Salem's Lot - Stephen King [116]
Yet if you looked in the eyes, it wasn’t so bad. If you looked in the eyes, you weren’t so afraid anymore and you saw that all you had to do was open the window and say, ‘C’mon in, Danny,’ and then you wouldn’t be afraid at all because you’d be at one with Danny and all of them and at one with him. You’d be -
No! That’s how they get you!
He dragged his eyes away, and it took all of his will power to do it.
‘Mark, let me in! I command it! He commands it!’
Mark began to walk toward the window again. There was no help for it. There was no possible way to deny that voice. As he drew closer to the glass, the evil little boy’s face on the other side began to twitch and grimace with eagerness. Fingernails, black with earth, scratched across the windowpane.
Think of something. Quick! Quick!
‘The rain,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In vain he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.’
Danny Glick hissed at him.
‘Mark! Open the window!’
‘Betty Bitter bought some butter-’
‘The window, Mark, he commands it!’
‘-but, says Betty, this butter’s bitter.’
He was weakening. That whispering voice was seeing through his barricade, and the command was imperative. Mark’s eyes fell on his desk, littered with his model monsters, now so bland and foolish -
His eyes fixed abruptly on part of the display and widened slightly.
The plastic ghoul was walking through a plastic graveyard and one of the monuments was in the shape of a cross.
With no pause for thought or consideration (both would have come to an adult-his father, for instance-and both would have undone him), Mark swept up the cross, curled it into a tight fist, and said loudly: ‘Come on in, then.’
The face became suffused with an expression of vulpine triumph. The window slid up and Danny stepped in and took two paces forward. The exhalation from that opening mouth was fetid, beyond description: a smell of charnel pits. Cold, fish-white hands descended on Mark’s shoulders. The head cocked, doglike, the upper lip curled away from those shining canines.
Mark brought the plastic cross around in a vicious swipe and laid it against Danny Glick’s cheek.
His scream was horrible, unearthly… and silent. It echoed only in the corridors of his brain and the chambers of his soul. The smile of triumph on the Glick-thing’s mouth became a yawning grimace of agony. Smoke spurted from the pallid flesh, and for just a moment, before the creature twisted away and half dived, half fell out the window, Mark felt the flesh yield like smoke.
And then it was over, as if it had never happened.
But for a moment the cross shone with a fierce light, as if an inner wire had been ignited. Then it dwindled away, leaving only a blue after-image in front of his eyes.
Through the grating in the floor, he heard the distinctive Click of the lamp in his parents’ bedroom and his father’s voice: ‘What in hell was that?’
13
His bedroom door opened two minutes later, but that was’ still time enough to set things to rights.
‘Son?’ Henry Petrie asked softly. ‘Are you awake?’
‘I guess so,’ Mark answered sleepily.
‘Did you have a bad dream?’
‘I… think so. I don’t remember.
‘You called out in your sleep-’
‘Sorry.’
‘No, don’t be sorry.’ He hesitated and then earlier memories of his son, a small child in a blue blanketsuit that had been much more trouble but infinitely more explicable: ‘Do you want a drink of water?’
‘No thanks, Dad.’
Henry Petrie surveyed the room briefly, unable to understand the trembling feeling of dread he had wakened with, and which lingered still-a feeling of disaster averted by cold inches. Yes, everything seemed all right. The window was shut. Nothing was knocked over.
‘Mark, is anything wrong?’
‘No, Dad.’
‘Well… g’night, then.’
‘Night.’ The door shut softly and his father’s slippered feet descended the