"Christ," Matt said.
"He has...a certain theory about the Marsten House. It springs partly from his own experience and partly from some rather amazing research he's done on Hubert Marsten--"
"His penchant for devil worship?"
She started. "How did you know that?"
He smiled a trifle grimly. "Not all the gossip in a small town is open gossip. There are secrets. Some of the secret gossip in 'salem's Lot has to do with Hubie Marsten. It's shared among perhaps only a dozen or so of the older people now--Mabel Werts is one of them. It was a long time ago, Susan. But even so, there is no statute of limitations on some stories. It's strange, you know. Even Mabel won't talk about Hubert Marsten with anyone but her own circle. They'll talk about his death, of course. About the murder. But if you ask about the ten years he and his wife spent up there in their house, doing God knows what, a sort of governor comes into play--perhaps the closest thing to a taboo our Western civilization knows. There have even been whispers that Hubert Marsten kidnapped and sacrificed small children to his infernal gods. I'm surprised Ben found out as much as he did. The secrecy concerning that aspect of Hubie and his wife and his house is almost tribal."
"He didn't come by it in the Lot."
"That explains it, then. I suspect his theory is a rather old parapsychological wheeze--that humans manufacture evil just as they manufacture snot or excrement or fingernail parings. That it doesn't go away. Specifically, that the Marsten House may have become a kind of evil dry-cell; a malign storage battery."
"Yes. He expressed it in exactly those terms." She looked at him wonderingly.
He gave a dry chuckle. "We've read the same books. And what do you think, Susan? Is there more than heaven and earth in your philosophy?"
"No," she said with quiet firmness. "Houses are only houses. Evil dies with the perpetration of evil acts."
"You're suggesting that Ben's instability may enable me to lead him down the path to insanity that I am already traversing?"
"No, of course not. I don't think you're insane. But Mr Burke, you must realize--"
"Be quiet."
He had cocked his head forward. She stopped talking and listened. Nothing...except perhaps a creaky board. She looked at him questioningly, and he shook his head. "You were saying?"
"Only that coincidence has made this a poor time for him to exorcise the demons of his youth. There's been a lot of cheap talk going around town since the Marsten House was reoccupied and that store was opened...there's been talk about Ben himself, for that matter. Rites of exorcism have been known to get out of hand and turn on the exorcist. I think Ben needs to get out of this town and I think maybe you could use a vacation from it, Mr Burke."
Exorcism made her think of Ben's request to mention the Catholic priest to Matt. On impulse, she decided not to. The reason he had asked was now clear enough, but it would only be adding fuel to a fire that was, in her opinion, already dangerously high. When Ben asked her--if he ever did--she would say she had forgotten.
"I know how mad it must sound," Matt said. "Even to me, who heard the window go up, and that laugh, and saw the screen lying beside the driveway this morning. But if it will allay your fears any, I must say that Ben's reaction to the whole thing was very sensible. He suggested we put the thing on the basis of a theory to be proved or disproved, and begin by--" He ceased again, listening.
This time the silence spun out, and when he spoke again, the soft certainty in his voice frightened her. "There's someone upstairs."
She listened. Nothing.
"You're imagining things."
"I know my house," he said softly. "Someone is in the guest bedroom...there, you hear?"
And this time she did hear. The audible creak of a board, creaking the way boards in old houses do, for no good reason at all. But to Susan's ears there seemed to be something more--something unutterably sly--in that sound.
"I'm going upstairs," he said.
"No!"
The word came out with no thought. She told herself: Now who's sitting in the chimney corner, believing the wind in the eaves is a banshee?
"I was frightened last night and did nothing and things grew worse. Now I am going upstairs."
"Mr Burke--"
They had both begun to speak in undertones. Tension had wormed into her veins, making her muscles stiff. Maybe there was someone upstairs. A prowler.
"Talk," he said. "After I go, continue speaking. On any subject."
And before she could argue, he was out of his seat and moving toward the hall, moving with a grace that was nearly astounding. He looked back once, but she couldn't read his eyes. He began to go up the stairs.
Her mind felt dazed into unreality by the swift turnaround things had taken. Less than two minutes ago they had been discussing this business calmly, under the rational light of electric bulbs. And now she was afraid. Question: If you put a psychologist in a room with a man who thinks he's Napoleon and leave them there for a year (or ten or twenty), will you end up with two Skinner men or two guys with their hands in their shirts? Answer: Insufficient data.
She opened her mouth and said, "Ben and I were going to drive up Route 1 to Camden on Sunday--you know, the town where they filmed Peyton Place--but now I guess we'll have to wait. They have the most darling little church..."
She found herself droning along with great facility, even though her hands were clenched together in her lap tightly enough to whiten the knuckles. Her mind was clear, still unimpressed with this talk of bloodsuckers and the undead. It was from her spinal cord, a much older network of nerves and ganglia, that the black dread emanated in waves.
SIX
Going up the stairs was the hardest thing Matt Burke had ever done in his life. That was all; that was it. Nothing else even came close. Except perhaps one thing.
As a boy of eight, he had been in a Cub Scout pack. The den mother's house was a mile up the road and going was fine, yes, excellent, because you walked in the late afternoon daylight. But coming home twilight had begun to fall, freeing the shadows to yawn across the road in long, twisty patterns--or, if the meeting was particularly enthusiastic and ran late, you had to walk home in the dark. Alone.
Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym...
There was a ruined church along the way, an old Methodist meetinghouse, which reared its shambles at the far end of a frost-heaved and hummocked lawn, and when you walked past the view of its glaring, senseless windows your footsteps became very loud in your ears and whatever you had been whistling died on your lips and you thought about how it must be inside--the overturned pews, the rotting hymnals, the crumbling altar where only mice now kept the sabbath, and you wondered what might be in there besides mice--what madmen, what monsters. Maybe they were peering out at you with yellow reptilian eyes. And maybe one night watching would not be enough; maybe some night that splintered, crazily hung door would be thrown open, and what you saw standing there would drive you to lunacy at one look.
And you couldn't explain that to your mother and father, who were creatures of the light. No more than you could explain to them how, at the age of three, the spare blanket at the foot of the crib turned into a collection of snakes that lay staring at you with flat and lidless eyes. No child ever conquers those fears, he thought. If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered. And the fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth. Sooner or later you found someone to walk past all the deserted meetinghouses you had to pass between grinning babyhood and grunting senility. Until tonight. Until tonight when you found out that none of the old fears had been staked--only tucked away in their tiny, child-sized coffins with a wild rose on top.
He didn't turn on the light. He mounted the steps, one by one, avoiding the sixth, which creaked. He held on to the crucifix, and his palm was sweaty and slick.
He reached the top and turned soundlessly
to look down the hall. The guest room door was ajar. He had left it shut. From downstairs came the steady murmur of Susan's voice.
Walking carefully to avoid squeaks, he went down to the door and stood in front of it. The basis of all human fears, he thought. A closed door, slightly ajar.
He reached out and pushed it open.
Mike Ryerson was lying on the bed.
Moonlight flooded in the windows and silvered the room, turning it into a lagoon of dreams. Matt shook his head, as if to clear it. Almost it seemed as though he had moved backward in time, that it was the night before. He would go downstairs and call Ben because Ben wasn't in the hospital yet--
Mike opened his eyes.
They glittered for just a moment in the moonlight, silver rimmed with red. They were as blank as washed blackboards. There was no human thought or feeling in them. The eyes are the windows of the soul, Wordsworth had said. If so, these windows looked in on an empty room.
Mike sat up, the sheet falling from his chest, and Matt saw the heavy industrial stitchwork where the M.E. or pathologist had repaired the work of his autopsy, perhaps whistling as he sewed.
Mike smiled, and his canines and incisors were white and sharp. The smile itself was a mere flexing of the muscles around the mouth; it never touched the eyes. They retained their original dead blankness.
Mike said very clearly, "Look at me."
Matt looked. Yes, the eyes were utterly blank. But very deep. You could almost see little silver cameos of yourself in those eyes, drowning sweetly, making the world seem unimportant, making fears seem unimportant--
He stepped backward and cried out, "No! No!"
And held the crucifix out.
Whatever had been Mike Ryerson hissed as if hot water had been thrown in its face. Its arms went up as if to ward off a blow. Matt took a step into the room; Ryerson took a compensatory one backward.
"Get out of here!" Matt croaked. "I revoke my invitation!"
Ryerson screamed, a high, ululating sound full of hate and pain. He took four shambling steps backward. The backs of the knees struck the ledge of the open window, and Ryerson tottered past the edge of balance.
"I will see you sleep like the dead, teacher."
It fell outward into the night, going backward with its hands thrown out above its head, like a diver going off a high board. The pallid body gleamed like marble, in hard and depthless contrast to the black stitches that crisscrossed the torso in a Y pattern.
Matt let out a crazed, terrified wail and rushed to the window and peered out. There was nothing to be seen but the moon-gilded night--and suspended in the air below the window and above the spill of light that marked the living room, a dancing pattern of motes that might have been dust. They whirled, coalesced in a pattern that was hideously humanoid, and then dissipated into nothing.
He turned to run, and that was when the pain filled his chest and made him stagger. He clutched at it and doubled over. The pain seemed to be coming up his arm in steady, pulsing waves. The crucifix swung below his eyes.
He walked out the door holding his forearms crossed before his chest, the chain of the crucifix still caught in his right hand. The image of Mike Ryerson hanging in the dark air like some pallid high-diver hung before him.
"Mr Burke!"
"My doctor is James Cody," he said through lips that were as cold as snow. "It's on the phone reminder. I'm having a heart attack, I think."
He collapsed in the upper hall, facedown.
SEVEN
She dialed the number marked beside jimmy cody, pill-pusher. The legend was written in the neat block capitals she remembered so well from her school days. A woman's voice answered and Susan said, "Is the doctor home? Emergency!"
"Yes," the woman said calmly. "Here he is."
"Dr Cody speaking."
"This is Susan Norton. I'm at Mr Burke's house. He's had a heart attack."
"Who? Matt Burke?"
"Yes. He's unconscious. What should I--"
"Call an ambulance," he said. "In Cumberland that's 841-4000. Stay with him. Put a blanket over him but don't move him. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Will you--"
But the phone clicked, and she was alone.
She called for an ambulance and then she was alone again, faced with going back upstairs to him.
EIGHT
She stared at the stairwell with a trepidation which was amazing to her. She found herself wishing that none of it had happened, not so that Matt could be all right, but so she would not have to feel this sick, shaken fear. Her unbelief had been total--she saw Matt's perceptions of the previous night as something to be defined in terms of her accepted realities, nothing more or less. And now that firm unbelief was gone from beneath her and she felt herself falling.
She had heard Matt's voice and had heard a terrible toneless incantation: I will see you sleep like the dead, teacher. The voice that had spoken those words had no more human quality than a dog's bark.
She went back upstairs, forcing her body through every step. Even the hall light did not help much. Matt lay where she had left him, his face turned sideways so the right cheek lay against the threadbare nap of the hall runner, breathing in harsh, tearing gasps. She bent and undid the top two buttons of his shirt and his breathing seemed to ease a little. Then she went into the guest bedroom to get a blanket.
The room was cool. The window stood open. The bed had been stripped except for the mattress pad, but there were blankets stacked on the top shelf of the closet. As she turned back to the hall, something on the floor near the window glittered in the moonlight and she stooped and picked it up. She recognized it immediately. A Cumberland Consolidated High School class ring. The initials engraved on the inner curve were M.C.R.
Michael Corey Ryerson.
For that moment, in the dark, she believed. She believed it all. A scream rose in her throat and she choked it unvoiced, but the ring tumbled from her fingers and lay on the floor below the window, glinting in the moonlight that rode the autumn dark.
Chapter Ten
The Lot (III)
The town knew about darkness.
It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. The town is an accumulation of three parts which, in sum, are greater than the sections. The town is the people who live there, the buildings which they have erected to den or do business in, and it is the land. The people are Scotch-English and French. There are others, of course--a smattering, like a fistful of pepper thrown in a pot of salt, but not many. This melting pot never melted very much. The buildings are nearly all constructed of honest wood. Many of the older houses are saltboxes and most of the stores are false fronted, although no one could have said why. The people know there is nothing behind those facades just as most of them know that Loretta Starcher wears falsies. The land is granite-bodied and covered with a thin, easily ruptured skin of topsoil. Farming it is a thankless, sweaty, miserable, crazy business. The harrow turns up great chunks of the granite underlayer and breaks on them. In May you take out your truck as soon as the ground is dry enough to support it, and you and your boys fill it up with rocks perhaps a dozen times before harrowing and dump them in the great weed-choked pile where you have dumped them since 1955, when you first took this tiger by the balls. And when you have picked them until the dirt won't come out from under your nails when you wash and your fingers feel huge and numb and oddly large-pored, you hitch your harrow to your tractor and before you've broken two rows you bust one of the blades on a rock you missed. And putting on a new blade, getting your oldest boy to hold up the hitch so you can get at it, the first mosquito of the new season buzzes bloodthirstily past your ear with that eye-watering hum that always makes you think it's the sound loonies must hear just before they kill all their kids or close their eyes on the Interstate and put the gas pedal to the floor or tighten their toe on
the trigger of the .30-.30 they just jammed into their quackers; and then your boy's sweat-slicked fingers slip and one of the other round harrow blades scrapes skin from your arm and looking around in that kind of despairing, heartless flicker of time, when it seems you could just give it all over and take up drinking or go down to the bank that holds your mortgage and declare bankruptcy, at that moment of hating the land and the soft suck of gravity that holds you to it, you also love it and understand how it knows darkness and has always known it. The land has got you, locked up solid got you, and the house, and the woman you fell in love with when you started high school (only she was a girl then, and you didn't know for shit about girls except you got one and hung on to her and she wrote your name all over her book covers and first you broke her in and then she broke you in and then neither one of you had to worry about that mess anymore), and the kids have got you, the kids that were started in the creaky double bed with the splintered headboard. You and she made the kids after the darkness fell--six kids, or seven, or ten. The bank has you, and the car dealership, and the Sears store in Lewiston, and John Deere in Brunswick. But most of all the town has you because you know it the way you know the shape of your wife's breast. You know who will be hanging around Crossen's store in the daytime because Knapp Shoe laid him off and you know who is having woman trouble even before he knows it, the way Reggie Sawyer is having it, with that phone-company kid dipping his wick in Bonnie Sawyer's barrel; you know where the roads go and where, on Friday afternoon, you and Hank and Nolly Gardener can go and park and drink a couple of six-packs or a couple of cases. You know how the ground lies and you know how to get through the Marshes in April without getting the tops of your boots wet. You know it all. And it knows you, how your crotch aches from the tractor saddle when the day's harrowing is done and how the lump on your back was just a cyst and nothing to worry about like the doctor said at first it might be, and how your mind works over the bills that come in during the last week of the month. It sees through your lies, even the ones you tell yourself, like how you are going to take the wife and the kids to Disneyland next year or the year after that, like how you can afford the payments on a new color TV if you cut cordwood next fall, like how everything is going to come out all right. Being in the town is a daily act of utter intercourse, so complete that it makes what you and your wife do in the squeaky bed look like a handshake. Being in the town is prosaic, sensuous, alcoholic. And in the dark, the town is yours and you are the town's and together you sleep like the dead, like the very stones in your north field. There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.