by Stephen King
He touched the heavy shape of his father's target pistol in his jacket pocket. Bullets were no good against them--except maybe silver ones--but a shot between the eyes would punch that Straker's ticket, all right.
His eyes shifted downward momentarily to the roughly cylindrical shape propped against the tree, wrapped in an old piece of toweling. There was a woodpile behind his house, half a cord of yellow ash stove lengths which he and his father had cut with the McCulloch chain saw in July and August. Henry Petrie was methodical, and each length, Mark knew, would be within an inch of three feet, one way or the other. His father knew the proper length just as he knew that winter followed fall and that yellow ash would burn longer and cleaner in the living room fireplace.
His son, who knew other things, knew that ash was for men--things--like him. This morning, while his mother and father were out on their Sunday bird walk, he had taken one of the lengths and whacked one end into a rough point with his Boy Scout hatchet. It was rough, but it would serve.
He saw a flash of color and shrank back against the tree, peering around the rough bark with one eye. A moment later he got his first clear glimpse of the person climbing the hill. It was a girl. He felt a sense of relief mingled with disappointment. No henchman of the devil there; that was Mr Norton's daughter.
His gaze sharpened again. She was carrying a stake of her own! As she drew closer, he felt an urge to laugh bitterly--a piece of snow fence, that's what she had. Two swings with an ordinary tool box hammer would split it right in two.
She was going to pass his tree on the right. As she drew closer, he began to slide carefully around his tree to the left, avoiding any small twigs that might pop and give him away. At last the synchronized little movement was done; her back was to him as she went on up the hill toward the break in the trees. She was going very carefully, he noted with approval. That was good. In spite of the silly snow fence stake, she apparently had some idea of what she was getting into. Still, if she went much further, she was going to be in trouble. Straker was at home. Mark had been here since twelve-thirty, and he had seen Straker go out to the driveway and look down the road and then go back into the house. Mark had been trying to make up his mind on what to do himself when this girl had entered things, upsetting the equation.
Perhaps she was going to be all right. She had stopped behind a screen of bushes and was crouching there, just looking at the house. Mark turned it over in his mind. Obviously she knew. How didn't matter, but she would not have had even that pitiful stake with her if she didn't know. He supposed he would have to go up and warn her that Straker was still around, and on guard. She probably didn't have a gun, not even a little one like his.
He was pondering how to make his presence known to her without having her scream her head off when the motor of Straker's car roared into life. She jumped visibly, and at first he was afraid she was going to break and run, crashing through the woods and advertising her presence for a hundred miles. But then she hunkered down again, holding on to the ground like she was afraid it would fly away from her. She's got guts even if she is stupid, he thought approvingly.
Straker's car backed down the driveway--she would have a much better view from where she was; he could only see the Packard's black roof--hesitated for a moment, and then went off down the road toward town.
He decided they had to team up. Anything would be better than going up to that house alone. He had already sampled the poison atmosphere that enveloped it. He had felt it from a half a mile away, and it thickened as you got closer.
Now he ran lightly up the carpeted incline and put his hand on her shoulder. He felt her body tense, knew she was going to scream, and said, "Don't yell. It's all right. It's me."
She didn't scream. What escaped was a terrified exhalation of air. She turned around and looked at him, her face white. "W-Who's me?"
He sat down beside her. "My name is Mark Petrie. I know you; you're Sue Norton. My dad knows your dad."
"Petrie...? Henry Petrie?"
"Yes, that's my father."
"What are you doing here?" Her eyes were moving continually over him, as if she hadn't been able to take in his actuality yet.
"The same thing you are. Only that stake won't work. It's too..." He groped for a word that had checked into his vocabulary through sight and definition but not by use. "It's too flimsy."
She looked down at her piece of snow fence and actually blushed. "Oh, that. Well, I found that in the woods and...and thought someone might fall over it, so I just--"
He cut her adult temporizing short impatiently: "You came to kill the vampire, didn't you?"
"Wherever did you get that idea? Vampires and things like that?"
He said somberly, "A vampire tried to get me last night. It almost did, too."
"That's absurd. A big boy like you should know better than to make up--"
"It was Danny Glick."
She recoiled, her eyes wincing as if he had thrown a mock punch instead of words. She groped out, found his arm, and held it. Their eyes locked. "Are you making this up, Mark?"
"No," he said, and told his story in a few simple sentences.
"And you came here alone?" she asked when he had finished. "You believed it and came up here alone?"
"Believed it?" He looked at her, honestly puzzled. "Sure I believed it. I saw it, didn't I?"
There was no response to that, and suddenly she was ashamed of her instant doubt (no, doubt was too kind a word) of Matt's story and of Ben's tentative acceptance.
"How come you're here?"
She hesitated a moment and then said, "There are some men in town who suspect that there is a man in that house whom no one has seen. That he might be a...a..." Still she could not say the word, but he nodded his understanding. Even on short acquaintance, he seemed quite an extraordinary little boy.
Abridging all that she might have added, she said simply, "So I came to look and find out."
He nodded at the stake. "And brought that to pound through him?"
"I don't know if I could do that."
"I could," he said calmly. "After what I saw last night. Danny was outside my window, holding on like a great big fly. And his teeth..." He shook his head, dismissing the nightmare as a businessman might dismiss a bankrupt client.
"Do your parents know you're here?" she asked, knowing they must not.
"No," he said matter-of-factly. "Sunday is their nature day. They go on bird walks in the mornings and do other things in the afternoon. Sometimes I go and sometimes I don't. Today they went for a ride up the coast."
"You're quite a boy," she said.
"No, I'm not," he said, his composure unruffled by the praise. "But I'm going to get rid of him." He looked up at the house.
"Are you sure--"
"Sure I am. So're you. Can't you feel how bad he is? Doesn't that house make you afraid, just looking at it?"
"Yes," she said simply, giving in to him. His logic was the logic of nerve endings, and unlike Ben's or Matt's, it was resistless.
"How are we going to do it?" she asked, automatically giving over the leadership of the venture to him.
"Just go up there and break in," he said. "Find him, pound the stake--my stake--through his heart, and get out again. He's probably down cellar. They like dark places. Did you bring a flashlight?"
"No."
"Damn it, neither did I." He shuffled his sneakered feet aimlessly in the leaves for a moment. "Probably didn't bring a cross either, did you?"
"Yes, I did," Susan said. She pulled the link chain out of her blouse and showed him. He nodded and then pulled a chain out of his own shirt.
"I hope I can get this back before my folks come home," he said gloomily. "I crooked it from my mother's jewelry box. I'll catch hell if she finds out." He looked around. The shadows had lengthened even as they talked, and they both felt an impulse to delay and delay.
"When we find him, don't look in his eyes," Mark told her. "He can't move out of his coffin, not un
til dark, but he can still hook you with his eyes. Do you know anything religious by heart?"
They had started through the bushes between the woods and the unkempt lawn of the Marsten House.
"Well, the Lord's Prayer--"
"Sure, that's good. I know that one, too. We'll both say it while I pound the stake in."
He saw her expression, revolted and half flagging, and he took her hand and squeezed it. His self-possession was disconcerting. "Listen, we have to. I bet he's got half the town after last night. If we wait any longer, he'll have it all. It will go fast, now."
"After last night?"
"I dreamed it," Mark said. His voice was still calm, but his eyes were dark. "I dreamed of them going to houses and calling on phones and begging to be let in. Some people knew, way down deep they knew, but they let them in just the same. Because it was easier to do that than to think something so bad might be real."
"Just a dream," she said uneasily.
"I bet there's a lot of people lying around in bed today with the curtains closed or the shades drawn, wondering if they've got a cold or the flu or something. They feel all weak and fuzzy-headed. They don't want to eat. The idea of eating makes them want to puke."
"How do you know so much?"
"I read the monster magazines," he said, "and go to see the movies when I can. Usually I have to tell my mom I'm going to see Walt Disney. And you can't trust all of it. Sometimes they just make stuff up so the story will be bloodier."
They were at the side of the house. Say, we're quite a crew, we believers, Susan thought. An old teacher half-cracked with books, a writer obsessed with his childhood nightmares, a little boy who has taken a postgraduate course in vampire lore from the films and the modern penny-dreadfuls. And me? Do I really believe? Are paranoid fantasies catching?
She believed.
As Mark had said, this close to the house it was just not possible to scoff. All the thought processes, the act of conversation itself, were overshadowed by a more fundamental voice that was screaming danger! danger! in words that were not words at all. Her heartbeat and respiration were up, yet her skin was cold with the capillary-dilating effect of adrenaline, which keeps the blood hiding deep in the body's wells during moments of stress. Her kidneys were tight and heavy. Her eyes seemed preternaturally sharp, taking in every splinter and paint flake on the side of the house. And all of this had been triggered by no external stimuli at all: no men with guns, no large and snarling dogs, no smell of fire. A deeper watchman than her five senses had been wakened after a long season of sleep. And there was no ignoring it.
She peered through a break in the lower shutters. "Why, they haven't done a thing to it," she said almost angrily. "It's a mess."
"Let me see. Boost me up."
She laced her fingers together so he could look through the broken slats and into the crumbling living room of the Marsten House. He saw a deserted, boxy parlor with a thick patina of dust on the floor (many footprints had been tracked through it), peeling wallpaper, two or three old easy chairs, a scarred table. There were cobwebs festooned in the room's upper corners, near the ceiling.
Before she could protest, he had rapped the hook-and-eye combination that held the shutter closed with the blunt end of his stake. The lock fell to the ground in two rusty pieces, and the shutters creaked outward an inch or two.
"Hey!" she protested. "You shouldn't--"
"What do you want to do? Ring the doorbell?"
He accordioned back the right-hand shutter and rapped one of the dusty, wavy panes of glass. It tinkled inward. The fear leaped up in her, hot and strong, making a coppery taste in her mouth.
"We can still run," she said, almost to herself.
He looked down at her and there was no contempt in his glance--only an honesty and a fear that was as great as her own. "You go if you have to," he said.
"No. I don't have to." She tried to swallow away the obstruction in her throat and succeeded not at all. "Hurry it up. You're getting heavy."
He knocked the protruding shards of glass out of the pane he had broken, switched the stake to his other hand, then reached through and unlatched the window. It moaned slightly as he pushed it up, and then the way was open.
She let him down and they looked wordlessly at the window for a moment. Then Susan stepped forward, pushed the right-hand shutter open all the way, and put her hands on the splintery windowsill preparatory to boosting herself up. The fear in her was sickening with its greatness, settled in her belly like a horrid pregnancy. At last, she understood how Matt Burke had felt as he had gone up the stairs to whatever waited in his guest room.
She had always consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fears = unknown. And to solve the equation, one simply reduced the problem to simple algebraic terms, thus: unknown = creaky board (or whatever), creaky board = nothing to be afraid of. In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of equality. Some fears were justified, of course (you don't drive when you're too plowed to see, don't extend the hand of friendship to snarling dogs, don't go parking with boys you don't know--how did the old joke go? Screw or walk?), but until now she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insoluble. The act of moving forward at all became heroism.
She boosted herself with a smooth flex of muscles, swung one leg over the sill, and then dropped to the dusty parlor floor and looked around. There was a smell. It oozed out of the walls in an almost visible miasma. She tried to tell herself it was only plaster rot, or the accumulated damp guano of all the animals that had nested behind those broken lathings--woodchucks, rats, perhaps even a raccoon or two. But it was more. The smell was deeper than animal-stink, more entrenched. It made her think of tears and vomit and blackness.
"Hey," Mark called softly. His hands waved above the windowsill. "A little help."
She leaned out, caught him under the armpits, and dragged him up until he had caught a grip on the windowsill. Then he jackknifed himself in neatly. His sneakered feet thumped the carpet, and then the house was still again.
They found themselves listening to the silence, fascinated by it. There did not even seem to be the faint, high hum that comes in utter stillness, the sound of nerve endings idling in neutral. There was only a great dead soundlessness and the beat of blood in their own ears.
And yet they both knew, of course. They were not alone.
TWO
"Come on," he said. "Let's look around." He clutched the stake very tightly and for just a moment looked longingly back at the window.
She moved slowly toward the hall and he came after her. Just outside the door there was a small end table with a book on it. Mark picked it up.
"Hey," he said. "Do you know Latin?"
"A little, from high school."
"What's this mean?" He showed her the binding.
She sounded the words out, a frown creasing her forehead. Then she shook her head. "Don't know."
He opened the book at random, and flinched. There was a picture of a naked man holding a child's gutted body toward something you couldn't see. He put the book down, glad to let go of it--the stretched binding felt uncomfortably familiar under his hand--and they went down the hallway toward the kitchen together. The shadows were more prominent here. The sun had gotten around to the other side of the house.
"Do you smell it?" he asked.
"Yes."
"It's worse back here, isn't it?"
"Yes."
He was remembering the cold-pantry his mother had kept in the other house, and how one year three bushel baskets of tomatoes had gone bad down there in the dark. This smell was like that, like the smell of tomatoes decaying into putrescence.
Susan whispered: "God, I'm so scared."
His hand groped out, found hers, and they locked tightly.
The kitchen linoleum was old and gritty and pocked, worn black in front of the old porcelain-t
ub sink. A large, scarred table stood in the middle of the floor, and on it was a yellow plate, a knife and fork, and a scrap of raw hamburger.
The cellar door was standing ajar.
"That's where we have to go," he said.
"Oh," she said weakly.
The door was open just a crack, and the light did not penetrate at all. The tongue of darkness seemed to lick hungrily at the kitchen, waiting for night to come so it could swallow it whole. That quarter inch of darkness was hideous, unspeakable in its possibilities. She stood beside Mark, helpless and moveless.
Then he stepped forward and pulled the door open and stood for a moment, looking down. She saw a muscle jump beneath his jaw.
"I think--" he began, and she heard something behind her and turned, suddenly feeling slow, feeling too late. It was Straker. He was grinning.
Mark turned, saw, and tried to dive around him. Straker's fist crashed into his chin and he knew no more.
THREE
When Mark came to, he was being carried up a flight of stairs--not the cellar stairs, though. There was not that feeling of stone enclosure, and the air was not so fetid. He allowed his eyelids to unclose themselves a tiny fraction, letting his head still loll limply on his neck. A stair landing coming up...the second floor. He could see quite clearly. The sun was not down yet. Thin hope, then.
They gained the landing, and suddenly the arms holding him were gone. He thumped heavily onto the floor, hitting his head.
"Do you not think I know when someone is playing the possum, young master?" Straker asked him. From the floor he seemed easily ten feet tall. His bald head glistened with a subdued elegance in the gathering gloom. Mark saw with growing terror that there was a coil of rope around his shoulder.
He grabbed for the pocket where the pistol had been.
Straker threw back his head and laughed. "I have taken the liberty of removing the gun, young master. Boys should not be allowed weapons they do not understand...any more than they should lead young ladies to houses where their commerce has not been invited."