piled up in the mailbox until it was impossible to cram in more. Larry took them all up the walk with the intention of putting them in between the screen door and the main door.
It was August and high summer, the beginning of dog days, and the grass in the Marsten front yard was calf- high, green and rank. Honeysuckle ran wild over the trellis on the west side of the house, and fat bees buzzed indolently around the wax-white, redolent blossoms. In those days the house was still a fine-looking place in spite of the high grass, and it was generally agreed that Hubie had built the nicest house in ‘salem’s Lot before going soft in the attic.
Halfway up the walk, according to the story that was eventually told with breathless horror to each new Ladies’ Auxiliary member, Larry had smelled something bad, like spoiled meat. He knocked on the front door and got no answer. He looked through the door but could see nothing in the thick gloom. He went around to the back instead of walking in, which was lucky for him. The smell was worse in back. Larry tried the back door, found it unlocked, and stepped into the kitchen. Birdie Marsten was sprawled in a corner, legs splayed out, feet bare. Half her head had been blown away by a close-range shot from a thirty-ought-six.
. (‘Flies,’ Audrey Hersey always said at this point, speaking with calm authority. ‘Larry said the kitchen was full of em. Buzzing around, lighting on the… you know, and taking off again. Flies.’)
Larry McLeod turned around and went straight back to town. He fetched Norris Varney, who was constable at the time, and three or four of the hangers-on from Crossen’s Store-Milt’s father was still running the place in those days. Audrey’s eldest brother, Jackson, had been among them. They drove back up in Norris’s Chevrolet and Larry’s mail truck.
No one from town had ever been in the house, and it was a nine days’ wonder. After the excitement died down, the Portland
Jackson Hersey picked up a
Norris Varney discovered how lucky Larry had been when he went around to the back door. The murder weapon had been lashed to a chair with its barrel pointing directly at the front door, aimed chest-high. The gun was cocked, and a string attached to the trigger ran down the hall to the doorknob.
(‘Gun was loaded, too,’ Audrey would say at this point. ‘One tug and Larry McLeod would have gone straight up to the pearly gates.’)
There were other, less lethal booby traps. A forty-pound bundle of newspapers had been rigged over the dining room door. One of the stair risers leading to the second floor had been hinged and could have cost someone a broken ankle. It quickly became apparent that Hubie Marsten had been something more than Soft; he had been a full-fledged Loony.
They found him in the bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall, dangling from a rafter.
(Susan and her girl friends had tortured themselves deliciously with the stories they had gleaned from their elders; Amy Rawcliffe had a log playhouse in her back yard and they would lock themselves in and sit in the dark, scaring each other about the Marsten House, which gained its proper noun status for all time even before Hitler invaded Poland, and repeating their elders’ stories with as many grisly embellishments as their minds could conceive. Even now, eighteen years later, she found that just thinking of the Marsten House had acted on her like a wizard’s spell, conjuring up the painfully clear images of little girls crouched inside Amy’s playhouse, holding hands, and Amy saying with impressive eeriness: ‘His face was all swole up and his tongue turned black and popped out and there was flies crawling on it. My momma tole Mrs Werts.’)
‘… place.’
‘What? I’m sorry.’ She came back to the present with an almost physical wrench. Ben was pulling off the turnpike and onto the ‘salem’s Lot exit ramp.
‘I said, it was a spooky old place.’
Tell me about when you went in.’
He laughed humorlessly and flicked up his high beams. The two-lane blacktop ran straight ahead through an alley of pine and spruce, deserted. ‘It started as kid’s stuff. Maybe that’s all it ever was. Remember, this was in 1951, and little kids had to think up something to take the place of sniffing airplane glue out of paper bags, which hadn’t been invented yet. I used to play pretty much with the Bend kids, and most of them have probably moved away by now… do they still call south ‘salem’s Lot the Bend?’
‘Yes.’
‘I messed around with Davie Barclay, Charles James only all the kids used to call him Sonny Harold Rauberson, Floyd Tibbits-’
‘Floyd?’ she asked, startled.
‘Yes, do you know him?’
‘I’ve dated him,’ she said, and afraid her voice sounded strange, hurried on: ‘Sonny James is still around, too. He runs the gas station on Jointner Avenue. Harold Rauberson is dead. Leukemia.’
‘They were all older than I, by a year or two. They had a club. Exclusive, you know. Only Bloody Pirates with at least three references need apply.’ He had meant it to be light, but there was a jag of old bitterness buried in the words. ‘But I was persistent. The one thing in the world I wanted was to be a Bloody Pirate… that summer, at least.
‘They finally weakened and told me I could come in if I passed the initiation, which Davie thought up on the spot. We were all going up to the Marsten House, and I was supposed to go in and bring something out. As booty.’ He chuckled but his mouth had gone dry.
‘What happened?’
‘I got in through a window. The house was
