Salem’s Lot (6 page)

She took one of his cigarettes and lit it.

‘Anyway, I slept with the light on in my bedroom for weeks after, and I’ve dreamed about opening that door off and on for the rest of my life. Whenever I’m in stress, the dream comes.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘Not very, anyway. We all have our bad dreams.’ He gestured with a thumb at the silent, sleeping houses they were passing on Jointner Avenue. ‘Sometimes I wonder that the very boards of those houses don’t cry out with the awful things that happen in dreams.’ He paused. ‘Come on down to Eva’s and sit on the porch for a while, if you like. I can’t invite you in-rules of the house-but I’ve got a couple of Cokes in the icebox and some Bacardi in my room, if you’d like a nightcap.’

‘I’d like one very much.’

He turned onto Railroad Street, popped off the headlights, and turned into the small dirt parking lot which served the rooming house. The back porch was painted white with red trim, and the three wicker chairs lined up on it looked toward the Royal River. The river itself was a dazzling dream. There was a late summer moon caught in the trees on the river’s far bank, three-quarters full, and it had painted a silver path across the water. With the town silent, she could hear the faint foaming sound as water spilled down the sluiceways of the dam.

‘Sit down. I’ll be back.’

He went in, closing the screen door softly behind him, and she sat down in one of the rockers.

She liked him in spite of his strangeness. She was not a believer in love at first sight, although she did believe that instant lust (going under the more innocent name of infatuation) occurred frequently. And yet he wasn’t a man that would ordinarily encourage midnight entries in a locked diary; he was too thin for his height, a little pale. His face was introspective and bookish, and his eyes rarely gave away the train of his thoughts. All this topped with a heavy pelt of black hair that looked as if it had been raked with the fingers rather than brushed.

And that story -

Neither
Conway’s Daughter
nor
Air Dance
hinted at such a morbid turn of mind. The former was about a minister’s daughter who runs away, joins the counterculture, and takes a long, rambling journey across the country by thumb. The latter was the story of Frank Buzzey, an escaped convict who begins a new life as a car mechanic in another state, and his eventual recapture. Both of them were bright, energetic books, and Hubie Marsten’s dangling shadow, mirrored in the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, did not seem to lie over either of them.

As if by the very suggestion, she found her eyes dragged away from the river and up to the left of the porch, where the last hill before town blotted out the stars.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘I hope these’ll be all right.

‘Look at the Marsten House,’ she said.

He did. There was a light on up there.

7

The drinks were gone and midnight passed; the moon was nearly out of sight. They had made some light conversation, and then she said into a pause:

‘I like you, Ben. Very much.’

‘I like you, too. And I’m surprised… no, I don ‘t mean it that way. Do you remember that stupid crack I made in the park? This all seems too fortuitous.’

‘I want to see you again, if you want to see me.’

‘I do.’

‘But go slow, Remember, I’m just a small-town girl.’

He smiled. ‘It seems so Hollywood. But Hollywood good. Am I supposed to kiss you now?’

‘Yes,’ she said seriously, ‘I think that comes next.’

He was sitting in the rocker next to her, and without stopping its slow movement forth and back, he leaned over and pressed his mouth on hers, with no attempt to draw her tongue or to touch her. His lips were firm with the pressure of his square teeth, and there was a faint taste-odor of rum and tobacco.

She began to rock also, and the movement made the kiss into something new. It waxed and waned, light and then firm. She thought: He’s tasting me. The thought wakened a secret, clean excitement in her, and she broke the kiss before it could take her further.

‘Wow,’ he said.

‘Would you like to come to dinner at my house tomorrow night?’ she asked. ‘My folks would love to meet you, I bet.’ In the pleasure and serenity of this moment, she could throw that sop to her mother.

‘Home cooking?’

‘The homiest.’

‘I’d love it. I’ve been living on TV dinners since I moved in.’

‘Six o’clock? We eat early in Sticksville.’

‘Sure. Fine. And speaking of home, I better get you there. Come on.’

They didn’t speak on the ride back until she could see the night light twinkling on top of the hill, the one her mother always left on when she was out.

‘I wonder who’s up there tonight?’ she asked, looking toward the Marsten House.

‘The new owner, probably,’ he said noncommittally.

‘It didn’t look like electricity, that light,’ she mused. ‘Too yellow, too faint. Kerosene lamp, maybe.’

‘They probably haven’t had a chance to have the power turned on yet.’

‘Maybe. But almost anyone with a little foresight would call up the power company before they moved in.’ He didn’t reply. They had come to her driveway.

‘Ben,’ she said suddenly, ‘is your new book about the Marsten House?’

He laughed and kissed the tip of her nose. ‘It’s late.’

She smiled at him. ‘I don’t mean to snoop.’

‘It’s all right. But maybe another time… in daylight.’

‘Okay.’

‘You better get in, girly. Six tomorrow?’

She looked at her watch. ‘Six today.’

‘Night, Susan.’

‘Night.’

She got out and ran lightly up the path to the side door, then turned and waved as he drove away. Before she went in, she added sour cream to the milkman’s order. With baked potatoes, that would add a little class to supper.

She paused a minute longer before going in, looking up at the Marsten House.

8

In his small, boxlike room he undressed with the light off and crawled into bed naked. She was a nice girl, the first nice one since Miranda had died. He hoped he wasn’t trying to turn her into a new Miranda; that would be painful for him and horribly unfair to her.

He lay down and let himself drift. Shortly before sleep took him, he hooked himself up on one elbow, looked past the square shadow of his typewriter and the thin sheaf of manuscript beside it, and out the window. He had asked Eva Miller specifically for this room after looking at several, because it faced the Marsten House directly.

The lights up there were still on.

That night he had the old dream for the first time since he had come to Jerusalem’s Lot, and it had not come with such vividness since those terrible maroon days following Miranda’s death in the motorcycle accident. The run up the hallway, the horrible scream of the door as he pulled it open, the dangling figure suddenly opening its hideous puffed eyes, himself turning to the door in the slow, sludgy panic of dreams -

And finding it locked.

THE LOT (I)

1

The town is not slow to wake-chores won’t wait. Even while the edge of the sun lies below the horizon and darkness is on the land, activity has begun.

2

4:00 A.M.

The Griffen boys-Hal, eighteen, and Jack, fourteen and the two hired hands had begun the milking. The barn was a marvel of cleanliness, whitewashed and gleaming. Down the center, between the spotless runways which fronted the stalls on both sides, a cement drinking trough ran. Hal turned on the water at the far end by flicking a switch and opening a valve. The electric pump that pulled water up from one of the two artesian wells that served the place hummed into smooth operation. He was a sullen boy, not bright, and especially irked on this day. He and his father had had it out the night before. Hal wanted to quit school. He hated school. He hated its boredom, its insistence that you sit still for great fifty-minute chunks of time, and he hated all his subjects with the exceptions of Woodshop and Graphic Arts. English was maddening, history was stupid, business math was incomprehensible. And none of it mattered, that was the hell of it. Cows didn’t care if you said ain’t or mixed your tenses, they didn’t care who was the Commander in Chief of the goddamn Army of the Potomac during the goddamn Civil War, and as for math, his own for chrissakes father couldn’t add two fifths and one half if it meant the firing squad. That’s why he had an accountant. And look at that guy! College-educated and still working for a dummy like his old man, His father had told him many times that book learning wasn’t the secret of running a successful business (and dairy farming was a business like any other);
knowing
people was the secret of that, His father was a great one to sling all that bullshit about the wonders of education, him and his sixth-grade education. He never read anything but
Reader’s Digest
and the farm was making $16,000 a year. Know people. Be able to shake their hands and ask after their wives by name. Well, Hal knew people. There were two kinds: those you could push around and those you couldn’t. The former outnumbered the latter ten to one.

Unfortunately, his father was a one.

He looked over his shoulder at Jack, who was forking hay slowly and dreamily into the first four stalls from a broken bale. There was the bookworm, Daddy’s pet. The miserable little shit.

‘Come on!’ He shouted. ‘Fork that hay!’

He opened the storage lockers and pulled out the first of their four milking machines. He trundled it down the aisle, frowning fiercely over the glittering stainless-steel top.

School. Fucking for chrissakes
school
.

The next nine months stretched ahead of him like an endless tomb.

3

4:30 A.M.

The fruits of yesterday’s late milking had been processed and were now on their way back to the Lot, this time in cartons rather than galvanized steel milk cans, under the colorful label of Slewfoot Hill Dairy. Charles Griffen’s father had marketed his own milk, but that was no longer practical. The conglomerates had eaten up the last of the independents.

The Slewfoot Hill milkman in west Salem was Irwin Purinton, and he began his run along Brock Street (which was known in the country as the Brock Road or That Christless Washboard). Later he would cover the center of town and then work back out of town along the Brooks Road.

Win had turned sixty-one in August, and for the first time his coming retirement seemed real and possible. His wife, a hateful old bitch named Elsie, had died in the fall of 1973 (predeceasing him was the one considerate thing she had done in twenty-seven years of marriage), and when his retirement finally came he was going to pack up his dog, a half-cocker mongrel named Doc, and move down to Pemaquid Point. He planned to sleep until nine o’clock every day and never look at another sunrise.

He pulled over in front of the Norton house, and filled his carry rack with their order: orange juice, two quarts of milk, a dozen eggs. Climbing out of the cab, his knee gave a twinge, but only a faint one. It was going to be a fine day.

There was an addition to Mrs Norton’s usual order in Susan’s round, Palmer-method script: ‘Please leave one small sour cream, Win. Thanx.’

Purinton went back for it, thinking it was going to be one of those days when everyone wanted something special. Sour cream! He had tasted it once and liked to puke.

The sky was beginning to lighten in the east, and on the fields between here and town, heavy dew sparkled like a king’s ransom of diamonds.

4

5:15 A.M.

Eva Miller had been up for twenty minutes, dressed in a rag of a housedress and a pair of floppy pink slippers. She was cooking her breakfast-four scrambled eggs, eight rashers of bacon, a skillet of home fries. She would garnish this humble repast with two slices of toast and jam, a ten-ounce tumbler of orange juice, and two cups of coffee with cream to follow. She was a big woman, but not precisely fat; she worked too hard at keeping her place up to ever be fat. The curves of her body were heroic, Rabelaisian. Watching her in motion at her eight-burner electric stove was like watching the restless movements of the tide, or the migration of sand dunes.

She liked to eat her morning meal in this utter solitude, planning the work ahead of her for the day. There was a lot of it: Wednesday was the day she changed the linen. She had nine boarders at present, counting the new one, Mr Mears. The house had three stories and seventeen rooms and there were also floors to wash, the stairs to be scrubbed, the banister to be waxed, and the rug to be turned in the central common room. She would get Weasel Craig to help her with some of it, unless he was sleeping off a bad drunk.

The back door opened just as she was sitting down to the table.

‘Hi, Win. How are you doing?’

‘Passable. Knee’s kickin’ a bit.’

‘Sorry to hear it. You want to leave an extra quart of milk and a gallon of that lemonade?’

‘Sure,’ he said, resigned. ‘I knew it was gonna be that kind of day.’

She dug into her eggs, dismissing the comment. Win Purinton could always find something to complain about, although God knew he should have been the happiest man alive since that hell-cat he had hooked up with fell down the cellar stairs and broke her neck.

At quarter of six, just as she was finishing up her second cup of coffee and smoking a Chesterfield, the
Press-Herald
thumped against the side of the house and dropped into the rosebushes. The third time this week; the Kilby kid was batting a thousand. Probably delivering the papers wrecked out of his mind. Well, let it sit there awhile. The earliest sunshine, thin and precious gold, was slanting in through the east windows. It was the best time of her day, and she would not disturb its moveless peace for anything.

Her boarders had the use of the stove and the refrigerator-that, like the weekly change of linen, came with their rent-and shortly the peace would be broken as Grover Verrill and Mickey Sylvester came down to slop up their cereal before leaving for the textile mill over in Gates Falls where they both worked.

As if her thought had summoned a messenger of their coming, the toilet on the second floor flushed and she heard Sylvester’s heavy work boots on the stairs.

She heaved herself up and went to rescue the paper.