Salem's Lot

‘Will you be late tonight?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What shall I tell Floyd Tibbits if he calls?’

The anger flashed over her again. ‘Tell him what you want.’ She paused. ‘You will anyway.’

‘Susan!’

She went upstairs without looking back.

Mrs Norton remained where she was, staring out the window and at the town without seeing it. Overhead she could hear Susan’s footsteps and then the clatter of her easel being pulled out.

She got up and began to iron again. When she thought Susan might be fully immersed in her work (although she didn’t allow that idea to do more than flitter through a corner of her conscious mind), she went to the telephone in the pantry and called up Mabel Werts. In the course of the conversation she happened to mention that Susie had told her there was a famous author in their midst and Mabel sniffed and said well you must mean that man who wrote Conway’s Daughter and Mrs Norton said yes and Mabel said that wasn’t writing but just a sexbook, pure and simple. Mrs Norton asked if he was staying at a motel or -

As a matter of fact, he was staying downtown at Eva’s Rooms, the town’s only boardinghouse. Mrs Norton felt a surge of relief. Eva Miller was a decent widow who would put up with no hanky-panky. Her rules on women in the rooms were brief and to the point. If she’s your mother or your sister, all right. If she’s not, you can sit in the kitchen. No negotiation on the rule was entertained.

Mrs Norton hung up fifteen minutes later, after artfully camouflaging her main objective with small talk.

Susan, she thought, going back to the ironing board. Oh, Susan, I only want what’s best for you. Can’t you see that?

6

They were driving back from Portland along 295, and it was not late at all-only a little after eleven. The speed limit on the expressway after it got out of Portland’s suburbs was fifty-five, and he drove well. The Citroen’s headlights cut the dark smoothly.

They had both enjoyed the movie, but cautiously, the way people do when they are feeling for each other’s boundaries. Now her mother’s question occurred to her and she said, ‘Where are you staying? Are you renting a place?’

‘I’ve got a third-floor cubbyhole at Eva’s Rooms, on Railroad Street.’

‘But that’s awful! It must be a hundred degrees up there!’

‘I like the heat,’ he said. ‘I work well in it. Strip to the waist, turn up the radio, and drink a gallon of beer. I’ve been putting out ten pages a day, fresh copy. There’s some interesting old codgers there, too. And when you finally go out on the porch and catch the breeze… heaven.’

‘Still,’ she said doubtfully.

‘I thought about renting the Marsten House,’ he said casually. ‘Even went so far as to inquire about it. But it’s been sold.’

‘The Marsten House?’ She smiled. ‘You’re thinking of the wrong place.’

‘Nope. Sits up on that first hill to the northwest of town. Brooks Road.’

‘Sold? Who in the name of heaven-?’

‘I wondered the same thing. I’ve been accused of having a screw loose from time to time, but even I only thought of renting it. The real estate man wouldn’t tell me. Seems to be a deep, dark secret.’

‘Maybe some out-of-state people want to turn it into a summer place,’ she said. ‘Whoever it is, they’re crazy. Renovating a place is one thing-I’d love to try it-but that place is beyond renovation. The place was a wreck even when I was a kid. Ben, why would you ever want to stay there?’

‘Were you ever actually inside?’

‘No, but I looked in the window on a dare. Were you?’

‘Yes. Once.’

‘Creepy place, isn’t it?’

They fell silent, both thinking of the Marsten House. This particular reminiscence did not have the pastel nostalgia of the others. The scandal and violence connected with the house had occurred before their births, but small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.

The story of Hubert Marsten and his wife, Birdie, was the closest thing the town had to a skeleton in its closet. Hubie had been the president of a large New England trucking company in the 1920s-a trucking company which, some said, conducted its most profitable business after midnight, running Canadian whisky into Massachusetts.

He and his wife had retired wealthy to ‘salem’s Lot in 1929, and had lost a good part of that wealth (no one, not even Mabel Werts, knew exactly how much) in the stock market crash of 1929.

In the ten years between the fall of the market and the rise of Hitler, Marsten and his wife lived in their house like hermits. The only time they were seen was on Wednesday afternoons when they came to town to do their shopping. Larry McLeod, who was the mailman during those years, reported that Marsten got four daily papers, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, and a pulp magazine called Amazing Stories. He also got a check once a month from the trucking company, which was based in Fall River, Massachusetts. Larry said he could tell it was a check by bending the envelope and peeking into the address window.

Larry was the one who found them in the summer of 1939. The papers and magazines-five days’ worth-had