Salem's Lot

  "Yes," Ben said. He looked at the man in the army uniform, who was shaking off in leisurely fashion. "Hurry it up, can you, buddy?"

  "Why? He ain't in no rush."

  Nevertheless, he zipped up and stepped away from the urinal so they could get in.

  Ben got an arm around Weasel's back, hooked a hand in his armpit, and lifted. For a moment his buttocks pressed against the tiled wall and he could feel the vibrations from the band. Weasel came up with the limp mail sack weight of utter unconsciousness. Matt slid his head under Weasel's other arm, hooked his own arm around Weasel's waist, and they carried him out the door.

  "There goes Weasel," someone said, and there was laughter.

  "Dell ought to cut him off," Matt said, sounding out of breath. "He knows how this always turns out."

  They went through the door into the foyer, and then out onto the wooden steps leading down to the parking lot.

  "Easy," Ben grunted. "Don't drop him."

  They went down the stairs, Weasel's limp feet clopping on the risers like blocks of wood.

  "The Citroen...over in the last row."

  They carried him over. The coolness in the air was sharper now, and tomorrow the leaves would be blooded. Weasel had begun to grunt deep in his throat and his head jerked weakly on the stalk of his neck.

  "Can you put him to bed when you get back to Eva's?" Matt asked.

  "Yes, I think so."

  "Good. Look, you can just see the rooftop of the Marsten House over the trees."

  Ben looked. Matt was right; the top angle just peeked above the dark horizon of pines, blotting out the stars at the rim of the visible world with the regular shape of human construction.

  Ben opened the passenger door and said, "Here. Let me have him."

  He took Weasel's full weight and slipped him neatly into the passenger seat and closed the door. Weasel's head lolled against the window, giving it a flattened, grotesque look.

  "Tuesday at eleven?"

  "I'll be there."

  "Thanks. And thanks for helping Weasel, too." He held out his hand and Ben shook it.

  He got in, started the Citroen, and headed back toward town. Once the roadhouse neon had disappeared behind the trees, the road was deserted and black, and Ben thought, These roads are haunted now.

  Weasel gave a snort and a groan beside him and Ben jumped. The Citroen swerved minutely on the road.

  Now, why did I think that?

  No answer.

  SEVEN

  He opened the wing window so that it scooped cold air directly onto Weasel on the ride home, and by the time he drove into Eva Miller's dooryard, Weasel had attained a soupy semiconsciousness.

  Ben led him, half stumbling, up the back porch steps and into the kitchen, which was dimly lit by the stove's fluorescent. Weasel moaned, then muttered deep in his throat, "She's a lovely girl, Jack, and married women, they know...know..."

  A shadow detached itself from the hall and it was Eva, huge in an old quilted housecoat, her hair done up in rollers and covered with a filmy net scarf. Her face was pale and ghostly with night cream.

  "Ed," she said. "Oh, Ed...you do go on, don't you?"

  His eyes opened a little at the sound of her voice, and a smile touched his features. "On and on and on," he croaked. "Wouldn't you know it more than the rest?"

  "Can you get him up to his room?" she asked Ben.

  "Yes, no sweat."

  He tightened his grip on Weasel and somehow got him up the stairs and down to his room. The door was unlocked and he carried him inside. The minute he laid him on the bed, signs of consciousness ceased and he fell into a deep sleep.

  Ben paused a moment to look around. The room was clean, almost sterile, things put away with barrackslike neatness. As he began to work on Weasel's shoes, Eva Miller said from behind him, "Never mind that, Mr Mears. Go on up, if you like."

  "But he ought to be--"

  "I'll undress him." Her face was grave and full of dignified, measured sadness. "Undress him and give him an alcohol rub to help with his hangover in the morning. I've done it before. Many times."

  "All right," Ben said, and went upstairs without looking back. He undressed slowly, thought about taking a shower, and decided not to. He got into bed and lay looking at the ceiling and did not sleep for a long time.

  Chapter Six

  The Lot (II)

  Fall and spring came to Jerusalem's Lot with the same suddenness of sunrise and sunset in the tropics. The line of demarcation could be as thin as one day. But spring is not the finest season in New England--it's too short, too uncertain, too apt to turn savage on short notice. Even so, there are April days which linger in the memory even after one has forgotten the wife's touch, or the feel of the baby's toothless mouth at the nipple. But by mid-May, the sun rises out of the morning's haze with authority and potency, and standing on your top step at seven in the morning with your dinner bucket in your hand, you know that the dew will be melted off the grass by eight and that the dust on the back roads will hang depthless and still in the air for five minutes after a car's passage; and that by one in the afternoon it will be up to ninety-five on the third floor of the mill and the sweat will roll off your arms like oil and stick your shirt to your back in a widening patch and it might as well be July.

  But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.

  It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white ships with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die--migrate or die. Even in your house, behind square walls, the wind beats against the wood and the glass and sends its fleshless pucker against the eaves and sooner or later you have to put down what you were doing and go out and see. And you can stand on your stoop or in your dooryard at mid-afternoon and watch the cloud shadows rush across Griffen's pasture and up Schoolyard Hill, light and dark, light and dark, like the shutters of the gods being opened and closed. You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation. And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

  TWO

  That year the first day of fall (real fall as opposed to calendar fall) was September 28, the day that Danny Glick was buried in the Harmony Hill Cemetery.

  Church services were private, but the graveside services were open to the town and a good portion of the town turned out--classmates, the curious, and the older people to whom funerals grow nearly compulsive as old age knits their shrouds up around them.

  They came up Burns Road in a long line, twisting up and out of sight over the next hill. All the cars had their lights turned on in spite of the day's brilliance. First came Carl Foreman's hearse, its rear windows filled with flowers, then Tony Glick's 1965 Mercury, its deteriorating muffler bellowing and farting. Behind that, in the next four cars, came relatives on both sides of the family, one bunch from as far away as Tulsa, Oklahoma. Others in that long, lights-on parade included: Mark Petrie (the boy Ralphie and Danny had been on their way to see the night Ralphie disa
ppeared) and his mother and father; Richie Boddin and family; Mabel Werts in a car containing Mr and Mrs William Norton (sitting in the backseat with her cane planted between her swelled legs, she talked with unceasing constancy about other funerals she had attended all the way back to 1930); Lester Durham and his wife, Harriet; Paul Mayberry and his wife, Glynis; Pat Middler, Joe Crane, Vinnie Upshaw, and Clyde Corliss, all riding in a car driven by Milt Crossen (Milt had opened the beer cooler before they left, and they had all shared out a solemn six-pack in front of the stove); Eva Miller in a car which also contained her close friends Loretta Starcher and Rhoda Curless, who were both maiden ladies; Parkins Gillespie and his deputy, Nolly Gardener, riding in the Jerusalem's Lot police car (Parkins's Ford with a stick-on dashboard bubble); Lawrence Crockett and his sallow wife; Charles Rhodes, the sour bus driver, who went to all funerals on general principles; the Charles Griffen family, including wife and two sons, Hal and Jack, the only offspring still living at home.

  Mike Ryerson and Royal Snow had dug the grave early that morning, laying strips of fake grass over the raw soil they had thrown out of the ground. Mike had lighted the Flame of Remembrance that the Glicks had specified. Mike could remember thinking that Royal didn't seem himself this morning. He was usually full of little jokes and ditties about the work at hand (cracked, off-key tenor: "They wrap you up in a big white sheet, an' put you down at least six feet...."), but this morning he had seemed exceptionally quiet, almost sullen. Hung over, maybe, Mike thought. He and that muscle-bound buddy of his, Peters, had certainly been slopping it up down at Dell's the night before.

  Five minutes ago, when he had seen Carl's hearse coming over the hill about a mile down the road, he had swung open the wide iron gates, glancing up at the high iron spikes as he always did since he had found Doc up there. With the gates open, he walked back to the newly dug grave where Father Donald Callahan, the pastor of the Jerusalem's Lot parish, waited by the grave. He was wearing a stole about his shoulders and the book he held was open to the children's burial service. This was what they called the third station, Mike knew. The first was the house of the deceased, the second at the tiny Catholic Church, St Andrew's. Last station, Harmony Hill. Everybody out.

  A little chill touched him and he looked down at the bright plastic grass, wondering why it had to be a part of every funeral. It looked like exactly what it was: a cheap imitation of life discreetly masking the heavy brown clods of the final earth.

  "They're on their way, Father," he said.

  Callahan was a tall man with piercing blue eyes and a ruddy complexion. His hair was a graying steel color. Ryerson, who hadn't been to church since he turned sixteen, liked him the best of all the local witch doctors. John Groggins, the Methodist minister, was a hypocritical old poop, and Patterson, from the Church of the Latter-day Saints and Followers of the Cross, was as crazy as a bear stuck in a honey tree. At a funeral for one of the church deacons two or three years back, Patterson had gotten right down and rolled on the ground. But Callahan seemed nice enough for a Pope-lover; his funerals were calm and comforting and always short. Ryerson doubted if Callahan had gotten all those red and broken veins in his cheeks and around his nose from praying, but if Callahan did a little drinking, who was to blame him? The way the world was, it was a wonder all those preachers didn't end up in looney bins.

  "Thanks, Mike," he said, and looked up at the bright sky. "This is going to be a hard one."

  "I guess so. How long?"

  "Ten minutes, no more. I'm not going to draw out his parents' agony. There's enough of that still ahead of them."

  "Okay," Mike said, and walked toward the rear of the graveyard. He would jump over the stone wall, go into the woods, and eat a late lunch. He knew from long experience that the last thing the grieving family and friends want to see during the third station is the resident gravedigger in his dirt-stained coveralls; it kind of put a crimp in the minister's glowing pictures of immortality and the pearly gates.

  Near the back wall he paused and bent to examine a slate headstone that had fallen forward. He stood it up and again felt a small chill go through him as he brushed the dirt from the inscription:

  HUBERT BARCLAY MARSTEN

  October 6, 1889

  August 12, 1939

  The angel of Death who holdeth

  The bronze Lamp beyond the golden door

  Hath taken thee into dark Waters

  And below that, almost obliterated by thirty-six seasons of freeze and thaw:

  God Grant He Lie Still

  Still vaguely troubled and still not knowing why, Mike Ryerson went back into the woods to sit by the brook and eat his lunch.

  THREE

  In the early days at the seminary, a friend of Father Callahan's had given him a blasphemous crewelwork sampler which had sent him into gales of horrified laughter at the time, but which seemed more true and less blasphemous as the years passed: God grant me the SERENITY to accept what I cannot change, the TENACITY to change what I may, and the GOOD LUCK not to fuck up too often. This in Old English script with a rising sun in the background.

  Now, standing before Danny Glick's mourners, that old credo recurred.

  The pallbearers, two uncles and two cousins of the dead boy, had lowered the coffin into the ground. Marjorie Glick, dressed in a black coat and a veiled black hat, her face showing through the mesh in the netting like cottage cheese, stood swaying in the protective curve of her father's arm, clutching a black purse as though it were a life preserver. Tony Glick stood apart from her, his face shocked and wandering. Several times during the church service he had looked around, as if to verify his presence among these people. His face was that of a man who believes he is dreaming.

  The church can't stop this dream, Callahan thought. Nor all the serenity, tenacity, or good luck in the world. The fuck-up has already happened.

  He sprinkled holy water on the coffin and the grave, sanctifying them for all time.

  "Let us pray," he said. The words rolled melodiously from his throat as they always had, in shine and shadow, drunk or sober. The mourners bowed their heads.

  "Lord God, through your mercy those who have lived in faith find eternal peace. Bless this grave and send your angel to watch over it. As we bury the body of Daniel Glick, welcome him into your presence, and with your saints let him rejoice in you forever. We ask it through Christ our Lord. Amen."

  "Amen," the congregation muttered, and the wind swept it away in rags. Tony Glick was looking around with wide, haunted eyes. His wife was pressing a Kleenex to her mouth.

  "With faith in Jesus Christ, we reverently bring the body of this child to be buried in its human imperfection. Let us pray with confidence to God, who gives life to all things, that he will raise up this mortal body to the perfection and company of saints."

  He turned the pages of his missal. A woman in the third row of the loose horseshoe grouped around the grave had begun to sob hoarsely. A bird chirruped somewhere back in the woods.

  "Let us pray for our brother Daniel Glick to our Lord Jesus Christ," Father Callahan said, "who told us: 'I am the resurrection and the life. The man who believes in me will live even though he dies, and every living person who puts his faith in me will never suffer eternal death.' Lord, you wept at the death of Lazarus, your friend: comfort us in our sorrow. We ask this in faith."

  "Lord, hear our prayer," the Catholics answered.

  "You raised the dead to life; give our brother Daniel eternal life. We ask this in faith."

  "Lord, hear our prayer," they answered. Something seemed to be dawning in Tony Glick's eyes; a revelation, perhaps.

  "Our brother Daniel was washed clean in baptism; give him fellowship with all your saints. We ask this in faith."

  "Lord, hear our prayer."

  "He was nourished with your body and blood; grant him a place at the table in your heavenly kingdom. We ask this in faith."

  "Lord, hear our prayer."

  Marjorie Glick had begun to rock back and
forth, moaning.

  "Comfort us in our sorrow at the death of our brother; let our faith be our consolation and eternal life our hope. We ask this in faith."

  "Lord, hear our prayer."

  He closed his missal. "Let us pray as our Lord taught us," he said quietly. "Our Father who art in heaven--"

  "No!" Tony Glick screamed, and propelled himself forward. "You ain't gonna throw no dirt on my boy!"

  Hands reached out to stay him, but they were belated. For a moment he tottered on the edge of the grave, and then the fake grass wrinkled and gave way. He fell into the hole and landed on the coffin with a horrid, heavy thump.

  "Danny, you come outta there!" he bawled.

  "Oh, my," Mabel Werts said, and pressed her black silk funeral hankie to her lips. Her eyes were bright and avid, storing this the way a squirrel stores nuts for the winter.

  "Danny, goddammit, you stop this fucking around!"

  Father Callahan nodded at two of the pallbearers and they stepped forward, but three other men, including Parkins Gillespie and Nolly Gardener, had to step in before Glick could be gotten out of the grave, kicking and screaming and howling.

  "Danny, you stop it now! You got your Momma scared! I'm gonna whip your butt for you! Lemme go! Lemme go...I want m'boy...let me go, you pricks...ahhh, God--"

  "Our Father who art in heaven--" Callahan began again, and other voices joined him, lifting the words toward the indifferent shield of the sky.

  "--hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done--"

  "Danny, you come to me, hear? You hear me?"

  "--on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us--"

  "Dannneeee--"

  "--our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us--"

  "He ain't dead, he ain't dead, let go a me you miserable shitpokes--"

  "--and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Through Christ our Lord, amen."

  "He ain't dead," Tony Glick sobbed. "He can't be. He's only twelve fucking years old." He began to weep heavily and staggered forward in spite of the men who held him, his face ravaged and streaming with tears. He fell on his knees at Callahan's feet and grasped his trousers with muddy hands. "Please give me my boy back. Please don't fool me no more."