Salem's Lot

by Stephen King

  "It's as old as Macedonia," Father Callahan said. "Hanging the body of your enemy or betrayer upside down so his head faces earth instead of heaven. St Paul was crucified that way, on an X-shaped cross with his legs broken."

  Ben spoke, and his voice sounded old and dusty in his throat. "He's still diverting us. He has a hundred tricks. Let's go."

  They followed him back down the hall, back down the stairs, into the kitchen. Once there, he deferred to Father Callahan again. For a moment they just looked at each other, and then at the cellar door that led downward, just as twenty-five-odd years ago he had taken a set of stairs upward, to face an overwhelming question.

  THIRTEEN

  When the priest opened the door, Mark felt the rank, rotten odor assail his nostrils again--but that was also different. Not so strong. Less malevolent.

  The priest started down the stairs. Still, it took all his willpower to continue down after Father Callahan into that pit of the dead.

  Jimmy had produced a flashlight from his bag and clicked it on. The beam illuminated the floor, crossed to one wall, and swung back. It paused for a moment on a long crate, and then the beam fell on a table.

  "There," he said. "Look."

  It was an envelope, clean and shining in all this dingy darkness, a rich yellow vellum.

  "It's a trick," Father Callahan said. "Better not touch it."

  "No," Mark spoke up. He felt both relief and disappointment. "He's not here. He's gone. That's for us. Full of mean things, probably."

  Ben stepped forward and picked the envelope up. He turned it over in his hands twice--Mark could see in the glow of Jimmy's flashlight that his fingers were trembling--and then he tore it open.

  There was one sheet inside, rich vellum like the envelope, and they crowded around. Jimmy focused his flashlight on the page, which was closely written in an elegant, spider-thin hand. They read it together, Mark a little more slowly than the others.

  October 4.

  My Dear Young Friends,

  How lovely of you to have stopped by!

  I am never averse to company; it has been one of my great joys in a long and often lonely life. Had you come in the evening, I should have welcomed you in person with the greatest of pleasure. However, since I suspected you might choose to arrive during daylight hours, I thought it best to be out.

  I have left you a small token of my appreciation; someone very near and dear to one of you is now in the place where I occupied my days until I decided that other quarters might be more congenial. She is very lovely, Mr Mears--very toothsome, if I may be permitted a small bon mot. I have no further need of her and so I have left her for you to--how is your idiom?--to warm up for the main event. To whet your appetites, if you like. Let us see how well you like the appetizer to the main course you contemplate, shall we?

  Master Petrie, you have robbed me of the most faithful and resourceful servant I have ever known. You have caused me, in an indirect fashion, to take part in his ruination; have caused my own appetites to betray me. You sneaked up behind him, doubtless. I am going to enjoy dealing with you. Your parents first, I think. Tonight...or tomorrow night...or the next. And then you. But you shall enter my church as choirboy castratum.

  And Father Callahan--have they persuaded you to come? I thought so. I have observed you at some length since I arrived in Jerusalem's Lot...much as a good chess player will study the games of his opposition, am I correct? The Catholic Church is not the oldest of my opponents, though! I was old when it was young, when its members hid in the catacombs of Rome and painted fishes on their chests so they could tell one from another. I was strong when this simpering club of bread-eaters and wine-drinkers who venerate the sheep-savior was weak. My rites were old when the rites of your church were unconceived. Yet I do not underestimate. I am wise in the ways of goodness as well as those of evil. I am not jaded.

  And I will best you. How? you say. Does not Callahan bear the symbol of White? Does not Callahan move in the day as well as the night? Are there not charms and potions, both Christian and pagan, which my so-good friend Matthew Burke has informed me and my compatriots of? Yes, yes, and yes. But I have lived longer than you. I am crafty. I am not the serpent, but the father of serpents.

  Still, you say, this is not enough. And it is not. In the end, "Father" Callahan, you will undo yourself. Your faith in the White is weak and soft. Your talk of love is presumption. Only when you speak of the bottle are you informed.

  My good, good friends--Mr Mears; Mr Cody; Master Petrie; Father Callahan--enjoy your stay. The Medoc is excellent, procured for me especially by the late owner of this house, whose personal company I was never able to enjoy. Please be my guests if you still have a taste for wine after you have finished the work at hand. We will meet again, in person, and I shall convey my felicitations to each of you at that time in a more personal way.

  Until then, adieu.

  BARLOW.

  Trembling, Ben let the letter fall to the table. He looked at the others. Mark stood with his hands clenched into fists, his mouth frozen in the twist of someone who has bitten something rotten; Jimmy, his oddly boyish face drawn and pale; Father Donald Callahan, his eyes alight, his mouth drawn down in a trembling bow.

  And one by one, they looked up at him.

  "Come on," he said.

  They went around the corner together.

  FOURTEEN

  Parkins Gillespie was standing on the front step of the brick Municipal Building, looking through his high-powered Zeiss binoculars when Nolly Gardener drove up in the town's police car and got out, hitching up his belt and picking out his seat at the same time.

  "What's up, Park?" he asked, walking up the steps.

  Parkins gave him the glasses wordlessly and flicked one callused thumb at the Marsten House.

  Nolly looked. He saw that old Packard, and parked in front of it, a new tan Buick. The gain on the binoculars wasn't quite high enough to pick off the plate number. He lowered his glasses. "That's Doc Cody's car, ain't it?"

  "Yes, I believe it is." Parkins inserted a Pall Mall between his lips and scratched a kitchen match on the brick wall behind him.

  "I never seen a car up there except that Packard."

  "Yes, that's so," Parkins said meditatively.

  "Think we ought to go up there and have a look?" Nolly spoke with a marked lack of his usual enthusiasm. He had been a lawman for five years and was still entranced with his own position.

  "No," Parkins said, "I believe we'll just leave her alone." He took his watch out of his vest and clicked up the scrolled silver cover like a trainman checking an express. Just 3:41. He checked his watch against the clock on the town hall and then tucked it back into place.

  "How'd all that come out with Floyd Tibbits and the little McDougall baby?" Nolly asked.

  "Dunno."

  "Oh," Nolly said, momentarily nonplussed. Parkins was always taciturn, but this was a new high for him. He looked through the glasses again: no change.

  "Town seems quiet today," Nolly volunteered.

  "Yes," Parkins said. He looked across Jointner Avenue and the park with his faded blue eyes. Both the avenue and the park were deserted. They had been deserted most of the day. There was a remarkable lack of mothers strolling babies or idlers around the War Memorial.

  "Funny things been happening," Nolly ventured.

  "Yes," Parkins said, considering.

  As a last gasp, Nolly fell back on the one bit of conversational bait that Parkins had never failed to rise to: the weather. "Clouding up," he said. "Be rain by tonight."

  Parkins studied the sky. There were mackerel scales directly overhead and a building bar of clouds to the southwest. "Yes," he said, and threw the stub of his cigarette away.

  "Park, you feelin' all right?"

  Parkins Gillespie considered it.

  "Nope," he said.

  "Well, what in hell's the matter?"

  "I believe," Gillespie said, "that I'm scared shitless."

 
; "What?" Nolly floundered. "Of what?"

  "Dunno," Parkins said, and took his binoculars back. He began to scan the Marsten House again while Nolly stood speechless beside him.

  FIFTEEN

  Beyond the table where the letter had been propped, the cellar made an L-turn, and they were now in what once had been a wine cellar. Hubert Marsten must have been a bootlegger indeed, Ben thought. There were small and medium casks covered with dust and cobwebs. One wall was covered with a crisscrossed wine rack, and ancient magnums still peered forth from some of the diamond-shaped pigeonholes. Some of them had exploded, and where sparkling burgundy had once waited for some discerning palate, the spider now made his home. Others had undoubtedly turned to vinegar; that sharp odor drifted in the air, mingled with that of slow corruption.

  "No," Ben said, speaking quietly, as a man speaks a fact. "I can't."

  "You must," Father Callahan said. "I'm not telling you it will be easy, or for the best. Only that you must."

  "I can't!" Ben cried, and this time the words echoed in the cellar.

  In the center, on a raised dais and spotlighted by Jimmy's flashlight, Susan Norton lay still. She was covered from shoulders to feet in a drift of simple white linen, and when they reached her, none of them had been able to speak. Wonder had swallowed words.

  In life she had been a cheerfully pretty girl who had missed the turn to beauty somewhere (perhaps by inches), not through any lack in her features but--just possibly--because her life had been so calm and unremarkable. But now she had achieved beauty. Dark beauty.

  Death had not put its mark on her. Her face was blushed with color, and her lips, innocent of makeup, were a deep and glowing red. Her forehead was pale but flawless, the skin like cream. Her eyes were closed, and the dark lashes lay sootily against her cheeks. One hand was curled at her side, and the other was thrown lightly across her waist. Yet the total impression was not of angelic loveliness but a cold, disconnected beauty. Something in her face--not stated but hinted at--made Jimmy think of the young Saigon girls, some not yet thirteen, who would kneel before soldiers in the alleys behind the bars, not for the first time or the hundredth. Yet with those girls, the corruption hadn't been evil but only a knowledge of the world that had come too soon. The change in Susan's face was quite different--but he could not have said just how.

  Now Callahan stepped forward and pressed his fingers against the springiness of her left breast. "Here," he said. "The heart."

  "No," Ben repeated. "I can't."

  "Be her lover," Father Callahan said softly. "Better, be her husband. You won't hurt her, Ben. You'll free her. The only one hurt will be you."

  Ben looked at him dumbly. Mark had taken the stake from Jimmy's black bag and held it out wordlessly. Ben took it in a hand that seemed to stretch out for miles.

  If I don't think about it when I do it, then maybe--

  But it would be impossible not to think about it. And suddenly a line came to him from Dracula, that amusing bit of fiction that no longer amused him in the slightest. It was Van Helsing's speech to Arthur Holmwood when Arthur had been faced with this same dreadful task: We must go through bitter waters before we reach the sweet.

  Could there be sweetness for any of them, ever again?

  "Take it away!" he groaned. "Don't make me do this--"

  No answer.

  He felt a cold, sick sweat spring out on his brow, his cheeks, his forearms. The stake that had been a simple baseball bat four hours before seemed infused with eerie heaviness, as if invisible yet titanic lines of force had converged on it.

  He lifted the stake and pressed it against her left breast, just above the last fastened button of her blouse. The point made a dimple in her flesh, and he felt the side of his mouth begin to twitch in an uncontrollable tic.

  "She's not dead," he said. His voice was hoarse and thick. It was his last line of defense.

  "No," Jimmy said implacably. "She's Undead, Ben." He had shown them; had wrapped the blood-pressure cuff around her still arm and pumped it. The reading had been 00/00. He had put his stethoscope on her chest, and each of them had listened to the silence inside her.

  Something was put into Ben's other hand--years later he still did not remember which of them had put it there. The hammer. The Craftsman hammer with the rubber perforated grip. The head glimmered in the flashlight's glow.

  "Do it quickly," Callahan said, "and go out into the daylight. We'll do the rest."

  We must go through bitter waters before we reach the sweet.

  "God forgive me," Ben whispered.

  He raised the hammer and brought it down.

  The hammer struck the top of the stake squarely, and the gelatinous tremor that vibrated up the length of ash would haunt him forever in his dreams. Her eyes flew open, wide and blue, as if from the very force of the blow. Blood gushed upward from the stake's point of entry in a bright and astonishing flood, splashing his hands, his shirt, his cheeks. In an instant the cellar was filled with its hot, coppery odor.

  She writhed on the table. Her hands came up and beat madly at the air like birds. Her feet thumped an aimless, rattling tattoo on the wood of the platform. Her mouth yawned open, revealing shocking, wolflike fangs, and she began to peal forth shriek after shriek, like hell's clarion. Blood gushed from the corners of her mouth in freshets.

  The hammer rose and fell: again...again...again.

  Ben's brain was filled with the shrieks of large black crows. It whirled with awful, unremembered images. His hands were scarlet, the stake was scarlet, the remorselessly rising and falling hammer was scarlet. In Jimmy's trembling hands the flashlight became stroboscopic, illuminating Susan's crazed, lashing face in spurts and flashes. Her teeth sheared through the flesh of her lips, tearing them to ribbons. Blood splattered across the fresh linen sheet which Jimmy had so neatly turned back, making patterns like Chinese ideograms.

  And then, suddenly, her back arched like a bow, and her mouth stretched open until it seemed her jaws must break. A huge explosion of darker blood issued forth from the wound the stake had made--almost black in this chancy, lunatic light: heart's blood. The scream that welled from the sounding chamber of that gaping mouth came from all the subcellars of deepest race memory and beyond that, to the moist darknesses of the human soul. Blood suddenly boiled from her mouth and nose in a tide...and something else. In the faint light it was only a suggestion, a shadow, of something leaping up and out, cheated and ruined. It merged with the darkness and was gone.

  She settled back, her mouth relaxing, closing. The mangled lips parted in a last, susurrating pulse of air. For a moment the eyelids fluttered and Ben saw, or fancied he saw, the Susan he had met in the park, reading his book.

  It was done.

  He backed away, dropping the hammer, holding his hands out before him, a terrified conductor whose symphony has run riot.

  Callahan put a hand on his shoulder. "Ben--"

  He fled.

  He stumbled going up the stairs, fell, and crawled toward the light at the top. Childhood horror and adult horror had merged. If he looked over his shoulder, he would see Hubie Marsten (or perhaps Straker) only a hand's breadth behind, grinning out of his puffed and greenish face, the rope embedded deep into his neck--the grin revealing fangs instead of teeth. He screamed once, miserably.

  Dimly, he heard Callahan cry out, "No, let him go--"

  He burst through the kitchen and out the back door. The back porch steps were gone under his feet and he pitched headlong into the dirt. He got to his knees, crawled, got to his feet, and cast a glance behind him.

  Nothing.

  The house loomed without purpose, the last of its evil stolen away. It was just a house again.

  Ben Mears stood in the great silence of the weed-choked backyard, his head thrown back, breathing in great white snuffles of air.

  SIXTEEN

  In the fall, night comes like this in the Lot:

  The sun loses its thin grip on the air first, turning it cold, makin
g it remember that winter is coming and winter will be long. Thin clouds form, and the shadows lengthen out. They have no breadth, as summer shadows have; there are no leaves on the trees or fat clouds in the sky to make them thick. They are gaunt, mean shadows that bite the ground like teeth.

  As the sun nears the horizon, its benevolent yellow begins to deepen, to become infected, until it glares an angry inflamed orange. It throws a variegated glow over the horizon--a cloud-congested caul that is alternately red, orange, vermilion, purple. Sometimes the clouds break apart in great, slow rafts, letting through beams of innocent yellow sunlight that are bitterly nostalgic for the summer that has gone by.

  This is six o'clock, the supper hour (in the Lot, dinner is eaten at noon and the lunch buckets that men grab from counters before going out the door are known as dinner pails). Mabel Werts, the unhealthy fat of old age hanging doughily on her bones, is sitting down to a broiled breast of chicken and a cup of Lipton tea, the phone by her elbow. In Eva's the men are getting together whatever they have to get together: TV dinners, canned corned beef, canned beans which are woefully unlike the beans their mothers used to bake all Saturday morning and afternoon years ago, spaghetti dinners, or reheated hamburgers picked up at the Falmouth McDonald's on the way home from work. Eva sits at the table in the front room, irritably playing gin rummy with Grover Verrill, and snapping at the others to wipe up their grease and to stop that damn slopping around. They cannot remember ever having seen her this way, cat-nervous and feisty. But they know what the matter is, even if she does not.

  Mr and Mrs Petrie eat sandwiches in their kitchen, trying to puzzle out the call they have just received, a call from the local Catholic priest, Father Callahan: Your son is with me. He's fine. I will have him home shortly. Good-by. They have debated calling the local lawman, Parkins Gillespie, and have decided to wait a bit longer. They have sensed some sort of change in their son, who has always been what his mother likes to call A Deep One. Yet the specters of Ralphie and Danny Glick hang over them, unacknowledged.

  Milt Crossen is having bread and milk in the back of his store. He has had damned little appetite since his wife died back in '68. Delbert Markey, proprietor of Dell's, is working his way methodically through the five hamburgers which he has fried himself on the grill. He eats them with mustard and heaps of raw onions, and will complain most of the night to anyone who will listen that his goddamn acid indigestion is killing him. Father Callahan's housekeeper, Rhoda Curless, eats nothing. She is worried about the Father, who is out someplace ramming the roads. Harriet Durham and her family are eating pork chops. Carl Smith, a widower since 1957, has one boiled potato and a bottle of Moxie. The Derek Boddins are having an Armour Star ham and brussels sprouts. Yechhh, says Richie Boddin, the deposed bully. Brussels sprouts. You eat 'em or I'll clout your ass backward, Derek says. He hates them himself.