Salem's Lot

by Stephen King

  O, Cal! He is no more, Bones. He is gone in my place, in the place of this wretch with his pipe-stem arms and skull face who I see reflected back in the darkened glass. And yet he may be the more fortunate; for no dreams haunt him as they have haunted me these last days--twisted shapes that lurk in the nightmare corridors of delirium. Even now my hands tremble; I have splotched the page with ink.

  Calvin confronted me on that morning just as I was about to slip away--and I thinking I had been so crafty. I had told him that I had decided we must leave, and asked him if he would go to Tandrell, some ten miles distant, and hire a trap where we were less notorious. He agreed to make the hike and I watched him leave by the sea-road. When he was out of sight I quickly made myself ready, donning both coat and muffler [for the weather had turned frosty; the first touch of coming winter was on that morning's cutting breeze]. I wished briefly for a gun, then laughed at myself for the wish. What avails guns in such a matter?

  I let myself out by the pantry-way, pausing for a last look at sea and sky; for the smell of the fresh air against the putrescence I knew I should smell soon enough; for the sight of a foraging gull wheeling below the clouds.

  I turned--and there stood Calvin McCann.

  "You shall not go alone," said he; and his face was as grim as ever I have seen it.

  "But, Calvin--" I began.

  "No, not a word! We go together and do what we must, or I return you bodily to the house. You are not well. You shall not go alone."

  It is impossible to describe the conflicting emotions that swept over me: confusion, pique, gratefulness--yet the greatest of them was love.

  We made our way silently past the summer-house and the sundial, down the weed-covered verge and into the woods. All was dead still--not a bird sang nor a wood-cricket chirruped. The world seemed cupped in a silent pall. There was only the ever-present smell of salt, and from far away, the faint tang of wood smoke. The woods were a blazoned riot of colour, but, to my eye, scarlet seemed to predominate all.

  Soon the scent of salt passed, and another, more sinister odour took its place; that rottenness which I have mentioned. When we came to the leaning bridge which spanned the Royal, I expected Cal to ask me again to defer, but he did not. He paused, looked at that grim spire which seemed to mock the blue sky above it, and then looked at me. We went on.

  We proceeded with quick yet dread footsteps to James Boon's church. The door still hung ajar from our latter exit, and the darkness within seemed to leer at us. As we mounted the steps, brass seemed to fill my heart; my hand trembled as it touched the door-handle and pulled it. The smell within was greater, more noxious than ever.

  We stepped into the shadowy ante-room and, with no pause, into the main chamber.

  It was a shambles.

  Something vast had been at work in there, and a mighty destruction had taken place. Pews were overturned and heaped like jackstraws. The wicked cross lay against the east wall, and a jagged hole in the plaster above it testified to the force with which it had been hurled. The oil-lamps had been ripped from their high fixtures, and the reek of whale-oil mingled with the terrible stink which pervaded the town. And down the center aisle, like a ghastly bridal path, was a trail of black ichor, mingled with sinister tendrils of blood. Our eyes followed it to the pulpit--the only untouched thing in view. Atop it, staring at us from across that blasphemous Book with glazed eyes, was the butchered body of a lamb.

  "God," Calvin whispered.

  We approached, keeping clear of the slime on the floor. The room echoed back our footsteps and seemed to transmute them into the sound of gigantic laughter.

  We mounted the narthex together. The lamb had not been torn or eaten; it appeared, rather, to have been squeezed until its blood-vessels had forcibly ruptured. Blood lay in thick and noisome puddles on the lectern itself, and about the base of it...yet on the book it was transparent, and the crabbed runes could be read through it, as through coloured glass!

  "Must we touch it?" Cal asked, unfaltering.

  "Yes. I must have it."

  "What will you do?"

  "What should have been done sixty years ago. I am going to destroy it."

  We rolled the lamb's corpse away from the book; it struck the floor with a hideous, lolling thud. The blood-stained pages now seemed alive with a scarlet glow of their own.

  My ears began to ring and hum; a low chant seemed to emanate from the walls themselves. From the twisted look on Cal's face I knew he heard the same. The floor beneath us trembled, as if the familiar which haunted this church came now unto us, to protect its own. The fabric of sane space and time seemed to twist and crack; the church seemed filled with spectres and litten with the hell-glow of eternal cold fire. It seemed that I saw James Boon, hideous and misshapen, cavorting around the supine body of a woman, and my Grand-uncle Philip behind him, an acolyte in a black, hooded cassock, who held a knife and a bowl.

  "Deum vobiscum magna vermis--"

  The words shuddered and writhed on the page before me, soaked in the blood of sacrifice, prize of a creature that shambles beyond the stars--

  A blind, interbred congregation swaying in mindless, daemoniac praise; deformed faces filled with hungering, nameless anticipation--

  And the Latin was replaced by an older tongue, ancient when Egypt was young and the Pyramids unbuilt, ancient when this Earth still hung in an unformed, boiling firmament of empty gas:

  "Gyyagin vardar Yogsoggoth! Verminis! Gyyagin! Gyyagin! Gyyagin!"

  The pulpit began to rend and split, pushing upward--

  Calvin screamed and lifted an arm to shield his face. The narthex trembled with a huge, tenebrous motion like a ship wracked in a gale. I snatched up the book and held it away from me; it seemed filled with the heat of the sun and I felt that I should be cindered, blinded.

  "Run!" Calvin screamed. "Run!"

  But I stood frozen and the alien presence filled me like an ancient vessel that had waited for years--for generations!

  "Gyyagin vardar!" I screamed. "Servant of Yogsoggoth, the Nameless One! The Worm from beyond Space! Star-Eater! Blinder of Time! Verminis! Now comes the Hour of Filling, the Time of Rending! Verminis! Alyah! Alyah! Gyyagin!"

  Calvin pushed me and I tottered, the church whirling before me, and fell to the floor. My head crashed against the edge of an upturned pew, and red fire filled my head--yet seemed to clear it.

  I groped for the sulphur matches I had brought.

  Subterranean thunder filled the place. Plaster fell. The rusted bell in the steeple pealed a choked devil's carillon in sympathetic vibration.

  My match flared. I touched it to the book just as the pulpit exploded upward in a rending explosion of wood. A huge black maw was discovered beneath; Cal tottered on the edge his hands held out, his face distended in a wordless scream that I shall hear forever.

  And then there was a huge surge of gray, vibrating flesh. The smell became a nightmare tide. It was a huge outpouring of a viscid, pustulant jelly, a huge and awful form that seemed to skyrocket from the very bowels of the ground. And yet, with a sudden horrible comprehension which no man can have known, I perceived that it was but one ring, one segment, of a monster worm that had existed eyeless for years in the chambered darkness beneath that abominated church!

  The book flared alight in my hands, and the Thing seemed to scream soundlessly above me. Calvin was struck glancingly and flung the length of the church like a doll with a broken neck.

  It subsided--the thing subsided, leaving only a huge and shattered hole surrounded with black slime, and a great screaming, mewling sound that seemed to fade through colossal distances and was gone.

  I looked down. The book was ashes.

  I began to laugh, then to howl like a struck beast.

  All sanity left me, and I sat on the floor with blood streaming from my temple, screaming and gibbering into those unhallowed shadows while Calvin sprawled in the far corner, staring at me with glazing, horror-struck eyes.

  I have no
idea how long I existed in that state. It is beyond all telling. But when I came again to my faculties, shadows had drawn long paths around me and I sat in twilight. Movement had caught my eye, movement from the shattered hole in the narthex floor.

  A hand groped its way over the riven floor-boards.

  My mad laughter choked in my throat. All hysteria melted into numb bloodlessness.

  With terrible, vengeful slowness, a wracked figure pulled itself up from darkness, and a half-skull peered at me. Beetles crawled over the fleshless forehead. A rotted cassock clung to the askew hollows of mouldered collar-bones. Only the eyes lived--red, insane pits that glared at me with more than lunacy; they glared with the empty life of the pathless wastes beyond the edges of the Universe.

  It came to take me down to darkness.

  That was when I fled, screeching, leaving the body of my lifelong friend unheeded in that place of dread. I ran until the air seemed to burst like magma in my lungs and brain. I ran until I had gained this possessed and tainted house again, and my room, where I collapsed and have lain like a dead man until to-day. I ran because even in my crazed state, and even in the shattered ruin of that dead-yet-animated shape, I had seen the family resemblance. Yet not of Philip or of Robert, whose likenesses hang in the upstairs gallery. That rotted visage belonged to James Boon, Keeper of the Worm!

  He still lives somewhere in the twisted, lightless wanderings beneath Jerusalem's Lot and Chapelwaite--and It still lives. The burning of the book thwarted It, but there are other copies.

  Yet I am the gateway, and I am the last of the Boone blood. For the good of all humanity I must die...and break the chain forever.

  I go to the sea now, Bones. My journey, like my story, is at an end. May God rest you and grant you all peace.

  CHARLES

  The odd series of papers above was eventually received by Mr Everett Granson, to whom they had been addressed. It is assumed that a recurrence of the unfortunate brain fever which struck him originally following the death of his wife in 1848 caused Charles Boone to lose his sanity and murder his companion and longtime friend, Mr Calvin McCann.

  The entries in Mr McCann's pocket journal are a fascinating exercise in forgery, undoubtedly perpetrated by Charles Boone in an effort to reinforce his own paranoid delusions.

  In at least two particulars, however, Charles Boone is proved wrong. First, when the town of Jerusalem's Lot was "rediscovered" (I use the term historically, of course), the floor of the narthex, although rotted, showed no sign of explosion or huge damage. Although the ancient pews were overturned and several windows shattered, this can be assumed to be the work of vandals from neighboring towns over the years. Among the older residents of Preacher's Corners and Tandrell there is still some idle rumor about Jerusalem's Lot (perhaps, in his day, it was this kind of harmless folk legend which started Charles Boone's mind on its fatal course), but this seems hardly relevant.

  Second, Charles Boone was not the last of his line. His grandfather, Robert Boone, sired at least two bastards. One died in infancy. The second took the Boone name and located in the town of Central Falls, Rhode Island. I am the final descendant of this offshoot of the Boone line; Charles Boone's second cousin, removed by three generations. These papers have been in my committal for ten years. I offer them for publication on the occasion of my residence in the Boone ancestral home, Chapelwaite, in the hope that the reader will find sympathy in his heart for Charles Boone's poor, misguided soul. So far as I can tell, he was correct about only one thing: this place badly needs the services of an exterminator.

  There are some huge rats in the walls, by the sound.

  Signed,

  James Robert Boone

  October 2, 1971.

  Deleted Scenes

  In Susan (I), after Ben and Susan depart before their date in the evening, the original manuscript reads:

  And yet, the horror was on its way even then, and not so far distant: the horror was docking at Portland Harbor, only twenty miles away. Neither of them had mentioned the Marsten House, which brooded over the north end of town like the humped shoulders of some Gothic spinster, but either might have; it had been vacant for years--over twenty of them. The great forest fire of 1951 had burned almost to its very yard before the wind had changed, leaving it to stand at the lip of all that great charring.

  It had stood more years, and still more: the FOR SALE sign had been replaced three times, and the last time it had been allowed to whiten in the sun until it was unreadable. Then a gale in the Fall of 1960 had ripped it completely away, leaving only the sheriff 's NO TRESPASSING signs, which were replaced with machinelike regularity each Spring and Fall.

  A full year ago, a new sign had been nailed up on the peeling boards beside the ramshackle front porch, and this sign said: SOLD.

  In The Lot (I) after Ben Mears contemplates the Marsten House at 4 o'clock, King has the following passage:

  He hung the towel over his shoulder, turned back to the door--and froze, staring out the window. Something was different out there, different than it had been yesterday.

  Not in the town, certainly; it drowsed away the late afternoon under a sky of that peculiar shade of deep blue that graces New England on particularly fine days in late September.

  He could look across the two-story buildings on Momson Avenue, see their flat, asphalted roofs, across the park where the children now home from school lazed or biked or squabbled, and out to the northwest section of town where Brock Street disappeared beyond the shoulder of that first wooded hill. His eye followed up naturally to the break in the woods where the Burns Road cut through, and to the Marsten House which sat overlooking the town.

  The shutters were closed.

  When he had come back to Momson ['Salem's Lot], one of the things that had made him decide to stay and write the book that had been increasingly on his mind had been the close correspondence between his memory of the Marsten House and its actuality, twenty-four years later. It was still unpainted, still leaning and ominous and seemingly pregnant with awful things (and perhaps the suicide-murder perpetrated by Hubie Marsten was only the least of them) that had transpired within its walls. The upstairs windows were still like vacant eyes peering forth from under steep angled eaves like eyebrows--eyes that had been cataracted with patched and faded green shades. The glass in those windows had been long since broken with small boys' stones, of course, but that added rather than detracted from the overall impression of idiot malignancy.

  The shutters had always hung leaningly beside the windows, accordioned back and held with rusty eyehook latches. It seemed to Ben that they had been flakingly green in 1951 (the house itself had been a peeled and ruinous white), but now all the color was gone from them, and like the house, they were a uniform and weatherbeaten gray.

  But they had been pulled shut.

  He stood with the towel over his shoulder, looking out at it, not moving, feeling a crawl of fear in his belly that he did not try to analyze. He had thought occupancy could only destroy the fragile splice of child-memory and adult-reality that was so important to the book he was writing, unless it was his own occupancy--a thought that still made him feel fear-sick. The new owner would reshingle, or cut the lawn, or tear off the old ivy trellis and repaint. But the closing of the shutters in the daytime had added something unreckoned with, something he most emphatically didn't like.

  In The Lot (I), section 20 (11:59 PM), when Straker sacrifices the body of Ralphie Glick, King's original passages read:

  In the Burns Road cemetery, a dark figure stood meditatively inside the gate, waiting for the turn of time, for the instant of midnight when God hides His face.

  "O my father," the figure said, its voice soft and cultured, flavored with a faint and unidentifiable accent, "favor me now. Lord of Flies, Prince of Darkness, favor me now. Now I bring you spoiled meat and reeking flesh. Blood I bring, the water of life. With my left hand I bring it. Make a sign for me on this ground, consecrated in your name. I wait a sign
to begin your work."

  The voice died away. A wind sprang up, gentle, bringing with it the sigh and whisper of leafy branches and grasses, and a whiff of corruption from the dump at the end of the road.

  A blue light began to glow at the far end of the cemetery, and intensified. In its glow, the figure's countenance was discovered: elderly, with sunken eyes, and strangely heavy, almost negroid lips. The hair, swept back from the forehead, was pure white.

  The blue glow intensified, grew searing, and took on a hunched, shifting shape that seemed to stretch up and up, beyond the close and hemming horizon of trees, to the sky itself.

  A Voice said: "What do you bring me?"

  "This."

  The figure stooped, and then stood with the sleeping figure of a child in his arms.

  "It is well."

  The figure bowed.

  "Consummate your act, and grow strong."

  It became unspeakable.

  The chapter Danny Glick and Others (which King originally had titled Straker) features the scene where Royal Snow and Hank Peters bring the crate with Barlow's coffin down cellar of the Marsten House. In the first draft, there is no Barlow and Straker antique store and only one box is delivered. When Hank delivers the locks, he sees a rat on the table. The original passage features more rats. Grisly scenes of rats are not so frequent in the published novel:

  The beam steadied. Hank sucked in breath and felt the room go hazy around him.

  Rats.

  Hundreds of them, possibly thousands, all of them massed in ranks and platoons at that elbow bend. Staring at him, their V-shaped upper lips lifted to show the sharp incisors beneath. Their eyes glared at him.

  He panicked, threw the keys wildly on the table, and turned away, shambling into a run. Again that queer odor of putrefaction seemed to fill his nostrils, the smell of age and wet and rotting flesh. He had to get away from it.