Salem's Lot - Stephen King [148]
Something flapped overhead and Callahan looked up, startled out of his confused revery. A bird? A bat? Gone. Didn’t matter.
He listened for the town and heard nothing but the whine of telephone wires.
The night the kudzu gets your fields, you sleep like the dead.
Who wrote that? Dickey?
No sound; no light but the fluorescent in front of the church where Fred Astaire had never danced and the faint waxing and waning of the yellow warning light at the crossroads of Brock Street and Jointner Avenue. No baby cried.
The night the kudzu gets your fields, you sleep like-
The exultation had faded away like a bad echo of pride. Terror struck him around the heart like a blow. Not terror for his life or his honor or that his housekeeper might find out about his drinking. It was a terror he had never dreamed of, not even in the tortured days of his adolescence.
The terror he felt was for his immortal soul.
Part Three: THE DESERTED VILLAGE
I heard a voice crying from the deep:
Come join me baby, in my endless sleep.
-Old rock ‘n’ roll song
And travelers now within that valley
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh-but smile no more.
-Edgar Allen Poe
The Haunted Palace
Tell you now that the whole town is empty.
-Bob Dylan
Chapter Fourteen
THE LOT (IV)
1
From the Old Farmer’s Almanac’:
Sunset on Sunday, October 5, 1975, at 7:02 P.M., sunrise on Monday, October 6, 1975, at 6:49 A.M. The period of darkness on Jerusalem’s Lot during that particular rotation of the Earth, thirteen days after the vernal equinox, lasted eleven hours and forty-seven minutes. The moon was new. The day’s verse from the Old Farmer was: ‘See less sun, harvest’s nigh done.’
From the Portland Weather Station:
High temperature for the period of darkness was 62°, reported at 7:05 P.M. Low temperature was 47°, reported at 4:06 A.M. Scattered clouds, precipitation zero. Winds from the northwest at five to ten miles per hour.
From the Cumberland County police blotter:
Nothing.
2
No one pronounced Jerusalem’s Lot dead on the morning of October 6; no one knew it was. Like the bodies of previous days, it retained every semblance of life.
Ruthie Crockett, who had lain pale and ill in bed all weekend, was gone on Monday morning. The disappearance went unreported. Her mother was down cellar, lying behind her shelves of preserves with a canvas tarpaulin pulled over her body, and Larry Crockett, who woke up very late indeed, simply assumed that his daughter had gotten herself off to school. He decided not to go into the office that day. He felt weak and washed out and lighthearted. Flu, or something. The light hurt his eyes. He got up and pulled down the shades, yelping once when the sunlight fell directly on his arm. He would have to replace that window some day when he felt better. Defective window glass was no joke. You could come home on a sunshiny day, find your house burning away six licks to the minute, and those insurance pricks in the home office called it spontaneous combustion and wouldn’t pay up. When he felt better was time enough. He thought about a cup of coffee and felt sick to his stomach. He wondered vaguely where his wife was, and then the subject slipped out of his mind. He went back to bed, fingering a funny little shaving nick just under his chin, pulled the sheet over his wan cheek, and went back to sleep.
His daughter, meanwhile, slept in enameled darkness within an abandoned freezer close to Dud Rogers-in the night world of her new existence, she found his advances among the heaped mounds of garbage very acceptable.
Loretta Starcher, the town librarian, had also disappeared, although there was no one in her disconnected spinster’s life to remark it. She now resided on