Salem's Lot

by Stephen King

  "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. Lumley 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?"

  I gave Tookey my hand and pulled him onto his feet. "Are you all--"

  "Never mind me," he says. "We've got to get hold of him, Booth."

  We went after him as fast as we could, which wasn't very fast with the snow hip-deep in some places. But then he stopped and we caught up to him.

  "Mr Lumley--" Tookey started, laying a hand on his shoulder.

  "This way," Lumley said. "This is the way they went. Look!"

  We looked down. We were in a kind of dip here, and most of the wind went right over our heads. And you could see two sets of tracks, one large and one small, just filling up with snow. If we had been five minutes later, they would have been gone.

  He started to walk away, his head down, and Tookey grabbed him back. "No! No, Lumley!"

  Lumley turned his wild face up to Tookey's and made a fist. He drew it back...but something in Tookey's face made him falter. He looked from Tookey to me and then back again.

  "She'll freeze," he said, as if we were a couple of stupid kids. "Don't you get it? She doesn't have her jacket on and she's only seven years old--"

  "They could be anywhere," Tookey said. "You can't follow those tracks. They'll be gone in the next drift."

  "What do you suggest?" Lumley yells, his voice high and hysterical. "If we go back to get the police, she'll freeze to death! Francie and my wife!"

  "They may be frozen already," Tookey said. His eyes caught Lumley's. "Frozen, or something worse."

  "What do you mean?" Lumley whispered. "Get it straight, goddamn it! Tell me!"

  "Mr Lumley," Tookey says, "there's something in the Lot--"

  But I was the one who came out with it finally, said the word I never expected to say. "Vampires, Mr Lumley. Jerusalem's Lot is full of vampires. I expect that's hard for you to swallow--"

  He was staring at me as if I'd gone green. "Loonies," he whispers. "You're a couple of loonies." Then he turned away, cupped his hands around his mouth, and bellowed, "FRANCIE! JANEY!" He started floundering off again. The snow was up to the hem of his fancy coat.

  I looked at Tookey. "What do we do now?"

  "Follow him," Tookey says. His hair was plastered with snow, and he did look a little bit loony. "I can't just leave him out here, Booth. Can you?"

  "No," I say. "Guess not."

  So we started to wade through the snow after Lumley as best we could. But he kept getting further and further ahead. He had his youth to spend, you see. He was breaking the trail, going through that snow like a bull. My arthritis began to bother me something terrible, and I started to look down at my legs, telling myself: A little further, just a little further, keep goin', damn it, keep goin'...

  I piled right into Tookey, who was standing spread-legged in a drift. His head was hanging and both of his hands were pressed to his chest.

  "Tookey," I say, "you okay?"

  "I'm all right," he said, taking his hands away. "We'll stick with him, Booth, and when he fags out he'll see reason."

  We topped a rise and there was Lumley at the bottom, looking desperately for more tracks. Poor man, there wasn't a chance he was going to find them. The wind blew straight across down there where he was, and any tracks would have been rubbed out three minutes after they was made, let alone a couple of hours.

  He raised his head and screamed into the night: "FRAN
CIE! JANEY! FOR GOD'S SAKE!" And you could hear the desperation in his voice, the terror, and pity him for it. The only answer he got was the freight-train wail of the wind. It almost seemed to be laughin' at him, saying: I took them Mister New Jersey with your fancy car and camel's-hair topcoat. I took them and I rubbed out their tracks and by morning I'll have them just as neat and frozen as two strawberries in a deepfreeze...

  "Lumley!" Tookey bawled over the wind. "Listen, you never mind vampires or boogies or nothing like that, but you mind this! You're just making it worse for them! We got to get the--"

  And then there was an answer, a voice coming out of the dark like little tinkling silver bells, and my heart turned cold as ice in a cistern.

  "Jerry...Jerry, is that you?"

  Lumley wheeled at the sound. And then she came, drifting out of the dark shadows of a little copse of trees like a ghost. She was a city woman, all right, and right then she seemed like the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I felt like I wanted to go to her and tell her how glad I was she was safe after all. She was wearing a heavy green pullover sort of thing, a poncho, I believe they're called. It floated all around her, and her dark hair streamed out in the wild wind like water in a December creek, just before the winter freeze stills it and locks it in.

  Maybe I did take a step toward her, because I felt Tookey's hand on my shoulder, rough and warm. And still--how can I say it?--I yearned after her, so dark and beautiful with that green poncho floating around her neck and shoulders, as exotic and strange as to make you think of some beautiful woman from a Walter de la Mare poem.

  "Janey!" Lumley cried. "Janey!" He began to struggle through the snow toward her, his arms outstretched.

  "No!" Tookey cried. "No, Lumley!"

  He never even looked...but she did. She looked up at us and grinned. And when she did, I felt my longing, my yearning turn to horror as cold as the grave, as white and silent as bones in a shroud. Even from the rise we could see the sullen red glare in those eyes. They were less human than a wolf 's eyes. And when she grinned you could see how long her teeth had become. She wasn't human anymore. She was a dead thing somehow come back to life in this black howling storm.

  Tookey made the sign of the cross at her. She flinched back...and then grinned at us again. We were too far away, and maybe too scared.

  "Stop it!" I whispered. "Can't we stop it?"

  "Too late, Booth!" Tookey says grimly.

  Lumley had reached her. He looked like a ghost himself, coated in snow like he was. He reached for her...and then he began to scream. I'll hear that sound in my dreams, that man screaming like a child in a nightmare. He tried to back away from her, but her arms, long and bare and as white as the snow, snaked out and pulled him to her. I could see her cock her head and then thrust it forward--

  "Booth!" Tookey said hoarsely. "We've got to get out of here!"

  And so we ran. Ran like rats, I suppose some would say, but those who would weren't there that night. We fled back down along our own trail, falling down, getting up again, slipping and sliding. I kept looking back over my shoulder to see if that woman was coming after us, grinning that grin and watching us with those red eyes.

  We got back to the Scout and Tookey doubled over, holding his chest. "Tookey!" I said, badly scared. "What--"

  "Ticker," he said. "Been bad for five years or more. Get me around in the shotgun seat, Booth, and then get us the hell out of here."

  I hooked an arm under his coat and dragged him around and somehow boosted him up and in. He leaned his head back and shut his eyes. His skin was waxy-looking and yellow.

  I went back around the hood of the truck at a trot, and I damned near ran into the little girl. She was just standing there beside the driver's side door, her hair in pigtails, wearing nothing but a little bit of a yellow dress.

  "Mister," she said in a high, clear voice, as sweet as morning mist, "won't you help me find my mother? She's gone and I'm so cold--"

  "Honey," I said, "honey, you better get in the truck. Your mother's--"

  I broke off, and if there was ever a time in my life I was close to swooning, that was the moment. She was standing there, you see, but she was standing on top of the snow and there were no tracks, not in any direction.

  She looked up at me then, Lumley's daughter, Francie. She was no more than seven years old, and she was going to be seven for an eternity of nights. Her little face was a ghastly corpse white, her eyes a red and silver that you could fall into. And below her jaw I could see two small punctures like pinpricks, their edges horribly mangled.

  She held out her arms at me and smiled. "Pick me up, mister," she said softly. "I want to give you a kiss. Then you can take me to my mommy."

  I didn't want to, but there was nothing I could do. I was leaning forward, my arms outstretched. I could see her mouth opening, I could see the little fangs inside the pink ring of her lips. Something slipped down her chin, bright and silvery, and with a dim, distant, faraway horror, I realized she was drooling.

  Her small hands clasped themselves around my neck and I was thinking: Well, maybe it won't be so bad, not so bad, maybe it won't be so awful after a while--when something black flew out of the Scout and struck her on the chest. There was a puff of strange-smelling smoke, a flashing glow that was gone an instant later, and then she was backing away, hissing. Her face was twisted into a vulpine mask of rage, hate, and pain. She turned sideways and then...and then she was gone. One moment she was there, and the next there was a twisting knot of snow that looked a little bit like a human shape. Then the wind tattered it away across the fields.

  "Booth!" Tookey whispered. "Be quick, now!"

  And I was. But not so quick that I didn't have time to pick up what he had thrown at that little girl from hell. His mother's Douay Bible. That was some time ago. I'm a sight older now, and I was no chicken then. Herb Tooklander passed on two years ago. He went peaceful, in the night. The bar is still there, some man and his wife from Waterville bought it, nice people, and they've kept it pretty much the same. But I don't go by much. It's different somehow with Tookey gone.

  Things in the Lot go on pretty much as they always have. The sheriff found that fellow Lumley's car the next day, out of gas, the battery dead. Neither Tookey nor I said anything about it. What would have been the point? And every now and then a hitchhiker or a camper will disappear around there someplace, up on Schoolyard Hill or out near the Harmony Hill cemetery. They'll turn up the fellow's packsack or a paperback book all swollen and bleached out by the rain or snow, or some such. But never the people.

  I still have bad dreams about that stormy night we went out there. Not about the woman so much as the little girl, and the way she smiled when she held her arms up so I could pick her up. So she could give me a kiss. But I'm an old man and the time comes soon when dreams are done.

  You may have an occasion to be traveling in southern Maine yourself one of these days. Pretty part of the countryside. You may even stop by Tookey's Bar for a drink. Nice place. They kept the name just the same. So have your drink, and then my advice to you is to keep right on moving north. Whatever you do, don't go up that road to Jerusalem's Lot.

  Especially not after dark.

  There's a little girl somewhere out there. And I think she's still waiting for her good-night kiss.

  Jerusalem's Lot

  Oct. 2, 1850.

  DEAR BONES,

  How good it was to step into the cold, draughty hall here at Chapelwaite, every bone in an ache from that abominable coach, in need of instant relief from my distended bladder--and to see a letter addressed in your own inimitable scrawl propped on the obscene little cherry-wood table beside the door! Be assured that I set to deciphering it as soon as the needs of the body were attended to (in a coldly ornate downstairs bathroom where I could see my breath rising before my eyes).

  I'm glad to hear that you are recovered from the miasma that has so long set in your lungs, although I assure you that I do sympathize with the moral dil
emma the cure has affected you with. An ailing abolitionist healed by the sunny climes of slave-struck Florida! Still and all, Bones, I ask you as a friend who has also walked in the valley of the shadow, to take all care of yourself and venture not back to Massachusetts until your body gives you leave. Your fine mind and incisive pen cannot serve us if you are clay, and if the Southern zone is a healing one, is there not poetic justice in that?

  Yes, the house is quite as fine as I had been led to believe by my cousin's executors, but rather more sinister. It sits atop a huge and jutting point of land perhaps three miles north of Falmouth and nine miles north of Portland. Behind it are some four acres of grounds, gone back to the wild in the most formidable manner imaginable--junipers, scrub vines, bushes, and various forms of creeper climb wildly over the picturesque stone walls that separate the estate from the town domain. Awful imitations of Greek statuary peer blindly through the wrack from atop various hillocks--they seem, in most cases, about to lunge at the passer-by. My Cousin Stephen's tastes seem to have run the gamut from the unacceptable to the downright horrific. There is an odd little summer-house which has been nearly buried in scarlet sumac and a grotesque sundial in the midst of what must once have been a garden. It adds the final lunatic touch.

  But the view from the parlour more than excuses this; I command a dizzying view of the rocks at the foot of Chapelwaite Head and the Atlantic itself. A huge, bellied bay-window looks out on this, and a huge, toad-like secretary stands beside it. It will do nicely for the start of that novel which I have talked of so long [and no doubt tiresomely].

  To-day has been gray with occasional splatters of rain. As I look out all seems to be a study in slate--the rocks, old and worn as Time itself, the sky, and of course the sea, which crashes against the granite fangs below with a sound which is not precisely sound but vibration--I can feel the waves with my feet even as I write. The sensation is not a wholly unpleasant one.

  I know you disapprove my solitary habits, dear Bones, but I assure you that I am fine and happy. Calvin is with me, as practical, silent, and as dependable as ever, and by midweek I am sure that between the two of us we shall have straightened our affairs and made arrangement for necessary deliveries from town--and a company of cleaning women to begin blowing the dust from this place!