Night Shift

  even if there was just Tookey and me, it was enough. I wouldn't have felt the same about it if the place had been Tookey's Rest. It's crazy but it's true.

  We got this fellow in front of the fire and he got the shakes harder than ever. He hugged onto his knees and his teeth clattered together and a few drops of clear mucus spilled off the end of his nose. I think he was starting to realize that another fifteen minutes out there might have been enough to kill him. It's not the snow, it's the wind-chill factor. It steals your heat.

  "Where did you go off the road?" Tookey asked him. "S-six miles s-s-south of h-here," he said.

  Tookey and I stared at each other, and all of a sudden I felt cold. Cold all over. "You sure?" Tookey demanded. "You came six miles through the snow?"

  He nodded. "I checked the odometer when we came through t-town. I was following directions . . . going to see my wife's ssister . . . in Cumberland . . . never been there before . . . we're from New Jersey . . ."

  New Jersey. If there's anyone more purely foolish than a New Yorker it's a fellow from New Jersey. "Six miles, you're sure?" Tookey demanded.

  "Pretty sure, yeah. I found the turnoff but it was drifted in . . . it was . . ."

  Tookey grabbed him. In the shifting glow of the fire his face looked pale and strained, older than his sixty-six years by ten. "You made a right turn?"

  "Right turn, yeah. My wife--" "Did you see a sign?"

  "Sign?" He looked up at Tookey blankly and wiped the end of his nose. "Of course I did. It was on my instructions. Take Jointner Avenue through Jerusalem's Lot to the 295 entrance ramp." He looked from Tookey to me and back to Tookey again. Outside, the wind whistled and howled and moaned through the eaves. "Wasn't that right, mister?"

  "The Lot," Tookey said, almost too soft to hear. "Oh my God."

  "What's wrong?" the man said. His voice was rising. "Wasn't that right? I mean, the road looked drifted in, but I thought . .

  . if there's a town there, the plows will be out and . . . and then I . . ." He just sort of tailed off.

  "Booth," Tookey said to me, low. "Get on the phone. Call the sheriff."

  "Sure," this fool from New Jersey says, "that's right. What's wrong with you guys, anyway? You look like you saw a ghost."

  Tookey said, "No ghosts in the Lot, mister. Did you tell them to stay in the car?" "Sure I did," he said, sounding injured. "I'm not crazy."

  Well, you couldn't have proved it by me.

  "What's your name?" I asked him. "For the sheriff." "Lumley," he says. "Gerard Lumley."

  He started in with Tookey again, and I went across to the telephone. I picked it up and heard nothing but dead silence. I hit the cutoff buttons a couple of times. Still nothing.

  I came back. Tookey had poured Gerard Lumley another tot of brandy, and this one was going down him a lot smoother. "Was he out?" Tookey asked.

  "Phone's dead."

  "Hot damn," Tookey says, and we look at each other. Outside the wind gusted up, throwing snow against the windows. Lumley looked from Tookey to me and back again.

  "Well, haven't either of you got a car?" he asked. The anxiety was back in his voice. "They've got to run the engine to run the heater. I only had about a quarter of a tank of gas, and it took me an hour and a half to . . . Look, will you answer me?" He stood up and grabbed Tookey's shirt.

  "Mister," Tookey says, "I think your hand just ran away from your brains, there."

  Lumley looked at his hand, at Tookey, then dropped it. "Maine," he hissed. He made it sound like a dirty word about somebody's mother. "All right," he said. "Where's the nearest gas station? They must have a tow truck--"

  "Nearest gas station is in Falmouth Center," I said. "That's three miles down the road from here." "Thanks," he said, a bit sarcastic, and headed for the door, buttoning his coat.

  "Won't be open, though," I added.

  He turned back slowly and looked at us. "What are you talking about, old man?"

  "He's trying to tell you that the station in the Center belongs to Billy Larribee and Billy's out driving the plow, you damn fool," Tookey says patiently. "Now why don't you come back here and sit down, before you bust a gut?"

  He came back, looking dazed and frightened. "Are you telling me you can't . . . that there isn't . . . ?"

  "I ain't telling you nothing," Tookey says. "You're doing all the telling, and if you stopped for a minute, we could think this over."

  "What's this town, Jerusalem's Lot?" he asked. "Why was the road drifted in? And no lights on anywhere?" I said, "Jerusalem's Lot burned out two years back."

  "And they never rebuilt?" He looked like he didn't believe it.

  "It appears that way," I said, and looked at Tookey. "What are we going to do about this?" "Can't leave them out there," he said.

  I got closer to him. Lumley had wandered away to look out the window into the snowy night. "What if they've been got at?" I asked.

  "That may be," he said. "But we don't know it for sure. I've got my Bible on the shelf. You still wear your Pope's medal?"

  I pulled the crucifix out of my shirt and showed him. I was born and raised Congregational, but most folks who live around the Lot wear something--crucifix, St. Christopher's medal, rosary, something. Because two years ago, in the span of

  one dark October month, the Lot went bad. Sometimes, late at night, when there were just a few regulars drawn up around Tookey's fire, people would talk it over. Talk around it is more like the truth. You see, people in the Lot started to disappear. First a few, then a few more, than a whole slew. The schools closed. The town stood empty for most of a year. Oh, a few people moved in--mostly damn fools from out of state like this fine specimen here--drawn by the low property values, I suppose. But they didn't last. A lot of them moved out a month or two after they'd moved in. The others . . . well, they disappeared. Then the town burned flat. It was at the end of a long dry fall. They figure it started up by the Marsten House on the hill that overlooked Jointner Avenue, but no one knows how it started, not to this day. It burned out of control for three days. After that, for a time, things were better. And then they started again.

  I only heard the word "vampires" mentioned once. A crazy pulp truck driver named Richie Messina from over Freeport way was in Tookey's that night, pretty well liquored up. "Jesus Christ," this stampeder roars, standing up about nine feet tall in his wool pants and his plaid shirt and his leather-topped boots. "Are you all so damn afraid to say it out? Vampires! That's what you're all thinking, ain't it? Jesus-jumped-up-Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar! Just like a bunch of kids scared of the movies! You know what there is down there in 'Salem's Lot? Want me to tell you? Want me to tell you?"

  "Do tell, Richie," Tookey says. It had got real quiet in the bar. You could hear the fire popping, and outside the soft drift of November rain coming down in the dark. "You got the floor."

  "What you got over there is your basic wild dog pack," Richie Messina tells us. "That's what you got. That and a lot of old women who love a good spook story. Why, for eighty bucks I'd go up there and spend the night in what's left of that haunted house you're all so worried about. Well, what about it? Anyone want to put it up?"

  But nobody would. Richie was a loudmouth and a mean drunk and no one was going to shed any tears at his wake, but none of us were willing to see him go into 'Salem's Lot after dark.

  "Be screwed to the bunch of you," Richie says. "I got my four-ten in the trunk of my Chevy, and that'll stop anything in Falmouth, Cumberland, or Jerusalem's Lot. And that's where I'm goin'."

  He slammed out of the bar and no one said a word for a while. Then Lamont Henry says, real quiet, "That's the last time anyone's gonna see Richie Messina. Holy God." And Lamont, raised to be a Methodist from his mother's knee, crossed himself.

  "He'll sober off and change his mind," Tookey said, but he sounded uneasy. "He'll be back by closin' time, makin' out it was all a joke."

  But Lamont had the right of that one, because no one ever saw Richie again. His wife t
old the state cops she thought he'd gone to Florida to beat a collection agency, but you could see the truth of the thing in her eyes--sick, scared eyes. Not long after, she moved away to Rhode Island. Maybe she thought Richie was going to come after her some dark night. And I'm not the man to say he might not have done.

  Now Tookey was looking at me and I was looking at Tookey as I stuffed my crucifix back into my shirt. I never felt so old or so scared in my life.

  Tookey said again, "We can't just leave them out there, Booth." "Yeah. I know."

  We looked at each other for a moment longer, and then he reached out and gripped my shoulder. "You're a good man, Booth." That was enough to buck me up some. It seems like when you pass seventy, people start forgetting that you are a man, or that you ever were.

  Tookey walked over to Lumley and said, "I've got a four-wheel-drive Scout. I'll get it out."

  "For God's sake, man, why didn't you say so before?" He had whirled around from the window and was staring angrily at Tookey. "Why'd you have to spend ten minutes beating around the bush?"

  Tookey said, very softly, "Mister, you shut your jaw. And if you get urge to open it, you remember who made that turn onto an unplowed road in the middle of a goddamned blizzard."

  He started to say something, and then shut his mouth. Thick color had risen up in his cheeks. Tookey went out to get his Scout out of the garage. I felt around under the bar for his chrome flask and filled it full of brandy. Figured we might need it before this night was over.

  Maine blizzard--ever been out in one?

  The snow comes flying so thick and fine that it looks like sand and sounds like that, beating on the sides of your car or pickup. You don't want to use your high beams because they reflect off the snow and you can't see ten feet in front of you. With the low beams on, you can see maybe fifteen feet. But I can live with the snow. It's the wind I don't like, when it picks up and begins to howl, driving the snow into a hundred weird flying shapes and sounding like all the hate and pain and fear in the world. There's death in the throat of a snowstorm wind, white death--and maybe something beyond death. That's no sound to hear when you're tucked up all cozy in your own bed with the shutters bolted and the doors locked. It's that much worse if you're driving. And we were driving smack into 'Salem's Lot.

  "Hurry up a little, can't you?" Lumley asked.

  I said, "For a man who came in half frozen, you're in one hell of a hurry to end up walking again."

  He gave me a resentful, baffled look and didn't say anything else. We were moving up the highway at a steady twenty-five miles an hour. It was hard to believe that Billy Larribee had just plowed this stretch an hour ago; another two inches had covered it, and it was drifting in. The strongest gusts of wind rocked the Scout on her springs. The headlights showed a swirling white nothing up ahead of us. We hadn't met a single car.

  About ten minutes later Lumley gasps: "Hey! What's that?"

  He was pointing out my side of the car; I'd been looking dead ahead. I turned, but was a shade too late. I thought I could see some sort of slumped form fading back from the car, back into the snow, but that could have been imagination.

  "What was it? A deer?" I asked.

  "I guess so," he says, sounding shaky. "But its eyes--they looked red." He looked at me. "Is that how a deer's eyes look at night?" He sounded almost as if he were pleading.

  "They can look like anything," I says, thinking that might be true, but I've seen a lot of deer at night from a lot of cars, and never saw any set of eyes reflect back red.

  Tookey didn't say anything.

  About fifteen minutes later, we came to a place where the snowbank on the right of the road wasn't so high because the plows are supposed to raise their blades a little when they go through an intersection.

  "This looks like where we turned," Lumley said, not sounding too sure about it. "I don't see the sign--" "This is it," Tookey answered. He didn't sound like himself at all. "You can just see the top of the signpost."

  "Oh. Sure." Lumley sounded relieved. "Listen, Mr. Tooklander, I'm sorry about being so short back there. I was cold and worried and calling myself two hundred kinds of fool. And I want to thank you both--"

  "Don't thank Booth and me until we've got them in this car," Tookey said. He put the Scout in four-wheel drive and slammed his way through the snowbank and onto Jointner Avenue, which goes through the Lot and out to 295. Snow flew up from the mudguards. The rear end tried to break a little bit, but Tookey's been driving through snow since Hector was a pup. He jockeyed it a bit, talked to it, and on we went. The headlights picked out the bare indication of other tire tracks from time to time, the ones made by Lumley's car, and then they would disappear again. Lumley was leaning forward, looking for his car. And all at once Tookey said, "Mr. Lumley."

  "What?" He looked around at Tookey.

  "People around these parts are kind of superstitious about 'Salem's Lot," Tookey says, sounding easy enough--but I could see the deep lines of strain around his mouth, and the way his eyes kept moving from side to side. "If your people are in the car, why, that's fine. We'll pack them up, go back to my place, and tomorrow, when the storm's over, Billy will be glad to yank your car out of the snowbank. But if they're not in the car--"

  "Not in the car?" Lumley broke in sharply. "Why wouldn't they be in the car?"

  "If they're not in the car," Tookey goes on, not answering, "we're going to turn around and drive back to Falmouth Center and whistle for the sheriff. Makes no sense to go wallowing around at night in a snowstorm anyway, does it?"

  "They'll be in the car. Where else would they be?"

  I said, "One other thing, Mr. Lumley. If we should see anybody, we're not going to talk to them. Not even if they talk to us. You understand that?"

  Very slow, Lumley says, "Just what are these superstitions?"

  Before I could say anything--God alone knows what I would have said--Tookey broke in. "We're there."

  We were coming up on the back end of a big Mercedes. The whole hood of the thing was buried in a snowdrift, and another drift had socked in the whole left side of the car. But the taillights were on and we could see exhaust drifting out of the tailpipe.

  "They didn't run out of gas, anyway," Lumley said.

  Tookey pulled up and pulled on the Scout's emergency brake. "You remember what Booth told you, Lumley."

  "Sure, sure." But he wasn't thinking of anything but his wife and daughter. I don't see how anybody could blame him, either.

  "Ready, Booth?" Tookey asked me. His eyes held on mine, grim and gray in the dashboard lights. "I guess I am," I said.

  We all got out and the wind grabbed us, throwing snow in our faces. Lumley was first, bending into the wind, his fancy topcoat billowing out behind him like a sail. He cast two shadows, one from Tookey's headlights, the other from his own taillights. I was behind him, and Tookey was a step behind me. When I got to the trunk of the Mercedes, Tookey grabbed me.

  "Let him go," he said.

  "Janey! Francie!" Lumley yelled. "Everything okay?" He pulled open the driver's-side door and leaned in. "Everything--" He froze to a dead stop. The wind ripped the heavy door right out of his hand and pushed it all the way open.

  "Holy God, Booth," Tookey said, just below the scream of the wind. "I think it's happened again."

  Lumley turned back toward us. His face was scared and bewildered, his eyes wide. All of a sudden he lunged toward us through the snow, slipping and almost falling. He brushed me away like I was nothing and grabbed Tookey.

  "How did you know?" he roared. "Where are they? What the hell is going on here?"

  Tookey broke his grip and shoved past him. He and I looked into the Mercedes together. Warm as toast it was, but it wasn't going to be for much longer. The little amber low-fuel light was glowing. The big car was empty. There was a child's Barbie doll on the passenger's floormat. And a child's ski parka was crumpled over the seatback.

  Tookey put his hands over his face . . . and then he was gone. Lum
ley had grabbed him and shoved him right back into the snowbank. His face was pale and wild. His mouth was working as if he had chewed down on some bitter stuff he couldn't yet unpucker enough to spit out. He reached in and grabbed the parka.

  "Francie's coat?" he kind of whispered. And then loud, bellowing: "Francie's coat!" He turned around, holding it in front of him by the little fur-trimmed hood. He looked at me, blank and unbelieving. "She can't be out without her coat on, Mr. Booth. Why . . . why . . . she'll freeze to death."

  "Mr. Lumley--"

  He blundered past me, still holding the parka, shouting: "Francie! Janey! Where are you? Where are youuu?"