Salem's Lot - Stephen King [200]
He looked around for Mark, and saw him lying by the porch door, on his face.
50
Ben told himself that the boy had just fainted, and nothing more. It might be true. His pulse was strong and regular. He gathered him in his arms and carried him out to the Citroën.
He got behind the wheel and started the engine. As he pulled out onto Railroad Street, delayed reaction struck him like a physical blow, and he had to stifle a scream.
They were in the streets, the walking dead.
Cold and hot, his head full of a wild roaring sound, he turned left on Jointner Avenue and drove out of ‘salem’s Lot.
Chapter Fifteen
BEN AND MARK
1
Mark woke up a little at a time, letting the Citroën’s steady hum bring him back without thought or memory. At last he looked out the window, and fright took him in rough hands. It was dark. The trees at the sides of the road were vague blurs, and the cars that passed them had their parking lights and headlights on. A gagging, inarticulate groan escaped him, and he clawed at his neck for the cross that still hung there.
‘Relax,’ Ben said. ‘We’re out of town. It’s twenty miles behind us.’
The boy reached over him, almost making him swerve, and locked the driver’s side door. Whirling, he locked his own door. Then he crouched slowly down in a ball on his side of the seat. He wished the nothingness would come back. The nothingness was nice. Nice nothingness with no nasty pictures in it.
The steady sound of the Citroën’s engine was soothing. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Nice. He closed his eyes.
‘Mark?’
Safer not to answer.
‘Mark, are you all right?’
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
‘-mark-’
Far away. That was all right. Nice nothingness came back, and shades of gray swallowed him.
2
Ben checked them into a motel just across the New Hampshire state line, signing the register Ben Cody and Son, scrawling it. Mark walked into the room holding his cross out. His eyes darted from side to side in their sockets like small, trapped beasts. He held the cross until Ben had closed the door, locked it, and hung his own cross from the doorknob. There was a color TV and Ben watched it for a while. Two African nations had gone to war. The President had a cold but it wasn’t considered serious. And a man in Los Angeles had gone berserk and shot fourteen people. The weather forecast was for rain-snow flurries in northern Maine.
3
‘Salem’s Lot slept darkly, and the vampires walked its streets and country roads like a trace memory of evil. Some of them had emerged enough from the shadows of death to have regained some rudimentary cunning. Lawrence Crockett called up Royal Snow and invited him over to the office to play some cribbage. When Royal pulled up front and walked in, Lawrence and his wife fell on him. Glynis Mayberry called Mabel Werts, said she was frightened, and asked if she could come over and spend the evening with her until her husband got back from Waterville. Mabel agreed with almost pitiful relief, and when she opened the door ten minutes later, Glynis was standing there stark naked, her purse over her arm, grinning with huge, ravenous incisors. Mabel had time to scream, but only once. When Delbert Markey stepped out of his deserted tavern just after eight o’clock, Carl Foreman and a grinning Homer McCaslin stepped out of the shadows and said they had come for a drink. Milt Crossen was visited at his store just after closing time by a number of his most faithful customers and oldest cronies. And George Middler visited several of the high school boys who bought things at his store and always had looked at him with a mixture of scorn and knowledge; and his darkest fantasies were satisfied.
Tourists and through-travelers still passed by on Route 12, seeing nothing of the Lot but an Elks billboard and a thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed sign. Outside of town they went back up to sixty and perhaps dismissed it with a single thought: Christ, what a dead little place.
The town kept its secrets, and