Salem's Lot

He looked up for a moment, in a last glimmering of sanity, his face streaked and circled with dirt and sweat, the eyes staring from it in bulging white circles.

Venus glowed against the breast of the sky.

Panting, he pulled himself out of the grave, lay down full length, and fumbled for the catches on the coffin lid. He found them and pulled. The lid swung upward, gritting on its hinges just as he had imagined it would, showing at first only pink satin, and then one dark-clad arm (Da

Mike’s breath clogged and stopped in his throat.

The eyes were open. Just as he had known they would be. Wide open and hardly glazed at all. They seemed to sparkle with hideous life in the last, dying light of day. There was no death pallor in that face; the cheeks seemed rosy, almost juicy with vitality.

He tried to drag his eyes away from that glittering, frozen stare and was unable.

He muttered: “Jesus—”

The sun’s diminishing arc passed below the horizon.

FIVE

Mark Petrie was working on a model of Frankenstein’s monster in his room and listening to his parents down in the living room. His room was on the second floor of the farmhouse they had bought on South Jointner Avenue, and although the house was heated by a modern oil furnace now, the old second-floor grates were still there. Originally, when the house had been heated by a central kitchen stove, the warm-air grates had kept the second floor from becoming too cold—although the woman who had originally lived in this house with her dour Baptist husband from 1873 to 1896 had still taken a hot brick wrapped in fla

Although his parents were down in the living room, they might as well have been discussing him right outside the door.

Once, when his father had caught him listening at the door in their old house—Mark had only been six then—his father had told him an old English proverb: Never listen at a knothole lest you be vexed. That meant, his father said, that you may hear something about yourself that you don’t like.

Well, there was another one, too. Forewarned is forearmed.

At age twelve, Mark Petrie was a little ski

Now June Petrie was saying: “Do you think it’s affected him, Henry?”

“Hard…to tell.” And Mark knew by the pause that his father was lighting his pipe. “He’s got a hell of a poker face.”

“Still waters run deep, though.” She paused. His mother was always saying things like still waters run deep or it’s a long, long road that has no turning. He loved them both dearly, but sometimes they seemed just as ponderous as the books in the folio section of the library…and just as dusty.

“They were on their way to see Mark,” she resumed. “To play with his train set…now one dead and one missing! Don’t fool yourself, Henry. The boy feels something.”

“He’s got his feet pretty solidly planted on the ground,” Mr Petrie said. “Whatever his feelings are, I’m sure he’s got them in hand.”

Mark glued the Frankenstein monster’s left arm into the shoulder socket. It was a specially treated Aurora model that glowed green in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus he had gotten for memorizing all of the 119th Psalm in Sunday school class in Kittery.

“I’ve sometimes thought we should have had another,” his father was saying. “Among other things, it would have been good for Mark.”

And his mother, in an arch tone: “Not for lack of trying, dear.”

His father grunted.

There was a long pause in the conversation. His father, he knew, would be rattling through The Wall Street Journal. His mother would be holding a novel by Jane Austen on her lap, or perhaps Henry James. She read them over and over again, and Mark was darned if he could see the sense in reading a book more than once. You knew how it was going to end.

“D’you think it’s safe to let him go in the woods behind the house?” his mother asked presently. “They say there’s quicksand somewhere in town—”

“Miles from here.”

Mark relaxed a little and glued the monster’s other arm on. He had a whole table of Aurora horror monsters, arranged in a scene that he changed each time a new element was added. It was a pretty good set. Da

“I think it’s okay,” his father said. “Not after dark, of course.”

“Well, I hope that awful funeral won’t give him nightmares.”

Mark could almost see his father shrug. “Tony Glick…unfortunate. But death and grief are part of living. Time he got used to the idea.”

“Maybe.” Another long pause. What was coming now? he wondered. The child is the father of the man, maybe. Or as the twig is bent the tree is shaped. Mark glued the monster onto his base, which was a grave mound with a leaning headstone in the background. “In the midst of life we’re in death. But Imay have nightmares.”

“Oh?”

“That Mr Foreman must be quite an artist, grisly as it sounds. He really looked as if he was just asleep. That any second he might open his eyes and yawn and…I don’t know why these people insist on torturing themselves with open-coffin services. It’s…heathenish.”

“Well, it’s over.”

“Yes, I suppose. He’s a good boy, isn’t he, Henry?”

“Mark? The best.”

Mark smiled.

“Is there anything on TV?”

“I’ll look.”

Mark turned the rest off; the serious discussion was done. He set his model on the windowsill to dry and harden. In another fifteen minutes his mother would be calling up for him to get ready for bed. He took his pajamas out of the top dresser drawer and began to undress.

In point of fact, his mother was worrying needlessly about his psyche, which was not tender at all. There was no particular reason why it should have been; he was a typical boy in most ways, despite his economy and his gracefulness. His family was upper middle class and still upwardly mobile, and the marriage of his parents was sound. They loved each other firmly, if a little stodgily. There had never been any great trauma in Mark’s life. The few school fights had not scarred him. He got along with his peers and in general wanted the same things they wanted.