyes. Oh, Da

“There ain’t no ghosts, you fool. Come on.”

Da

“It’s watchin’ us,” Ralphie whispered.

“Listen, I’m not go

“No, Da

Da

And Da

There were no ghosts, but there werepreeverts. They stopped in black cars and offered you candy or hung around on street corners or…or they followed you into the woods…

And then…

Oh and then they…

“Run,” he said harshly.

But Ralphie trembled beside him in a paralysis of fear. His grip on Da

“Da

A branch snapped.

Da

The darkness enfolded them.

NINETEEN

9:00 PM

Mabel Werts was a hugely fat woman, seventy-four on her last birthday, and her legs had become less and less reliable. She was a repository of town history and town gossip, and her memory stretched back over five decades of necrology, adultery, thievery, and insanity. She was a gossip but not a deliberately cruel one (although those whose stories she had sped on their back fence way might tend to disagree); she simply lived in and for the town. In a way she wasthe town, a fat widow who now went out very little, and who spent most of her time by her window dressed in a tentlike silk camisole, her yellowish-ivory hair done up in a coronet of thick, braided cables, with the telephone on her right hand and her high-powered Japanese binoculars on the left. The combination of the two—plus the time to use them fully—made her a benevolent spider sitting in the center of a communications web that stretched from the Bend to east ’salem.

She had been watching the Marsten House for want of something better to watch when the shutters to the left of the porch were opened, letting out a golden square of light that was definitely not the steady glow of electricity. She had gotten just a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been a man’s head and shoulders silhouetted against the light. It gave her a queer thrill.

There had been no more movement from the house.

She thought: Now, what kind of people is it that only opens up when a body can’t catch a decent glimpse of them?

She put the glasses down and carefully picked up the telephone. Two voices—she quickly identified them as Harriet Durham and Glynis Mayberry—were talking about the Ryerson boy finding Irwin Purinton’s dog.

She sat quietly, breathing through her mouth, so as to give no sign of her presence on the line.

TWENTY

11:59 PM

The day trembled on the edge of extinction. The houses slept in darkness. Downtown, night lights in the hardware store and the Foreman Funeral Home and the Excellent Café threw mild electric light onto the pavement. Some lay awake—George Boyer, who had just gotten home from the three-to-eleven shift at the Gates Mill, Win Purinton, sitting and playing solitaire and unable to sleep for thinking of his Doc, whose passing had affected him much more deeply than that of his wife—but most slept the sleep of the just and the hard-working.

In Harmony Hill Cemetery a dark figure stood meditatively inside the gate, waiting for the turn of time. When he spoke, the voice was soft and cultured.

“O my father, favor me now. Lord of Flies, favor me now. Now I bring you spoiled meat and reeking flesh. I have made sacrifice for your favor. With my left hand I bring it. Make a sign for me on this ground, consecrated in your name. I wait for a sign to begin your work.”

The voice died away. A wind had sprung up, gentle, bringing with it the sigh and whisper of leafy branches and grasses and a whiff of carrion from the dump up the road.

There was no sound but that brought on the breeze. The figure stood silent and thoughtful for a time. Then it stooped and stood with the figure of a child in his arms.

“I bring you this.”

It became unspeakable.

Chapter Four

Da

Da

The men talked it over. Yes, the boys had gone by the woods path. No, the little brook was very shallow at this time of year, especially after the fine weather. No more than ankle-deep. Henry suggested that he start from his end of the path with a high-powered flashlight and Mr Glick start from his. Perhaps the boys had found a woodchuck burrow or were smoking cigarettes or something. Tony agreed and thanked Mr Petrie for his trouble. Mr Petrie said it was no trouble at all. Tony hung up and comforted his wife a little; she was frightened. He had mentally decided that neither of the boys was going to be able to sit down for a week when he found them.

But before he had even left the yard, Da

He told his father that he and Ralphie had gone down the path through the woods, had crossed Crockett Brook by the stepping-stones, and had gotten up the other bank with no trouble. Then Ralphie began to talk about a ghost in the woods (Da