Salem’s Lot (31 page)

8

The rebellion had been growing in her all afternoon, and around two o’clock it burst its bonds. They were going at it stupidly, taking the long way around the barn to prove something that was (sorry, Mr Burke) probably a lot of horseshit anyway. Susan decided to go up to the Marsten House now, this afternoon.

She went downstairs and picked up her pocketbook. Ann Norton was baking cookies and her father was in the living room, watching the Packers-Patriots game.

‘Where are you going?’ Mrs Norton asked.

‘For a drive.’

‘Supper’s at six. See if you can be back on time.’

‘Five at the latest.’

She went out and got into her car, which was her proudest possession-not because it was the first one she’d ever owned outright (although it was), but because she had paid for it (almost, she amended; there were six payments left) from her own work, her own talent. It was a Vega hatchback, now almost two years old. She backed it carefully out of the garage and lifted a hand briefly to her mother, who was looking out the kitchen window at her. The break was still between them, not spoken of, not healed. The other quarrels, no matter how bitter, had always knit up in time; life simply went on, burying the hurts under a bandage of days, not ripped off again until the next quarrel, when all the old grudges and grievances would be brought out and counted up like high-scoring cribbage hands. But this one seemed complete, it had been a total war. The wounds were beyond bandaging. Only amputation remained. She had already packed most of her things, and it felt right. This had been long overdue.

She drove out along Brock Street, feeling a growing sense of pleasure and purpose (and a not unpleasant underlayer of absurdity) as the house dropped behind her. She was going to take positive action, and the thought was a tonic to her. She was a forthright girl, and the events of the weekend had bewildered her, left her drifting at sea. Now she would row!

She pulled over onto the soft shoulder outside the village limits, and walked out into Carl Smith’s west pasture to where a roll of red-painted snow fence was curled up, waiting for winter. The sense of absurdity was magnified now, and she couldn’t help grinning as she bent one of the pickets back and forth until the flexible wire holding it to the others snapped. The picket formed a natural stake, about three feet tong, tapering to a point. She carried it back to the car and put it in the back seat, knowing intellectually what it was for (she had seen enough Hammer films at the drive-in on double dates to know you had to pound a stake into a vampire’s heart), but never pausing to wonder if she would be able to hammer it through a man’s chest if the situation called for it.

She drove on, past the town limits and into Cumberland. On the left was a small country store that stayed open on Sundays, where her father got the Sunday
Times
. Susan remembered a small display ease of junk jewelry beside the counter.

She bought the
Times
, and then picked out a small gold crucifix. Her purchases came to four-fifty, and were rung up by a fat counterman who hardly turned from the TV, where Jim Plunkett was being thrown for a loss.

She turned north on the County Road, a newly surfaced stretch of two-lane blacktop. Everything seemed fresh and crisp and alive in the sunny afternoon, and life seemed very dear. Her thoughts jumped from that to Ben. It was a short jump.

The sun came out from behind a slowly moving cumulus cloud, flooding the road with brilliant patches of dark and light as it streamed through the overhanging trees. On a day like this, she thought, it was possible to believe there would be happy endings all around.

About five miles up County, she turned off onto the Brooks Road, which was unpaved once she recrossed the town line into ‘salem’s Lot. The road rose and fell and wound through the heavily wooded area northwest of the village, and much of the bright afternoon sunlight was cut off. There were no houses or trailers out here. Most of the land was owned by a paper company most renowned for asking patrons not to squeeze their toilet paper. The verge of the road was marked every one hundred feet with no-hunting and no-trespassing signs. As she passed the turnoff which led to the dump, a ripple of unease went through her. On this gloomy stretch of road, nebulous possibilities seemed more real. She found herself wondering-not for the first time-why any normal man would buy the wreck of a suicide’s house and then keep the windows shuttered against the sunlight.

The road dipped sharply and then rose steeply up the western flank of Marsten’s Hill. She could make out the peak of the Marsten House roof through the trees.

She parked at the head of a disused wood-road at the bottom of the dip and got out of the car. After a moment’s hesitation, she took the stake and hung the crucifix around her neck. She still felt absurd, but not half so absurd as she was going to feel if someone she knew happened to drive by and see her marching up the road with a snow-fence picket in her hand.

Hi, Suze, where you headed?

Oh, just up to the old Marsten place to kill a vampire. But I have to hurry because supper’s at six.

She decided to cut through the woods.

She stepped carefully over a ruinous rock wall at the foot of the road’s ditch, and was glad she had worn slacks. Very much
haute couture
for fearless vampire killers. There were nasty brambles and deadfalls before the woods actually started.

In the pines it was at least ten degrees cooler, and gloomier still. The ground was carpeted with old needles, and the wind hissed through the trees. Somewhere, some small animal crashed off through the underbrush. She suddenly realized that if she turned to her left, a walk of no more than half a mile would bring her into the Harmony Hill Cemetery, if she were agile enough to scale the back wall.

She toiled steadily upward, going as quietly as possible. As she neared the brow of the hill, she began to catch glimpses of the house through the steadily thinning screen of branches-the blind side of the house in relation to the village below. And she began to be afraid. She could not put her finger on any precise reason, and in that way it was like the fear she had felt (but had already largely forgotten) at Matt Burke’s house. She was fairly sure that no one could hear her, and it was broad daylight-but the fear was there, a steadily oppressive weight. It seemed to be welling into her consciousness from a part of her brain that was usually silent and probably as obsolete as her appendix. Her pleasure in the day was gone. The sense that she was playing was gone. The feeling of decisiveness was gone. She found herself thinking of those same drive-in horror movie epics where the heroine goes venturing up the narrow attic stairs to see what’s frightened poor old Mrs Cobham so, or down into some dark, cobwebby cellar where the walls are rough, sweating stone - symbolic womb - and she, with her date’s arm comfortably around her, thinking: What a silly bitch… I’d never do that! And here she was, doing it, and she began to grasp how deep the division between the human cerebrum and the human midbrain had become; how the cerebrum can force one on and on in spite of the warnings given by that instinctive part, which is so similar in physical construction to the brain of the alligator. The cerebrum could force one on and on, until the attic door was flung open in the face of some grinning horror or one looked into a half-bricked alcove in the cellar and saw -

STOP!

She threw the thoughts off and found that she was sweating. All at the sight of an ordinary house with its shutters closed. You’ve got to stop being stupid, she told herself. You’re going to go up there and spy the place out, that’s all. From the front yard you can see our own house. Now, what in God’s name could happen to you in sight of your own house?

Nonetheless, she bent over slightly and took a tighter grip on the stake, and when the screening trees became too thin to offer much protection, she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled. Three or four minutes later, she had come as far as it was possible without breaking cover. From her spot behind a final stand of pines and a spray of junipers, she could see the west side of the house and the creepered tangle of honeysuckle, now autumn-barren. The grass of summer was yellow but still knee-high. No effort had been made to cut it.

A motor roared suddenly in the stillness, making her heart rise into her throat. She controlled herself by hooking her fingers into the ground and biting hard on her lower lip. A moment later an old black car backed into sight, paused at the head of the driveway, and then turned out onto the road and started away toward town. Before it drew out of sight, she saw the man quite clearly: large bald head, eyes sunken so deeply you could really see nothing of them but the sockets, and the lapels and collar of a dark suit. Straker. On his way in to Crossen’s store, perhaps.

She could see that most of the shutters had broken slats. All right, then. She would creep up and peek through and see what there was to see. Probably nothing but a house in the first stages of a long renovation process, new plastering under way, new papering perhaps, tools and ladders and buckets. All about as romantic and supernatural as a TV football game.

But still: the fear.

It rose suddenly, emotion overspilling logic and the bright Formica reason of the cerebrum, filling her mouth with a taste like black copper.

And she knew someone was behind her even before the hand fell on her shoulder.

9

It was almost dark.

Ben got up from the wooden folding chair, walked over to the window that looked out on the funeral parlor’s back lawn, and saw nothing in particular. It was quarter to seven, and evening’s shadows were very long. The grass was still green despite the lateness of the year, and he supposed that the thoughtful mortician would endeavor to keep it so until snow covered it. A symbol of continuing life in the midst of the death of the year. He found the thought inordinately depressing and turned from the view.

‘I wish I had a cigarette,’ he said.

‘They’re killers,’ Jimmy told him without turning around. He was watching a Sunday night wildlife program on Maury Green’s small Sony. ‘Actually, so do I. I quit when the surgeon general did his number on cigarettes ten years ago. Bad PR not to. But I always wake up grabbing for the pack on the night stand.’

‘I thought you quit.’

‘I keep it there for the same reason some alcoholics keep a bottle of scotch on the kitchen shelf. Will power, son.’

Ben looked at the clock: 6:47. Maury Green’s Sunday paper said sundown would officially arrive at 7:02 EST.

Jimmy had handled everything quite neatly. Maury Green was a small man who had answered the door in an unbuttoned black vest and an open-collar white shirt. His sober, inquiring expression had changed to a broad smile of welcome.

‘
Shalom
, Jimmy!’ He cried. ‘It’s good to see you! Where you been keeping yourself?’

‘Saving the world from the common cold,’ Jimmy said, smiling, as Green wrung his hand. ‘I want you to meet a very good friend of mine. Maury Green, Ben Mears.’

Ben’s hand was enveloped in both of Maury’s. His eyes glistened behind the black-rimmed glasses he wore. ‘
Shalom
, also. Any friend of Jimmy’s, and so on. Come on in, both of you. I could call Rachel-’

‘Please don’t,’ Jimmy said. ‘We’ve come to ask a favor. A rather large one.’

Green glanced more closely at Jimmy’s face. "‘A rather large one,"‘ he jeered softly. ‘And why? What have you ever done for me, that my son should graduate third in his class from North-western? Anything, Jimmy.’

Jimmy blushed. ‘I did what anyone would have done, Maury.’

‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ Green said. ‘Ask. What is it that has you and Mr Mears so worried? Have you been in an accident?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

He had taken them into a small kitchenette behind the chapel, and as they talked, he brewed coffee in a battered old pot that sat on a hot plate.

‘Has Norbert come after Mrs Glick yet?’ Jimmy asked.

‘No, and not a sign of him,’ Maury said, putting sugar and cream on the table. ‘That one will come by at eleven tonight and wonder why I’m not here to let him in.’ He sighed. ‘Poor lady. Such tragedy in one family. And she looks so sweet, Jimmy. That old poop Reardon brought her in. She was your patient?’

‘No,’ Jimmy said. ‘But Ben and I… we’d like to sit up with her this evening, Maury. Right downstairs.’

Green paused in the act of reaching for the coffeepot. ‘Sit up with her? Examine her, you mean?’

‘No’ Jimmy said steadily. ‘Just sit up with her.’

He looked at them closely. ‘No, I see you’re not. Why would you want to do that?’

‘I can’t tell you that, Maury.’

‘Oh.’ He poured the coffee, sat down with them, and sipped. ‘Not too strong. Very nice. Has she got something? Something infectious?’

Jimmy and Ben exchanged a glance.

‘Not in the accepted sense of the word,’ Jimmy said finally.

‘You’d like me to keep my mouth shut about this, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘And if Norbert comes?’

‘I can handle Norbert,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’ll tell him Reardon asked me to check her for infectious encephalitis. He’ll never check.’

Green nodded. ‘Norbert doesn’t know enough to check his watch, unless someone asks him.’

‘Is it okay, Maury?’

‘Sure, sure. I thought you said a big favor.’

‘It’s bigger than you think, maybe.’

‘When I finish my coffee, I’ll go home and see what horror Rachel has produced for my Sunday dinner. Here is the key. Lock up when you go, Jimmy.’

Jimmy tucked it away in his pocket. ‘I will. Thanks again, Maury.’

‘Anything. Just do me one favor in return.’

‘Sure. What?’

‘If she says anything, write it down for posterity.’ He began to chuckle, saw the identical look on their faces, and stopped.