Salem's Lot - Stephen King [135]
‘After last night?’
‘I dreamed it,’ Mark said. His voice was still calm, but his eyes were dark. ‘I dreamed of them going to houses and calling on phones and begging to be let in. Some people knew, way down deep they knew, but they let them in just the same. Because it was easier to do that than to think something so bad might be real.’
‘Just a dream,’ she said uneasily.
‘I bet there’s a lot of people lying around in bed today with the curtains closed or the shades drawn, wondering if they’ve got a cold or the flu or something. They feel all weak and fuzzy-headed. They don’t want to eat. The idea of eating makes them want to puke.’
‘How do you know so much?’
‘I read the monster magazines,’ he said, ‘and go to see the movies when I can. Usually I have to tell my mom I’m going to see Walt Disney. And you can’t trust all of it. Sometimes they just make stuff up so the story will be bloodier.’
They were at the side of the house. Say, we’re quite a crew, we believers, Susan thought. An old teacher half-cracked with books, a writer obsessed with his childhood nightmares, a little boy who has taken a postgraduate course in vampire lore from the films and the modern penny-dreadfuls. And me? Do I really believe? Are paranoid fantasies catching?
She believed.
As Mark had said, this close to the house it was just not possible to scoff. All the thought processes, the act of conversation itself, were overshadowed by a more fundamental voice that was screaming danger! danger! in words that were not words at all. Her heart-beat and respiration were up, yet her skin was cold with the capillary-dilating effect of adrenaline, which keeps the blood hiding deep in the body’s wells during moments of stress. Her kidneys were tight and heavy. Her eyes seemed preternaturally sharp, taking in every splinter and paint flake on the side of the house. And all of this had been triggered by no external stimuli at all: no men with guns, no large and snarling dogs, no smell of fire. A deeper watchman than her five senses had been wakened after a long season of sleep. And there was no ignoring it.
She peered through a break in the lower shutters. ‘Why, they haven’t done a thing to it,’ she said almost angrily. ‘It’s a mess.’
‘Let me see. Boost me up.’
She laced her fingers together so he could look through the broken slats and into the crumbling living room of the Marsten House. He saw a deserted, boxy parlor with a thick patina of dust on the floor (many footprints had been tracked through it), peeling wallpaper, two or three old easy chairs, a scarred table. There were cobwebs festooned in the room’s upper corners, near the ceiling.
Before she could protest, he had rapped the hook-and-eye combination that held the shutter closed with the blunt end of his stake. The lock fell to the ground in two rusty pieces, and the shutters creaked outward an inch or two.
‘Hey!’ she protested. ‘You shouldn’t-’
‘What do you want to do? Ring the doorbell?’
He accordioned back the right-hand shutter and rapped one of the dusty, wavy panes of glass. It tinkled inward. The fear leaped up in her, hot and strong, making a coppery taste in her mouth.
‘We can still run,’ she said, almost to herself.
He looked down at her and there was no contempt in his glance-only an honesty and a fear that was as great as her own. ‘You go if you have to,’ he said.
‘No. I don’t have to.’ She tried to swallow away the obstruction in her throat and succeeded not at all. ‘Hurry it up. You’re getting heavy.’
He knocked the protruding shards of glass out of the pane he had broken, switched the stake to his other hand, then reached through and unlatched the window. It moaned slightly as he pushed it up, and then the way was open.
She let him down and they looked wordlessly at the window for a moment. Then Susan stepped forward, pushed the right-hand shutter open all the way, and put her hands on the splintery windowsill preparatory to boosting herself up. The fear in