Salem's Lot

‘Wait,’ Mark said. ‘Let me pull one of them out.’

‘Pull…? Why?’

‘Maybe the daylight will kill them,’ Mark said. ‘Maybe we won’t have to do that with the stakes.’

Jimmy felt hope. ‘Yeah, okay. Which one?’

‘Not the baby,’ Mark said instantly. ‘The man. You catch one foot.’

‘All right,’ Jimmy said. His mouth had gone cotton-dry, and when he swallowed there was a click in his throat.

Mark wriggled in on his stomach, the dead leaves that had drifted in crackling under his weight. He seized one of Roy McDougall’s workboots and pulled. Jimmy squirmed in beside him, scraping his back on the low overhang, fighting claustrophobia. He got hold of the other boot and together they pulled him out into the lessening drizzle and white light.

What followed was almost unbearable. Roy McDougall began to writhe as soon as the light struck him full, like a man who has been disturbed in sleep. Steam and moisture came from his pores, and the skin underwent a slight sagging and yellowing. Eyeballs rolled behind the thin skin of his closed lids. His feet kicked slowly and dreamily in the wet leaves. His upper lip curled back, showing upper incisors like those of a large dog-a German shepherd or a collie. His arms thrashed slowly, the hands clenching and unclenching, and when one of them brushed Mark’s shirt, he jerked back with a disgusted cry.

Roy turned over and began to hunch slowly back into the crawl space, arms and knees and face digging grooves in the rain-softened humus. Jimmy noted that a hitching, Cheyne-Stokes type of respiration had begun as soon as the light struck the body; it stopped as soon as McDougall was wholly in shadow again. So did the moisture extrusion.

When he had reached his previous resting place, McDougall turned over and lay still.

‘Shut it,’ Mark said in a strangled voice. ‘Please shut it.’ Jimmy closed the trap and replaced the hammered lock as well as he could. The image of McDougall’s body, struggling in the wet, rotted leaves like a dazed snake, remained in his mind. He did not think there would ever be a time when it was not within hand’s reach of his memory-even if he lived to be a hundred.

38

They stood in the rain, I trembling, looking at each other. ‘Next door?’ Mark asked.

‘Yes. They’d be the logical ones for the McDougalls to attack first.’

They went across, and this time their nostrils picked up the telltale odor of rot in the dooryard. The name below the doorbell was Evans. Jimmy nodded. David Evans and family. He worked as a mechanic in the auto department of Sears in Gates Falls. He had treated him a couple of years ago, for a cyst or something.

This time the bell worked, but there was no response. They found Mrs Evans in bed. The two children were in a bunk bed in a single bedroom, dressed in identical pajamas that featured characters from the Pooh stories. It took longer to find Dave Evans. He had hidden himself away in the unfinished storage space over the small garage.

Jimmy marked a check inside a circle on the front door and the garage door. ‘We’re doing good,’ he said. ‘Two for two.’

Mark said diffidently, ‘Could you hold on a minute or two? I’d like to wash my hands.’

‘Sure,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’d like that, too. The Evanses won’t mind if we use their bathroom.’

They went inside, and Jimmy sat down in one of the living room chairs and closed his eyes. Soon he heard Mark running water in the bathroom.

On the darkened screen of his eyes he saw the mortician’s table, saw the sheet covering Marjorie Glick’s body start to tremble, saw her hand fall out and begin its delicate toe dance on the air- He opened his eyes.

This trailer was in nicer condition than the McDougalls’, neater, taken care of. He had never met Mrs Evans, but it seemed she must have taken pride in her home. There was a neat pile of the dead children’s toys in a small storage room, a room that had probably been called the laundry room in the mobile home dealer’s original brochure. Poor kids, he hoped they’d enjoyed the toys while there had still been bright days and sunshine to enjoy them in. There was a tricycle, several large plastic trucks and a play gas station, one of those caterpillars on wheels (there must have been some dandy fights over that), a toy pool table.

He started to look away and then looked back, startled.

Blue chalk.

Three shaded lights in a row.

Men walking around the green table under the bright lights, cueing up, brushing the grains of blue chalk off their fingertips -

‘Mark!’ he shouted, sitting bolt upright in the chair. ‘Mark!’ And Mark came running with his shirt off, to see what the matter was.

39

An old student of Matt’s (class of ‘64, A’s in literature, C’s in composition) had dropped by to see him around two-thirty, had commented on the stacks of arcane literature, and had asked Matt if he was studying for a degree in the occult. Matt couldn’t remember if his name was Herbert or Harold.

Matt, who had been reading a book called Strange Disappearances when Herbert- or-Harold walked in, welcomed the interruption. He was waiting for the phone to ring even now, although he knew the others could not safely enter the Brock Street School until after three o’clock. He was desperate to know what had happened to Father Callahan. And the day seemed to be passing with alarming rapidity-he had always heard that time passed slowly in the hospital. He felt slow and foggy, an old man at last.