"Leukemia?" Matt asked.
"Yes--it was the only thing that fit. But I've never heard of a case of mortician's complexion in conjunction with anemia. And rigor mortis was late and extremely shallow, which is a condition most common with people who are prone to hypertension--high blood pressure."
"Did he have a previous history of anemia?"
"Hell, no! I gave him a physical myself when he went out for little league baseball. That also tends to make me think that the kid was maybe developing leukemia. The tests he was given when he was admitted show negative, but they were general diagnostic tests, not very conclusive. If the boy had lived one more day..." He trailed off for a moment. "Anyway, I'm in correspondence with three heavy heads in the area. If the condition has been noted before in pm leukemia patients, I think that will solve it. I still might write it up, though."
He shook his head. "The mother and father went into hysterics when they saw him, and I can't blame them. That kid didn't look any more dead than, well, than you do. He looked ready to get right up and start shagging flies."
"His father made that very clear at the funeral," Matt said. "I don't suppose Danny had any innocent-looking marks on his neck?"
Jimmy Cody had been rearranging medicine samples in a glass case, and now he looked around sharply.
"Why, now that you mention it, the boy did have a couple of small scratches just above the carotid vein. How did you know that?"
Matt smiled, although he felt a superstitious uneasiness in spite of himself, and felt the crawl of hard bumps up his forearms--somewhere a goose was walking across his grave. But he certainly was not going to show Jimmy Cody that feeling.
"It seems to me you have a little more technical literature to read, Jimmy. I recommend the public library. A man by the name of Bram Stoker described all of Danny Glick's symptoms almost seventy-five years ago."
"Are you kidding me?"
"I certainly hope so," Matt said. "The name of the book is Dracula."
In Chapter 8 (Ben [III]), there are several scenes which failed to make it to the finished book. Here are a few:
When he woke up, it was quarter after four. His body was beaded with sweat, and he had kicked the upper sheet away. Still, he felt clearheaded again. The events of that early morning seemed to be far away and dim, and Matt Burke's fancies seemed no more than a harmless, antique whimsey.
Still, Mike Bush [Ryerson] was dead. That was a fact.
He went down the hall to the shower with a towel slung over his shoulder, and Weasel looked out of his room. His eyes were bleary, and he was holding a gallon jug of zinfandel red by the neck.
"Ben, how are you, buddy?"
"All right, Weasel."
"Come on in an' have a drink. Awful thing about Mike Bush. I knew his mom well. She was a lovely woman."
"Maybe later, Weasel. I want to get a shower."
"Sure, buddy. Say--"
Ben, who had gotten to the bathroom door, looked back over his shoulder.
"I heard ol' Mabel Werts blabbing her jowls to Joe Crane when I was down to the store, an' she was saying that maybe both Mike and that poor little Glick boy might have had some rare disease--"
"That's bullshit, Weasel."
"Yeah...still, you shower good, buddy. You never know what germs dead people have."
Ben went in and shut the door. Undressing, he reflected that the telephone was the most primitive form of communication in a small town. The comment Matt Burke had made to Jimmy Cody had been enough to set the ball rolling. Like that game they played on rainy days when they were kids--Whisper. Start off with "Frankie Winchell has pimples" and by the time it got to the other side of the room you had "Francis Waylon is pregnant." Parkins Gillespie whispers to his wife, his wife whispers to Ann Norton, Ann whispers to Mabel Werts, and Mabel sends it into the streets in a fright-wig.
He turned on the showerhead.
When he went downstairs, Eva said: "Matt Burke called about an hour ago. Wants you to call him back. He said there was no hurry."
"Okay."
Several of the oldsters who roomed at Eva's were eating their supper at the table--beans and sardines--and asked him to sit down and tell them about Mike. Ben did, not because he wanted to tell his story again, but because he was curious to find how far the rumors had gotten.
"I heard they may throw a quarantine over us," Grover Verrill said, holding a sardine by its tail for a moment before popping it into his toothless mouth.
"Where did you hear that?" Ben asked.
"Joe Crane was tellin' it down at Crossen's," Grover said, and looked over at Vinnie Upshaw. "Ain't you been down there today?"
"No; goddamn leg's tighter'n a tick. May go down this evenin'."
"Why would they want to throw a quarantine?" Mabe Mullican asked.
"They think he may have had one of them funny diseases," Grover said. "The berryberries or Hong Kong mumps or some shit like that," he added sagely.
"Think he mighta caught it off that Glick kid, do they?" Mabe asked.
"Well, as Joe told it--"
Ben slipped away to the phone in the hall and dialed Matt's number. The other end was picked up after a single ring. "Hello? Ben?"
"Yes."
"I talked to Carl Foreman."
"What did he say?"
"Daniel Glick was cosmeticized, but not embalmed. The father wouldn't allow it."
"Which means he..." Ben suddenly became aware that he could be heard in the kitchen.
Matt mistook his reticence for the delicacy they had both shown when approaching the subject.
"It means that Danny Glick could be Undead. He could have sucked Mike Bush's blood." His voice rose a note. "We're talking about vampires, Ben. And all the old legends say they can only be stopped by three things: sunlight, holy artifacts, or a stake through the heart. I don't know about the others--perhaps the Torah would stop a Jewish vampire--but I suspect evisceration would substitute nicely for the stake. But Danny Glick was not eviscerated! He was not embalmed! He could be--"
"Settle down," Ben said.
"Yes," Matt said. "Yes, I'm sorry for that. Are there people close enough to hear?"
"Yes."
"You're coming over tonight?"
"Yes."
"Good. Good." The relief in Matt's voice was nearly tangible. "Can you see how important it is that Mike Bush is given...everything?"
"Yes."
"There's another matter, too. Something I just thought of."
"What?"
"Not over the phone. Will you be here...before dark?"
"Yes, okay." Ben hesitated, and then said what had been on his mind. "I may bring Susan with me."
"Do you mean tell her?"
"Is it a bad idea?"
"I don't know...no, that might be all right. If you think it's best, all right."
"Okay," Ben said. "Maybe I'll bring her and the three of us can...can discuss things."
"All right, Ben. I'm sorry if I sounded hysterical."
"No, you didn't. I'll see you, Matt."
"Okay. Good-by."
"By."
Ben hung up thoughtfully. The fears were not so distant or so curiously antique now. The word they had both avoided--even the night before--had been spoken.
Vampire.
From the German word wampyre, meaning devil. Night-creature, pallid as the moon. Seriocomic hero of a thousand poorly-photographed B-pictures, destined to their own nighttime living death at drive-in theaters across the United States. Mainstay of the comic books of the 50s, when Ben had grown up, and now of the 70s, when he had returned to the place of his growing-up.
Vampire.
Dweller in cold marble tombs and crypts of earth and stone. Propitiating its own legend, even in the face of cold science, thriving even in an age of rockets, computers, DNA analysis. Flittering into ten thousand bedrooms of the mind, where voluptuous teenage girls lay in the grip of nightmares with their nightgowns twisted above their alabaster thighs.
&nb
sp; Vampire.
The old men--and Eva--were looking at him, but he hardly noticed them going out. The word clanged in his mind like a churchyard bell.
In the original ending to Susan (II), Count Barlow (who is called Sarlinov in the original manuscript) and Straker meet out near the end of town to discuss how the novel's heroes had been faring.
The Deep Cut Road skirts the marshes to the southwest of the town's center, and then winds crazily through a series of folded ridges and sudden, knife-cut dips, and here the country was so wild that even the ubiquitous trailers were left behind. It was here that the big fire of 1951 burned at its most feverish, destructive pitch, and the growth has come back and formed into fervid tangles and nightmare patterns which lurch over and under huge deadfalls like a drunkard's stagger. This country continues for only five miles or so, but it is five miles of the wildest land in the area. Now, with much of the fall foliage dashed from the trees and the wildly-leaning trunks painted by the moonlight, the woods looked like nothing so much as a three-dimensional maze constructed by a madman.
At nearly midnight on that Friday night, a black Packard--either a '39 or a '40--was parked somewhere along this stretch of road, idling quietly. The exhaust drew a wavering line in the dark. A tall shadow--Straker--stood with one foot on the driver's side running board, smoking one of his Turkish cigarettes.
Something stirred in the air, darker even than the pines that formed the scene's backdrop. A large crow, or perhaps a bat. Its form seemed to shift, elongate, and change. For a moment it seemed oddly insubstantial, as if it might disappear altogether. And then there was a second shadow, standing beside the first.
"Our father has been kind," Straker remarked.
"Be it ever so," remarked the other. His hair was now a vigorous black, with the faintest speckles of gray at the temples. "Mr Ben Mears?"
"In the hospital."
"And Mr Tibbits?"
"In the constable's lock-up. Mr Bush will attend to him later."
"Burke is out of the way?"
"Yes. Not dead, but also in the hospital. He had a heart attack."
"It is sufficient. He had the most knowledge; and a certain...persuasiveness."
"But no zealotry."
"Ah, no." The figure with the vigorous black hair laughed softly. He did not in the least look like Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee. "No zealotry there."
"Is Master Glick--"
"Master Glick is about his business. Yes. Yes, indeed." The dark man laughed again.
Straker asked humbly: "Is it my time yet?"
"Almost, my good servant. It is almost time."
"Our father is kind," Straker said, and there was the faintest touch of resignation in his voice.
"Be it ever so."
Together, in the darkness, they seemed to merge into a single shadow.
In The Lot (III), we have this scene of Ruthie Crockett being visited by Dud Rogers, and another of the McDougall baby visiting his mother.
Ruthie Crockett's shortie nightgown had twisted up above her thighs, showing a darker patch at their juncture that had been there for less than two years. Her perfect adolescent breasts rose and fell slowly in her deep sleep.
It took a long time for the soft beating on her window to awaken her, and even then she never woke fully. It was in a dream that she saw the oddly cocked head and behind it the twisted, hunched back of Dud Rogers.
His eyes glittered over her, filling with the night-reality of her slumbrous vitality, so deep that even in deepest sleep no cool hint of mortality could touch it. Her breasts pressed against each other in milky curves at the bodice of her nightdress.
"Ruthie...please, Ruthie, let me in a minute. Let me in."
And she, still dreaming of the boy who had just the previous evening parked with her and run his hands over her body until it seemed ready to shriek aloud with painful pleasure, seemed to see his clear face and his straight back instead of Dud's, and as she slid the window open and held out her sleeping arms, the flame leaped up in her like coal oil splashed into an open hearth and his arms were around her and there were no negatives now, negatives were swept away, impossible. His lips found the soft column of her throat, and for a single, darkly enchanted moment, she could hear the soft and eager champing of his tongue against her skin, laving it, preparing it for some unknown and unexpected entry.
His teeth dented against her throat...paused...pierced.
Orgasm shook her. Fierce, alien, compelling beyond all compulsion. And again. And again. So, on and on, down dark hallways, until all thought of her flesh was lost, drowned in a sweet green singing that rose and rose, bearing her down into darkness, unbearable in its sweet repulsiveness.
In her dream, her son had come back to her.
She lay in her own bed again, because Roy had taken her home. He had driven her home heavily sedated, sitting on the far right-hand side of the front seat with her hands in her lap. Roy asked her if she would like something to eat. She said no thank you. Her eyes, moving listlessly around the dining nook of the trailer and the living room beyond, saw that all sign of the baby was gone: Playpen, toy basket, Raggedy Andy doll, the caterpillar, the high chair where she had tried to feed him back to life.
No thank you, she had said, I want to go to sleep.
And now in this dream Randy was scratching at the window and she rushed to let him in because it was night and cold and her baby boy was naked.
She opened the window and he crawled into her arms--never mind how he got up to that high window, it doesn't matter in dreams--and nuzzled at her neck like a little puppy dog.
And he was cold, so cold--but alive, not like this morning. His eyes were open and they were so pretty that you could hardly look away from them and he had been cutting new teeth, too.
Come to bed, baby, cover up warm with Momma.
And as she pulled the blankets over them a heavy sweetness--fulfillment--came to her and it was all right again because this was real and the rest had been a dream.
But you're so cold, she said, hugging Randy to her, and her body heat did not seem to bring any vitality to him.
Teeth, nuzzling her neck.
Is oo hungwy? Want Momma to fix oo a wittle snackie?
But too hard to get up. And surely she was meant to nourish her own, and let him grow strong. She was going to be a good mother from now on. Such a scare she had had!
Leaning back on her pillow, drowsing off, she gave her son suck. In a last moment of belated fright, of near reality, she glanced over at the mirror which ran the length of her dressing table and in the glimmering light saw her own ecstatic face, eyes burning with a dark love that verged on fanaticism, and her arms cradling--nothing.
Her eyes searched for him in the crook of the arm and found him, her son with his tiny body lying on the swell of her breast, his working mouth pressed to her throat.
I'm never going to hit you again, Randy, she thought, just before drowsing off.
Never again.
In Chapter 12 (Mark), both Mark and Susan explore the Marsten House, plotting to kill Barlow. However, in the published novel, the house is still a shambles when Susan peers in the window. In the original manuscript, there has been some renovation, detailed below:
She peered in through the break in the shutters. "Wow," she murmured.
"What is it?" he asked anxiously. Even standing on tiptoe, he wasn't quite tall enough to peer in.
She tried stumblingly to explain. Of course, neither of them knew that Parker [Larry] Crockett, feeling more and more like a man in the devil's power, had been acting on Straker's orders--orders that unvaryingly specified pick-up and delivery after dark. The invoices and bills of lading were always correct to the final letter, and payment was always to be made in cash--and Straker calculated with devilish accuracy, including sums for tipping porters and drivers. Drivers were hard to find, also. The harried Crockett found himself having to cast further and further afield for haulers and he found none that would do the job mo
re than once. Royal Snow had laughed in his face and said, "I wouldn't go back to that hell-house for a million bucks. Not if you drove the million up to my back door in a pickup. Get someone else."
The triumph of owning the hot property downstate had even gone a bit sour in his mouth. Looking at the duly-executed papers in his safe-deposit box somehow didn't compensate for the looks on the country-boys' faces when they came into his office to collect Straker's money. Parker knew that some of the deliveries were paintings--even when crated and covered with brown paper, the shape and feel of a painting was unmistakable. He suspected that the other crates, some of them picked up at the Portland docks, some at the Gates Falls railhead, contained furniture.
On Friday evening, the two men Parker had hired from Harlow had not returned--instead, Straker had shown up, driving the U-Haul.
"Where are those two guys?" Parker had asked. "I got their money..." He indicated the sealed white envelopes with a finger that shook slightly. Straker made that happen, damn him. For the first time in his long and not-so-straight business life, Parker Crockett felt manipulated, and he did not like it.
"They were curious," Straker said, smiling his wolfish smile. "Like Bluebeard's wife."
"Where are they?" Parker asked again, aware that he was afraid Straker might tell him the truth.
"I've paid them," Straker said. "You needn't worry. You can keep that, if you like," he added carelessly. There was two hundred dollars in each envelope.
Parker said deliberately: "If the State Police or Homer McCaslin shows up here, I want you to know I'm not going to cover up a goddamned thing. You've exceeded our agreement."
Straker had thrown back his head and roared out his humorless, black laughter. "You are a precious man, Mr Crockett. Precious. You needn't fear the authorities. Indeed, no." The mockery of humor disappeared from his face like a dream. "If you must fear anything, fear your own curiosity. Do not be like those two dirt-grubbers tonight...or Bluebeard's wife. There is a saying in our country: he who knows little is a sparrow; and the sparrows abide."
And Parker Crockett asked no more questions. His daughter was sick in bed, and he asked no questions about that, either.