Salem's Lot

  "Still, you say, this is not enough. And it is not. In the end, it is your own wretched faith that will undo you. It is weak...soft...rotten. It is no longer a defense against the evils that are in your world, if it ever was. You yourself, acolyte and preserver of the flame, doubt the worth of the flame that you guard. You preach of love and there is no love. I spit on love!" He cried it, his voice rising in a sudden and wrenching flight that held notes of madness. "Love, the talisman of White! What is it? Words and pressings of flesh and barnyard copulation! The rest is mere presumption! It has failed!" And now that voice, as resourceful as a cathedral organ, had taken on accents of triumph, and it was impossible to tell if they were real or counterfeit.

  "Always you assume good is greater than evil, but it is not so. Goodness, dear Father Callahan, requires the act of faith. Evil requires only that one wait. It is loose in the world, as omnipresent as the wind. You know that, but you do not know of good. And when the moment comes, it will be check to the king...and black wins all!"

  The voice rose to a scream that made them all flinch, and then the voice was silent. The tape spooled on vacantly for a sheaf of moments, and then another voice spoke--Susan's voice. The cool, clear accents were the same, complete to the faint Maine accent of slurred r's. Yet for all that, it was a travesty, a husk, a bad imitation, a talking doll speaking in Susan's voice.

  "Come to me, Ben. Let me fuck you. Wait until dark and I'll fuck you. Fuck-fuck-fuck. Father Callahan, too. Would you like a piece of it, Father? Let me slip my hand under that black robe and start to--"

  Ben pulled the tape recorder off the shelf, barely aware that he was screaming. Something inside it popped and flared and the words ran down to a grotesquely deepening basso, and still he didn't, couldn't stop. He kicked it, sending one of the reels flying, unreeling tape. He chased it, kicked it again, chased it, kicked it again, chased it--

  Hands on his shoulders, shaking him. "Ben, stop it! Stop it! Stop it!"

  He glanced up, dazed. Jimmy's face in front of his, contorted. Weeping?

  "I'm sorry," he said, his voice dull and distant in his own ears. "Sorry."

  He looked around. Mark, his fists still balled, his mouth frozen in the twist of someone who has bitten something rotten; Jimmy, his oddly boyish face streaked with sweat and tears; Father Donald Callahan, his face pallid and drawn into an agonized rictus. And they were all looking at him.

  Later, when Barlow has Callahan cornered in the Petrie kitchen, the published novel takes a different turn; the original plays out below.

  The cross's glow was dying.

  He looked at it, eyes widening. Fear leaped into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. His head jerked up and he stared at Sarlinov. He was coming forward, his smile wide, almost voluptuous.

  "Stay back," Callahan said hoarsely, retreating a step. "I command it, in the name of God."

  Sarlinov laughed at him.

  The glow in the cross was only a thin and guttering light in a cruciform shape. The shadows had crept across the vampire's face again, masking his features in strangely barbaric lines and triangles under the sharp cheekbones.

  Callahan took another step backward, and his buttocks bumped the kitchen table, which was set against the wall.

  "Nowhere left to go," Sarlinov murmured sadly, but his dark eyes bubbled with infernal mirth. "Sad to see a man's faith fail. Ah, well..."

  The cross trembled in his hand and suddenly all its light was gone. It was only a piece of plaster that his mother had bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper's price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough power, seemingly, to smash down walls and shatter stones, was gone. The muscles remembered the thrumming but could not duplicate it.

  Sarlinov's voice came out of the dark--Callahan shifted his eyes with frenzied futility to locate its position exactly and couldn't. Sarlinov was toying with him now, playing cat-and-mouse.

  Can he hear my heart beating? Callahan wondered. Like a rabbit, caught in a trap? I pray to God not.

  "It is the malaise of you Americans," Sarlinov's voice said from a new place. "You believe in toothpastes and the spray for armpits and for wonderful pills, but you do not believe in Powers. Instead, you have grown rich on darkness, like a fat pig that has grown fat on garbage. It is ripe, swelled, ready to be bled."

  God, Callahan thought, I'm begging, pleading, for You to get me out of this. Not for myself but for...for...

  Yet there was no intensity to his thoughts, none of the feeling of transmitting that had come to him as a young man; no feeling that the words were going further than the cage of his skull.

  Something clattered to the floor.

  The cross.

  "Ah, you've dropped it," Sarlinov said, and now he was far to the right of where Callahan had expected him, nearly behind him. "But it doesn't matter; you've forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross...or the flag...or the bread and wine...others...only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the flag cloth, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. Is it not so? If you had dropped it before, you should have beaten me yet another night. I rather suspected you would. In a way, I had hoped it might be so. It has been long since I met an opponent of any real worth."

  Another silence, dreadful. There was no sound of movement, none. The vampire was more silent than a cat in its deadly stalk.

  Callahan suddenly began to grope on the table, running his hands lightly across its surface, his fingers trying to remember where it was, the knife Mrs Petrie had used to cut the sandwiches.

  He remembered Matt saying, Some things are worse than death.

  His fingertips read breadcrumbs like braille, slid over a plate, touched the rim of a coffee cup. Where was it? Where? For the love of God!

  And as he touched it and his fingers closed around the wooden handle, Sarlinov spoke again, almost at his elbow.

  "But there must be an end to talking now," Sarlinov said with real regret. "There must be--"

  "In God's name!" Callahan cried, and swung the knife in a great, rising arc.

  Light suddenly streamed from the blade in bright effulgence. Sarlinov's words were broken off into a jagged scream, and for one split second, Callahan could see the blazing knife-blade mirrored in each of his nighted eyes.

  The blade grazed his forehead, and blood streamed forth in a welling stream.

  "It's too late, shaman!" Sarlinov snarled. "You pay a thousand times for your flawed belief, and for daring to cut me--"

  And with no thought (he was, after all, a thinking man), Callahan plunged the knife into his own chest, not feeling it, seeing the impotent fury in the thing's eyes--but it dared not come near.

  He withdrew the blade, and plunged it in again, with all that remained of his flagging strength. As thought began to ebb, he realized that his faith--some of it--had come back and he might have cheated himself of victory in his final, instinctive effort to save his soul from the hell of the Undead; and that was the most serious denial of faith of all.

  Then thought was gone and he fell forward on the haft of the knife and he closed his eyes and let himself go off to see what gods there were.

  This scene occurs when Jimmy and Ben are driving back into Momson.

  As they drew closer to Momson, an almost palpable cloud formed just above their heads, like the ones that used to form over the heads of Huey, Dewie, and Louie in the old Donald Duck comic books when they were angry. When Jimmy pulled off the turnpike at the large green reflectorized sign that read ROUTE 12 MOMSON CUMBERLAND CUMBERLAND CTR Ben reflected that this was the way he and Susan had come home after their first date--she had wanted to see something with a car chase in it--and he had told her about the childhood experience that had finally gotten him pregnant with book. That book seemed very pale now.

  "It's gone bad," Jimmy said. His boyish face looked pale and frightened and angry. "Christ, you can almost smell it."

  And you could, although the smell was mental rather tha
n physical; a psychic whiff of tombs.

  Route 12 was nearly deserted. On the way in, they passed Win Purinton's milk truck, and he lifted his hand in a puzzled, bemused kind of wave. They passed a few fast-moving cars going the other way, obviously transients. The houses on outer Momson Avenue had a deserted, shut-up look.

  As they entered town, Jimmy said in an almost absurdly relieved tone: "Look there. Crossen's is open."

  It was. Milt was out front, gassing up a car with a New Hampshire license plate, and Grover Verrill was standing next to him, dressed in a yellow lobsterman's slicker.

  "Don't see the rest of the crew, though," Jimmy added.

  Milt glanced up at them and waved, and Ben thought he saw lines of strain on both old men's faces. The CLOSED sign was still posted inside the door of Foreman's Mortuary. The hardware store was also closed. The diner was open, however; as they flashed by, Ben caught a glimpse of Pauline Dickens serving someone coffee. The rest of the place looked empty.

  The local police car was pulled up by the Municipal Building and Parkins Gillespie, also in a slicker, was standing beside it. He did not wave, but watched them go by with hooded eyes.

  The downtown streets were empty--not unusual in itself; it was a small town, and it was raining--but many shades were drawn, giving the town a brooding, secret look.

  "They've been at it, all right," Ben said.

  Later, they enter the Petrie house and encounter the remains of Callahan.

  "Good dear Christ," Jimmy whispered. His arms turned to water; the bats went crashing over the floor like swollen pick-up sticks.

  Ben only stared, frozen.

  The bodies of Mr and Mrs Petrie lay where they had fallen, undisturbed. But Sarlinov had vented his full fury on Callahan, who had branded him and then cheated him at the moment of his victory.

  His headless corpse was nailed to the dining room door, in a hideous parody of the crucifixion.

  Ben closed his eyes, tried to swallow, and found nothing to swallow on. His mouth was like glass. Think of it as a cut of meat at the delicatessen, he told himself sickly. Think of it as--

  He dropped his own armload and ran for the sink.

  Faintly, he heard Jimmy cry out in a choked voice: "What kind of a man is he?"

  Ben raised himself on trembling arms and ran water into the sink. As if from a great distance, he heard his voice say: "Not a man at all."

  The truth of it finally struck home to both of them, with a great and iron weight, like the slamming of a huge door.

  When Jimmy and Mark begin working on taking care of the vampires, they manage more than pulling Roy McDougall out into the sun, as this section shows:

  Roy McDougall's car was standing in the driveway of the trailer lot on the Bend Road, and seeing it there on a weekday made Jimmy suspect the worst.

  He and Mark got out into the rain without a word. Jimmy took his black bag, and Mark brought several of the freshly sharpened stakes and a hammer with a two-pound head from the trunk. Jimmy mounted the rickety steps and tried the bell. It didn't work, and so he knocked instead. The pounding roused no one, either in the McDougall trailer or in the neighboring one twenty yards down--although there was a car in that yard, also.

  Jimmy tried the storm door, and it was locked. "Give me that hammer," he said.

  Mark handed it over, and Jimmy smashed the glass to the right of the knob, whacking it out with two solid blows. He reached through and unsnapped the catch. The inside door was unlocked. They went in.

  The smell was definable instantly--a dead giveaway. Jimmy felt his nostrils cringe against it, to try (unsuccessfully) to shut it out. The smell was not as strong as it had been in the basement of the Marsten House, but it was just as basically offensive--the smell of rot, of deadness. A wet, putrefied smell. Jimmy found himself suddenly remembering when, as boys, he and his buddies had gone out on their bikes during spring vacation to pick up the returnable beer and soft drink bottles the retreating snow had uncovered. In one of these (an Orange Crush bottle) he saw a small, decayed field mouse which had been attracted by the sweetness, perhaps, and had then been unable to get out. He had gotten a whiff of it and had immediately turned away and thrown up. This smell was plangently like that--sickish sweet and decayed sour mixed together and fermenting wildly. He felt his gorge rise.

  "They're here," Mark said.

  They went through the place methodically--kitchen, dining nook, living room, each bedroom. They opened closets as they went. Jimmy thought they had found something in the master bedroom closet, but it was only a heap of dirty clothes.

  "No cellar?" Mark asked.

  "No...but there might be a crawl space."

  They went around the back and saw the small door that swung inward set into the trailer's rudimentary foundation. It was fastened with a padlock. Jimmy knocked it off with five hard blows from the hammer, and when he pushed open the half-trap, the smell hit them in a wave of corruption.

  "There they are," Mark said.

  Peering in, Jimmy could just see three sets of feet, like corpses lined up on a battlefield. One set wore work boots, one wore knitted slippers, and the third set--tiny feet indeed--were bare.

  Family scene, he thought crazily. Norman Rockwell, where are you? Unreality washed over him. The baby, he thought. How am I supposed to do this to a little baby? Matt would do it. I'm not Matt. I'm a doctor. I'm supposed to be a healer, not a...You are healing. You're giving them back their souls so they can leave whatever awful place they're in.

  "I'm smaller," Mark said. "I'll go in."

  He dropped to his knees and wriggled through the half-trap.

  "Get the...the little one first," Jimmy heard himself saying. "Let's get that over with."

  Mark grabbed Randy McDougall's ankles and pulled him out.

  He was naked and dirty, his small body scratched and the knees lacerated to the point of horror. God knows where the fever in his body had caused him to crawl on them. As soon as the daylight struck his body, his eyelids fluttered and he began to writhe.

  Mark gave him a last convulsive jerk out of the half-trap and then stood away, his face a writhing mask of revulsion and grim vengeance.

  The baby writhed on the drifts of wet leaves like a fish hooked and pulled up on the bank. Tiny mewling noises escaped its throat as the light burned it. Inside the crawl space, his mother stirred and moaned and made an inarticulate cry. Her feet and hands were twitching, Jimmy saw, as if an electric current had been passed through them.

  Randy screamed, lips peeling back over baby teeth that had suddenly developed into puppy fangs, sharp enough to rip skin.

  "Hold him," he said to Mark.

  Mark hesitated for a moment. The thought of touching the thing they had dragged out of the darkness showed on his face. Then he dropped to his knees and pinned the arms.

  Jimmy had taken his stethoscope, and now he put the earpieces in place, and he applied the pick-up to that twisting chest. Randy's small head lashed from side to side, gnashing at the air. His eyelids twitched with the roll of the eyes in their sockets.

  No heartbeat.

  "In the name of God," Jimmy said, and brought the stake down with both hands in a hard, sweeping curve.

  It was very quick.

  The body jerked upward, the eyelids flew open, and then the body settled back tiredly and was still. Only a dead little boy remained in front of them...but one that had been dead for a week, and unembalmed. The body swelled in front of them, and suddenly a ghastly, noxious burp escaped the mouth, and they both turned away from it. The cheeks sagged, and the eyes fell inward.

  Mark gave a horrified little cry and turned away, but Jimmy felt comforted. He had seen this: it was a normal (although accelerated) process--decay. Nature reclaiming her component parts. Full circle. Something inside him loosened, and he could believe that, even if they were not doing God's work, that they were doing nature's.

  "Are you all right?" he asked Mark. "Can you keep going?"

  "Yes." H
e turned and looked at Jimmy with wan, horrified eyes. "It's not like the movies, is it?"

  "No."

  He glanced down at the small corpse. It had caught up with itself, and was finished. The blood which had gushed from around the stake had clotted, then powdered. The entry wound itself looked shriveled and old. He touched the stake and it wiggled easily, with none of the tension he would have found in, say, the handle of a knife planted in a new corpse. The tissues had relaxed like old rubber bands.

  He looked at Mark and said: "Poor kid. He's not pretty, but this is the way he should be. This is right."

  Mark nodded. "Yes. I know that. It's only hard for a minute." He looked at the other two, in their pitiful mock-grave. "How are we going to handle them? If they thrash, I can't hold them."

  "I will, if you can drive the stake. Can you do that?"

  "Yes."

  Jimmy crawled in, holding his breath against the stench, and pulled out Sandy McDougall. Mark used the hammer quickly and mercifully. Roy McDougall was more difficult. He had been a strong man, in the prime of his life, and his thrashings and buckings were like a maddened horse. The predatory lungings of his bared teeth were frightening. A square strike on the wrist could sever the hand completely. Mark made two false starts; one nick in the shoulder and one stroke that dug a shallow channel across McDougall's rib cage. Both of them unleashed freshets of blood, and his screams attained a horrible, foghorn quality that unnerved Jimmy almost totally.

  In panicky desperation, Jimmy threw himself across Roy McDougall's stomach and thighs and yelled: "Quick! Hit him now!"

  Mark brought the stake down and smashed it into the flesh with one heavy blow from the hammer. For a moment McDougall's thrashings intensified, tossing Jimmy off as if he were a piece of chaff, and then he trembled all over and lay still. One of his hands closed tightly, clutching a useless fistful of leaves, and they both watched it, fascinated, until it loosened.

  "Let's drag them back inside there," Jimmy said.

  "Shouldn't we take them to the river--?"

  "We'll leave the stakes in them. I think that will do it; they're only Undead, and their hearts are destroyed. And if we have to take time to do that with each of them, we'll never get done."